Campuses:
Assistant Professor, Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology
Mailing address: 200 Hodson Hall, 1980 Folwell Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55108
Phone: 612-721-4009
Fax: 612-625-5299
Email: Nerbonne@umn.edu
Preparing students for the real world is one of my primary passions. I have devoted much of my energy over the past 16 years to helping my students learn, both in the classroom and in the community. One of the ways that I do this is by making it clear that I too am learning every day. At any particular moment, they may well be the teacher and I the learner. It is my job to facilitate the exchange and bound the learning environment, not to have all the answers.
At the University of Minnesota I am an Adjunct Assistant Professor and I currently teach:
I am also the Environmental Sustainability Program Director at the Higher Education Consortium for Urban affairs (www.hecua.org) At HECUA I run two off- campus immersion programs focusing on Environmental Sustainability:
I love teaching in the immersion context because it gives me the opportunity to continue my exploration of the environmental movement in Minnesota in a truly hands-on way. Instead of analyzing the community, we work with the community and at the same time take the time to process what we have learned in a way that will be useful to us (and maybe even to others) in the future. In the ES program I am part of a learning community and of a moral community. The experiences we have together help hold up a mirror so that I can look at my own life with new insight and motivation.
My research focuses on the relationship between natural systems and human action. I have long been interested in charting the relationship between science and citizen empowerment. My dissertation focused on understanding the role of data in empowering citizen groups at the community level. Recently I have shifted my research to focus more on individual knowledge and attitudes and how they impact environmental behavior. Most importantly, I consider myself to be part of a broader movement that embraces local communities, researching questions that they have identified, and working with them to better understand how to take action in their communities.
