Teaching and Practice
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Networking a Network
Building a Small, Solar-Powered Work Shed
How to Launch a River Semester: Creating Experimental Programs in Higher Education
Do You Know Where You Are?
By Laura Rockhold. Over recent years I have been on a journey, one that has deepened my understanding of, and engagement with, the Indigenous names of the place I call home: Minnesota. As a writer, poet, and visual artist, much of my work explores themes of interconnectedness between the personal, ecological, universal, and spiritual; I have found naming to be one way of praising, participating, and communing with others and nature and even myself, as so much of who we are is rooted in language and place.
Centering Water: Practices of Commitment
By Boyce Upholt, Katie Hart Potapoff, Michael Anderson, Britt Gangeness, Angie Hong, Coosa Riverkeeper, Greg Seitz, and Andy Erickson. Water is part of our everyday lives. We depend on clean water for health and sanitation, for livelihoods and recreation, for habitats, histories, and futures. Since water is so important to humans (and nonhumans) in myriad ways, how do we demonstrate our reciprocal commitment to water?
Creative Connections with Rivers: A Toolkit for Learning and Collaboration
We are three people who draw on research and practice to create arts-based learning, engagement materials, and interventions with and for diverse audiences. We purposefully integrate and apply different artistic methods in non-artistic disciplines, such as ecology and environmental conservation, physics, climate science, and human health. We came to know each other and work together through a four-year project that was awarded to the lead author and focused on rivers in a fragmented world. Our project had local and global foci on rivers, and many of the activities, including those shared in this article, were designed with and for people in the United Kingdom but with a view that the ideas could be adapted and applied in other contexts.
The River at our Doorstep: Student Projects Tell Stories of the Mississippi River
The Mississippi River, by all accounts one of the great rivers of the world, flows through the middle of the campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. During fall semester, 2022, the University Honors Program continued a long-standing commitment to introducing students to the river at their doorstep by offering an Honors Seminar…
Teaching Indigenous Epistemologies at the University of Minnesota
It has been argued that the twin ongoing and overarching crises facing students in higher education today are the urgencies of calls for justice and the threats from a changing climate. Indeed, these are inextricably intertwined. Students will face them no matter what their profession, or however they find themselves living as a citizen in the world. As Vicente Diaz reminds us so eloquently in his contribution to this collection, “the epistemological system on which our present political, economic, and cultural existences are based is unsustainable. We need radically different ways of defining what it means to be human, of understanding human-ness in relations of kinship and reciprocity, and of understanding and respecting the living world around us.”…
