A Prescott College graduate student is examining how language can shape the way people understand landscapes, communities and their relationship with the natural world.
Carley Kwiatkowski, who is pursuing a Master of Arts in Outdoor Leadership, is developing a capstone project that brings language education into place-based learning. Her goal is to create a curriculum that makes engagement with language a central part of outdoor education.
### Examining the influence of language
Kwiatkowski’s thesis considers how widely used languages can carry assumptions inherited from colonial history. Her work specifically explores how English may reinforce the idea that people exist apart from, or above, the plants, animals and other elements of the living world.
The project also looks at whether renewed engagement with ancestral languages and languages rooted in particular places can strengthen connections among people, their surroundings and the broader natural environment. This approach places language alongside direct outdoor experience as a tool for understanding place.
Kwiatkowski identifies as white and of European descent, with family connections to Ireland. She is using the Irish language as a case study while considering the wider significance of language in outdoor education. The project is intended in part to offer white outdoor educators another framework for evaluating how they approach their work.
### Six weeks of research in Ireland
Her research included six weeks at Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland, one of Prescott College’s global partner schools. While there, Kwiatkowski interviewed Irish speakers involved in efforts to revitalize the language or incorporate it into their professional work.
The interviews focused on how learning, speaking and reconnecting with Irish affected participants personally and professionally. Irish has experienced a long history of colonial oppression, making language revitalization particularly relevant to Kwiatkowski’s study of identity, place and education. She plans to use insights from those conversations while designing her capstone curriculum.
The location also had a personal connection. Burren College of Art is in the same Irish county where Kwiatkowski traces part of her ancestry, allowing her to combine academic research with an exploration of her own family background.
### Creative arts emerge as another connection
Although Kwiatkowski traveled to Burren as an Outdoor Leadership student, her time at an art school introduced another dimension to the project. She observed students creating work shaped by the surrounding landscape and responding to the places where they were studying.
That experience led her to consider how visual art, music and other forms of creative expression can help people describe and understand their relationships with a place. The creative arts are not part of the formal scope of her current capstone, but they have become an area she may explore in relation to outdoor and place-based education.
### Building on an unconventional background
Before entering the Outdoor Leadership program, Kwiatkowski had experience in language and cultural immersion programming in Tanzania. That background differs from a more traditional path into outdoor education, but it provided a foundation for combining language study with leadership and place-based teaching.
At Prescott College, she has used that experience to investigate how outdoor education might expand beyond instruction centered only on recreation or technical skills. Her capstone instead treats language, cultural history and relationships with the living environment as connected parts of educational practice.
The project remains focused on developing a curriculum informed by her interviews, academic research and experience in Ireland. It also illustrates how a Prescott-based graduate program can connect local study with research conducted through an international partner institution.