Northern Arizona University
AC-5: Immersive Experience

The Grand Canyon Semester is an integrated learning experience in the humanities and sciences through which each student comes to understand the environmental and social challenges confronting society in the 21st century. The Grand Canyon Semester fosters a deep interest in exploring the intertwined issues that surround, influence, and shape the natural and cultural worlds of the Grand Canyon region. Using interdisciplinary approaches, students understand how cross-sections and intersections of people, culture, and environment shape the economic, political, artistic, ecological, social, and spiritual forces of the greater Grand Canyon region. Students explore how management, policy, and research strive to balance complex issues such as climate change, mining, dams, tourism, land development, and biological and cultural diversity. This immersion into the interconnected regional issues poses challenging questions that foster critical thinking skills that will help students address 21st-century global issues such as: How are indigenous people, minorities, and women represented in the park now and historically? How do limited water resources, population growth, and changing social values determine our relationship to this fragile and stunning landscape? How can we protect a World Heritage Site that is also a “crown jewel” of America’s National Park system and still make it available to nearly six million visitors a year? What are the legal and moral rights of the Native peoples whose ancestors lived in this canyon country for thousands of years? What are our stewardship responsibilities to this unique region of the earth? Students will address these questions and many more by studying the complexities of issues affecting the greater Grand Canyon region and developing transferable skills to engage similar problems in other environments. Using “City as Text” methods, students will come to understand ethics, policy, science, aesthetics, and social justice through multiple lenses. Their knowledge will be scaled to national and global issues through reflective writing assignments designed to transfer the GCS experience to their lives and studies at their home institutions and to better understand their sense of place at their home locals.