Program History

Parks as Portals to Learning is an interdisciplinary field workshop was developed by Dr. Ben Bobowski and Dr. Ben Baldwin of the National Park Service and Rocky Mountain National Park. This workshop is a major curricular and institutional innovation that addresses a real-world, practical problem: the disconnection between academic teaching and research on the one hand, and professional natural resource management in the public land agencies on the other. Parks as Portals to Learning will use environmental history as a foundation for students, professors, and agency professionals to analyze contemporary resource issues such as climate change, air quality, and elk-vegetation dynamics. The pilot launched in 2013, with field workshops held each summer since. For one week each August, a group of students and faculty from a range of disciplines stay on the ground in Rocky Mountain National Park. They engage with park natural and cultural resource managers, learn about management issues within the park, and propose ways to use environmental history to address these issues and propose creative strategies for learning about and preserving park resources.

The Parks as Portals to Learning field workshop aims to bring together students, faculty, and resource managers in one of the United States’ most iconic national parks to develop processes that will 1) better prepare participants for the real-world challenges of professional positions in public lands management, 2) encourage collaboration, mutual respect, and sharing of knowledge among academics, practitioners, and students, and 3) break down barriers that inhibit collaborative interdisciplinary efforts to address the park’s contemporary sustainability issues, such as climate change, air quality, and elk-vegetation dynamics.

The long term vision of PPL is to use the knowledge gained from the program in Rocky Mountain National Park to develop an educational program that accomplishes the goals outlined above while being easily replicable, so that other sites in the NPS as well as students from diverse backgrounds and at different stages of their academic careers can benefit.