Chapter 14 Campus Without Boundaries: The Brooklyn GreenWalk Monica Berger, Reggie Blake, Anne Leonard, Robin Michals, Mark Noonan, Susan Phillip, and Peter Spellane “Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” Walt Whitman On May 1, 2008, City Tech students led a walking tour for the general public and the college community that explored urban environmental challenges and sustain- able solutions currently being implemented in DUMBO and Downtown Brooklyn. Drawing well over 150 attendees, the tour was developed by students in five different disciplines—chemistry, English, communication design, hospitality management, and physics. At the seven locations of the tour, specific issues that relate to the sus- tainability of cities presented themselves. Within a half-mile radius of the City Tech campus, we found instances or sites impacted by the warming of the planet and ris- ing sea levels, issues of disposal of waste, and the generation of power. Solutions were also evident: the recycling of paper, composting of domestic waste, construc- tion of green buildings, absorption of carbon dioxide by trees in city parks, and marketing of locally grown foods. The project reached outside of campus walls, literally moving out of the box-like classrooms, redefining the classroom as an inter- action between students and professors and between the college community and its neighborhood. The local neighborhood became “text.” During the GreenWalk project, first-hand experience, direct observation, and interpretation of the environ- ment outside the classroom became a transformative complement to the intellectual study and analysis that normally take place inside campus walls. In every sense of the term, the Brooklyn GreenWalk sought to radically transform space of sev- eral kinds: classroom space, academic discipline space, and the space in which one defines oneself as a teacher and as a learner. As a one-time public event, the walk- ing tour on May 1 succeeded in its mission. If the goals of general education are to develop the judgment and analytical tools that are needed to navigate contemporary civic and professional life, the GreenWalk suggested one way forward. R. Michals (B ) New York City College of Technology, Brooklyn, NY, USA e-mail: rmichals@citytech.cuny.edu 253 J. Summerfield, C.C. Smith (eds.), Making Teaching and Learning Matter, Explorations of Educational Purpose 11, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9166-6_14, C  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011