December 1998

Related Links Audubon Expedition Institute

College without a Campus Visits George Mason Twenty-three students and three faculty members from the Audubon Expedition Institute camped out on the Fairfax Campus in early November. Traveling in a pale yellow school bus with their luggage strapped on top, they were on their way south, planning to reach their destination in the Florida panhandle at the end of the semester. They held an "open bus" in the Patriot Center parking lot to give Mason students an opportunity to come aboard and find out about the program. The institute, which is an educational program of the National Audu-bon Society, prepares undergraduate and graduate students for environmental careers. The bus, one of four that the institute owns, is a mobile classroom. Each semester, students and faculty members travel through a region of the United States, stopping along the way to go hiking, to talk with industry about business concerns, to discuss with authors and scientists their perspectives on current issues, and to attend congressional briefings. Luther Brown, director of field studies at New Century College, invited the group to campus. One of the three faculty members on the bus, Rob Baldwin, is a George Mason alumnus and one of Brown's former graduate students. The institute is similar in ways to George Mason's New Century College, says Brown. "They are, for instance, portfolio based, and they do use a learning-community approach and bring in a lot of resource people, as New Century tries to do." Also, like the Audubon program, though to a lesser extent, New Century College incorporates experiential learning into its curriculum. New Century College freshmen had the opportunity to meet with the visiting group to learn more about the program. "It's possible that some George Mason students might want to enroll in, say, a semester program with the Audubon group to take advantage of its members' expertise in experiential kinds of things," says Brown.