News

Landscapes for Learning

By Dan Berrett

May 6, 2018

Colleges are dedicated to the transmission of knowledge, but this activity doesn’t always occur in a typical classroom. On some campuses, teaching and learning take place far beyond the walls of any building.

The Chronicle collected images from institutions across the country that make intriguing use of the landscape, loosely defined, to foster learning. The images here depict some unusual spaces in which teaching happens — amid forests, on the edge of a marsh, at a pond, aboard a vessel, and even underground.

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The Kimballton Underground Research Facility is in a cavern near the bottom of a working limestone mine in Giles County, Va., about 30 minutes from Virginia Tech. The physics department operates three laboratories at KURF, where experiments study neutrinos and other subatomic particles, best done below the earth’s surface to avoid cosmic rays.

As a result of a historic drought in 2007, Duke U. built a $14-million water-harvesting and -reuse pond on its campus in Durham, N.C. This spillway releases the water downstream after it has been cleansed within the pond. Students have studied how to balance the educational and recreational uses of the pond and the impact on its surrounding ecosystem.

Alicia Rachow and Amy Honk, both students, work with the ecologist Brad Herrick of the U. of Wisconsin at Madison Arboretum. They are trying to manage an invasive canary grass that has encroached on the arboretum’s natural prairie grasses. To measure the effectiveness of the project, the students catalog square sections of the prairie along the border area between the natural species and the invasive grass.

St. John’s Abbey Arboretum at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s U. serves as an outdoor classroom for students, who learn about prescribed fire, oak regeneration, invasive-species removal, a controlled deer hunt, and an active logging operation, among other land-stewardship tools.

Katya Kent, a student at Bowdoin College, spent her 2017 summer internship on a sediment study in Scarborough Marsh, in southern Maine.

Orange Coast College, a community college in Costa Mesa, Calif., operates a professional mariners’ program, taught in part on the Nordic Star, a 92-foot yacht. Students learn electronic navigation and engine maintenance, as well as boat-handling, seamanship, and U.S. Coast Guard-approved safety measures.

Students work with Doug Rouse, a plant pathologist at the U. of Wisconsin at Madison Arboretum, to collect soil samples as part of the Small World Initiative, a global effort to isolate bacteria from soil in local environments that could lead to new antibiotics. The program encourages students to pursue careers in science through laboratory and field-research courses while addressing a worldwide health threat — the diminishing supply of effective antibiotics — via its motto: “crowdsourcing antibiotic discovery.”

Landscapes for Learning

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