Wild about nature

Jason BreMiller is as passionate about the outdoors as he is about literature. Last winter, to illustrate concepts discussed in his ENG420 course, he led students on a walk through the woods to build a fire, cook, then taste a deer heart from an animal he had humanely harvested.

At different points in his teaching career — before and after arriving at Exeter in 2012 — BreMiller has guided students through ice caves in Iceland, up Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro and through the Serengeti because he believes place-based education helps students learn. “I’ve tried in my pedagogy to set a high bar of traditional academic rigor but explore different possibilities for its delivery,” BreMiller says.

His ENG572: Literature and the Land course is centered around weekly field trips — hikes through forests, visits to local orchards, explorations of the New Hampshire Seacoast — connected to the stories students read and discuss in class. “Literature and the Land is really built around deepening students’ awareness of and connection to place, and relying on the body of literature that’s conducive to that,” BreMiller says. “It’s perfect for seniors who are poised to reflect about transition. We visit places designed to prompt them to think about what it means to have a relationship to place that’s both good for human and biological communities.”

BreMiller spent much of his childhood exploring the outdoors, observing animals and learning to bow hunt with the help of his father, a wildlife enthusiast who often brought animals into the house. “My childhood was unusual in the sense that you’d go get ice cream and all these bird specimens would just spill out of the freezer,” he says. “I also remember we glued a turtle back together that had cracked its shell on the road. I grew up with a deep affinity for natural spaces and a comfort with being outdoors.”

After pursuing studies in environmental humanities in college and graduate school, BreMiller gravitated to mountaineering and backpacking, completing a NOLS outdoor educator mountaineering course and becoming a field instructor. “These pieces fit in my teaching career, where I saw the value of being outdoors with students and observing firsthand the magic that is both intellectual and deeply internal by teaching in wild places,” he says.

BreMiller is the founder and director of Exeter’s Environmental Literature Institute, a weeklong conference for teachers, and established INT519: Green Umbrella Learning Lab, an integrated studies course which gives students an opportunity to dig into sustainability projects on and off campus. Among its successes were the introduction of RedBikes, a campus bike share program, and an initiative to raise the awareness of local drinking water quality. “The kids are developing the skills to execute high stakes, complex projects with real outcomes for the community, which in mymind is the logical extension of Harkness pedagogy,” he says.

One idea BreMiller is contemplating is a field-based, interdisciplinary course on the philosophy and ethics of hunting. It invites many complex questions but, most important to BreMiller, it takes those conversations outdoors.