Renewing Awe in the Urban Experience: Historic Changes in Land-Based Education

Abstract

What role can awe play in the practice of environmental education as our lives become increasingly urbanized? This paper looks at the historic emergence of land experience in environmental education and thinking as a means for examining its potential role in an urban academic setting. Many early environmental scholars proposed that the mind is spread out in surrounding ecologies, and it was an idea that fostered curriculum initiatives like land experience, interdisciplinarity, and critical histories. Using archival documents and seminal environmental thought from two academic environmental programs, I consider the potential of renewing the awe-inspiring experience of land education as the context for historic and critical interdisciplinary thought on the urban places where most of us live.