Our Place: Five days of reading, hiking and writing for middle and high school students.

Our Place is an inquiry-based summer-learning camp that takes students outdoors to investigate the environmental history of the Pioneer Valley. To ensure the highest quality experience, class size is limited to six students.

Educational Enhancement

Our Place is designed to enhance students’ understandings of literature, history and science, and give them a chance to write creatively about themselves and the environment in a supportive, adventurous group setting.

Using the peripatetic teaching method of Aristotle, instructors bring students to places rich with natural and cultural history and prompt them to encounter those histories directly. A third of the learning process involves the discussion of ideas; a third involves the physical exercise, feelings, and perceptions of discovery; a third involves writing creatively about these experiences. This learning process requires students to draw upon and apply what they have learned in their English, history and science classes during the school year. Taking them in to the field and opening up the cross-disciplinary field of environmental history, Our Place inspires students to synthesize a whole-view articulation of what they think and who they are. This experience has proven to be valuable, and often transformative, for students from all backgrounds.

Inquiry-based Learning

The question that motivates our five-day quest is: “What is our place?”

“Our place” is Nonotuck, a bioregion characterized by its unique climate, soils and creatures, and by a cultural landscape that expresses the human inhabitation of one of the oldest, most storied agricultural regions in the United States. It is bounded on the south by the Holyoke range, the north by Mt. Toby, and on the east and west by the hills that cradle the Connecticut River:

In the philosophical sense of the term, “our place” refers to how we fit in to the ecological processes and systems of our bioregion, and to its human history, past and present. In the same way buildings rise from the ground, environmental history uses ecology as the base upon which human history rises. We will hike through and perceive the subtle differences in character between these biomes:

Curriculum

Cost and Logistics

Calendar

July 26-30

Aug 9-13
Aug 16-20
Aug 23-27

Our Place: Summer

A 5-day field environmental philosophy intensive that combines reading, hiking, and writing.

$250.00Price:

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