Moss Appreciation Week : Cultivating in Students a Practice of Looking Closely at the Landscape Around Them

This February marks the seventh year that Lewis & Clark College has celebrated Moss Appreciation Week. Moss Week was created as a way to increase awareness of bryophytes in our especially mossy environs (and as a way to lure our friend John Christy of the PSU Herbarium to campus). Since then it has grown from a few small workshops to a campus-wide celebration. With a schedule intertwining scientific and creative offerings, academic and otherwise, including a keynote lecture, a moss petting zoo, a moss walk, terrarium making with moss collected from campus, student designed stickers, student-authored moss poetry featured on custom bookmarks, and as of late, a gastropod derby, Moss Week has grown into something more than we imagined: it has proven to be a way of building community and a sense of identity by encouraging a place-based sensibility among our student body. Moss Week invites students to take a closer look at the quietest and smallest (visible) life forms in our shared landscape and, in doing so, it aims to cultivate a practice of observation and reverence. This poster will share some lessons learned over the past seven years that might carry over to others working in environmental education and outreach. These lessons include the value of offering a range of modalities for engagement, privileging reverence as much as if not more so than information conveyance, and the expansive possibilities of opting to focus not on an elusive, charismatic megafauna, but rather a nearly omnipresent, diminutive miniflora.