Ryan Anderson is a Masters of Sustainable Solutions at Arizona State University. He serves as editor in chief for a team of five graduate students and two undergraduate videographers at the Sustainability Review.
In high school, my teachers warned me about the unreliability of open-source databases such as Wikipedia and the need to turn to the trusted academic resources (e.g. Lexis Nexus, Google Scholar, EBSCO, etc.). Like many high school students, I found it challenging to use and learn from academic literature. Academia rarely considers the social barriers that prevent students from accessing the information they need. Besides the monetary requirements to purchase the information, readers often find themselves disengaged with the saturation of jargon, long-winded sentences, and monotone in many academic articles. By not considering these factors, academia creates a divide between themselves and the public that seeks accessible information.
At the Sustainability Review (tSR) we believe the information produced by the academic world is not only important, but can inspire our youth, professionals, and public to take action and achieve the sustainable outcomes we need. tSR inspires through its innovative video format that adds a narrative to the images, concepts and ideas of sustainability research. As an open-access journal that publishes easy to understand content, we hope to reach a diverse and wide audience, because we feel that anyone with an Internet connection can understand and apply scientific research.
We want to serve as the public forum for users to hear about the diversity of sustainability projects from Low-Impact Development in Mesa to large-scale solar energy collaboration in Palestine. We want to explain how the circular economy operates in the amount of time it takes for a coffee break. We want to empower future sustainability leaders by informing them on the latest trends on a monthly basis. Most importantly, we want to initiate an open discussion about sustainability science and ways in which it can improve.
This March, tSR will initiate that conversation by giving users a voice in our first annual High School Summit. High school students will share their sustainability solutions at a poster session to peers and Arizona State University (ASU) students, faculty and staff. The poster session allows students the opportunity to network with faculty and sustainability practitioners and possibly transform ideas into action.
This event not only compliments tSR’s mission, but also adds to ASU’s larger vision of the New American University by leveraging our place in the community to encourage young entrepreneurs to transform society for the public good. Using its social media and online presence, tSR continues to build and improve avenues for these ideas and solutions to inspire the modern world. Much like a TEDx talk, two high school students will have the opportunity to present their innovative solution in a short one to two minute science video (SciVO). These two students will learn how to communicate in the fast-paced, technological society, while their audience adds live, real-time feedback.
As a graduate student-led project, tSR faces financial and structural limitations that prevent the journal from capturing the whole field of sustainability science and research. So, audience feedback plays a critical role in determining which content contributes the most value to the public good. The ability to hear ideas and solutions from a sector of tSR’s audience during this summit will ultimately shape tSR’s future content to fit the needs and wants of sustainability leaders. By engaging our audience through social media and in interactive settings, we learn which stories and research resonates with users and ways to present this content more clearly and concisely.
The content we have shared to date is far from perfect, but as an online journal we can adapt to the changing interests and needs of the 21st century. A future tSR editorial staff may find that our current structure of videos does not serve the audience and will have the capability to change it. Or, they could expand the journal to include new forms of content including artwork, infographics, and creative writing. An academic journal for the modern world does not have to remain static, rigidly adhering to guidelines established at its inception. For tSR, it only has to meet the needs of the public and inspire the leaders of the future.
Visit the Sustainability Review here.