Calvin Prof To Be Honored By Michigan Campus Compact

February 15, 2006 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Calvin College biology professor Dave Warners is being honored by the Michigan
Campus Compact with an MCC Faculty/Staff Community Service-Learning Award. This
annual award is the highest honor the MCC bestows on faculty and staff in the
state of Michigan.

Warners will be formally honored during an evening awards ceremony to be held
Thursday, February 16 on the campus of the University of Michigan-Flint as part
of the Tenth Annual Institute on Service-Learning.

In recent years Warners has led a number of interesting projects at Calvin
that connect the natural environment of the campus to various courses in the
sciences.

For example, in 2004 he organized a group of Calvin students who explored the
possible options for processing organic wastes at Calvin.

"The purpose of this exercise," he says, "was to increase student awareness of
how wastes are disposed at Calvin and to expose them to alternative
practices."

He also has led efforts to remove exotic plants from the Calvin College
Ecosystem Preserve, and other sites on campus, and has helped educate students
about potential removal strategies and how they compare.

Such efforts on campus have also brought Warners beyond the Calvin campus. He
recently performed botanical inventories of four significant parcels of natural
areas in West Michigan, the largest of which is Hoffmaster State Park. These
inventories generated information that will help the land managers care for
these natural areas.

Other off-campus activities have included utilizing Calvin students to help
local schools and parks establish native wildflower habitats. Over a dozen such
projects have been done in the past eight years. One of these was a Native
American Garden at Creston Christian School, where all the plants used were
important species for local Indian tribes.

Warners was nominated for the award by Jeff Bouman, director of the
Service-Learning Center at Calvin, who says the honor is an appropriate one.

"Dave's work not only with students, but with other faculty, defies the
traditional stereotype of service-learning only fitting with social science or
human services courses," says Bouman. "His love for creation care and his
desire to fuel student interest in this process is infectious, and frankly,
helps me to do my job more effectively."

Michigan Campus Compact is a state-level, non-profit organization that
promotes the education and commitment of Michigan college students to be
civically engaged citizens, through creating and expanding academic,
co-curricular and campus-wide opportunities for community service,
service-learning and civic engagement.

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Received on Wed Feb 15 16:32:07 2006