Workshop series for schools
plants in the landscape
The Plants in the Landscape program is designed for high school students in 9-11 grades. It uses place-based learning to explore how the inter-connected relationships of hydrology, soils, land use patterns and micro-climate determined plant communities across the landscape. The program combines science-based observation, and field work with art, herbalism and wilderness survival skills such as tracking and scat observation, to understand the dynamics of plant communities and the roles plants play in our lives. Over the three weeks of the course, students develop strong comprehension of natural capital, social value as well as wild life benefits of plant communities as varied as flood plain forest, mesic upland forest and farm field.
Hydrology and Creativity
The Hydrology and Creativity program gives students an understanding of the principles of hydrology in the landscape and a way to express their own response to the aquatic systems in their community. Each student through their experiences in the activities and discussions learns a methodology that illustrates how to connect scientific observation to creative process. This program uses art as a vehicle to conceptualize the scientific dynamics of water processes in the landscape. It does so through scientific observation and experimentation using diverse media, and then synthesizes the results through drawing, painting and environmental sculpture. Through a series of three hour-long segments, students observe and experience the phenomenological properties of water moving through landscape, with discussions and experiments. They then use those experiences to form their own responses to how they observed water moving through the landscape in a group creative exercise, “drawing the river,” where they paint flow patterns with their classmates to form a “memory river”. In the last two hour session, students make their own environmental art pieces on the banks of a river that runs nearby their school. The program was designed for the 5th and 6th graders at the Anne T. Dunphy School in Williamsburg, MA.