The Center for Learning with Nature began in 2013. Our work is a team effort, most especially relying on the educators we collaborate with, the teachers who make these efforts take root in the real world. We hope you’ll join us.
More about some of the individuals joining this effort:
Sam Stier is the Founding Director of The Center for Learning With Nature — the bigger person in the photo : )
Sam fell in love with Nature as a kid catching frogs in the wilds of the American Midwest. He studied biology and communication theory at college, then afterward moved to the big city, drove preschoolers around as a bus driver, and cleaned the shark tanks at the local aquarium as a volunteer diver. During graduate school in natural resource management he began working as a backcountry ranger with the U.S. Forest Service in the summers. During this time he convinced the CEO of Motorola to donate over a million dollars worth of communications equipment to combat poaching in underfunded protected areas around the world. He then spent four years as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer, studying the diet of endangered flying foxes with 6-foot wingspans in the dipterocarp forests of the Philippine Islands, the subject of his master’s research, and started that country’s first natural history museum. Returning to the U.S., Sam worked as an environmental consultant with the World Bank, Nature Conservancy, and others. Then, by chance hearing a presentation about innovation inspired by Nature given by Janine Benyus, Sam realized his love of Nature was better utilized in the service of improving the human-built world than by running away from it. He began working for Benyus to help establish the Biomimicry Institute, consulting on sustainability with corporations and leading youth education initiatives.
A National Science Foundation Fellow in STEM curricula design, Sam was appointed to the NGSS review team by the State of Montana’s Department of Education in 2012. He founded The Center for Learning with Nature to provide training and original curricula for educators on how to teach daily school subjects (math, chemistry, engineering, etc.) in ways that increase students’ fascination with Nature and capacity to imagine and create a sustainable human-built world. His award-winning curricula, now used across the U.S. and in over 70 countries worldwide, reaches tens of thousands of children each year. His materials include original labs such as making carbon neutral concrete out of car exhaust (inspired by corals and the work of Dr. Brent Constantz) and learning how to strengthen yet minimize material in manufacturing by examining the design of schoolyard trees.
Sam has authored popular books on Nature-oriented teaching and the first college textbook on bioinspired engineering. He has held faculty appointments in engineering at Texas Tech University, where his course on bioinspired engineering was adopted as foundational and a graduation requirement of the many thousands of students across the engineering college. He also teaches sustainable design at the renown Otis College of Art and Design; consults with companies (e.g., working with Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Mercedes, Ford, The North Face, Vans, etc.) on improving their profitability and sustainability using Nature-inspired innovation; and speaks professionally and gives workshops on Nature-inspired innovation and education at conferences around the world.
Sam lives by a chatty creek in Montana with his family and enjoys hobbies such as traveling, hiking, skiing, kayaking, music, and writing.
