Happy New Year, everyone! We are certainly happy to announce our new collaborator – Nick Morris from Ohio.
Nick Morris is currently the community outreach coordinator for Stark Parks working to expand the reach of the park district as an essential community resource. In this capacity he serves as director of Live Well Stark County which is a collaborative project to support healthy eating and active living and Stark Parks’ ACE program which aims to position the park district as a site for higher education learning for sustainability. Recently he developed Introduction to Watershed Studies; a park based biology course through Kent State university which combines environmental science and humanities based inquiries to reconceptualize watersheds as communities. Prior to working with Stark Parks he earned his BS in Biology in 2001 from Muskingum University and taught high school biology for five years. He earned his Master’s degree in education from Walsh University in 2004 and served as an adjunct professor of multi-cultural education there until 2009. He is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural Foundations of Education and is a current adjunct professor of environmental education at Kent State University.
The goals for our collaboration are
– to share the models of collaborative education with representatives from the universities and community partners
– to explore the potential of adding art to environmental initiatives
– to develop a longer term project partnering between Art-Eco Project and Stark Park’s Academy of Collaborative Education (ACE)
The ACE program has brought together university and college students and faculty as well as high school students to address the health of the local environment through community-based learning. The project launched in 2014 after Stark Parks received a grant from the Herbert W. Hoover Foundation.
Read Nick’s interview about the ACE program from thesuburbanite.com.
We met Nick at the EJE conference last year and now he is coming to Tampere to work with us in June 13-20. Looking forward to this great collaboration! Welcome, Nick!