Tomorrow Begins Day One of a 3-Part Environmental Workshop at Weir Farm. Excited to Tap My Louisville KIESD Masters in Science

The office frog is becoming iconic for my posts, as I realized he became the backdrop as graduate students and I began to pile up Bill McKibben's American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. I did a Masters of Science through the Kentucky Institute for Education and Sustainable Development in 1998, a thesis that became my first official academic publication (although I had poems and partial insights in more scholarly work my mentor professors wrote).

For many years in KY, my students and I worked on Beargrass Creek and when I had 9th and 10th graders I often did an environmental writing unit. Fast forward to 2017 when CWP-Fairfield received its first Weir Farm National Park Service/National Writing Project collaboration grant. It was then I met ranger Kristin Lessard and, without a beat, contacted teacher Rich Novack to see if he was interested in leading the way.

Sh'Zaam. The seed quickly bloomed.

This year, we are maintaining a 3-day workshop for teachers, and opening the last day  to bring their students to the National Historic Site. We are also doing it in collaboration with the National Day on Writing (#NDOW, October 20th) and the NWP two-week #WriteOut for place-based creations.

Rich Novack leads the attendees with words and Lessard's staff does a phenomenal job teaching about John Weir, the property, the impressionist painting, and the history.

At Fairfield University, Colin Hosten, the Writing Center, and the core-writing team will lead a day of nature writing across campus (October 18th).

The student day will be hosted on the 21st. We have been interested to include youth in our work, as we've found their insight, intelligence, action and drive to be extremely useful (we can thank the Young Adult Literacy Labs for this)(and I'd love to see an entire week as a lab next summer).

I already tweeted out the image for today's post, but I wanted to take a moment to expand my thinking in this Chrysalis year. Frog was central to my KIESD days and if it wasn't for my work at the Beargrass Creek Nature Preserve (and with Al Dittmer, Barbie Bruker-Corwin and David Wicks), I wouldn't be the thinker that I am today.

Very much looking forward to year 3 of this work!