HUMAN & ENVIRONMENTAL WELLNESS
IMG CREDIT: ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
On Tuesday, January 23rd, Darron Collins spoke to members of B Inspired about human and environmental wellness. Darron Collins is currently in his seventh year as President of College of the Atlantic. Prior to that, he worked for the World Wildlife Fund. As such, he has a unique approach to education and overall wellness.
He began by introducing the College and its remarkable approach to education. College of the Atlantic is distinctive from other colleges and universities in many ways. It is home to just 350 students, far north on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. The students play an essential role in the administration; they sit on boards alongside faculty, such as the Building and Development board and the Presidential Hiring board. Additionally, the College offers just one major: human ecology, which is the study of how humans interact with the environment.
Indeed, the school is well situated for students to study the environment: the campus overlooks the Atlantic and is across the road from Acadia National Park. These outdoor resources are not just used for formal education; students and faculty are encouraged to go outside and explore their surroundings through exercise, no matter the weather.
In terms of mental wellness, Darron has four skills he tries to develop daily that contribute to his personal wellness. The first of these is focused observation and natural history. He says the best way to practice this is to spend half the time “using narrative description”, and then half the time drawing whatever it is that you are observing. This develops “focused attention, learning to see, appreciating detail, and finding beauty in the mundane”. The next area he practices is ethnography and participant observation. Participant observation is learning by doing, whereas ethnography “is simply about asking questions”. He recommends watching “for people who really know what they are doing”, and then asking them how they do it. He says practicing this helps develop empathy, and also allows you to realize “you can learn from anyone and through almost any experience”. The third objective is to make. This can be anything from painting to cooking. He says, “the process of having an idea in your head and then realizing (or trying to realize) that idea is at the root of all scientific inquiry and artistic practice”. Through the daily practice of “making”, you develop causality and hypothesis testing. Last, but not least, is storytelling. Darron says that “storytelling is a definitional criteria for being human”. He has found that practicing these skills every day heightens a person’s “sense of wonder with the world” and helps him or her to become a better problem solver.
Listening to Darron made it clear that, just like in life, there are many different approaches to education and wellness. While it can be easy to get stuck in one’s own routine and beliefs, there is immeasurable value in discussing such topics with people who hold different viewpoints. More often than not, being open to hearing how others see the world makes us re-evaluate our own way of life.