Class on the current
Augsburg College leads nation’s first semester on Mississippi River
Text by Megan Brandsrud O Photos by Ricky Taylor
n Sept. 1, 12 students, one teaching assistant, two professors and two guides boarded 24-foot voya- geur canoes to embark on an adventure down the
Mississippi River. No, this isn’t a twist to the Gilligan’s Island theme song—it’s the story of Augsburg College’s “River Semester.” Minneapolis-based Augsburg, one of the ELCA’s 26 colleges and universities, led the nation’s first semester-
A group from Augsburg College, Minneapolis, paddles a 24-foot voyageur canoe down the Mississippi River during the school’s “River Semester” journey.
long course on the mighty Mississippi last fall. Te group shoved off from St. Paul, Minn., on what the Minnesota governor declared “Augsburg College River Semester Day” and was joined by nearly 100 guests who paddled alongside them for the first two hours of the adventure. Te leader of the fleet was Joe Underhill, a political
science professor at Augsburg who had been brain- storming ideas for this trip for 15 years. “It seemed that there was a great opportunity to educate students by taking them out on the Mississippi River, which flowed by just a few blocks from our campus,” he said. “As I explored this idea, I found that almost no one was using the river as a classroom.” Aſter leading a few short river trips with students,
Underhill connected with Wilderness Inquiry, an outfit- ter and guide service, and began to think that a full- semester expedition was a possibility. A couple of years later it became a reality. Te crew
spent four months traveling 2,500 miles down the Mis- sissippi from Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico. About 750 of those miles were paddled and the rest were via bus to ensure the group had time to cover the length of the river while allowing off days for coursework, study- ing and rest.
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www.thelutheran.org
Augsburg River Semester students use the Mississippi shore as their classroom.
Studying aboard Underhill and Torpe Halloran, a biology instructor at Augsburg, led four courses (16 credits) on the trip,
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