Outdoor Recreation and Leadership Management majors from Northern Michigan University were responsible for planning and leading morning tours of various Marquette-area locations during last weekend's Fresh Coast Film Festival (FCFF). The annual festival features documentaries celebrating the outdoor lifestyle, water-rich environment and resilient spirit of the Great Lakes region.
Students in professor Jacquie Medina's recreational interpretation course delivered tours that included a hike along the Dead River with a story of the 2003 flood, the Carp River and Mount Marquette, separate bog walks at Presque Isle and Wetmore, and a journey up Sugarloaf. These experiential learning opportunities are available to Northern undergraduates due to a longstanding partnership between Medina and Bill Thompson, NMU alumnus and co-owner of Down Wind Sports.
“I have been working with Bill and the FCFF since 2016, creating opportunities for our students to gain professional development skills,” explained Medina. “This experience is a field-based opportunity that exemplifies two of Northern's Grand Challanges, as outlined by President [Brock] Tessman: Partnering with Place; and High-Impact Practices such as service- and community-based learning."
“The relationship between the Fresh Coast Film Festival and the NMU students who lead our outdoor tours in invaluable,” Thompson described. “The feedback we get from our participants is overwhelmingly positive, and many patrons return to our festival specifically for the tours. NMU should be very proud of their students and the work they put into making the Fresh Coast Film Festival the success it is today.”
Students have been working since the start of the semester to research and plan tours that showcase Marquette and provide insight into local history within the context of a professional-level experience for FCFF participants and the general public.
Current outdoor recreation and leadership management undergraduates Riley Perry and Kat Tissue shared insights into their experience preparing for the event. They explained that the FCFF collaboration allows them to apply what they are learning in the classroom to a practical situation.
“I think that the FCFF tour guide opportunity is one of a kind for the major, and a first for the ORLM students being able to use their learned skills in a professional environment required for class, and not just peer-leading-peer participant tours,” Tissue asserted. “It benefits my prospects greatly by literally putting my knowledge in a real-world setting with people who don't have the same class and experiences as myself, allowing me to make changes to my methods of delivery.”
The FCFF experience breaks away from in-class practice by throwing students into an uncontrolled, variable environment. Planning for success requires students to learn new strategies of interpretation to create an engaging experience for all kinds of people through research, site resource surveys, risk management components, collaboration practice, revisions and encouraging guidance from my professor Medina.
The process for students involves identifying the tangibles, or anything observable with the senses, and the intangibles, or abstract concepts associated with their target locations.
“The final step in this process is to create universal concepts so people can have something more broad that they can relate to,” explained Perry. “An example of this in play would be the Dead River that you can see from one of our stops, that is the tangible. The intangible could be the push and pull of the river. One of the universal concepts you can grasp from this is power.”
Tissue and Perry's tour of the Dead River took participants on a 1.2-mile hike on the NTN trailhead by Tourist Park. They collaborated to choose this particular location in order to provide an experience that includes many meaningful interpretation locations.
“The Tourist Park trailhead allows participants to see firsthand the areas that were affected the most by the flood of May 2003, and just how resilient the Marquette community is, having rebuilt the area so well,” Tissue explained.
Perry and Tissue created engaging and informative experiences during their tour by providing pictures and resources for the participants to view while relating the hardship of a past flood to current events such as hurricanes Helene and Milton, inspiring empathy and also joy from the sense of community and perseverance that surface during such events.
Both students expressed incredible gratitude for their Northern experience and the apt location Marquette provides for the outdoor recreation and leadership management undergraduates.
“Living in Marquette is a dream when studying outdoor recreation because there are so many opportunities to live out your degree, from joining a club, to working events such as Fresh Coast or Ice Fest, to even just getting to put your skills to the test in the field,” Perry said. “All in all, NMU has allowed me to grow as an outdoor leader and as a person.”
Learn more about the Fresh Coast Film Festival and its outdoor tours here.
