Meet some of the incredible professionals who are hosting workshops at Columbia Springs this Spring! To learn more about the workshops and register online, click here.
Grace Teigen and Gene Wigglesworth will be teaching an Intro to the Environment Workshop Series. Gene has a background in teaching Geography and developed a curriculum for an Earth and Environmental Science course while teaching in Michigan. He became an independent businessman upon moving to Washington and developed an auto repair franchise. Currently, he is known as the “Tree Guy” in his neighborhood after noticing a decline in plum tree health and creating a group to focus on restoring the diversity of tree canopy in his neighborhood. Grace has a background teaching English and Communications, followed by a career as an insurance executive.
Both Gene and Grace are active members of the art and environmental communities in Vancouver, WA, using their educational and business savvy backgrounds to make positive change. Their workshop series will incorporate their varied interests in science, business and the arts to help better understand our changing climate and what we can do to help.
Elizabeth Koch teaches our Forest Therapy Workshops. Elizabeth is a certified Forest Therapy Guide through The Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides Program. Koch grew up on Vermont acreage where she gardened and chopped wood and spent much of her free time happily “mucking about” in the woods. She currently works with special education students in the Vancouver School District. Previously, she was an educator for Columbia Springs Field Trip program!
Her Forest Therapy courses invite you to interact with nature in a way that promotes healing interactions. She believes this practice has helped her in her battle with cancer. In 2016, she was told she had only months to live. Read more about Elizabeth and her Forest Therapy practices here.
April Baisan is teaching a Botanical Illustration Workshop. Whether leading dragonfly walks or teaching nature drawing, April intrigues and inspires with her keen observations and interpretations of the natural world’s connectedness. She is a nature artist, writer and educator and had a M.A. in Education from the University of Arizona.
April learned to draw and paint from her father when she was a child growing up in the American Southwestern deserts. She moved in Washington recently to help her son with his organic farm.