Note From the Teachers 2022

When this class began in 2018 with the title of “River Stories,” our goal as instructors was to help students focus their awareness and reporting on the landscape of the southern Willamette Valley. Our intention then, and now, is to help students make sense of the place they live in, how we have shaped this landscape, how it has shaped us, and what this means.

Our mission still holds, and this website “Science Stories” represents the work from the third version of a class in place-based journalism. 

Students head into our community to find stories that help us understand this place we live during our time in history — to begin conversations about relationships between air, water, fire, and the people and places of this valley, this state, and the Western United States.

In September of 2020, for example, the Holiday Farm Fire roared down the McKenzie River Valley. It stopped short of burning the twin towns of Springfield and Eugene, but it did take with it 174,000 acres of forest, several small communities, and a lot of homes.

Through the winter and spring of 2021, student journalists in the Science Story class at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication collaborated with communities along the McKenzie River to find and tell stories that help us understand the Holiday Farm Fire and the people and landscapes it impacted most. The resulting 2021 website, “Living in a Flammable Landscape,” is also available here.

Through the winter and spring of 2022, new students took up where the previous year’s students left off, chronicling the forest and landscape as they recover, and people of this place as they rebuild, move in, or move away. Some students in this year’s class have explored ideas focusing on campus life and living in Eugene as environmental conditions change. You will find their stories here in “Life in a Changing Landscape.”

Torsten Kjellstrand and Dennis Dimick

July 2022