November 16, 2015
Sarah Krier, a junior majoring in environmental studies and life sciences communication, had already spent two seasons as a camp counselor in Hudson. But this past summer she wanted to do something deeper: impart the teachings of Aldo Leopold to young people.
In particular she wanted to draw from a recent massive open online course (MOOC), “The Land Ethic Reclaimed: Aldo Leopold, Perceptive Hunting, and Conservation,” featuring wildlife ecology professor Tim Van Deelen, a faculty affiliate of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
“I never fully appreciated the outdoors until my dad took me hunting when I was 12. For the first time I felt that nature is a community I’m a part of,” says Krier. While hunting was not on the camp’s agenda, the course’s overarching concepts certainly could be: “I wanted every child to be able to form a personal connection with the outdoors.”
For the “Little Aldos” project, as it was called, Krier received a Wisconsin Open Education Community Fellowship, an award totaling up to $6,000 offered by the Division of Continuing Studies and the Morgridge Center for Public Service. Under the guidance of LSC professor Bret Shaw, who is also a Nelson Institute affiliate, she designed programs for younger and older campers, drawing on materials from the nonprofit Aldo Leopold Foundation.
The YMCA Camp DayCroix offered a rich opportunity to work with children from diverse backgrounds, many of them from the Twin Cities. Younger children explored the camp’s different ecosystems and engaged in fun activities (wildlife observation, planting sugar maples) developed as an accompaniment to Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. They kept nature journals in which to draw and write about their experiences.
Older campers built Leopold benches and led a project implementing a compost system for the camp’s food waste. While Krier had nearly 80 kids in her programs throughout the summer, these activities extended her reach to many more of the season’s some 3,000 campers.
She feels she met her goal of helping children form a personal connection with nature.
“Every kid’s connection was a little bit different. Some kids really got into bug catching. Others dove into their journals,” Krier says. “We had kids who had never actually seen a chicken. For them to come and say ‘I eat chicken all the time, and that’s what it looks like?’ is just a really cool way for them to have that connection to nature.”
This story was originally published in Grow magazine by the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.
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