Environmental Science in Action: High Impact Learning from Farm to Field

“The knowledge sticks when their hands are in the dirt, when they’ve pulled the plant, and asked why it grew that way.”

Audio Case Study

Click to hear the audio interview with Preethi.

Written Case Study

When Professor Preethi Radhakrishnan began her work on the First-Year Seminar (FYS) in Environmental Science, she didn’t just inherit a curriculum—she helped build it from the ground up. Working closely with Professor Andrea Francis, Radhakrishnan designed the learning objectives for NSF 101 by embedding the foundational principles of high impact practices directly into the syllabus. That early work, infused with deep reading, reflection, and collaboration, shaped her understanding of HIPs not just as a set of techniques but as a philosophical commitment to student-centered, socially engaged learning.

“I don’t think I’d ever taught a course like it before,” she said, reflecting on the challenge of designing a course that had to merge academic research skills with college readiness, community engagement, and discipline-specific inquiry. This “meta-HIP,” her term for a course embedded with multiple HIP strategies, introduced students to the scientific method while encouraging them to reflect critically on their role as knowledge-makers, not just passive consumers of content.

Her understanding of HIPs grew with experience. “What they all have in common really is student ownership of their work and of their learning… moving from content assimilation into real knowledge application.” That insight shaped her ongoing work in Environmental Science. “The ideas around high impact practices, which happen in First-Year Seminar, I recognized were super important to connect to other classes.” 

To sustain that momentum, she secured grants and built internships, what she calls “apprenticeships.” These became a core part of the Environmental Science program. “If they don’t have solid work-based learning, they’re not employable. And these were alumni who were telling me this.” The result was a redesigned LIB200 as an experiential learning course with multiple internship modules. “My favorite ones are the service-based ones.”

One example is Project Sembrar. “Sembrar is Spanish for to grow and cultivate. As you know, we have this beautiful urban farm now.” Students learn sustainable agriculture, food justice, and food sovereignty. “They learn from local urban farmers… they get to ask questions and look at their crop plan, and it’s totally diverse.” Then, she says, “They take it back to the Bronx and they change their communities.”

Another internship takes students to Rutgers Farm. “Students are asking really hard questions… about the animal industry, dairy farmers, you know, what’s the deal with milk?” These questions become the basis for critical thinking and inquiry. Global experiences are expanding too. “We’re developing another global experience… with a college in Guatemala where they’re growing coffee beans.” These virtual exchanges are “seeing firsthand what this looks like,” thanks to student translators. “They’re applying lived knowledge in an academic context.”

Even in traditional courses like Integrative Physiology, she reframes content. “I begin all of my anatomy by telling them what the global implications are….” When talking about respiratory systems, she shares how amphibians breathe through their skin and how they’re dying out. “You can see them sit up and pay attention to what you’re saying.” The goal is always to connect content to context and create space for student reflection. “When you do it well, they give you the most brilliant work.”

That reflective work is supported by projects like the open pedagogy FYS textbook. “We had our students co-create and write a lot of it… the stuff that comes out of that class, we put it back in the book.” It’s “recursive. It’s not a textbook anymore, it’s a lived experience.”

Mentoring, she notes, differs from classroom teaching. “When I mentor a research student, I am hyper focused, but doing that in a classroom of 25 students is much harder.” Her solution is intentional planning. “Build it into your lecture objectives. It doesn’t have to be two separate things.”

What motivates her? “Students retain information at a much higher rate when they’re involved.” She compares rote memorization of mitosis to pulling out a root system on the farm. “They could tell me more about mitosis because it’s a real-world scenario.”

Student transformation is a throughline. She tracks impact through pre- and post-internship surveys and hires film students to document it. As they experience more hands-on work, they ask “How do I solve this problem?” and then come up with solutions.

When students using LaGuardia’s food pantry noted that they didn’t have refrigerators to keep the produce from the college’s farm, Radhakrishnan’s students leapt into problem solving mode. They ended up proposing returnable cold packs, a solution they immediately instituted. “That’s a brilliant idea,” Radhakrishnan says. And, it worked.

Still, challenges remain. “I do miss interdisciplinary conversations.” She hopes for more opportunities to talk with faculty across disciplines and envisions “a little TED talk type thing” where students present their high impact practice work.

Ultimately, she sees HIPs as future-facing. “We’re educating students for a future that we don’t know exists.” Creativity, she believes, will always matter. “In order to create spaces where students are able to problem solve in unique ways, we have to be training them for that transdisciplinary thinking… because I think that’s where the good stuff is.”

Courses Targeting High Impact Practices

• NSF101: First Year Seminar Natural Sciences
• SCG252: Animal Behavior and Ethics
• LIB200: Experiential Learning
• SCB212: Integrative Physiology
• SGN115: Sustainable Urban Agriculture

Other High Impact Practices Used

• First-Year Experience
• Diversity and Global Learning
• Internships
• Undergraduate Research

About

Dr. Radhakrishnan is the program director of the Environmental Science program at LAGCC. In her time as program director she helped conceive and grow two new options in the program, the sustainable urban agriculture and animal science options. Dr. Radhakrishnan earned her Bachelors in Zoology and Plant Science, Masters in Biotechnology and PhD in Animal Behavior and Integrated Pest Management from Macquarie University, Australia in 2008. Her field of research interests include integrated pest management, insect behavior, life history traits in insects and metagenomics.

In 2021, Dr. Radhakrishnan was awarded a USDA Hispanic Serving Institution Educational grant titled “Project SEMBRAR: Growing and Diversifying the Next Generation of Urban Agricultural STEM Leaders” (2021-25). The main goal of Project SEMBRAR is to sustain and grow the next generation of Urban STEM agricultural leaders. More recently, Dr. Radhakrishnan was awarded the NextGen USDA NIFA grant titled, “The Animal Science Discovery (ANSCId) program: An experiential learning, career development, and scholarship pipeline between LAGCC and Rutgers”. This grant aims to open the gateway to a tiered pathway that is structured, scaffolded, rich in experiential learning, peer mentoring and fortified with scholarships to forge a pipeline between NYC high schools to LAGCC (2-year) and Rutgers (4-year) for careers in Animal Science through the use of summer experiential learning and fully funded transfer scholarships to Rutgers.

Dr. Radhakrishnan has received several other PSC-CUNY grants and the Elsevier Women in STEM grant. Dr. Radhakrishnan is an active member of the Womensphere Foundation and serves as an ambassador for community colleges CUNY-wide to champion the cause of attracting more women into S.TE.M majors. She also serves as reviewer for Journals such as Behavioral Ecology and Physiological Entomology and grants such as NSF and Elsevier Foundation.