Welcome to the Chancellor’s Point Project blog.

As this rather grassroots program continues to grow in both interest and momentum we hope that this web site will be a beneficial tool. Here members of Historic St. Mary’s City, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and the local community can learn more about and contribute to the process of bringing Chancellor’s Point Natural History Area back to life.

I hope that this will help connect us all to the ongoing discussions of this exciting project.

Please always feel free to contact me by any means.

Mike Benjamin

jmbenjamin@smcm.edu

j.michael.benjamin@gmail.com


Academia

Chancellor's Point in Academia.

Links
Study Abroad at Chancellor's Point Proposal

1 comment:

  1. Leave No Trace at Chancellor’s Point:
    A “study abroad” program only feet away but centuries ago.

    St. Mary’s College has an extremely progressive investment in the environmental movement. Green ways of thinking and acting guide many important academic decisions made by both students and faculty. Our love for this pristine setting is immeasurable and we conduct ourselves accordingly. What students need now is to combine stewardship and academia, history and modernity, our heritage with our habits, and most importantly our studies with our lived experience.

    For several years St. Mary’s has been working to provide students and teachers with the opportunity participate in the wilderness ethics course LNT (Leave No Trace) in cooperation with National Outdoor Leadership School’s Professional Program. This working relationship had been a success to date in both Patagonia and Easter Island, Chile. As a collaboration of our disciplinary academia and the experiential place-space learning of NOLS, these trips are in many ways the first of their kind. With the wilderness as the classroom, purpose and necessity accompany any discussion of economics, history, physics, philosophy, biology, anthropology, or art.

    We seek to further this program by bringing such an experience home, specifically to Chancellors Point, as a means to bridge the gap between our twenty first century college and the seventeenth century landscape that is our heritage. This is an opportunity to activate the traditions and lessons of Historic St. Mary’s through curricular courses outside of the classroom. Much like our own study abroad experiences, Chancellor’s Point can provide host to students and faculty in an environment extraordinary to any classroom. This is a site that can facilitate extended stays for students through the practice of Leave No Trace ethics. This will not only protect our wilderness, but the archaeological significance of the site as well. The location is perfect for its displacement from college urbanity yet is close enough to access its services after a walk in the woods.

    In order to accomplish such goals we will need to partner with Historic St. Mary’s City to propose a curriculum that accentuates the needs of the academic disciplines and the lessons of HSMC. In addition, Chancellor’s Point will need a renovation to accommodate the stay of small groups of students and faculty. All proposed development should be designed to leave no footprint and/or with respect to historic traditions. Potential to develop the property as a small subsistence farm in a likeness to seventeenth century agriculture should be considered as a way to directly connect students to the land.

    This program would not only be a landmark for the college and for historic, but it would be the first program of its kind for any university. We will be a model and a training facility for other institutions who will inevitably seek to provide their students with these opportunities as well. A generation of environmentalists is only as valuable as their experience in the environment. The lessons to be learned in the landscape can no longer go unrecognized.

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