GLACE students and instructors pose for a group photo at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

What does it mean to learn from a place, rather than about it? What happens when instructors break the conventions of traditional pedagogy, and allow informed curiosity to set the agenda? And what if it’s all happening at a biological field station in northern Michigan?

In year one of the Great Lakes Arts, Cultures, and Environments (GLACE) program, led by U-M Comparative Literature/Program in the Environment professor Ingrid Diran and hosted at UMBS, an eager group of students and faculty explored these questions and more. The results have been surprising, delightful, and epistemologically rich.

“GLACE is all about turning the idea of a basic curriculum upside down and instead giving students the tools to acquire knowledge from anything, and to find it themselves,” says teaching assistant Eva Roos. Roos, a UMBS Biology of Birds alumna and current SEAS master’s student in Landscape Architecture, returned to Douglas Lake this spring to teach with Diran.

Eva Roos, GLACE teaching assistant.

A humanities program is born

The seeds for GLACE were sown two years ago when English Department Chair David Porter got wind of UMBS’s new Transforming Learning Program (TLP). Funded by an initiative through the Provost’s office, TLP seeks to bring unique, interdisciplinary courses to UMBS’s traditional field station setting. Porter tapped Diran to create a new, place-based, residential learning experience at UMBS, inspired by the longstanding success of the English Department’s New England Literature Program (NELP).

How it works: GLACE consists of four “intensives” in cultural geography, place-based epistemology, environmental writing and creative non-fiction, and Native American history in Michigan and the wider Great Lakes region. Diran and Roos anchor the program, but guest instructors - including Anishinaabemowin linguist Margaret Noodin, essayist Aisha Sabatini Sloan, and historian/cartographer Daegan Miller - lead each intensive. GLACE students collaborate with and learn alongside students in traditional UMBS science courses, and earn eight-credits over a six-week stay.

GLACE students work on an assignment in the UMBS dining hall.

The bold experiment

There is often a measure of uncertainty when piloting a new program, especially when it requires a nontraditional teaching philosophy in coordination with three other instructors. But the outcomes of GLACE’s first spring have exceeded Diran and Roos’s wildest dreams - complete with plenty of surprises along the way.

“Ingrid’s syllabus was basically tossed out. Everything has come together in unexpected ways. The intensives have really flowed together and complemented each other. The timing has been perfect,” says Roos.

Diran sees the intensive-based model of GLACE as exerting a cumulative and recursive effect. Each course - and each instructor - leaves its mark on the way students approach subsequent learning.

“We’ve been pulling the pedagogical curtain away,” says Diran. “When those constraints are loosened or played with, a lot of other things happen. Students can examine the conventions of a traditional classroom, and what goes into prompting learning. That started with Margaret [Noodin], who taught them that for the Anishinaabe, the world is animate. The world has something to teach. With that lesson in hand, they’ve gone from learning about to learning from.”

LISTEN: A song co-written by GLACE students and instructor Margaret Noodin to recognize the history of the Anishinaabeg surrounding UMBS.

From Noodin’s “Natural and Unnatural Histories” intensive on Anishinaabe language, history, and culture, students transitioned into Sabatini Sloan’s “Self in Space” intensive on personal essay writing. Harnessing the students’ intellectual momentum, Sabatini Sloan gave them creative texts and asked for their reactions. She used the texts as models for diverse themes as well as genres of writing, then let students play with media and themes. The result was a set of creative experiments: interviews with plants and animals, inexpert field guides to coincidences and dreams, and theories of dining hall sociology and boats. To Diran, the exercise felt like an extension of the “baseline of animacy” principle established by Noodin.

“Coming in as the last guest instructor, I feel like I’m benefitting from all the work previous instructors have done,” says the “A Short History of Placemaking” intensive instructor Daegan Miller. “Instead of me coming in and setting expectations, the students have caught me up and told me what GLACE is all about. They’ve taken ownership of the course. That’s really what you want as a teacher.”

“There’s a really strong GLACE identity,” adds Diran. “They are at the helm of their own intellectual itinerary.”

Ingrid Diran, program director (and captain!) of the GLACE program.

Putting some meat on the intellectual

So why a field station in northern Michigan?

“The location has been completely integral,” says Roos. “In some ways, GLACE is like NELP - it’s a six-week immersive course in the woods. But what makes it really special is the interdisciplinary nature. In the first two weeks, GLACE students joined Introductory Biology class field trips, helped collect data for the General Ecology students’ group projects, and worked on plant identification with Ethnobotany. This exchange gives science students a new context for their studies, and GLACE students an enhanced understanding of science.”

In addition to being embedded in a scientific research community, UMBS’s position at the center of the Great Lakes Basin and near the traditional lands of the Burt Lake Band, Little Traverse Bay Band, and other Anishinaabe groups has been crucial to the “place-based” component of GLACE. Natural and cultural resources inform one another, and require students to position themselves within a multidimensional context.

“The core of GLACE is placemaking,” says Diran. “We’re in the heart of the Great Lakes watershed, which is itself at the center - both geographically and, you could argue, historically - of this whole continent. GLACE is about this place, and the people - like the Burt Lake Band - who inhabit it. The Bio Station and its surroundings have become the core subject.”

Miller elaborates: “My experience in GLACE has been different than a traditional discussion section. It’s not just intellectual work - there’s a practical, hands-on component. The woods is part of the classroom. We walk through bushwhack while we’re reading about cartography, and it shows us how bugs, swamps, and natural features affect the process. We really dig into a task and tear it apart.”

“It puts some meat on the intellectual,” he adds.

The GLACE Triangle

Because GLACE covers so much disciplinary ground, Diran and students found it helpful to maintain a core strategy for approaching subject matter: namely, how new information fits into the dynamic calculus of self, place, and people. In an attempt to keep this heuristic top of mind, the unofficial GLACE triangle was born.

In this model, self, place, and people work together to orient an agent to its environment. Per Diran, “If you know two angles, you can solve for the third. Margaret brought their attention to place based on who animates it. Aisha helped them develop their sense of self in relation to the people and environment around them. Daegan taught them about mapping in order to understand how people use land, or how land itself is peopled.”

As for the student perspective, it is clear that breaking pedagogical barriers and learning to acquire knowledge from without and within has proved powerful. English major and GLACE student Joseph Behnke provides a moving endorsement:

“GLACE has been my most enjoyable experience at U-M, bar none. The program put me in contact with so many incredible people, and is a truly unique experience. Ingrid, Eva, Margaret, Aisha, Chris [Matthews, who led a two day mini-intensive on applying writing styles and techniques], and Daegan are all phenomenal instructors and facilitators, not just because they are wonderful and insightful people, but because they created a space in which the other eight of us could step up and offer ourselves to the group. Now I can carry a little bit of each of us forward with me in life, for which I'll always be grateful.”

To preserve the lessons and spirit of GLACE, instructors created a web-archive of student work. It is available for public viewing, and for GLACE alumni to revisit and reactivate the capacities they developed over their six-week stay at UMBS.

More about GLACE here.