Sleepaway Camp for Professors
Indiana University’s Doug Knapp in Yellowstone. He made a five-park sweep evaluating education programs during his sabbatical. Photo courtesy Dr. Doug Knapp.
Denis and Elaine Defibaugh felt rejuvenated by the National Park Service program that enabled them to spend a shared sabbatical living and working in Utah’s Zion National Park during the fall of 2003. “My wife and I called it Shangri-La,” says Denis, a 53-year-old associate professor of photography at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, NY. And both Defibaughs found they had a lot to give in return.
About 20 hours a week, Denis took photos of life in the park, accompanying rangers as they netted and examined fish by day and bats by night. At the end of his 10-week stay, he presented the park with 1,200 digital images to be used in park publications. For his own fulfillment, Denis took black-and-white landscape photos and did a creative still-life series on birds, slated for the park’s museum.
Inspired by the beauty of Zion, Elaine, 51, an artist and adjunct art professor at RIT, created six-by-eight-foot abstract paintings in the garage of the Defibaughs’ temporary home there. Outside, she traced the shadows of the trees onto her canvas with charcoal and then filled in with layers of acrylic paint in her makeshift studio. She loved the interaction with passersby and putting on workshops for children in the park.
“It gave me a new outlook and a new energy to go out there and market my work,” Elaine says. As a result of her work in Zion, in 2007 Elaine will have her first solo New York art show. “It made me realize what I am doing is really valuable and it isn’t just for me—it’s for me to share. I can take more chances in interacting with people.”
Exploring the wilderness was “freeing,” says her husband. He’d blaze his own path through the park’s valleys, photographing coyotes running across a stream or whatever crossed his path. “The quiet, peaceful moments with just me and the environment” are sweet memories now that Denis is back in his campus routine, where teaching means “I’m always with people and always talking.”
Win-Win for Parks and Profs. Dozens of professors like the Defibaughs have found respite and meaningful work through the Sabbatical in the Parks Program since its inception in 1999. The National Park Service matches the interests of active faculty members with the needs of the parks. From forestry professors studying tree diseases to biological scientists tracking amphibians, the program offers academics a chance to apply their expertise to help the parks and, at the same time, reenergize themselves in some of the country’s most spectacular settings.
Doug Knapp, 48, has loved visiting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park ever since he was six years old. So he says he was “thrilled” to help improve park educational programs during his sabbatical from Indiana University in Bloomington, where he is an associate professor in the Department of Recreation and Park Administration.
In the fall of 2001, Knapp went to five national parks, including the Smokies, to review the quality of education programs. From his fieldwork, Knapp has published journal articles and hopes to write a textbook. He recalls one particular night tent camping in Yellowstone. “I could hear the wolf calling, the geyser gurgling, elk bugling,” he says. “I thought, ‘life can’t be too bad when all this is happening at once.’ ” (Ironically, after nights in the wild, Knapp had his worst encounter indoors, when he was stung by hornets nesting in a park’s apartment kitchen.)
Housing or office support generally comes free from the National Park Service while the professors remain on their universities’ payrolls. (Find more information at www.nature.nps.gov/sabbaticals.) Brian Forist, coordinator of the Sabbatical in the Parks Program, matches faculty abilities with parks’ needs, a selection process that begins with an applicant’s university-approved written proposal.
Often, academics like Carolyn Daugherty of Flagstaff, AZ, find both professional and spiritual renewal. Last spring, the associate professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and Recreation at Northern Arizona University, lived in Whiskeytown National Recreation Area in northern California, where she conducted environmental-impact assessments for the park service.
“As you get older, students begin to look at you as their mother or, worse, their grandmother,” says Daugherty, 59. “So if you have been in the work world and held an important function and are still a vibrant, active person, you get more respect. You are someone who has worked as a team member in a professional setting. That lends more credibility to what you are teaching. You are not just an ivory-tower geek.”
About the Author
Caralee Adams often writes for NRTA Live & Learn.
This article first appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Summer 2005.
