Grace Mikkelson

Nature exposure is beneficial to health, but access to the outdoors is not equitable across populations. I facilitated an active learning project focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion in nature for EcoliteracySCHOOL (Students Collaborating in Health-Oriented Outdoor Learning) high school and UMR students. My goal was to determine if combining the outdoors and diversity could deepen the outdoor experience as well as the understanding of diversity. In the class, an app-based communication platform called Slack facilitated virtual mentorship discussions. I created a diversity-based discussion post asking participants to collect outdoor natural materials and create a diversity-centric work of art. The participants were then asked to post the work of art and write a discussion post about how it felt while being outside and completing the artwork and how it represented diversity. I used qualitative analysis and four categories emerged from the data: process, self-view, emotions, and community. After completing the analysis it was found that emotion was the most common category with the code appreciation being the most common code. In the end, three conclusions were made, outdoor exposure decreased day-to-day stress and the participants experienced increased appreciation for the environment and increased awareness of diversity and how it affects their lives.