Outdoor Leadership and Service

Overview

Outdoor Leadership and Service is a class designed to welcome first year students to the Tuscaloosa community through engagement with the local environment. Students meet over the semester to perform service projects in nearby parks and to learn about and discuss environmental issues that affect Alabama as well as the global community. Older students lead the course and work with community partners to design the service projects each year.

Contributions

(Re)Creating the Class

OLS is the resurrection of an older program that was cut from its former home due to administrative reorganization. When this happened, those of us who were leaders were devastated, so we decided to try to save the program by rehoming it. After pitching the program to a few different options, an experimental learning college on campus adopted us. The course was reborn, but the work was just starting.

Due to logistical changes that accompanied our rehoming, we were unable to run the course as it existed in the past. The leaders had the significant task of rebuilding the class while ensuring the integrity of the program remains.

Because I had taken a leadership role in discussing the adoption of the class by UA’s New College, I was the most knowledgeable about what they were looking for in the class and stepped up as the director. Working with the leaders, I designed a class format that refocused the program on an academic study of environmental issues in addition to service, as was a request from New College. Two leaders and I created a curriculum that gave background information about the environmental issues the class would be interacting with directly through the service projects. The seminars we designed gave crucial context to the important work the students were doing.

Running the Program

As director, I also took up the role of managing the twelve student leaders in creating the service projects. My team designed four half-day service projects that will take place over the semester. These projects support local parks and natural areas, such as Moundville Archeological Center and Hurricane Creek Park. I also coordinated with UA Outdoor Recreation (my employer) to run a canoe trip on one of the rivers the students discussed in their first class meeting.

My main goal for the initial year was to run a successful program, defined in terms of accomplishing service and teaching new students about their local environment, ecologically and anthropologically. So many UA students come to Tuscaloosa and leave without stepping too far off of campus. I believe it is every student’s responsibility to understand where they are, as in who and what surrounds them. This is especially critical for students who come from states outside the South.