Integrate field research activities into your classroom curricula with the Schoodic Education Adventure program. Join us for two- and three-day workshops as we investigate opportunities to collect field data, apply it to classroom lessons across the curricula, and connect it to real-world applications in America’s national parks. Workshop activities highlight studies of forest community structure, marine biodiversity, geology, soil development, and New England history.

Explore the wide range of National Park Service resources available to teachers across the U.S. Visit an offshore island and learn how early artists, Native Americans, and coastal environments can intersect in your classroom. Develop activities in multiple subjects to take back to your classroom and interact with scientists studying Maine’s unique environment.

This place-based, interdisciplinary workshop uses Henry David Thoreau’s ethic and his experience at Walden Woods as a model, and features a daily mix of lectures, field trips, readings, discussions and reflection time. The participants encounter speakers from different fields with expertise in the areas of natural history, writing, literary analysis, history, and the environment.

"An NCHE team of Yohuru Williams, Tom Connors, and David Byrd will explore the topic of Postwar America: Civil Rights, the Sixties, and the Rise of Conservation at this Continuity and Change: America in the 20th Century colloquium."

"Discover what archeology is and how we learn from what others have left behind. Participants will become archaeologists as they participate in the Archaeology: History Found in Pieces program, visit Franklin Court and hear how archaeology was used to learn about Franklin and how it plays an important role in how we interpret Franklin today. Educators will learn about teaching with primary source documents and objects, discover how archaeologists and curators use these clues to piece together history, and have the opportunity to explore Independence Park Institute’s newly opened hands-on student learning labs."

This seminar, led by Kathryn Morse of Middlebury College, will explore westward expansion in the U.S. during the nineteenth century, offering "in-depth exploration of historic personalities, themes, and events and intensive work with primary source materials."

"Franklin's 'Autobiography' and Jefferson's 'Notes on the State of Virginia' are exemplary expressions of the principles that inform the American way of life. The course aims to recover what such a claim means by paying careful attention to what the books say about nature, human desires, reason, education, religion, government, farming, commerce, and several other things. As time permits, we will consider related writings of Franklin and Jefferson."

"Between ca. 1500 and ca. 1800, the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean saw the creation, destruction, and re-creation of communities as a result of the movement of peoples, commodities, institutions, social practices, and cultural values. This seminar will explore the pan-Atlantic webs of association linking people, objects, and beliefs across and within the region. The best Atlantic history is interactive and crosses borders. The hope is that participants will enlarge their horizons by placing the standard early North American story in a larger framework."

"Led by Patty Limerick, this seminar uses focused case studies to explore the larger picture of environmental history, a subject that has grown increasingly complex as historians deepen their understanding of the vast role of 'anthropogenic change' (also known as 'history!') in reconfiguring the places and processes we think of as 'natural.' Much of the seminar explores the transformation of attitudes, from the assessment of North American landscapes and resources by early settlers to the recognition of the changing "baseline" of global warming, along with a reconsideration—and revision—of the usual polarity pitting utilitarian approaches in opposition to preservationist approaches to the management of nature. With guest speakers drawn from the University of Colorado’s widely respected environmental studies program, the roles of naturalists and scientists in shaping American thinking about nature will receive particular attention, as will changes in the production and consumption of energy, a fundamental matter in environmental history. The concluding field trip to Rocky Mountain National Park gives the themes of the lectures and discussions a down-to-earth grounding in a visit to one of the most popular units in the nation’s public lands, while close attention to John McPhee’s 'Encounters with the Archdruid' provides a framework for drawing lessons from the past to enhance the quality of contemporary environmental decision-making."

"To many, the Great Plains are part of the Great Flyover, whose landscape and history alike are flat and featureless. But in this region in the middle of the nation, cultures have mingled and clashed for thousands of years. This seminar will focus on the 19th century, though also examining the first peoples and the continuing cultural exchanges of the 20th century. It will begin with the physical setting, plants, and animals, and consider early humans in both Native American traditions and anthropological/archeological studies. Europeans arriving in the 16th century accelerated the long history of change and evolution, initiating more than three centuries of converging peoples and cultures, new centers of power, flourishing trade, calamitous epidemics, and cultural and material intrusions from across the planet. Participants will visit Bent’s Fort to see a cultural crossroads illustrated through one family. The seminar will also examine cattle ranching, homesteading, scientific explorations, and the depiction of the plains in art."