The Fellowship for Restoration Ecologies and Culture (FREC) is a two-course sequence in which students work in UVM Natural Areas to design and execute restoration ecology projects. Throughout the course, students meet with community partners throughout Vermont and gain valuable experience working in the field. Both courses take an interdisciplinary approach to restoration ecology and integrate the arts, sciences, and humanities to provide a unique experience for students.
Fellowship Learning Goals:
Fellowship Learning Goals:
- Understand and reflect on the societal role restoration plays in addressing grand environmental challenges and human-nature interactions in the 21st century.
- Integrate theoretical concepts with landscape restoration practices applied in the field.
- Practice and integrate social and scientific skills required to imagine, reimagine, design, plan, monitor, restore, and sustain restored landscapes.
- Learn from and work alongside community partners whose mission includes the restoration of landscapes in New England.
- Engage with a place-making experience and participate in ways to express a sense of place.
- Collect data and make observations across a suite of ecological and social science methods.
- Utilize a field notebook to archive data and observations, make art, respond to prompts, and to serve as a repository of learning during the Fellowship.
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Fall Semester instructed by Dr. Amy Seidl or Dr. Noelia Barrios-Garcia
NR 2300 SL - Landscape Restoration and Leadership NR 2300 offers students in the Fellowship for Restoration Ecologies and Cultures an experiential course in landscape restoration and leadership. This course aims to contend with anthropogenic disturbance of ecosystems through an interdisciplinary approach while developing collaborative leadership skills among students. The course is guided by the idea that human agency can improve ecosystem health and that human: nature relationships can be reciprocal. Furthermore, it aims to explore how restoration is increasingly seen as a response to the grand challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change mitigation and adaptation. This course is centered on a collective approach to understanding a UVM Natural Area, learning its ecological constituents and ecosystem processes, developing a sense of place, investigating landscape restoration strategies, and collectively, planning and implementing some of those strategies in the spring. |
Spring Semester instructed by Dr. Cheryl Morse
GEOG 2707 SL - Restoration Cultures What values, motivations, and world views shape restoration efforts? How do people who make their living from place-based engagements— in recreation, agriculture, and forestry fields—balance the needs for production with stewardship? How do communities and organizations negotiate multiple uses of, and goals for, public spaces like town forests, trails, historic buildings, and conserved farms? How are nature-based interventions in public spaces designed and put into place? What technical, social, and scientific skills are needed to do this work? Who participates in, and benefits from, these interventions and initiatives? This course considers the relationship between culture and human-environment interactions. We will meet people in the places where they work, steward land, and lead restoration efforts, and learn from their understanding of how humans can function as actors within ecological systems. |