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Collaborative Practice

Graduate Minor

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Enhance Your Degree With A Collaborative Practice Minor

This minor is a unique learning opportunity for UW graduate students interested in learning practical skills to solve the world's most pressing environmental challenges. Collaborative problem solving, consensus building and multi-stakeholder dispute resolution are becoming standard management practices and are being integrated into the way we govern ourselves and our scarce resources, public services and human capital. Collaboration is becoming the 21st century’s governance tool of choice and necessity. The collaborative practice minor gives students skills in negotiation, collaborative decision making and process design. 

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Program Requirements

Curriculum & Courses

Department

Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources

About the Collaborative Practice Minor

The collaborative practice minor is one-of-a-kind, thanks to its positioning in UW’s Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources. Students in this program learn to understand and address complicated natural resource conflicts — and resolve them using collaboration, policy and scientific decision-making. 

Graduate students take 12-credit-hours to achieve this minor. However, those credits include a practicum course in which students complete an internship or fellowship to gain hands-on experience.

Students must be enrolled in a graduate degree program to pursue a minor in collaborative practice.

Students working together in class
Students working in class

Dr. Melanie Armstrong, director of the Ruckelshaus Institute, leads UW’s collaborative practice minor. Her research is highly interdisciplinary and often focuses on how societal systems are built around shifting ideologies of nature.

She has collaborated with the United States Forest Service to study recreation users’ experiences and managers’ approaches to prescribed fire in wilderness. She also led community engagement for the largest timber sale in the Gunnison National Forest.

As a 2020 National Geographic Explorer, she studied how Native American treaty rights influence resource management, then developed a curriculum around co-management of public lands and hosted a field school at Bears Ears National Monument.

Professor talking to students out in the field

 

 

What can you do with a collaborative practice minor?

The collaborative practice minor is designed to provide students with skills in designing, organizing, facilitating and evaluating collaborative decision-making processes — regardless of their industry or career path.

Although this is a new minor program, we’ve had graduates pursue exciting and impactful career opportunities in many different fields. One of our graduates is a Public Affairs Specialist for the USDA Forest Service in the Laramie Ranger District and another is a facilitator with The Langdon Group.

 

Students working out in the field together

Ruckelshaus Institute

Students pursuing the collaborative practice minor have the opportunity to engage with the Ruckelshaus Institute, a division of the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming.

The Ruckelshaus Institute has a rich history of valuing collaboration, which began when William D. Ruckelshaus came to UW in 1993 to serve as the founding chairman of a new institute dedicated to collaborative problem solving for natural resource challenges.

He was a proponent of bringing together diverse stakeholders, including different kinds of people who would be affected by any management or policy decision. He encouraged them to engage in civil discourse about desired outcomes for natural resource challenges. His goal was to build inclusive, lasting decisions that would avoid future litigation.

Students in the collaborative practice minor have an opportunity to continue his legacy by participating in Ruckelshaus projects — including working with the Emerging Issues Forum, the Western Confluence Magazine and a variety of topical stakeholder driven processes in the state and region.

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Collaborative Practice Minor Highlights

The collaborative practice minor is a unique and exciting program that encourages students to get involved in the community, connect with others and pursue their passions before graduation. Here are a few of our program’s highlights that students enjoy:

Community Engagement

Students are encouraged to get involved in our local community. They have many opportunities to work with local and regional organizations such as Lupine Collaborative and Learning Through Difference. We also encourage students to participate in workshops through UW’s restorative justice program and the Wyoming Department of Agriculture’s mediation program.

Experiential Learning Options

All minor students take the Applied Collaborative Practicum course. In this class, students get credit for community engagement, fellowships or career advancement activities. Students have used this time for internships and fellowships with organizations such as the National Forest Foundation Conservation Fellowship Program. Students also use this time for off-campus opportunities including stakeholder meetings and conferences in their field.

I would not have gotten [a job in the facilitation field] without being in the ENRS program for two reasons. First, my boss was a guest speaker in Corrie Knapp's ENRS 5900 class and talked to us about natural resources facilitation. I then used my collaborative practicum to interview my boss, which made the connection. Second, taking Steve's facilitation class and the Collaborative Practice minor gave me the collaboration chops to feel confident going into the interview. I got that interview because I reached out to my boss while I was in the job search phase just trying to get some advice on applying to this field. She then responded, well we are hiring right now, you should apply! There was definitely a little bit of luck there, but because I made the connection in class, deepened my collaborative practicum, and solidified my skills with the Collaborative Practice Minor, I was able to get the job.

- Will Benkelman

Related Programs

Interested in a collaborative practice minor? These programs may also be of interest to you:

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Haub School of ENR

University of Wyoming

Bim Kendall House

804 E Fremont St

Laramie, WY 82072

Phone: (307) 766-5080

Email: haub.school@uwyo.edu