The results are in for the 2014 uOttawa Sustainable Literacy Survey and the results are... well I don't know. They aren't good but they definitely aren't bad either. Last year, students from a first year Environmental Studies program participated in the distribution of a sustainable literacy test on campus. Students approached campus community members, including professors, students, and external community members, and asked them to fill in a simple 11 question test. The questions were multiple choice and all the tests were conducted in person. The results.... on average a score of 54% was achieved. So just in case you don't know, a sustainability literacy test is essentially a tool that helps measure understanding of sustainability concepts. The hope is that with a tool like this you can help increase knowledge about sustainability, and by extension promote more sustainable practices. Furthermore, organizations can use this tool to measure the impacts of messag...

Photo credit: AASHE I am now seeing stars wherever I go. And I don’t mean the massive, luminous balls of plasma held together by gravity that we gaze at romantically. I’m talking about the Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System (STARS). It’s a transparent, self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to gauge relative progress toward sustainability. This assessment framework provides universities the opportunity to benchmark their progress with respects to sustainability related issues. The framework scores institutions on 300 possible points and requires that the President of the University sign-off on the report to ensure that all the information has been reported faithfully. Basically, it’s one humongous form with more questions about our university than a detective with too much caffeine in his bloodstream. I have been working on it for 3 weeks now and have just begun to get to the good stuff, which means the real research. I have been organising myself and ...