Art, National Park and Wilderness Management

Park and Wilderness Management

6-9

Students will understand some of the different, and sometimes conflicting, considerations that go into making a national park or protected wilderness area.

Using materials from the natural world, students will build their own miniature park and make five rules for their park. They will then view each other's parks, hear the Yosemite National Park mission statement, and finish by discussing the difficulties of writing, implementing, and executing the statutes of a national park mission statement.

This activity can be done at any point in the week, either as an introduction to ideas about park management and wilderness, or as a wrap-up discussion of parks and our impact on them (and the fact that decisions about park management will be in these students' hands in the future).

Intro: Ask the students why this park is here? Why do wilderness areas exist? (Brainstorm a list of reasons). Lead into the main activity by saying that parks have to think of all these things when they come up with rules/laws about how to run the park. The students will now have a chance to consider these things for their own parks.

Activity: Tell the students they will now be building their own parks out of natural materials on the ground. They will be split into three groups, and each group will get a set of words (taken from the NPS mission statement). The five words are Preserve, Unimpaired, Enjoyment, Education, and Inspiration. Depending on which words a group gets, they should build a park that upholds those words and make five rules/laws to ensure that their visitors are also adhering to their park's mission.
The words should be split as follows:
Group 1: Enjoyment, Education, Inspiration
Group 2: Preserve, Unimpaired
Group 3: Enjoyment, Education, Inspiration, Preserve, Unimpaired

Give the students about 15 minutes to build their parks and come up with the laws. Then, do a parks tour-- I usually visit the group that got all five words last. Have each group present their park and its rules, and talk about why they built it that way (depending on their words).

Once the parks tour is done, ask the students if they notice any difficulties in designing a park that upholds all five words. What are these difficulties?

Read the students the NPS mission statment:
"The NPS preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the national park system for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations."

Possibly discussion questions:
Why is it hard to uphold all five values?
What would a park look like that only had the words Preserve and Unimpaired? (We saw one group's version).
Are there any parks like this?
Should we only have parks like that?
What kind of park is "better"?
Is the NPS doing a good job of upholding the mission statment in Yosemite?

For all students, make sure to define the five words being used for park-building.

If a particular student is having trouble understanding due to a special need, make sure you either pair them with a responsible student who can guide them in understanding. The instructor can also give extra supervision/help to that group and student.

If a group is advanced, bring the discussion questions to a higher level, and work on stretching their critical thinking skills through questions about the dichotomy between the different subsets of the five words.

Example for Group 1: A group with the words Education, Inspiration, and Enjoyment might choose to build an amusement park with some educational aspect. Or they could build a nature reserve that had different activities available.

Students will work collaboratively. Students will work in groups of 4.

1 class period. 1 Hr per class.

This is a great activity to help students begin to think about the role and purpose of wilderness in our world. In a more traditional classroom setting, the activity could be done with provided materials (paper, building blocks, legos, etc.).