Use of a Portable Sawmill for Forestry Instruction

The Arthur Temple College of Forestry and Agriculture at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, TX, has implemented an experiential learning exercise to improve student learning related to the forest products industry. During the week-long sophomoreor junior-level course Harvesting and Processing, forestry students tour multiple wood products facilities such as sawmills. These mills use complex technologies to maximize the lumber produced from each log, and students were having difficulty understanding the underlying concepts. As part of this course beginning in 2012, students began working in teams to estimate the lumber that will be recovered from a log and then actually sawing their own log using a portable sawmill. Since the introduction of this experiential learning project, student comments, instructor observations, and an increase in the mean course grades suggest that the sawmill activity is not only popular among students, it also allows for a fun, competitive, and engaging way to prepare future natural resource managers for their careers. Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Arthur Temple College of Forestry and Agriculture, Box 6109 SFA Station, Nacogdoches, TX 75962. *Corresponding author (stovalljp@sfasu.edu). Abbreviations: ATCOFA, Arthur Temple College of Forestry and Agriculture; BSF, Bachelor of Science in Forestry. Published in Nat. Sci. Educ. 45 (2016) doi:10.4195/nse2016.0001 Received 2 Feb. 2016 Accepted 17 May 2016 Available freely online through the author-supported open access option Copyright © 2016 American Society of Agronomy 5585 Guilford Road, Madison, WI 53711 USA This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) core ideas • Incorporating a sawmill exercise allowed students to develop log scaling and grading solutions. • Working in teams led to collaborative problem solving. • The sawmill exercise mimics larger-scale practices in industrial facilities. Universities play an important role in preparing natural resource professionals as individuals capable of solving complex problems (Bullard et al., 2014) whose education must be relevant, rigorous, and build relationships (Bullard, 2015). Gaps between skills desired by employers and those possessed by graduating undergraduate students have been identified, and include collaborative problem-solving and written and oral communication (Bullard et al., 2014; Sample et al., 1999). Current natural resource education needs to “provide opportunities for students to acquire the knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors that clearly reflect employer, societal, and environmental needs” (Layton et al., 2011). Natural resource managers learn problem solving experientially, but must blend this learning with critical thinking and other skills developed through a variety of instructional modes (Millenbah and Millspaugh, 2003). To solve complex and difficult solutions to natural resource problems, students need to work in interdisciplinary teams to develop and implement management plans (Newman et al., 2007). Gill (2004) identified four challenges for natural resource professionals including politicization of resource management, interdisciplinary collaboration, adaptive resource management, and adaptive resource policy-making. Students drawn to forestry tend to have a converging learning style that is characterized by a preference for active experimentation (Kolb et al., 2001), which suggests they are well-suited to experiential learning methods. Undergraduate education for the Bachelor of Science in Forestry (BSF) in the Arthur Temple College of Forestry and Agriculture (ATCOFA) at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, TX, focuses on management for forest products, wildlife, water quality, and recreation. A 6-weeklong field station focused on experiential learning is taught after the sophomore year. The term “field station” is used rather than the more traditional “field camp” because many of our students were military veterans in the late 1970s and equated “field camp” to “boot camp,” which produced an undesirable association for some of them. Field station is comprised of six separate 1-credit-hour courses (Table 1), which are taught in a different order each year depending on faculty availability. A different group of faculty teaches each course. Although the courses do not build on each other, they do build on other pre-requisites in the curriculum, and are key experiences needed for later course work. During field station, intensive experiential instruction in practical Published December 20, 2016