A student-led NMBU course combines theory, practice and personal reflection to explore how people understand and live with nature.
This June, the course Traditional Ecological Knowledge (EDS227) was held for the third time. The course explores knowledge, practices and beliefs that have developed through long relationships between communities and their natural surroundings.
The course began as an initiative by two students, Hanna Noemi Lindner and Lone Pollet. They felt the curriculum gave too little attention to local, Indigenous and traditional knowledge about nature, as well as ethnobotany (the study of how people use, understand and relate to plants).
They contacted people they could learn from and helped create the course. Encouraging feedback and strong interest have since led to plans to make it a permanent annual course at NMBU. This year, 36 students took part.
The course remains largely student-driven and depends on active participation. Activities include visits to farms, foraging trips, group projects, discussions, reflection journals, art in the forest and experiments with less conventional ways of learning. Students also taste dishes from different cultures, encounter a range of perspectives, including that of a Sámi scholar, and question assumptions shaped by colonial histories and ways of thinking.
These activities give students different ways to learn: not only through reading and discussion, but also through practical experience, creativity, reflection and learning from one another.
These learning activities are based on the learning model by Sipos et al. (2008), known as "head, hands and heart".
The head represents understanding ideas and concepts. The hands represent learning through practical experience and applying knowledge. The heart represents values, feelings and a sense of connection. Together, the three dimensions connect what students know, what they do and what matters to them.
By the end of the course, the students had completed a range of creative projects, explored traditional ecological knowledge in depth and learned from one another.
Following overwhelmingly positive feedback from the students, the course will continue in this open, student-driven format. Each new group will have room to contribute its own perspectives, questions and ideas, creating a shared space in which students can learn with their heads, hands and hearts.
