Using Leopold in Teaching

A page for teachers, by teachers

We invite educators at all levels to share their ideas about using Leopold in teaching here for others. Eventually we’d like to develop an outreach and networking strategy to connect educators all across the country using Leopold in teaching. We hope we have many more ways to connect you in the future!

In the meantime, we have compiled some of the resources the Aldo Leopold Foundation has developed for use in the classroom, alongside resources developed by our partners. Do you have something to share here? Send us an email! Have you used our film in teaching? How about our discussion guides? Just using the book itself? What works? What doesn't? Do you have tools you’d be willing to share here with other educators to make it easier for them to use Leopold in the classroom? Tell us! We’ll share it alongside the other resources you see on this page. The digital information age is an exciting time for collaboration and sharing. We look forward to hearing from you!

Green Fire Film

The Aldo Leopold Foundation has an exciting new resource to offer to educators: the first ever full-length, high definition film about Leopold: Green Fire—Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for our Time. The movie explores Aldo Leopold's life in the context of American conservation and environmental history, while also illustrating how Leopold's legacy lives on today in the work of people and organizations across the nation and around the world. The film will begin airing on Wisconsin Public Television on April 20, 2012. We are working toward a larger nationwide television release in 2013. Download a flyer specific to the use of Green Fire on college campuses.

Showing the film to your students
The full-length film has a run time of approximately 70 minutes and is now available for screenings. As we continue to raise financial resources for the film, we will be working on creating a fully-featured DVD designed specifically for classroom use, with a 56 minute runtime version of the film, DVD extras and shorts that will address specific subject areas. Anticipated release of the expanded version of the film will be sometime in 2012. If you are interested in showing your students the full-length film now, click here to learn more about scheduling a screening.

More Classroom Resources from the Aldo Leopold Foundation and other partner organizations and projects:

Discussion Questions
ASCA cover Discussion Guide for select essays in A Sand County Almanac by the Aldo Leopold Foundation (Adobe PDF format)
Discussion Guide for the Green Fire film by the Aldo Leopold Foundation (Adobe PDF format)
Discussion Guide to A Sand County Almanac: Shared by Susan Todd, University of Alaska Fairbanks (Adobe PDF format)
Discussion Guide for A Sand County Almanac: Shared by Northwest Earth Institute (Adobe PDF format)

Fact Sheets from the Aldo Leopold Foundation
Aldo Leopold (Adobe PDF format)
A Sand County Almanac (Adobe PDF format)
Land Ethic (Adobe PDF format)

Lessons, Lectures, Activities:
LEPCD Exploring the Outdoors with Aldo Leopold (CD) and;
The Leopold Education Project Lessons in a Land Ethic (available through a facilitator training)
Available from Pheasant’s Forever Leopold Education Project

A list of college-level syllabi on various aspects of the Land Ethic, complied by participants in the NEH-sponsored summer institutes on Leopold and Sustainability, organized by Dan Shilling at Arizona State University.

Lesson Plan for January Thaw from Brittany Roberts, lead teacher at Northern Waters Environmental School in Hayward, WI

Land Ethic Worksheet shared by Paul Totah, Director of Communications at St. Ignatius College Preparatory

Youtube lectures about Aldo Leopold shared by Susan Todd at the University of Alaska Fairbanks:

Books, Videos, Audio, and Websites

Books	Videos	Audio	Other
Check out the books written by and about Aldo Leopold	Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and a Land Ethic for Our Time Classroom screening license available from the Aldo Leopold Foundation	CD: Remembering Aldo Leopold Purchase it from the ALF Bookstore	Encyclopedia of Earth, Aldo Leopold Collection
For young audiences: Aldo Leopold's Shack: Nina's Story by Nancy Nye Hunt Purchase it from our bookstore	Aldo Leopold: Learning from the Land. Available from the Aldo Leopold Nature Center	Audio Documentary: Aldo Leopold and the Emerging Land Ethic Shared by Public Radio Exchange (PRX)	Wisconsin educators, check out the option to borrow a classroom set of A Sand County Almanac from the Wisconsin Center for Environmental Education Resources Library
For young audiences: Aldo Leopold: Champion of Conservation by Carole Marsh Available from Carole Marsh Bookstore	Watch Nina Leopold Bradley as she talks about phenology in relation to climate change in this four minute video.	“Before Silent Spring” Radio program with Curt Meine on Aldo Leopold available from the BBC.	Wisconsin EEK website written for kids about Aldo Leopold
For middle school age: Aldo Leopold: American Ecologist by Peter Anderson Search it on Google to find a store of your preference for purchase	Aldo Leopold: A Prophet for all Seasons. Available from Pheasant’s Forever Leopold Education Project	University of the Air (7/6/2008): What Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac can tell us about climate change University of the Air (8/1/2010): The Life and groundbreaking conservationism of Aldo Leopold	A small sample of what is available through the Leopold Digital Archives: See original drafts of Leopold’s hand-written essays. Read a lecture Leopold delivered as a professor in Wildlife Ecology at UW-Madison.
For middle school age: Things Natural, Wild, and Free: The Life of Aldo Leopold by Marybeth Lorbiecki Purchase it from Fulcrum Publishing	Buddy Huffaker talks about the energy efficient Aldo Leopold Legacy Center in Baraboo. The Center is both a headquarters for the Aldo Leopold Foundation and a visitor center for the Aldo Leopold Shack and Farm. Huffaker, the Executive Director of the Foundation, is interviewed here by Norman Gilliland for Wisconsin Public Television. Available through Portal Wisconsin.	Audiobook: A Sand County Almanac, read by Stuart Udall Search it on Google to find a store of your preference for download/purchase	Read posts by Leopold biographer Curt Meine discussing the land ethic in the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s America’s Wild Read blog
For high school age: Aldo Leopold: A Fierce Green Fire by Marybeth Lorbiecki Purchase it from our bookstore			LEP Task Cards. Available from Pheasant’s Forever Leopold Education Project LEP Blue Ribbon Quotes. Available from Pheasant’s Forever Leopold Education Project
Collegiate and beyond: Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work by Curt Meine Purchase it from our bookstore

Partner Organizations / Projects

Encyclopedia of Earth

Aldo Leopold and his intellectual legacy are the topic of one of the inaugural articles in the Encyclopedia of Earth. The Encyclopedia is the largest reliable information resource on the environment in history. It is the first web-based information resource that combines the trustworthiness and authority of scientific review with the power of web-based collaboration, all enabled by a state-of-the-art technology platform. The Encyclopedia is free to the public, has no advertising, and is governed by scientists, educators, and professionals. The Aldo Leopold Collection was co-authored by Aldo Leopold Foundation staff, and is a great resource for online research on Leopold.

Leopold Archives

The Aldo Leopold Foundation is the primary steward of Leopold’s writings, unpublished manuscripts, journals, correspondence, sketches, photographs, and implements he used on the land. The collection is housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives. The Aldo Leopold Foundation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives received a grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to begin digitizing the entire collection in 2007. The Leopold Digital Archives are now publicly available free of charge for viewing. Click here for more information on the project.

The Leopold Education Project

The Leopold Education Project ( LEP) is an innovative conservation education program based on the classic writings of renowned conservationist, Aldo Leopold. The primary objective is to teach conservation and instill respect for our national resources through hands-on activities in the outdoors. LEP offers several curriculum resources including the recent national award-winning curriculum, Exploring the Outdoors with Aldo Leopold consisting of sixteen interactive activities that engage a variety of audiences in the outdoors. LEP is the conservation education program of Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever. PF has owned and sponsored the program since 1992 and during this time over 18,000 individuals have gone through various training workshops. Whether a teacher, naturalist, interpreter, chapter member, parent, community member or volunteer, LEP’s resources can be used by all to provide opportunities to enjoy and learn more about habitat, wildlife and conservation. The foundation has partnered for years with LEP, working to help support, promote, and sometimes host its annual national conference.

The Aldo Leopold Nature Center

Operating two Wisconsin-based educational centers in Monona and Black Earth, the Aldo Leopold Nature Center is an independent not-for-profit charitable organization providing year-round programming which “teaches the student to see the land, to understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands” in the spirit of Aldo Leopold. ALNC offers field trips, seasonal family programs, special events, summer camps, teacher training workshops and interactive exhibits. Although a separate organization, ALNC is a partner of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. The Leopold family and Nina Leopold Bradley were instrumental in the founding of both organizations. Under their guidance, ALNC offers a number of initiatives to lead visitors to a deeper understanding of Leopold's land ethic, including: the Leopold Family Interpretive Trail: taking visitors through 21 acres of restored native habitat with questions Aldo Leopold might have asked you; the Children's Shack: child-scaled replica of the actual Aldo Leopold Shack designed to teach children about Aldo Leopold and how to live lightly on the land; and the Climate Education Center: a new wing at their Monona campus designed to teach about climate science, renewable energy and sustainability through interactive exhibits and a hands-on laboratory (named in honor of Nina) that helps children document their phenological observations.

The Aldo Leopold Foundation

Confused? Thought we were the same as the organizations listed above? Here's a quick summary of what we do:

The Aldo Leopold Foundation is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit, member-supported organization based at the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center in Baraboo, Wisconsin. The foundation’s mission is to inspire an ethical relationship between people and land through the legacy of Aldo Leopold. Leopold regarded a land ethic as a product of social evolution. “Nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written,’” he explained. “It evolves ‘in the minds of a thinking community.’” The foundation's membership forms a modern day "thinking community," and the foundation's programs create opportunities for rich, diverse, and productive dialogue with members and others about humanity’s relationships to land, allowing the idea of a land ethic to unfold in myriad ways. The Aldo Leopold Foundation owns and manages the original Aldo Leopold Shack and 300 surrounding acres, in addition to several other parcels, and we also manage much of the remainder of the 1,800-acre Leopold Memorial Reserve. We act as the executor of Leopold's literary estate, encourage scholarship on Leopold, and serve as a clearinghouse for information regarding Leopold, his work, and his ideas. The foundation's land stewardship initiatives work with neighbors and others to foster an understanding of the total land community, and our education programs serve nearly 10,000 visitors on-site each year, in addition to many thousands more served through this website, our Green Fire film, and other outreach programming. We also invite our audiences to connect with us via their social networks on Facebook and Twitter.