Emeritus Faculty of Undergraduate ProgramsInstruction

Joel Barnes

jbarnes@prescott.edu

(928) 350-2206

17

Publications

25

Presentations

8

Honors

Through teaching and advising I encourage students to wrap their education around their passions and run with it. I am proud to be part of this progressive academic community that encourages this student-driven approach to learning.
Joel C. Barnes. Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus. Environmental Studies & Sustainability; Adventure Education.

Academic Background:

• Ph.D., Union Institute & University, Environmental Conservation & Education, 2005.

• M.S., California State University at Humboldt, Natural Resource Studies in Wilderness & Water Resource Management, 1991.

• B.A., Prescott College, Environmental Sciences & Education, 1981.

Teaching, Administration, & Leadership:

Joel has been teaching environmental studies, sustainability, and adventure education at the secondary and college levels for over 40 years. The bulk of his career has been at Prescott College as a professor in their undergraduate and graduate programs. From 2009-2017 he led the design, delivery, and management of the Graduate Teaching Assistant Program (GTAP), the College's first on-campus, residential graduate program.The GTAP brought about a dozen graduate students each year to the Prescott, AZ campus where they worked with faculty to help teach undergraduate classes, explore the College's unique style of experiential education, and enrich the residential community. From 2011-2015 he served as Director of the College’s Grand Canyon Semester, a field-based conservation biology program designed around a formal partnership with Grand Canyon National Park. For three years (2017-2020) Joel worked at Wasatch Academy, a private international boarding high school in central Utah, as their Director of Sustainability and Experiential and Education. He returned to Prescott College as Faculty Emeritus in 2020.

Joel’s teaching and research explore the ecology, conservation, and restoration of aridland river systems and watersheds in the American West. While the Colorado Plateau serves as the geographical context of much of his work, his teaching style is best described as interdisciplinary, experiential, and student-centered. At the heart of his teaching philosophy is his belief that the best teachers are also the best learners; he shares with his students his thirst for new knowledge and engages with them in the experiential learning process. He dives in with them to role model the notion that learning is a continual, life-long process.

His students sense his compassion for the natural world and his drive to better understand how human systems are nestled within and dependent upon the larger natural systems. The triple bottom line of sustainability resonates with him on a personal and professional level, and he strives to integrate content from environmental studies and sustainability education with the praxis of experiential education and project-based learning.

Research and Consulting:

Joel's doctoral studies (1999-2005) focused on the conservation of river systems and watersheds in the American Southwest, and included a six-year research partnership with Grand Canyon National Park to support Wild and Scenic River (WSR) designation for the Colorado River and its tributaries. As the WSR Project Leader from Prescott College, Joel coordinated the WSR study for over 500 miles of rivers and streams in and adjacent to the Park. The field phase of this project was designed as a series of undergraduate courses and engaged over 60 students as field research assistants. Ultimately, this WSR study sets the stage for what would be one of the largest WSR designations ever passed by Congress, more than doubling the mileage of WSRs in the southwest. Joel’s research has advanced the College’s reputation as a leader in bioregional conservation and helped set the stage for further collaborative projects between the College and Grand Canyon National Park.

Since the early 2000's, Joel has served as a topical expert and consultant for Grand Canyon National Park, the Arizona Wilderness Coalition, Prescott Creeks Preservation Association, and other entities that champion environmental conservation, restoration, and education. He is involved in wholistic restoration and education projects focused on streams of the Central Arizona Highlands and the Grand Canyon Ecoregion. Since 2020, he has managed his own watershed restoration consulting business, Riparia, LLC.

Joel's current research and teaching weave together experiential and sustainability education, landscape ecology, wholistic ecological restoration, transdisciplinary water studies, bioregionalism, and expeditionary learning.

Personal Interests:

Joel has maintained his personal passion for natural history field studies, bioregional living and gardening, hiking, recreational boating on rivers, lakes, and oceans, a bit of surfing, and decades of conversational Spanish. He has embarked on many foreign travel & wildland expeditions for both work and play, including 50 trips down the Colorado River through Grand Canyon, extensive explorations throughout the American Southwest and the Colorado Plateau, as well New Zealand, southeastern Alaska, Costa Rica, Iceland, mainland Mèxico, the Baja Peninsula and Yucatàn Peninsula.

Academic Statement

Personal Philosophy of Education

My current professional goals and projects draw on over 40 years of experience in teaching, program administration, and educational leadership in higher education institutions, K-12 schools, and non-profit organizations. Among the more challenging projects I’ve been recently engaged in are directing and teaching two programs at Prescott College - the Graduate Teaching Assistant Program and the Grand Canyon Semester. Also, in 2012 I created my own consulting service, RIPARIA, which has focused on ecological restoration, education, and sustainability projects with organizations in central Arizona.

My teaching, leadership, and administration in these two programs enable me to forge professional goals that integrate content from the environmental studies field with the praxis of teacher training, science education, and service learning. These goals include…

• To serve as an inspirational role model and academic mentor for my students.

• To integrate my research activities, teaching, and community outreach/partnerships for the benefit of my students, my college community, and the broader communities in which I work.

• To hold the three pillars of environmental sustainability -- ecological health, social equity, and economic stability -- at the core of my personal and professional life.

With the American West as the geographical context of much of my work, "interdisciplinary" and "experiential" best describe the pedagogical context of my teaching. My academic background and teaching skills are clearly interdisciplinary and experiential in nature. My educational philosophy, while firmly rooted in alternative methodologies, incorporates certain valuable aspects of traditional education. Finding the combination that works best for a particular topic and group of students is a challenge I truly enjoy as a teacher. Through my years of teaching and learning, I have gained a consistency in style that includes a conscious effort to share with students my compassion for the natural world and an understanding of how human systems are nestled within and dependent upon the larger natural systems (Capra, 2002).

At the heart of my personal teaching philosophy is my belief that the best teachers are also the best learners. I convey to students my own thirst for new knowledge and engage myself, with them, in the experiential learning process. I dive in with them to role model the notion that learning is a continual process, even when I feel like "I know this stuff already" (Bain, 2004). In every course I teach, I inform my students that the syllabus they have before them represents about 2/3's of the course - they are responsible for developing the remaining third with the content and methodologies that address their needs and learning styles. This is usually expressed through their academic writings and student-directed research projects. This student-directed research is a component of all the courses I teach. This approach to teaching and learning incorporates aspects of constructivism (Henson, 2009) and multiple intelligences (Gardner, 2006). Through course design, I wholeheartedly advocate a personal commitment to sustainable participation in the natural environment and human communities. My assignments often include projects rooted in current environmental issues -- they can involve interactions with politicians, corporate executives and resource management agencies, and can directly involve students in service learning projects that contribute to the triple bottom line of sustainability.

This triple bottom line of sustainability resonates strongly with me on a personal and professional level! I have an absurdly strong hunch that an out-of-the-box ecocentric approach to reforming our economic systems will inevitably help to cultivate an ecocentric reform in our social systems in ways that support, restore and elucidate the Earth’s ecosystems. THIS is what lies at the heart of sustainability education!

My teaching emphasizes the application of new knowledge and insights within socio-cultural, politico-economic, ecological, experiential, and ethical contexts. My students know that the most important aspects of their learning are critical thinking and issues analysis from multiple perspectives, adopting both a problem-solving and a solution-generating approach to environmental challenges, and the exploration of personal relevance with the content and task at hand. These are the attributes I look for in students’ academic work, and what I focus on as I evaluate their learning. This type of learning helps students to develop effective written and verbal communication skills and a sense of self-direction. This style of learning propels them beyond the impersonal acquisition of knowledge, and creates something more meaningful, personal, and professionally transformative - mastery of the subject matter in the context of personal relevance.

In addition to these viewpoints, my teaching philosophy embraces these four core principles:

• Always leave your students inspired enough to take the next step and tackle the next challenge in their learning.

• Try your best to set your students up for success, but don’t protect them from failure; recognize that degrees of failure and disappointment also present opportunities for valuable learning.

• Be mindful of striking a balance between meeting students where they’re at, while also challenging them to discover and explore unfamiliar territories in learning.

• Remember that the processes of education (the ways of teaching & learning) are every bit as important as the content - the two are inextricably linked!

References Cited

Bain, Ken. 2004. What the Best College Teachers Do. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA.

Capara, Fritjof. 2002. The Hidden Connections. A Science for Sustainable Living. Anchor Books, Random House. NY, NY.

Gardner, Howard. 2006. Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons in Theory and Practice. Basic Books, HarperCollins. NY, NY.

Henson, Kenneth. 2009. Curriculum Planning: Integrating Multiculturalism, Constructivism and Education

Accolades