Inspired by a documentary film by Richard Foster, a world recognized nature cinematographer residing and working in Belize, we are offering a watershed field course designed for students to experience a journey through tropical watersheds; a journey that follows the path of the rain gods from the headwater regions high in the Maya Mountains all the way through the natural system to the Belize Barrier Reef.

We provide a proven field learning experience incorporating latest information on watershed structure, function, dynamics and management issues. Rapid Ecological Assessment protocols are introduced and demonstrated as a new tool that watershed communities can use to oversee and care for their neighborhood ecosystems. The field training program is offered as a component to existing field courses, or as a longer four week intensive academic field course.

Longer course components are developed around group projects designed to add information layers to existing data sets being built on the watersheds of Belize for watershed communities and Government agencies. It is an experiential learning program that applies student energies and creativity toward the production of useful information packets that include river reach maps, land use surveys, biodiversity inventories, rapid ecological assessment of impact sites, village profiles and watershed atlases. The course teaches us to experience watersheds as whole systems and build skills and understanding that promote creative environmental problem-solving and intercultural communicative competency.

What is experiential learning? It is learning by living. It is experiencing nature up close and personal through project-based, hands-on, community level field courses in watershed ecology, forest ecology, marine ecology and intercultural global ecology. It is exploring jungles, rivers and reefs while viewing these ecosystems through microscopes, binoculars, cameras, computers and eyes that can focus both outward and inward. It is facing our fear of nature and realizing its roots tangled in folklore and facts, seeking the threads of truth and understanding. It is reconnecting with the Earth through sky, rock, water and life and learning to live within our means while respecting the lives of others no matter what race, gender, age, nationality or species.