INHUT stands for Integrated Natural History of Utah, an interdisciplinary field study program designed by John Bennion of the English department, Riley Nelson, biology, Brian Cannon, history, and Brian Hill, Recreation Management. It is a unique offering to students that covers up to 14 credits of classes including some general education and honors courses. It is advertised to students as a way to study biology, recreation management, Utah history, and writing as one subject. The most recent trip, in spring of 2016, a group of 24 students and three professors traveled throughout southern Utah hiking, backpacking, whitewater rafting, canyoneering, and rock climbing. They studied stoneflies and native plants and species unique to the Utah desert. And they wrote personal reflective essays about their experience. I was able to sit down with Meagan Ricks, an MFA candidate specializing in creative nonfiction who was the teaching assistant for this study abroad, and an experienced outdoorswoman, and Emma Houghton, an environmental biology student who participated in the study abroad. I focused our questions around the role that reflective writing played in their experience with INHUT.
Read more about INHUT at BYU here and here.
Q: What’s type of writing did you do during INHUT?
Emma: I think writing in INHUT was the most personal I have ever written, and the process really brought it down to how I actually feel. I wrote essays where you tell a story, the personal narrative, but it felt more of me analyzing how I felt about things and how I reacted to experiences and where I stood on different things more than I can comprehend sometimes. Writing with John [Bennion] was very much about coming down to that personal level, more than I had ever before.
Q: How were your experiences outdoors in the wilderness related to that reflective process in writing?
Emma: I think sometimes you connect the wilderness with a lot of reflection, because you’re on your own in a sense, even though you’re with a group, but you’d go out and be sitting and looking at nature and that makes you think about life.
Q: Why do you think that is?
Emma: The simple answer is we are away from the world. We would get out there in the desert wilderness and we’d be the only people in a 50 mile radius. It’s getting away from—taking a step back from—your own life, taking a step away from society, from media. I just read an article in National Geographic magazine about traveling and going on trips. In it they said when you come back and reconnect into society, it only takes you 15 minutes to catch up on what you missed. That, to me, sums it up: there is so much more meaning in getting away than getting all caught up in what’s around us here.
Q: Why the outdoors as a setting and context for true reflective writing?
Meagan: I think there’s something about being outdoors in the middle of nowhere and even sometimes doing hard things like rappelling, where you are facing a fear that makes you more vulnerable, and with that vulnerability you are able to ask those questions. You are able to reflect more and be more open with a side of yourself that is easy to hide when you’re in civilization and you have the comforts of the things around you.
Q: Is it because the wilderness is less familiar, or is it the difficult activities you aren’t used to doing? What is familiar or unfamiliar about that?
Meagan: It’s partly the activities, and I think that is something about the wilderness that invites a rawness and openness that helps you prioritize, that helps you say these things are important and these things are not. I can go a week without showering and it’s not the end of the world, or bathe in a river. There’s something about it where you re-prioritize and it feels more rooted in what is most important.
Q: What kinds of activities were set up to make reflective writing happen during INHUT?
Emma: We wrote from a lot of writing prompts to get us thinking about something or an activity. One thing that I liked is that while we were doing a rappel, for example, we were challenged to write about the rappel while we were in the process of rappelling, because we had a lot of down time waiting for the group to come through. So that was really useful for me to produce my raw feelings about how I was actually feeling in that moment, because I was writing in that moment. That was a really neat experience to write about what we were doing in that moment. I liked that we had that time to sit and reflect. One thing we were asked to do was to incorporate things we had experienced a week before into what we were writing. We could incorporate a past experience into an idea that we were writing and that caused you to think about what would fit, what you could match up with the ideas. That was cool because sometimes I wouldn’t think about how walking in the desert connects to my life at home, but it did and that was cool.
Q: What was the peer review process like during INHUT?
Meagan: I think teaching and prepping students for peer review had a lot to do with conferencing with the students beforehand about their paper, reading other essays that worked, and talking about the principles that made them work. Subtly training the students to recognize what’s good, what works, and what doesn’t work, and why, prepares them for peer review. I think after awhile it becomes intuitive as you understand what you are looking for. You start to ask questions as you read, wondering ‘I wanted to know more about this’, and you begin to see the gaps yourself, because you’re being trained to read that way. It can be modeled after a teacher or a TA saying ‘I was wondering about this and this’ when looking at a student’s essay. As far as the process of peer review, the students would read the essay out loud to the whole group, which was vulnerable and scary because a lot of them wrote about very personal things. There were many tears and much rejoicing at the same time [laughs].
Emma: Sometimes it felt like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting; you just open up so much in your writing and to have that criticized as well, you put so much thought into this essay, then to have someone say ‘well, maybe do this differently, or I was looking for this’ and you never really thought ‘oh I should be saying that…’; it was very humbling.
Meagan: At the same time though, the criticism wasn’t about the idea or the experience. I think everybody felt validated and respected when they opened up and felt vulnerable, would you agree Emma?
Emma: Yeah.
Meagan: I think it was more about being able to put aside the personal and think, ‘okay they are talking about my work; how can I improve this essay’.
Q: How does peer review help you better reflect, or improve your writing?
Emma: When you’re writing a personal essay, it’s very closed off to you; you know what you’re thinking, but when you open it up to others, you really get to see what I (as the author) am not seeing. You’re opening your eyes to—I don’t know how to put it—making something very personal relatable to everyone else. And I think the peer review process really helps refine that kind of view, in that you are writing something not only for yourself but that others are going to read. That’s kind of the purpose of writing this personal essay, it’s that others will read it and learn from it. So the peer review process really helps refine that aspect that it is bridging the gap between this is writing from my private journal to this is an essay that others are going to read and reflect on.
Meagan: Very closely related to that too is being able to clearly communicate ideas and sometimes abstract feelings or thoughts that are accompanying events or life experiences. Peer review helps with clearly communicating that. I think beyond even just reflective writing, it’s a good human skill to have, to be able to communicate clearly to others experiences that you’re having and the significance of them both for the self and for others.
Q: Out of all the experiences with INHUT, what was the most impactful experience?
Emma: I was thinking about this earlier, thinking about how during INHUT I wasn’t really thinking about how much this was going to change my view or that the experiences I was having were really helping me prepare for other things. But I was out doing some biology fieldwork with plants back home in Hawaii, and we pulled out this measuring tape, this transect, and suddenly it all just clicked, I’ve done this before! Riley’s (the biology professor) crazy—what we thought were crazy—exercises were actually real world field work experiences. I don’t think I realized that what we were doing then was really going to prepare me for future things that I could do. The process of being there and doing those exercises, those experiments, it really prepares you for much more than I even imagined it would.
Q: Have you written about that yet?
Emma: No, I’ve written it in a thank you card. But no, I haven’t written about that yet.
Q: Do you consider yourself a writer?
Emma: I think I’d like to be. Right now, I’m going more the biology route. But I feel like writing is still important in any aspect of any career, and in life in general. I like writing a lot. I probably should do more of it. I’ve gone back to my essay and added to it, and worked on it more, because as life goes on, perspectives change. So I think analyzing those events or experiences with INHUT, having that opportunity to write about them, has increased my thinking about reflective writing. And I’m still working on deciding where I stand with it.
Q: What did you hope students learned about the process of writing about outdoor experience?
Meagan: Going back to this idea that wilderness is a vulnerable place, I think that being able to write about those times when you were afraid, or on a rappel, or when you felt the magnitude of how big this world is, it’s such a wide range of emotions, being able to write and reflect on that is important and makes you a better biology student to be able to see how this world connects together. It’s integrated studies for a reason—these subjects are connected—and the act of writing and reflecting in that setting helps to make those connections and solidify them. For a lot of the students it also brought out experiences from their past that they hadn’t yet reflected upon and there was something about being in the wilderness, in that raw experience, that helped them to solidify that too, and begin to make sense of the world around them.
Emma: Just in September there was the IUCN world conservation conference in Hawaii that I went to. Being able to attend the conference after having the integrated learning experience with INHUT really emphasized how the world and conservation is all connected. We all live in this world; we all live in nature. We’ve created our societies out of the resources we find in nature and coming back to that is like coming back to the start, coming back to where we all find a home, where we all find purpose. I think that you can find a way to connect anything to the world that we live in, to the outdoors, to society, to people, living in and breathing the air. It all surrounds us. So being on INHUT made me realize that biology isn’t separate from writing and isn’t separate from history, it really is all interconnected.