The Summer Honors Field Study is Back!

This once in a lifetime course begins with five weeks of course work in both the classroom and local ecosystems and concludes with 2 ½ weeks of travel from Oakton’s campus to Yellowstone National Park and back. While some details will change, the webpage produced in 2018, is a great introduction to the basic structure and dynamics of the course!

Learning Community (register for both)

Honors: Environmental Humanities AND Honors: A Survey of Ecology

Professors Marian Staats and Tess Lesniak 

Register for both HUM150 8H1 & BIO103 8H1 HUM 150 GH1

Gen Ed: Humanities-Fine Arts; Life Science; Global Studies. Students who have taken BIO 106 cannot receive BIO 103 credit for this course.

Concentrations:  Environmental Studies (x2); Global Studies; Great Books; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

From Professor Staats:

The integrated perspective developed by our learning community will provide a deeper understanding and appreciation of ecology in relation to environmental humanities, including stories, film, music, visual arts, and philosophy. Specifically, the field study’s learning community will engage you with your local community directly and as part of the broader environmental context in which you live. We’ll start with the urban-exurban sprawl abreast Lake Michigan sprinkled with the city parks, conservation areas, and malls that constitute Chicagoland and extend west through the Mississippi watershed to the “great plains” and finally to the forested Rocky Mountains and the prairies, scrublands, deserts, and basins that exist between the various mountain ranges of the north central Rocky Mountain states. The natural science/humanities perspective on peoples and ecosystems developed in this course will demonstrate how comprehension of “natural” systems is enhanced by awareness of the stories people tell about their relation to the land, the lives that they actually live, the impact of invasive species, notions of Indigeneity (for both human and non-human species), and questions of biodiversity, agroecology, and environmental justice, particularly with respect to Indigenous peoples but also as embodied in environmental issues more broadly.

Students will need to interview with both professors to take the course, and our emails are tlesniak@oakton.edu and mstaats@oakton.edu.