E-mail this pageADX Students Catch A Wave
Making a "Boots and Books" Connection With Students
"Outdoor Sport & Culture" (PED 370), an Adirondack Experience
3-credit course with no prerequisites and a million pleasures, allows active outdoor enthusiasts to do what they study. The course is offered Fall and Spring semesters and every wintersession, when Dr. Anneliese Mueller offers "Skiing & Culture" as her version of the changing topic of the seminar.
As Dr. Soroka, director of the Adirondack Experience, once said, "when I started ice climbing, the first thing I did was buy climbing boots; the second was to visit a bookstore." Now he and the ADX program help others make those "boots and books" connections.
The "Outdoor Sport & Culture" topics vary but every semester students invariably both experience their sport and then bridge experience and reflection in a myriad of ways.
One semester students both kayaked and read Qauyaks and Canoes: Native Ways of Knowing one of the several books that they read on the kayaking experience.
Nathaniel Arnold, a philosophy major, declared a minor in Outdoor Studies
last fall after taking an intro to kayaking course. "ADX's Sport & Culture class will stay with me longer than any . . . class I have ever taken."
One semester students went ice climbing and then read the likes of Annapurna: A Woman's Place, a book about how women overcame the stereotypes and barriers limiting women mountaineers.
Jessie Owens, an environmental science major, grew up, she says, "connected to the Adirondacks and the outdoors." The Adirondack Experience's Canoes, Kayaks, & Culture course allowed her to maintain and extend that connection.
January '03's course had students learning to use free-heel ski equipment, taking trips to Whiteface and Titus Mountain, interviewing down-hill skiers, and reading, among other things, From Skisport to Skiing.
Jeremy Gorzynski, a history major, says that history and the environment are interlinked. He suggests that any student, regardless of major, would profit from the Adirondack Experience course Outdoor Sport & Culture.
June '04 students who take on the adventure that is "Outdoor Sport & Culture" will travel to North Carolina's Outer Banks to learn to surf as well as make connections to the surfer culture via Tom Wolfe's essay, "The Pump House Gang," and other literature that looks at the surfing life.
Get Involved
Students who want to embed their outdoor experiences in their academic lives, who want to explore the relevance of their connectedness to the natural world by reading the literature that examines that connection, take "Outdoor Sport & Culture."
Catch the wave.
More information
Dr. Larry Soroka, Director The Adirondack Experience
Plattsburgh State University of New York
101 Broad Street
Plattsburgh, NY 12962
phone: (518) 564-5292
email: laurence.soroka@pattsburgh.edu
www.plattsburgh.edu/adx