Growing hearts and minds: Linking landscapes and lifescapes in a soils field course

Interacting with practitioners and understanding multiple, contradictory, and complex perspectives is an important skill for effectively managing terrestrial resources in the 21st century. Addressing these needs requires innovative approaches in higher education that elevate student learning outcomes and emphasize the affective learning domain through meaningful, place-based interactions with practitioners. We describe an approach taken to expand a traditional soils field course to include emphasis on higher-level student learning outcomes in the affective learning domain. Following the completion of a week-long field study course in which students gain skills in soil description, classification, and interpretation, the expanded second module of the course includes a traveling component in which students experience soils, landscapes, and “lifescapes” (i.e., the lived experiences of practitioners). This second module incorporates practitioners as the primary source of knowledge and is structured to encourage dialogue, understanding, and co-discovery centered around soils and land management. In unstructured narratives, students identified themes in the affective domain—deep collaboration, personal and professional development and sense of place, community, and joy—as transformational experiences in the course that influenced their personal and professional growth and future ability to interact with people from across the geographic, social, and political spectrum.