On a warm spring morning in May of 2025, along the side of a dirt road joining a rural two-lane highway in northern Minnesota, roughly forty students divided into small groups kneel among tall grass and slender aspen saplings. They talk excitedly as they dig with augers, pulling samples of the soil up and down a hillslope that follows the shoulder of the road. The sky is a dome of blue, occasional clouds scudding across, dew quickly evaporating from the tall grasses.
These are students from the class Field Study of Soils, co-taught by Soil, Water, and Climate faculty members Nic Jelinski and Kari Wolf, an experiential learning course offered after the spring semester has drawn to a close. In 2025, the course was run as a collaboration between the University of Minnesota, Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College (FLTCC), and Leech Lake Tribal College (LLTC), with support from the US Forest Service and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. This sunny hillslope is just one of many sites the class will visit over the course of two weeks.
Jelinski has been co-teaching this field course since 2013. Since then the class has been expanded to include more engagement with the people living on and working with soils the students would study- farmers and growers, land managers, natural resource professionals- to help students understand not only the soils themselves, but the larger human/soil ecosystem they were a part of.
“It became about soils, landscapes, and lifescapes,” Jelinski explains. “I basically cold-called people asking if they’d be interested in hosting our class on-site and sharing their perspectives on land management. People were really excited about that.”
Bringing students to the experts instead of inviting experts to the Twin Cities campus offers unique and high-impact learning experiences. This approach has the benefit of removing barriers such as travel expenses and scheduling issues that would make it more difficult for guest speakers to participate. It also means students get to camp together as a group during the two weeks of the course, a meaningful social experience not available in the classroom.
“In the field you are constantly with other people,” says CFANS student Caden Gagnon, who took the class in May of 2025. “You’re deliberating, and theorizing, and questioning, and getting other inputs. We didn’t always know what we would encounter at a site- it was a journey for everybody.” Caden is majoring in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM); after taking a course in basic soils, he wanted to dive deeper and enrolled in the field course. He has since declared a soil science minor.
Gabrielle Holler is also an ESPM major minoring in soil science. She says she chose the field course for the immersive learning experience. “It’s very different from a class that meets a couple times a week that you schedule time for,” she says. “Not only are you learning new information every day, but you get to apply what you learn right away.”
In 2025, University of Minnesota students in Field Study of Soils were joined by their peers from Leech Lake Tribal College and Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College. The idea for this new collaboration began with soil scientists at the US Forest Service, including Dave Morley, who works on the Superior National Forest.
“Dave Morley was pivotal to getting this new version of the class off the ground,” says Jelinski. “Without Dave, this collaboration wouldn’t have been possible.”
Dave Morley’s day to day work as a soil scientist involves conducting environmental impact assessments on Forest Service land. “The majority of my job is to evaluate the impact whenever there is an activity that disturbs the ground,” Morley explains. Disturbances include the activities of the timber and tourism industries, as well as natural occurrences such as wildfires. His job also includes community outreach and education; indeed, says Morley, this is one of the most important aspects of his job, and is key to garnering interest in soil science among young people at the beginning of their careers.
“[Outreach] is one of the most important things I do. We’ve had several recent retirements, and there aren’t as many people now
doing the same amount of work,” Morley says. “We need to be thinking: who’s taking over after us?”
Finding the answer to that question has proven challenging.
“Part of the problem for the Forest Service is that we work in remote locations. So one of the things I think about is how do we leverage partnerships to build local interest and capacity from young people from local communities? We certainly have capable, smart, young people already living here in the area that might be interested in this type of work.”
In the several years leading up to 2025, Morley and his colleagues connected with FLTCC and LLTC to discuss possible collaborations around providing some basic soil science education to their students. Neither college currently has soil science classes as part of its programming; Morley proposed a series of guest lectures in basic soil science to impart skills students need to succeed in internships and jobs with the Forest Service and similar agencies.
“Soil has many connections to the environmental research that we do, so it was exciting to get involved with [Dave Morley and his team],” says Steve Gebhard, Research Coordinator for the Environmental Institute at FLTCC, the 1994 Land Grant department dedicated to community education, outreach, and research on natural resources and environmental issues on Fond du Lac tribal lands.
What started as an idea for a few guest lectures expanded, pulling in other scientists from organizations such as the US Natural Resource Conservation Service, tribal natural resource management agencies, and eventually Jelinski’s University of Minnesota class.
“It grew from an idea for a few guest lectures over a three day period into Nic being willing to shift the location of his course to loop in all these other folks and the two tribal colleges,” Gebhard says.
Morley and Mike Rokus, a soil scientist for the USDA National Resources Conservation Service, gave guest lectures at the tribal colleges prior to the field course to help provide students some basic soil science knowledge before they hit the field (for UMN students, Basic Soil Science is a prerequisite for the field course).
“Before the class, I was curious and a little bit nervous, because I hadn’t branched out much beyond where I’m from,” says Mya Morgan, who grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation in north-central Minnesota and graduated from Leech Lake Tribal College with an associate’s degree in spring of 2025. Mya dreams of becoming a doctor. “I want to be an advocate for youth, and set an example for youth in my community about the possibilities the world holds for them”.
Mya says it felt important to gain hands-on experience outside the classroom, and chose to do an internship conducting vegetation surveys on the Chippewa National Forest. “During that internship, I got well acquainted with the natural sciences instructors at Leech Lake, and my geology teacher asked if I’d be interested in taking a field course in soils.” Excited about the opportunity for another hands-on learning experience, Mya said yes.
That geology teacher is Muhammad Hasnain, a physical sciences instructor at Leech Lake Tribal College. Hasnain says his goal is to get students excited about science, and serve as a mentor to them.
“I learned a lot from the class myself,” Hasnain says, “and my students learned a lot. But what is even more valuable to me is the personal development of my students. They grew so much in the way they communicate, the confidence of their body language; they changed so much with only two weeks experience.”
Jeff Vasquez was also encouraged by Hasnain to enroll in the field course. Jeff grew up on the Saginaw Chippewa reservation in Central Michigan, and moved to Bemidji in 2023.
“I’m doing the Forest Ecology program because I’m interested in taking a more holistic approach to agriculture,” Jeff explains. “I’m doing self-directed study in agroforestry and agroecology. I was really excited to learn about soil, because I hadn’t taken a soil-specific class before.”
Although the class visited a wide variety of sites and heard from numerous experts, collaborative meaning-making as a group was at the heart of the student experience. After taking samples at a site in small groups, the whole class would reconvene and report their findings, developing illustrations on a portable whiteboard and mapping in real time what the students found in the field.
“We would draw illustrations of the landscapes we were working in and how the soil and the hydrology were interacting, and explain what that meant about the history of the area,” Jeff recalls. “Pulling all of that together was my favorite part. Seeing all the pieces interacting was really, really cool.”
Caden also holds up these group discussions as one of his favorite parts of the class. “Crafting a narrative was the best way I can describe what a lot of our work was,” he says. “Storytelling helps people connect with a scientific discipline [...] because people naturally connect with stories.”
“Nic was always saying during the class that soil unites us,” Mya adds. “The class brought together students from different schools, different agencies, but we were united around one thing- and that thing was soil,” Mya explains. “I’m Ojibwe, and that way of doing science really aligned with my culture.”
“Science is built into [Ojibwe] culture, in a way,” Mya continues, describing how experiences living in alignment with the seasons means needing to know when to harvest wild rice, when to hunt for certain animals, when to pick berries and tap maples for syrup. Western science, Mya says, often creates a distance between observing an ecosystem as part of science and being a living part of that ecosystem. “In this class, I didn’t feel that disconnect. I felt very connected, very grounded with the people in the class, and with the soil.”
Both tribal colleges hosted lunches for the class on their respective campuses, offering another perspective on the topics the class covered in the field. Jeff says it was exciting to get to share his campus with students from different institutions, offer a tour of the college’s food sovereignty garden, and discuss Indigenous philosophies of science and the environment.
“This class was very much about building bridges, and it felt really wholesome,” says Mya.
“The tribal college students brought such a unique perspective and set of experiences to the class,” Gabrielle says. “I never would have gotten that had they not joined us, and been generous enough to invite us to their campuses.”
Most significantly, the impact of the class lingers in the lives of students who participated.
After the 2025 session, LLTC students Mya and Jeff both went on to enroll in a 10-week Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) over the summer on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. Both students cite participating in Field Study of Soils as giving them the confidence and the skills they needed to succeed during their time in the REU.
“The field course really prepared me for this experience,” Jeff says. “Even though I wasn’t working directly with soil (in the REU), I’m doing research on using biochar to remove contaminants from water and soil in a chemistry lab. Getting a full two weeks of hands-on experience really set me up for success because it let me connect what’s going on in the lab to what would happen in real practice.”
Mya agrees- participating in the field course assuaged the nervousness of pursuing an opportunity away from home. “After the soils course, I felt like I was more prepared to move to the Twin Cities."
After a successful first year, the collaboration continues: The 2026 course beings next week, with Red Lake Nation College joining the group. The organizers have spent the past year considering improvements and pursuing possible funding sources to support the tribal college students officially earning credit for their participation in the course. This year, the course is being offered as both SOIL 4511 (Field Study of Soils) through the University of Minnesota, and GEOL 210 (Soils and Sediments of the Leech Lake Area) through Leech Lake Tribal College. The University of Minnesota CFANS Office of Tribal Engagement & Outreach will be sponsoring three group meals for the 2026 version of the course.
“We spent the better part of a year building this collaboration,” says Gebhard, the research coordinator at FLTCC. “Everyone was so adaptable and intentional in the process of putting this class together. Taking the time to make sure things were done right, the right people were included, the right conversations happened, was critical for making this the best experience it could be for the students.”
“I’m honored to have been a part of this experimental version of the class- I think it was a resounding success,” Caden reflects. “It wasn’t just soil education- it was soil community.”
________
Many thanks to the people who were interviewed for, but not quoted in, this story- Randy Kolka, Mike Rokus, and Tara Wilder, as well as students from all three institutions who were kind enough to talk about their experiences informally while in the field. You provided invaluable information that made this story possible.
This story was written by Nora Poole, communications specialist in the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate.