UMF’s new June academic offerings take place-based learning to the next level.
By Marc Glass
A new academic term will be launched at the University of Maine at Farmington this June and with it comes a new set of learning labs — the rivers, lakes, woods and mountains of Western Maine.
UMF’s new Nature Term, which runs from June 4 to July 5, features a distinctive mix of academic courses and outdoor adventure experiences taught by professors, professional practitioners and outdoor recreation experts. The four-week term offers students the opportunity to pursue optional-credit nature-based courses — like Natural History of the Maine Watershed: Alpine Summits to the Gulf of Maine — in the morning and non-credit outdoor recreational experiences — like Mountain Biking in Western Maine — in the afternoon. Nature Term’s program of courses is designed to appeal to a broad range of learners, including high-school and college-age students pursuing academic credit as well as adults simply seeking edification in the embrace of the great outdoors.
Registration information and course descriptions are available at bit.ly/UMFnatureterm. Classes are available on a first-come, first-served basis, and the registration deadline is June 4, 2018, the first day of classes.
Among the faculty teaching in the inaugural Nature Term is Gretchen Legler, professor of creative writing, who has two courses on the docket: The Wisdom of Trees: Sylvan Writing and Rivers, Stories, Mountains, Dreams: Writing Nature in Western Maine. Legler says both courses will bring to life Thoreau’s words from The Maine Woods: “Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks!”
Gretchen Legler, professor of creative writing, will teach two courses in UMF’s inaugural Nature Term. (Photo by Ruth Hill.)
“It makes sense that when all of our senses are engaged — when we can smell dirt and sunshine, the flinty smell of sunshine on rock that you smell at the top of Maine mountains, or the earthy smell of a mossy tree stump and you can see sunshine glittering on water — your whole body is activated,” says Legler. “That just doesn’t happen in a regular classroom.”
In The Wisdom of Trees, Legler says students will consider the botany and aesthetics of campus trees in preparation for revising the University arboretum guide. In Rivers, Stories, Mountains, Dreams, students will paddle the Sandy River and Porter Lake as well as hike Bald Mountain in Washington Plantation and mountain bike sections of the Maine Huts and Trails network as a prelude to writing about nature. In both courses Legler says students will practice a skill that’s essential for nature writing: being present.
“The act of writing requires focused attention. In that way, nature writing is as much about meditation and focus and cultivating awareness as it is about transforming your experience into words,” she says. “These courses offer students the permission to be outside, to be still and to pay attention in the natural world in ways that are not normally available to them. For me, it’s about an experience that’s psychological and spiritual.”
On-campus residence-hall housing ($25 per day) as well as dining services will be offered during Nature Term. Registration is open to UMF students and community members, as well as high school students and other college students, regardless of whether or not they seek academic credit. Any outdoor adventure equipment required for course participation will be provided by UMF’s Mainely Outdoors program.
Students taking Farming & Sustainability: Human Ecology, Rural Studies, and the Lost Arts this June with Maurice Martin ’92, professor of community health, will find themselves learning and working on his 88-acre homestead in Starks. Along with readings from Hemingway, Thoreau, and Wilde, Martin’s syllabus includes beekeeping, raising chicks and ducklings from incubation to market, grafting fruit trees, attending a livestock auction, planting and propagating a kitchen garden, and harvesting, spinning, and knitting wool.
Maurice Martin ’92, professor of community health, at his 88-acre farm in Starks, the site of his 2018 Nature Term course. (Photo by Marc Glass.)
Martin says students will come to understand the seasonal rhythms of farming — how, for instance, the first crop of the year, maple syrup, is closely followed by setting poultry.
“The next thing you know, you’re on to hay, then cropping. With farming, there’s always the next thing to do, the next set of causally connected tasks,” says Martin. “If nothing else, the course will give students the opportunity to understand the amount of effort and responsibility it takes to put food on the table, which is among the most basic of all human needs.”
Martin says the course will also emphasize the importance of interdependence required for successful farming.
“You have to help each other in farming. It requires a commitment to community,” he says. “Show me a failed farm and I’ll show you a farmer who didn’t ask for help.”
Nic Koban, associate provost at UMF, says Nature Term courses were developed with a multigenerational audience in mind.
Nic Koban, associate provost, helped design and coordinate UMF’s inaugural Nature Term. (Photo by Marc Glass.)
“I have so many adult friends who have no plans to go back to college but have always wanted to be authors and believe they might have a book in them,” says Koban. “Nature Term is the perfect opportunity for adult learners to take a creative writing workshop with Pat O’Donnell. For people who want a guided experience of hiking five different mountains or canoeing the rivers of Western Maine, we have those and other non-credit offerings in the afternoons.”
Eric Brown, interim president of UMF, says the nearly 20 courses offered in Nature Term 2018 provide students and community members something they won’t find at other University-based summer programs.
Interim President Eric Brown says UMF’s Nature Term offers “the best of both worlds.” (Photo by Marc Glass.)
“There’s a marked difference between four weeks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and four weeks in the western mountains of Maine. There’s a reason that people flock here in the summer,” Brown says. “If you’re taking a nature writing course in the morning and a canoeing or hiking adventure in the afternoon, those experiences start to inform one another. Nature Term is experiential, but there’s an academic driver for it as well. It gets the intellect mobilized, and it gets the body mobilized. It’s the best of both worlds.”
Joining Legler and Martin in teaching 2018 Nature Term courses are:
- Former television meteorologist Mallory Brooke (Weather Analysis)
- Alpine Operations Coordinator Scott Hoisington ’79 (Hiking & Camping and Golf)
- University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of African Languages and Literatures Lecturer Anne Jebet Waliaula (Full Immersion Swahili)
- Associate Professor of Psychology Natasha Lekes (Ecopsychology in the Western Mountains of Maine)
- Associate Professor of Art History Sarah Maline (Art and Environment)
- Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Bill Mesce (Filmmaking and Film Appreciation: Nature as a Character)
- Art Instructor Elizabeth Olbert (Drawing Outside: The Real World)
- Professor of English Pat O’Donnell (Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction)
- Lecturer in Biology Nancy Prentiss (Natural History of the Maine Watershed: Alpine Summits to the Gulf of Maine)
- Assistant Director of the Fitness and Recreation Center Alison Thayer ’95 (Mountain Biking)
- Professor of Creative Writing Jeff Thomson (Creative Writing Workshop: Memoir)
- Alpine Ski Coach and Outdoor Recreation Coordinator Andrew Willihan ’06 (Golf) and
- Assistant Professor of English Shana Youngdahl (Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry).
Brown and Koban say low-cost on-campus residence-hall housing ($25 per day) as well as dining services will be offered during Nature Term. Registration is open to UMF students and community members, as well as high school students and other college students, regardless of whether or not they seek academic credit. Any outdoor adventure equipment required for course participation will be provided by UMF’s Mainely Outdoors program.
Classes are available on a first-come, first-served basis, and the deadline for course registration is the first day of classes, June 4. Information on registration and each course is available at bit.ly/UMFnatureterm. Individuals may also register in person from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, at the Merrill Center in UMF’s Merrill Hall, 224 Main St., in Farmington.