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That’s definitely a challenge, trying to reach out
to students without trying to be preaching
and I’m very clear in my GUR class,
my Intro to Environmental Studies class, that
I am an environmentalist and I do try
to advocate for better environmental decisions,
but at the same time I’m not there to tell them
what they can and they can’t do I really just
want to inform them of environmental issues
and how their personal decisions can
help them live more lightly on the land
if that’s what they choose to do.
And I hope, through the education that they
get through my class, that they do want to
sort of save the Earth at some level.
And that is hard to do, you know, I do have students,
in their evaluations, who say that
they should have a right to pollute
and it’s hard to read evaluations like that,
but I do appreciate their point of view and,
again, I’m hoping maybe just some of the things
that they take home from my lectures might
make them a little bit more aware, if not for
the environment, especially for their own bodies
and their own health and safety.
So, I try to take it in that perspective.
It’s a little bit easier at the upper division level
because most of my audience is Huxley students
and because they’re Huxley students
they already come in with an awareness and
almost an activism for wanting to be sustainable
and wanting to make good environmental decisions.
And, in that case, I try not to preach to the choir,
but that’s when I use the technologies and
the techniques and the pedagogies to really
introduce them to other sides.
And just yesterday in my course,
we were talking about the bison controversy
in Yellow Stone National Park and I
encouraged the students to look at this from
the ranchers’ perspective, that, you know,
we want to protect the bison as this symbol
and this heritage of both American Indian
and American western history.
Yet, many ranchers support being able to shoot
bison as livestock rather than treating them as
wildlife and one of the questions I asked is
‘why would ranchers would feel this way?’
And I don’t think students really think about
why ranchers might have a different perspective
than environmentalists.
So, really for the upper division students
I encourage them to look at different
points of view even though I know
they might agree with me on
several different levels.
So, I think that’s where my experience in the field
and my experience in research really
informs the students.