The Global Challenges Summer Camp is an opportunity for high school students to engage with environmental issues by creating community with faculty members, college mentors, and elementary-aged youth in Lincoln. Since the best way to learn is to teach, high school students will work alongside UNL students to innovate create hands-on activities and appropriate environmental lessons to help Nebraska youth understand environmental challenges and become environmental stewards.
This two-week educational and leadership camp for rising high school juniors and seniors will help kids understand basic issues surrounding climate change and environmental stewardship.
This global challenges camp will include “spark” mini lectures, helping students develop important skills for college while learning about environmental problems and effects. Each day students will focus on a different environmental challenge, with exposure to key concepts and debates. Students will then brainstorm solutions, research applications and create engaging activities for kids. In addition to classes at UNL’s Knoll Residence Hall, the camp will include field trips to UNL’s Reller Prairie Field Station (RPFS), a 80-acre parcel located 20 minutes south of the UNL City Campus. Since it is crucial that future environmental leaders develop a global mindset, students will have an immersive boot camp language experience in the afternoons. Language skills and cultural awareness are essential to global competencies and opening students’ minds to diversity of thought. Through exposure to Chinese, Spanish or Russian, students will not only learn some basic language skills, but the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures Technology Classroom and other cutting-edge resources will allow students to learn from and meet people from around the world.
Importantly, camp participants will have opportunities to teach others and engage in near-peer experiences with college students and Nebraska youth (K-8 students) through partnerships with Lincoln Public Schools and Lincoln’s Community Learning Centers (CLCs). With a focus on the effects of environmental change and stewardship, this global challenges summer camp will explore the ways governments, societies, and individuals lead and innovate, equipping young Nebraskans with the knowledge, skills, and mindsets to respond to and recover from disruptive environmental events.
Learn more and apply at:
https://honors.unl.edu/experiences/global-challenges-summer-camp