This entrance level, online, sensory-ecology course in practical, nature-connected education, counseling and healing enables the student to master and teach the therapeutic science of Applied Ecopsychology. Increase personal, social and environmental wellbeing by enabling individual to create beneficial moments that let Earth teach. This restorative thinking skill helps their 53 natural senses reasonably embrace their nurturing origins in the balanced, self-correcting and renewing ways of natural systems within and around us.

Learn to promote social and environmental responsibility by adapting unique nature-reconnecting methods and materials for your personal or professional use. Tangible sensory reconnections with nature through 27 activities and 53 natural senses satisfy deep natural wants: when unsatisfied, these wants disrupt global balance, and inner peace by fueling runaway disorders.

Discover how to prevent contemporary society’s nature-separated thinking from deteriorating personal growth and responsible relationships. Encounter and consider how to meet the challenges of the socializing process of Industrial Society that reduces our sensitivity and sensibility by excessively separating us from the self-correcting grace, balance and renewing powers of nature in and around us. Increase your marketability, effectiveness and global citizenship by educating and counseling with a readily accessible natural systems thinking process.

Wherever possible, the Project NatureConnect program integrates the fundamentals of Natural Attraction Ecology in its philosophy, systems, and procedures. Examples of this are self-organizing classes, sliding scale tuition, and student involvement in every level of program administration in mutual beneficial interdependent relationships. In this course, students experience, explore, and identify the differences between organizational processes in play in traditional industrial society organizations (processes which separate the “human” from the “natural”), and the way we follow nature’s flow in the Project NatureConnect program.

Students learn experientially through participation in mutually supportive relationships in group classes, in the online community discussions, in self-organizing work groups arising out of the attractions of students, faculty and staff, in the use of consensus building, asking permission, and respecting attractions as valid guides to personal choices.

Students volunteer to play support roles and offer services that tap their skills, talents and inclinations.  Read more about volunteer support roles. A student may offer any service they believe would help the organization by contacting the  Executive Director (Dr. Cohen). Students help build web pages, manage the online community, edit text, write advanced curriculum, offer ideas for research and development, orient and guide less experienced students, and help to refine and increase the extent to which the program functions as a natural community.

Students also learn how to make connections with others, nurture appreciation and excitement for reconnecting with nature, and invite others to learn the process, through engagement in public education and networking. Read more about public education.

Students participate in a minimum of 90 hours of activity (45 hours per credit).

Validation of public education, social networking and cooperative community participation . This course provides credit for demonstrating the student has met the requirements of the cooperative self-organization, growth and economics of the Project NatureConnect Institute of Global Education program at the Akamai Applied Ecopsychology Institute. These requirements are described in the Student Webstring Cooperative Contract and are part of the ECO 751 course. The course includes taking a certificate or degree level comprehensive exam and submitting a short petition that documents the student’s fulfillment of the requirements of academic program challenge exams and Student Cooperative Contract.

This challenge exam provides documentation of at least 107 academic credits, or their equivalence in work or life experience. The exam consists of the development of a Learning Portfolio.