Designing for Water: Case Studies in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed

The built environment negatively affects the water cycle, introducing chemicals and nutrients into the system, impacting the ability of plant, fish, and animal species to survive. Stretching from New York to Virginia, the 64,000 square miles of the Chesapeake Bay watershed includes housing, commerce, and industry for 16.6 million people. While architecture is typically designed to shed precipitation away from buildings, it is not typically designed for the on-site retention and management of that rain, snow, and sleet. Exploring the possibilities of ecoregion-specific environments illustrates the best practices for rainwater harvesting and storm water management across the varied landscapes of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. By using technologies such as cisterns, green roofs, and constructed wetlands, the built environment can be designed to decrease our need for expensive water purifying infrastructure and preserve the health of fragile estuary ecosystems such as the Chesapeake Bay

A Best Practices Service Learning Framework for the Public Relations Campaigns Course

Public relations curriculum often incorporates professional experience for progressive skill development. In the traditional public relations (PR) campaigns course, students typically research, develop, and implement a strategic campaign for a community organization as the client. Service learning is an effective pedagogical approach for the PR campaigns course with value-added learning outcomes, such as critical thinking and civic engagement. Adapting a National Society of Experiential Education (NSEE) best practices approach helps integrate service and reflection components as learning components. The instructional framework presented in this article combines service and reflection principles with course and campaign planning, implementation, and evaluation. Using the best practices framework as foundational scaffolding, instructors can strategically select elements from the framework to build a customized course plan