Just do it!
I started in the fall of 2015 teaching environmental stewardship for the first time. Although I have been learning about stewardship and trying to be a good steward throughout my adult life, I've never before been able to devote myself to teaching stewardship as the sole class topic. Being able to focus on it exclusively was both daunting and rewarding! I feel blessed to have been accompanied on this journey by an outstanding group of Hillsdale College students, six young people who set the bar for what will hopefully be an ongoing effort to systematically monitor and restore the Slayton Arboretum. Dr. Barber began the journey of creating the Arboretum back in the early 1920's, so we had some big shoes to fill, but the current crop of students proved they were more than ready to step up to the bar! Click here to meet the gang!
I wanted to keep the class organic in nature, meaning that although we would study some basic preassigned background principles of stewardship, our topics and knowledge base would arise naturally, informed by our actual experiences and practice. In pedagogical terms, this is known as praxis!
The basic class structure
The environmental stewardship seminar was comprised of four components:1. Reading, contemplating and discussing the book, A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. Leopold's expansive prose and extensive stewardship experience stimulated our minds in both the cognitive and emotional spheres.
2. Field trips to local places to fully engage our senses and give us real-life examples of how the concepts of stewardship are applied outside the classroom. We toured the Arboretum, visited the Lost Nation State Game Area, canoed the St. Joseph River, and visited the Michigan Nature Association's Sand Creek Prairie Sanctuary.
3. Basic science background knowledge which we would then apply to our chosen stewardship tasks. This was where the "rubber met the road," the "doing" of the tasks, which involved thinking and planning, researching best practices, and physical skills. These experiences were as varied as photographing deer signs, calling various regional arboretums to survey their deer management practices, seeking out manuals and stewardship guides, kitchen sink soil testing, and braving an early winter snowstorm to map the hillside.
Students chose topics that most interested them and ones they thought would be most practical for the future focus of the class. These decisions will have lasting impact on the future of the Arboretum. The group wisely chose to focus on the hillside restoration of the witch hazel collection. Thus their stewardship efforts unfolded in an area high on the priority list of the Arboretum's ten-year master plan and close to campus classrooms. The area is discretely manageable yet full of complexity, presenting variable and highly relevant challenges.
Students chose three project foci--evaluating and monitoring the soil, monitoring the vegetation, and monitoring and controlling deer browsing. Taken together they represent the major issues involved in the restoration of the hillside witch hazel area.
4. Reflecting and sharing of our experiences with others. Students presented their project results in a brown bag sharing session for the biology department at the end of the class. Click here to view their findings!
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