Building and maintaining a vibrant learning community depends on everyone’s commitment to fully engage in all class activities and to support each other’s learning. Attendance, preparation, and timeliness are critical for participating and contributing your insights and experiences to the community. You will get full credit for:
Attendance: punctual attendance and thoughtful participation at all class-meetings and retreats is the most critical aspect of the course (see flexibility and accountability)
Nature Connection Practice: facilitating and participating in out-of-class nature connection practices
Mission Statement: completing a personal statement integrating knowledge gained during the course to define intentions for your relationship with nature and your leadership in the community
We all come to this course with a variety of experiences, responsibilities, and needs. This means that we are not just students and instructors, but people with lives that will both inform and sometimes interfere with our ability to fully engage. To account for the unexpected situations, you have two “tokens.” Tokens can be used to make up for a late arrival or for a 48-hour extension on your Mission Statement due the last day of the course. An unexcused absence from one of the three classes on Grounds will lower your overall grade by 1/3 (e.g. from an A- to a B+). Please note that you cannot use a token for an unexcused retreat absence. They are too important to miss.
There is no need to tell me why you need to use a token. Just send us a brief email to let me know when and for what you are using it.
Excused absences for which you don't need a token are those that occur because of hospitalization, serious illness, death in a student’s family, important religious holidays, or authorized University activities (University-sponsored athletic events, or the like).
I deeply care about your growth as a person. The goal of the class is to deepen your sense of purpose through nature connection leadership. While I will reflect on your contributions to class and your final mission statement, you are ultimately accountable to yourself. At the end of the course, I will ask you to self-assess and give yourself a grade as you reflect on the following questions:
How did you tap into and cultivate your own sense of purpose over the course of the semester? How consistently did you practice being in relationship with nature and otherwise attend to your purpose in taking this class? What supported you or got in the way? What did you learn in the process?
How did you engage with assignments to advance your learning? Did you identify your growth edges and intentionally work to make the work relevant to goals for your life, to connect it to prior knowledge, and to foster curiosity about what you have not yet integrated into your understanding?
How did you tap into and cultivate social support in the class? How consistently did you practice giving and receiving? What helped you or got in the way? What did you learn in the process?
How did you tap into and cultivate joy and playfulness? How consistently did you practice? What supported you or got in the way? What did you learn in the process?
I will compare the grade you give yourself with my observations of your contributions and learning. If there is a significant discrepancy between our assessments, we will have a conversation to reach a mutual understanding of what a fair grade would look like.
In the age of Gen-AI, we all need to practice discerning when its use helps our thinking and when it gets in the way. In this course, we emphasize writing as a meditative practice to discover something about yourself, your unique relationship with nature, and your intentions for growth as a nature connection leader. Using Gen-AI will be an obstacle in this endeavor. I request that you not use AI when crafting your Mission Statement, your decomposition jar statement, or your daily moment in nature journal.
I trust that you will comply with the Honor Code. We also know that it can be difficult to discern exactly what constitutes plagiarism, particularly if you are coming from a different cultural context where citation rules may differ from those in the US. Generally speaking, plagiarism is any attempt to take credit for work done by another person or AI. To be sure, academics rely on the work of others to shape their own knowledge and interpretations. In writing, we need to acknowledge the importance of other works through footnotes and/or direct textual references to influential books, articles, and ideas. Not acknowledging the work of others, or transposing sentences, words, and concepts into your own work without using quotation marks or citations, can result in plagiarism. Working with a professor, tutor, or friend to clarify your ideas and organization for a paper or presentation is generally not plagiarism. Using an outline or thesis given to you by someone else without substantial modification is considered plagiarism. If you have any questions about what may constitute plagiarism, please consult with us. We value you giving us a chance to clear up any confusion!