Leadership Development through Design Based Wilderness Education

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been collaborating since 2010 with the Singapore Ministry of Education to help develop the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). One element of this collaboration, the Global Leadership Program (GLP), aims to provide SUTD students with the opportunity to interact with the MIT community and experience MIT’s academic culture. During GLP students participate in a program designed to develop leadership ability while also increasing their understanding of engineering science and design thinking. This paper introduces a curriculum combining the pedagogies of design-based learning and wilderness education that was implemented in the summer of 2014 to holistically address the development of these three competencies. Through design-based learning activities, both for and in a natural environment, students were encouraged to develop competencies in engineering science and engineering design while exploring the diverse attributes essential for success as an engineer. This paper examines the results of a retrospective post-then-pre survey administered to the participants upon completion of the program to explore the effects of the program on the development of professional engineering competencies. We find a statistically significant increase in items associated with Individual Leadership Skill, Group Leadership Skill and the role of Society and the Economy. These results are triangulated with student exit interviews and instructor observations.

Natures Running Wild: A Social-Ecological Perspective on Wilderness

This article is based on the thesis that wilderness as a cultural value emerges where it has been lost as a geographical and material phenomenon. In Europe the idea of wilderness experienced a surprising upswing at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, with wilderness tours, wilderness education, and self-experience trips into “wilderness” becoming widely established. Also, protection of “wilderness areas” which refers to such different phenomena as large forests, wild gardens, and urban wild is very much in demand. Against this background, the article looks into the material-ecological and symbolic-cultural senses of “wilderness” in the context of changing social relations to nature. Three forms of wilderness are distinguished. Adopting a socio-ecological perspective, the article builds on contemporary risk discourse.

“The Trouble with Wilderness” Education in the National Park Service: The Case of the Lost Cattle Mounts of Congaree

Due to recent policy changes, the amount of land that the National Park Service (NPS) manages as wilderness stands to rise considerably in coming decades. As it does, the number of cultural resources located in wilderness areas of the NPS will grow in kind. According to environmental historian William Cronon, our modern concept of wilderness is problematic: “it leaves no place for human beings” and ”represents a flight from history.” Taking Congaree National Park as its case study, this essay considers how, because of Cronon's “trouble with wilderness,” new wilderness designations and increasing emphasis on wilderness education in the NPS in the twenty-first century could adversely affect historical interpretation of some of the country's most valuable cultural resources.