Dr. Tema Milstein (UNM), award-winning journalist and
eco-pedagogist, visited as a guest facilitator at an afternoon workshop focusing
on using SMU’s garden as a “learning laboratory” for teaching and learning.
Participants included: Olivia Archibald, Heather Grob, David Martin, Teresa Winstead, Kathleen McCain, Julia Chavez, Ernesto Chavez, Mary Jo Hartman and Irina Gendelman
In the tradition of Hands-on Teaching and Place-based
Learning and following the concept of Washington Center’s Curriculum for the Bioregion, the workshop focused on the ways that we can prepare
undergraduates to live in a world where the complex issues of environmental
equality, community health and well-being, environmental justice, and
sustainability are paramount.
Faculty and staff discussed the Learning Garden as
a laboratory and envisioned a collection of teaching approaches to build
sustainability concepts and place-based learning into a wide array of
undergraduate courses that can be used to engage students with the issues
facing the bioregion.
Dr. Milstein’s work, which includes whale and
community-based participatory research, focuses on communication as a cultural
force in the nexus of humanity and ecology. She is Associate Professor in the
Department of Communication & Journalism at the University of New
Mexico. Among her publications, Dr.
Milstein’s article “Greening Communication” was published in Greening the
Academy: Ecopedagogy Through the Liberal Arts, a 2013 Critics Book Choice Award
from the American Educational Studies Association.
