Here are two cents.

Your approach //the history of a particular park, then a description, a discussion of visitation and demographics served, and lastly a discussion of the ecosystem services// is good if your aim is for the students to dig out information about a park. A problem is that the websites by the National Park Service already include this kind of information. So in most cases there is not much digging involved.

If it is a four year college, this type of term paper assignment does not seem to go to the desirable extent.

My suggestion is that the term paper should allow the student to take a position and argue it in the light of the park policies, actions and practices information readily available from the National Park Service.

Abdur,

Thank you for the reply. Under normal circumstances, I would agree that such a term paper is not really a college-level assignment. I insist that this particular paper is a short document for two reasons, making the students to fit all of their information into a very small number of pages forces them to think about what is and is not important, and secondly, they have to think about what is the best way to present that information.

That is an excellent idea to have the student advance an argument relative to park management, I think that could really work.

Kevin

I'd like to know more about the course and how it fits within a student's course of study. Is this a gen-ed course or an upper-level course? If it's an intro or gen-ed course, why not provide a list of parks students can NOT use for this assignment. That way, arguably, you could choose a well-known park like, Yosemite to provide an example of what you're looking for easily (or assign your TA/GA to pull it together for you), even if it's just a couple of slides with the kinds of details you'd like the students to research and include in their term paper. It'll be a simple way to provide some clarity and modeling for the rubric and hopefully cut down on some questions.

I also like the idea of having the students make an argument of some kind. Perhaps they can come up with a way of expanding the demographics/engagement of park visitors or something along those lines. Or find a recent issue involving the park and critically assess the arguments in the article/post/proposed solutions.

I checked the Grand Canyon off of my bucket list this past summer and it was AMAZING! So worth it! I'd love to go back! Good luck and report back on what you went with for this project!

The name of the course is Environmental Determinants of Public Health and is part of the masters in Public Health Program. I am a chemist (specializing in Environmental Chemistry) and teach the class as an adjunct.

The purpose of the class is to explore the intersections of environmental health and public health.

We look at things like environmental law and how it protects public health, exposure to toxic/carcinogenic substances, environmental justice (or the lack thereof) ecosystem services (with special emphasis on drinking water), and zoonotic diseases (such as Covid-19). After all of those heavy topics and depressing classes, we round out the semester with a unit on Parks and Open Space.

On the first day of class, each student gets a semester-long project / case study. This is the topic for their term paper and presentation during the last week of class. For most of the years I have taught the class, the case study is a USEPA Superfund site. This is a very good topic for a term paper and fits well with the theme of the class. Other years, I have assigned a case study based on a specific ecosystem service at a specific location. Examples include, a salt marsh in New England, acacia trees in Africa, seagrass beds, a coastal estuary in New Jersey, and even dung beetles on an island in Chesapeake Bay.

The beleaguered site coordinators and public information people at the EPA deserve a break from having my students call them. The good news about many sites is that they are cleaned up, or almost cleaned up, and many of the good ones are not all that interesting anymore.

So for a number of reasons, I would like to assign each student a National Park as their semester-long project. In a perfect world, each student could learn about the creation of the park, the ecosystem services that it provides, anthropogenic impacts on the park, biodiversity, the potential for zoonotic diseases, and visitation demographics. As I began to look through the literature it became obvious that not all parks are studied equally. The student assigned Yosemite could learn all of this in an afternoon.

So here I am wondering how to make this idea practical.....

Thank you so very much

kevin

Hi Kevin,

Have you looked at the NPS educator site? I realize their content is more K12 oriented, but you can always tweak content to make it more challenging for your students. Does your institution have a center for teaching or an instructional design team? If so, it might be worth meeting with an ID. Another fantastic resource is to meet with a research librarian. They are an incredible instructional resource that students and faculty sometimes aren't aware of. Good luck!

https://www.nps.gov/teachers/teacher-resources.htm

Pamela,

I did spend some time with the teacher resources and sadly, they were not much help. You are probably correct, next stop should be the library and the instructional design people, though I do not think they call it that.

Happy Holidays!

kevin

Kevin,

How's it going with your class? How did you design your park project? Do tell!

Pam