How America’s Best Idea Can Be Colleges’ Best Opportunity

As American colleges and universities continue to revolutionize their curricula through high-impact practices that include student engagement with real places and problems, and on-site research and service learning, they shouldn’t overlook one of the greatest hands-on educational opportunities the country has to offer — the national parks.

The educational mission of the National Park Service isn’t new. From its earliest days, the park service, which turns 100 this year, has embraced a program of public education: Its rangers, with their signature Smokey Bear hats, are the traditional public face of the parks, taking visitors on guided walks and generally interpreting the natural and cultural history of the parks for visitors.

More recently, the agency has extended its reach beyond park visitors through a variety of collaborative arrangements with educational institutions and distance-learning programs. Yet far too few colleges and universities are taking advantage of these rich learning opportunities. In addition to their pedagogical advantages, which are significant, they also come with a secondary benefit. Because the parks are federally funded and not subject to the budgetary fluctuations now plaguing many state systems of higher education, they offer a sustainable educational partnership for colleges both public and private.

For opportunities to engage with real places and problems, it’s hard to do better than the national parks, which are confronting a spectrum of challenges that include climate change, boundaries that don’t comport with ecological realities, and underrepresentation of minority racial and ethnic groups among park visitors.

Channel Islands National Park, off the coast of Southern California, is an example of the national parks’ growing ability to export compelling learning experiences. Threatened by ocean warming, acidification, and other effects of climate change, the park’s underwater kelp forest, a natural wonder, is at risk. Understanding the complexities of this problem — its causes, what might be done to ameliorate them, how the decline of this resource would affect the surrounding ecosystem, the economic impact of fewer visitors should conditions worsen — would give students in a variety of disciplines plenty of reality to grapple with.

And the hands-on learning component at Channel Islands need not be confined to students who can spend time in the park. It now offers an interactive webcast that can take students on a virtual tour through the kelp forest and allow them to talk with ranger-divers in real time. These kinds of immersive online student experiences are available at more parks every year.

The national parks have a great and pressing need for dedicated researchers, which represents another opportunity for engaged student learning. For example, the Park Studies Laboratory at my institution, the University of Vermont, has conducted studies in dozens of national parks through Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units, a network of federal agencies and colleges across the country. One of our programs has helped the staff at Acadia National Park, in Maine, determine when and where public use has threatened park resources and the quality of the visitor experience, and when additional management approaches are needed. Doctoral students funded through this and related studies are an important part of the next generation of professors and scientists who will carry on this important research. The ecosystem network, easily accessible online, offers research opportunities to students and faculty across the biological, physical, social, cultural, and engineering disciplines.

Managing national parks is fundamentally interdisciplinary, so stepping into the shoes of policy makers and park managers is a powerful way for faculty and students to overcome the inherent limitations of their conventional departmental silos. All national parks are “cultural landscapes,” shaped by both nature and culture, and therefore could be the focus of a host of integrative undergraduate and graduate seminars.

For example, climate models suggest that Glacier National Park may lose its glaciers in the next few decades and that Joshua trees and saguaro cactus may not be sustainable in their namesake national parks as much of the planet continues to become warmer and drier.

To address these issues, students must understand the physical, chemical, and biological causes and consequences of greenhouse-gas emissions. But to begin resolving them, they also need to know how the free-market economy and a democratic political system work and interact, as well as the psychology and sociology of how to change human behavior. Such multifaceted issues provide an ideal laboratory for an interdisciplinary education.

Finally, the national parks offer abundant opportunities for experiential and service learning. Many parks conduct annual BioBlitzes — short, intensive inventories of their biodiversity designed to encourage citizen science, which often rely on student recruits. More than 100 BioBlitzes will be conducted across the national park system in 2016, offering colleges around the country an opportunity to blend experiential and service learning into biology and botany courses.

The national parks have been called “America’s best idea,” but they may also be America’s best collection of classrooms. It’s time more of the country’s colleges opened up these classrooms to their students.

Robert Manning is a professor of environment and natural resources at the University of Vermont. His new book (with Rolf Diamant, Nora Mitchell, and David Harmon) is A Thinking Person’s Guide to America’s National Parks (George Braziller Inc., 2016).