Residency in Environmental Education
The purpose of the MOSS Graduate Residency in Environmental Education is to prepare professionals who will help to shape our future generation of citizens. These professionals may serve in the classroom, in the field, as formal educators, or as resource professionals. They will have the skills to effectively educate a diversity of learners through experiential methods, using the outdoors as an integrating context for learning about science, community and place.
Through the graduate residency, we expose our practitioners to opportunities to learn and grow as educators, scientists and leaders, to serve within their communities and develop their sense of place. Our hope is that they will develop a personal philosophy that will guide their own professional service as well as their participation as active and engaged citizens.
The residency provides practitioners with direct experiences in teaching an outdoor science curriculum to learners from a diversity of both urban and rural settings. Through coursework and mentoring by faculty, practitioners critically reflect on these experiences and gain new insight to apply to their next teaching experience. The format of this learning environment acknowledges that practitioners’ own experiences are the center point around which all new learning is incorporated; this experiential learning model emphasizes direct experience, reflection, and active experimentation.
The graduate residency experience provides opportunities for practitioners to develop a personal sense of place and connection to the natural and social systems that make up the MOSS community. Through coursework and teaching in the natural environment, practitioners develop an understanding of the rhythms and cycles of the local ecosystems. Because we live, work and play together, practitioners also make deep connections to the people of the MOSS community. Service opportunities and local partnerships help to extend these connections beyond the immediate MOSS social landscape and into the community at large.
The graduate residency experience provides a setting and structure in which practitioners work in small class settings and with individual mentors to help them grow in their professional identities as educators, students, and members of a community who are skilled and knowledgeable about teaching scientific and ecological literacy and understanding of the place where we live.