Penn State students get a feel for nature

Chris Uhl urges students in his environmental science class at Penn State to look at nature differently.

The goal, he said, is to use all senses to explore the environment.

“The course is about how might I come into relationship with the natural world, our mother,” Uhl said. “It’s a little bit of an oxymoron that here we are as beings made standing up without a shell and with our front exposed, yet students are in class buckled to a desk and looking down. We’re dropping our phones and putting away text books, and being one with nature.”

As part of a project with his BiSci 03 class, 500 students were asked to spend about an hour of their weekend with a group lead by a teaching assistant at Walnut Springs Park.

The idea was to have a direct experience with nature.

“It’s walking around and keeping an open mind, and observing,” Uhl said. “Nature is like a textbook — you can read it if you take a minute to observe it.”

Teaching Assistant Megan Loney, a junior, lead about 10 students on a hike through the park.

They looked at trees, ate the leaves from plants and even tasted sumac juice.

Student Emma Ortlieb said one of the most interesting things was learning about the life of a willow tree that has the same natural growth rate as a human, except with the average lifespan of 70.

“It just surprised me that something I thought lasted forever can die before a person,” Ortlieb said.

Uhl said asking students to complete homework after the nature hike “takes the fun out” of the project.

“It’s not really about that,” he said. “It’s just getting peer-to-peer interaction, and seeing the forest differently than they otherwise would have, and asking, ‘What’s going on here?’ They get that by reading the landscape and awakening their senses.”

This story was originally published September 24, 2016 at 6:07 PM with the headline "Penn State students get a feel for nature."