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Institute of Global Education
Applied Ecopsychology/Integrated Ecology
Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D.
sen mail
INSTRUCTIONS FOR WRITING COURSE PAPERS
AFTER JUNE 2001
As of November, 2004, scholarly papers for courses are advised but optional until a person does ECO 800.
The purpose of an IEE Project NatureConnect course paper is to help the student organize his/her course experiece and apply a working knowledge of the coursework in a manner that actively contributes to personal and global balance.
The final paper offers course learnings that integrate, validate and contribute important concepts, ideas and experiences to nature connected psychology and the public.
To meet this manifest, the paper consists of two parts:
Part One:
A. During, or at the end of your work in this course select magazines, journals, newsletters, ezines, or other publications, online or otherwise that you think would or should be interested in your work with NSTP or in NSTP in general.
B. Contact the editor of one or more publications by phone or write a letter of inquiry and introduce him/her to how a short article about some aspect of NSTP would benefit the publication and/or its readers. Show how your article ties in with or extends a previous article, current news event, or the purpose of their publication. Get an OK to submit an article to the publication, its length, how to submit (email, postal mail etc.) and anything special the editor might suggest. (You can often just submit a letter to an editor and then call to find out if it is accepted for publication)
C. Write the first 250-1000 words of your paper (or more if an editor requests more) as an article you submit to the editor of your choice that you have contacted.
Part Two:
As part of the remainder of your paper, it is advised for practice to use the APA Manual of Style
Be sure at this point you are aware of the option offered by the cooperative community process for certification or a degree as it can guide your choices in writing your papers.
Please address the following four paragraphs in a manner that integrates, validates and contributes important concepts and ideas to the profession or general field of nature connected psychology and the public.
Show how these concepts support the points you have made in you article in Part One
Whenever possible include the information and standards required for your dissertation or project in lieu of dissertation. What you collect and learn now will be useful later and save you much time and energy in producing your dissertation. The information and standards are located at http://www.ecopsych.com/dissertation.html
The concepts should include the following areas:
1. When you enrolled in the Degree program you stated you had certain needs and goals in mind. How has this course helped with respect to meeting them? How are you applying, or intend to apply what you have learned in the future?
2. Please identify what you think and feel are four or more most significant aspects of this course, state why they are significant, and show how, (document with examples, including quotes from the course participants and yourself) the course process contributes to personal, social and environmental wellness.
3. From this course describe and document (with examples, including quotes from the course participants and yourself) at least one example of each of the eight Natural System Thinking Process Basics (described below,) that you experienced during the course and its value to yourself and society.
4. What challenges does the course subject present, how do you think you can help meet them?
DOCUMENTATION
You can use your course experiences just as you would what a book might state. Call it empirical or phenomenological evidence. Give the posting a name cite its source, the date, group name, participants name. You could even make a web page containing the info and cite it.
If you have read or find anything else on the topic that adds info to this point in your paper, cite it too. Figure out a keyword that covers the essence of the point you are making and see what comes up in Google that you can cite, too. Look for web sites that offer articles. Encyclopedia Britannica has some, many other sites do, too. Look under keywords at the site and see what articles fit your keyword.
If I cover the point in the Web of Life book or Reconnecting With Nature, use them too.
> > I find writing a
3-page 'required' scholarly paper very
challenging, and I have a real problem with suggesting grades
toother student's work and having my own work graded. I don't
know what else to do, but to put it out to everyone.<<
I figure anybody who completes a course like this as a member in good standing gets an A until somebody or something convinces me otherwise. Fits into both worlds that way, eh?
If you are not going to learn anything from doing the paper, why do it? Most folks do learn something in the process
A scholarly paper requires citing the source of information and perhaps quoting it. Since our contact with nature and each other is the source of our information, plus the books, how hard can it be to snip out quotes from the emails that demonstrate the point you are making or vice-versa. (i.e. go through the emails, including your own and pick out quotes that demonstrate the points you are trying to make and design the paper that way.
Either way, I think you'll learn something valuable.
"Thanks Mike! This was very helpful. As I find myself dusting off my "academic repetoire" '
ELEMENTS OF APPLIED ECOPSYCHOLOGY
Below are eight Basics of the Natural Systems Thinking Process that help people solve the personal, social and environmental problems that result from the difference between the disconnected way we learn to think and how nature works. Please share how you would you edit, add to or modify them.
Rationale:
The heart of our unsolvable problems is psychological. We are in denial. We deny that we are addicted to a story that says for us to live we must conquer, exploit and subdue nature. Non-destructive alternatives are continually open to us but we seldom select them. Every other part of nature survives in balance through attraction energies that build consensual, mutually supportive relationships. NSTP enables us to think and act this way
Planet Earth acts like a living organism, a fertilized egg of the Universe. The web of life is an attraction based global ecosystem and "nervous system" of which people are part. To be part of a system one must in some way be in communication with the system. The Natural Systems Thinking Process enables a person to restore their inherent ability to consciously register and respond to communication with nature and its attraction energy intelligence. NSTP accomplishes this by providing activities that help us make genuine sensory contact with nature systems within and without, to bring webstrings into our awareness , the nameless intelligent attraction loves that we share with the web of life.
1. There is an age old purpose and non-verbal process that sustains nature's web of life and its members, including people. That purpose and process is to support life. In this regard there are no known substitutes for nature, the real thing.
2. To connect with nature, relationships must be entered by gaining consent, and measured by their long term effects on global life in a diverse balance.
3. When we provide material, social, or financial rewards for nature-disconnecting stories or acts, we become psychologically bonded/addicted to these stories and their destructive effects. Our bonding often overides messages from our sense of reason and the now of our lives.
4. Things that experience this disconnected imbalance suffer.
5. To reverse our imbalance and its discontents, continuing, thoughtful, shared, sensory contacts with webstring attractions in natural areas and people reconnect our thinking with nature's intelligent restorative ways. This regenerative process helps us produce more responsible personal, social and environmental relationships.
6. People experience webstrings as sensory attractions, uncomfortable sensations are webstrings that attract us to seek additional webstrings and participate.
7. When people think in consent and connection with webstrings they experience a cohesive global consciousness that leads to unity at every level of endeavor.
There is no substitute for nature's intelligent eons of experience in producing life in a balance. If a person is not in conscious connection with nature, the real thing, through genuine webstring attraction energies, they are probably playing God in some way without the wisdom to do so.
A person can learn to trust and use nature connected experiences to help produce unity and balance.
8. From subatomics to our solar system, Nature operates as a conscious, attraction/love, webstring process that organizes, preserves and regenerates itself to produce an optimum of life, diversity and cooperation without producing garbage or death as we know it. Nature's web-of-life way of expressing attraction love does not produce the pollution, abusiveness, war and stress that deteriorate life as we know it.
Our thinking is our personal and collective destiny. It is the disconnection of our thinking from natural systems within and around us that produces our discontents.
FACULTY CONTACT INFORMATION
Michael J. Cohen, Ed.D.
Director, Project NatureConnect
P. O. Box 1605
Friday Harbor, WA 98250 USA
Tel: (360) 378-6313
Email: nature@pacificrim.net
Website: www.ecopsych.com
Communications should take place during daytime working hours
in the western time zone or by appointment.
Project NatureConnect
Institute of Global Education
Special NGO consultant to United Nations Economic
and Social Council.
P.O. Box 1605 Friday Harbor WA 98250
(360) 378-6313
nature@pacificrim.net
www.ecopsych.com