Marlboro and EEI Foster Environmental Leadership

Marlboro College is pleased to announce a recent agreement with Expedition Education Institute (EEI) to adopt EEI’s innovative programs into its Semester at Marlboro offerings. Together, the two organizations will offer an undergraduate and gap-year pilot semester in the spring of 2015, and are in discussion about the possible launch of a new Master of Arts in Teaching for Ecological Education and Leadership in fall 2015.

Expedition Education Institute comes from more than 40 years of higher education rooted in direct experience, personal discovery, independent learning, and immersion in the natural world, as practiced by the former Audubon Expedition Institute. Throughout this legacy, the program has offered students and faculty the opportunity to live and learn together in an experiential learning community, traveling in a custom-retrofitted school bus. Participants eat, sleep, and study outdoors within a specific bioregion as they explore local and global environmental challenges that communities and ecosystems are facing.

“This is a great match in terms of taking our longstanding experiential education offerings to the next level,” said Kyhl Lyndgaard, professor of writing and director of environmental studies at Marlboro. He contrasts the interdisciplinary nature of both Marlboro and EEI’s programs with other programs that are primarily focused on natural sciences. “EEI is entirely field based, but still interdisciplinary, which is a hallmark of environmental studies at Marlboro.”