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Keeping the Academics in Service Learning Projects, or Teaching Environmental History to Tree Planters
Mark Stemen
California State University, Chico
| IN CALIFORNIA, AND ELSEWHERE, faculty are being encouraged to create "service learning opportunities" for their students, such as having social work students volunteer at a local soup kitchen, or having environmental studies students reforest the local watershed. While these endeavors have obvious social value, their education value suffers if students are unable to make connections between their projects and their academic work.1 Environmental studies programs are notorious for such disconnected activities. Tree planting is a classic example of a service learning project with little actual learning. Reforesting a degraded riparian corridor is a worthwhile pursuit and it connects people to a place, but what are students "learning" academically when they are planting trees? Well, if you frame it correctly, they can learn quite a lot. This essay describes my efforts to keep the scholarship in a local restoration project by connecting history and restoration ecology. Our efforts are a great service to many members of the watershed ecosystem and my students engage in a unique learning opportunity as they wrestle with the many facets of "restoring nature." |
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I have tried my hand at service learning projects over the past four years and I am increasingly interested in a tension I see between service and learning. It is fairly easy to identify projects that will provide high quality service to a partner—something that is really needed, like teaching kids about recycling—but it is hard to find an activity that is also high quality learning. Our city is required to teach school children about waste reduction so I developed a service learning component that allowed students to earn extra credit for going into elementary school classrooms to teach about recycling. The students were all going to be teachers so it was great training but it had very little to do with the academic content of my California history course.2 |
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Service learning projects that combine high quality service with high quality learning are hard to develop because service organizations tend to keep volunteer activities simple. If faculty are to make them academically challenging, we need to be creative with service learning opportunities. One option is to use the actual service as source material for other discussions. A colleague of mine developed a service learning component for her creative writing course that combined learning and service at a very high level. She required students to volunteer at a local soup kitchen for over forty hours during the course of a semester and then to write creatively on the human condition. The experiences gained interacting with patrons at the soup kitchen were tied directly to the course assignments, even if the service itself (washing dishes, etc.) was not.3 |
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In addition to teaching history, I manage the ninety-three acre Butte Creek Ecological Preserve located south of Chico in Butte Creek Canyon. It is a spectacular landscape of sheer cliffs and deep gorges, but the riparian corridor along the creek has been highly disturbed by in-stream mining. Butte Creek was dredged for gold as late as the Second World War and then it became a sand and gravel quarry. When the state finally purchased the property in 1998, it was in pretty bad shape. Since then, students and faculty have been charged with repairing the damage. We have a small greenhouse where we raise native trees, shrubs and grasses, and then we host groups of students who do the planting. One day I listened to a group of students argue about where they should plant a particular tree. They all had good points to make but they were unable to resolve the question. As I listened I realized that the disagreement all hinged on different conceptions of what they thought was "natural." |
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I discuss the social construction of nature in my environmental history course. In the past I have had a great time asking my students to write an essay on the term nature based on a "found object" they bring to class. The idea comes from an album of pictures included in the collection of essays, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, edited by William Cronon. The authors of the essays had been asked to discuss "rethinking nature in the modern world," and had found it helpful to have actual objects to discuss—like a box of "natural" cereal. It was in following this lead that I had begun early in each semester to ask my environmental history students to bring in an object, something that would help them "think about nature in new and unexpected ways." Now at Butte creek, listening to my students argue over that Valley Oak, I realized I could have the same effect by giving them some trees to plant, and then having them write an essay on what they had "restored."4 |
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Seedlings can be even more provocative if you attach them to the philosophical debate surrounding the practice of restoring past landscapes. A great text for this is the book Restoring Nature: Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities by Gobster and Hull. This collection of essays uses the Chicago Restoration controversy as a touchstone. A group of restoration advocates came up with a plan to restore lands around Chicago and they received great public support. But, when a local paper revealed the plans under the headline "Half Million Trees May Face the Ax," a controversy erupted. The scholars involved quickly learned that restoration meant different things to different people. For some, it meant restoring the tall grass prairie to what it looked like before Europeans arrived. For many others it meant simply restoring their favorite park to what it looked like when they were kids.5 |
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As the authors Gobster and Hull learned, "[r]estoration blurs the distinction between culture and nature." The discussions in the essays hinged on the idea that "for any particular place, many states of nature can be created or restored." I found that argument very similar to the arguments made in Uncommon Ground, "that 'nature' is not nearly so natural as it seems," and the "way we describe and understand the world is so entangled with our own values and assumptions that the two can never be fully separated."6 |
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Taking all this into account, I created a service learning component for my course, Nature and Society, that uses the Butte Creek Ecological Preserve to help students explore the cultural meanings of "restored" landscapes. As part of the course requirements, the students engage in the service of restoration on the Preserve (planting, weeding, watering, etc.) and they combine it with readings and classroom discussions on the social construction of nature. Students are quizzed about plants on the Preserve, for example, and then are required to write about native and non-native species, and what the word "native" means.7 |
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I also introduce the concept of "invented landscapes" that is the topic of the book Beyond Preservation, because it brings history into the debates over restoration. In this contribution, William Jordan argues that restoration has many benefits in addition to repairing past destructive behavior. Jordan writes that "[t]he general process of ecosystem construction provides the basis for healthy interaction between human beings and the rest of nature" and that "we can best come to understand ecosystems, and to enter into a relationship with them...by attempting to reconstruct them." In a nod to environmental historians, Jordan claims that an ability to "deal with the past" is one of the essentials to building a healthy relationship with the land through restoration. He argues that:
[b]ecause one of [our] abilities is a sense of history, and of history as a kind of progress, or at least change, the relationship must acknowledge and deal with the past—the history of our interaction with a particular landscape, and the deeper history of the general relationship of our species with the rest of nature.8
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On Butte Creek, the past is everywhere. There are still acres upon acres of dredge tailings that have to be "dealt with." There are also mounds of invasive species like Himalayan blackberry and yellow star thistle that add to the learning because students discover first hand that restoration is more than planting; it is also weeding. Replanting the riparian forest has also led my students to raise questions about themselves and the way they do things, such as: "If we are to make a relationship with this place, are we to do it in the same industrial manner that caused the disturbance?" They thought not, so the students and I have substituted shovels for power augers, and moved to hand watering whenever possible. |
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I have been describing the concept of the social construction of nature in class through lectures and reading for five years, and students often have found the discussion too abstract. Tree planting made it real. Nature is not the only social construction historians work with, however, and I believe the concepts I have described are widely applicable. Students in a California history class, for example, could volunteer at a Mission or archeology exhibit and then write about the construction of race and ethnicity. Students in labor history could volunteer at the local union hall, or maybe a fire station, and write about notions of class. Students could write about gender and sexuality in a wide range of service settings. The actual activity could be anything, even filing or sweeping. Like tree planting, the service becomes a learning tool when students explore how words and ideas surrounding the topics are constructed differently by different people. |
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Service learning is hard work, but it pays great dividends in learning opportunities. The best ones often arise unexpectedly. At the end of the semester controversy erupted on our preserve when the time came to use a chainsaw. Gray pines are native to the preserve, but they had expanded outside their characteristic range by following the mine tailings from the upland terrace into the riparian channel. When our restoration crew began to remove some gray pines to plant California sycamores, neighbors complained. I could not have created a better example of the issues involved in attempting to restore nature. In a heated discussion peppered with the terms "nature, native, and natural," students got a clear understanding of the how the meanings of words are socially constructed, and how powerful those meanings can be in trying to deal with the environmental history of a landscape. The discussion convinced me that to plant is to think. |
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Notes
1. The Corporation for National Service defines service learning as a "method by which students learn and develop through active participation in thoughtfully organized service that meets the need of a community and is integrated into and enhances the academic curriculum of the students." [emphasis added] The CNS also identifies "Seven Elements of High Quality Service-Learning": integrated learning, high quality service; collaboration; student voice, civic responsibility, reflection and evaluation.
2. It is also easy to think of projects that are high quality learning, real world applications for the complex ideas we discuss in class, but they are rarely in demand by service agencies. The trick is finding them together.
3. Government agencies and community groups consider 30 hours to be the threshold where the value of the volunteer's labor donated exceeds the cost of the time it took to train them.
4. William Cronon, ed. Uncommon Ground: Toward a Reinventing Nature, New York: WW Norton, 1995, p. 27.
5. Gobster, Paul and Bruce Hull eds. Restoring Nature: Perspectives from the Social Sciences and the Humanities, Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000.
6. Gobster and Hull, p. Cronon, p. 27.
7. The course text are Hull and Robertson, Restoring Nature, Baldwin, et all Beyond Preservation: Restoring and Inventing Landscapes, and a reader of articles from Cronon, David Orr, Michael Pollan, Aldo Leopold, Ann Reily, Stephanie Mills, and the journal Restoration Ecology.7
8. William Jordan, "Sunflower Forest," in Baldwin, et al, pp. 18–19.
References
Baldwin, A. Dwight Jr., Judith De Luce, and Carl Pletsch, eds. Beyond Preservation: Restoring and Inventing Landscapes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Cronon, William, Uncommon Ground: Toward a Reinvention of Nature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.
Furco, Andrew, "Service-Learning A Balanced Approach to Experiential Education," Expanding Boundaries: Serving and Learning. Washington DC: Corporation for National Service, 1996. Pp. 2–6.
Herman, Dan, "Developing a Spatial Perspective: Using the Local Landscape to Teach Students to Think Geographically," Journal of Geography 95 (4) pp. 162–167.
Gobster, Paul and Bruce Hull, Restoring Nature: Perspectives from the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000.
McKeown-Ice, Rosalyn, "Environmental Education: A Geographic Perspective," Journal of Geography 93 (1) pp. 40–42.
Medley, Kimberly E. and Lori M. Gramlich-Kaufman, "A Landscape Guide in Environmental Education," Journal of Geography v. 100, 2001, pp. 69–71.
"Placing Your Project on the Quadrant," Connecting Service and Learning to Improve Schools and Communities. Service Learning 2000 Center, nd.
Rubin, Maureen Shubow, "Seven Steps to Creating a Service-Learning Course," Dean and Provost, September 2001, p. 5.
Seven Elements of High Quality Service Learning. Service Learning 2000 Center, 1998.
Wooley, John T and Michael Vincent McGinnis, "The Conflicting Discourses of Restoration," Society and Natural Resources, 13: 3390357, 2000.
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