ENSC 10243 - Environmental Context: Natural History of North-Central Texas

This course is part of the Integrated Academic Community, one of five freshman courses run in tandem. It introduces environmental history, which integrates earth sciences, ecology, natural history, and environmental literature. Assignments are designed to increase awareness about how the regional environment has been shaped by interactions among cultural and natural processes. There also is emphasis on understanding the complex cosmology assembled from the various European imperialism, and urban ecology. The course centers upon five all-day field trips in the vicinity of Fort Worth. Trips include presentations and exercises representing different expert perspectives, designed both to showcase individual enthusiasms and to explore how disciplinary knowledge can be integrated into a richer understanding of the local environments. Whenever possible, readings from both scientific and literary sources are used to interpret the same landscapes and phenomena. Students practice describing environments in different modes, in order to cultivate the breadth of perspective required for environmental literacy. Each trip is framed during 2-hour evening sessions to discuss assigned readings, insights from the previous trip, and relevant concepts for the next trip.





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