“Being outside the classroom does not mean you're not in a classroom,” Professor Sam McMillan said. First-year students in Professor McMillan’s
“Adventure Literature” Core courses “Exploring the American Wilderness” and “Get Radical: The Literature and Culture of Surfing” are challenged intellectually, physically and spiritually.
“In [Exploring the American Wilderness] I truly learned discernment between what we think the wilderness is versus what it actually is,” one student said in their final reflections. “Overall, this class augmented my outlook on life.”
McMillan’s pedagogical approach emphasizes “place-based learning,” where students deepen their understanding of literature through direct engagement with the environments they study.
“The basic assumption on which these courses are founded is that our understanding of writing and other cultural concerns can be enhanced by knowledge and experience in a place,” McMillan said. “For me, right now at least, this is two particular places: the wilderness and the ocean.”
Professor Sam McMillan
Exploring the American Wilderness
This course transforms students’ perception of the natural world through literature, philosophy and wilderness exploration.
“It’s almost like an experiment,” McMillan said, likening their classroom study of authorial perspectives on wilderness to hypotheses and the course’s “three big adventures” as tests for students to find their own subjective truths.
They dive into challenging seminal works like Roderick Nash’s 1967 book “Wilderness and the American Mind.”
“It’s excruciating, but we can get through it because, eventually, all these boring ideas, the histories of national parks and things like that, are put into conversation with us actually being in that space,” McMillan said.
Insights from Nash’s book and other readings, like Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild” (1996) and the philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, can be challenging to grasp. However, McMillan has observed that experiencing the actual places discussed in these works profoundly deepens students' understanding and appreciation of the wilderness.
“We’re spending our class time reading authors who write about what the wilderness is and the sorts of values we attach to it,” he said. “Then, because it’s very abstract, we take students out into the wilderness. This gives them a chance to see how those ideas they’re reading about in the classroom materialize in the real world.”
McMillan explained that he leads three outdoor adventures throughout the semester.
The first adventure takes students to the untouched wilderness of Cumberland Island, Ga., less than two hours away by car and ferry.
“This is where we get our feet wet and break in our hiking boots," he said, also noting the wild horses that graze this Georgia national seashore.
At the end of the semester, the final adventure asks students to reflect on their connection to local ecology through an excursion to Vilano Beach for a surfing lesson.
We get to think about the ways something like surfing can allow us to perceive our environment in a different fashion,” McMillan said.
But the “big one,” as McMillan calls it, is a journey to the Blue Ridge Mountains for a 4-day backpacking trip along the Appalachian Trail. He describes this trip as “type two fun,” the kind of fun that may take years of reflection to look back on with fondness.
“I spend almost every single class before our trip telling the students, ‘It's going to be bad, you're going to hurt, but suffering is good," he said. "You are going to learn to embrace suffering.’ And this is where we read Cheryl Strayed’s ‘Wild’ which has the best descriptions of suffering while backpacking that I’ve ever read.”
Reflections from a former student highlight how this immersive physical challenge helps them develop a deeper appreciation for nature and discover their own potential.
“This class is life-altering, all because of the hiking trip,” the student wrote. “You don’t know how capable you are or what your limits are until you hike uphill with 60 pounds on your back for over 10 miles. You honestly feel limitless.”
Get Radical: The Literature and Culture of Surfing
While surfing makes a cameo in McMillan’s “Exploring the American Wilderness” course, it’s the star of the show in “Get Radical: The Literature and Culture of Surfing.”
Throughout the semester, students participate in about 10 surfing sessions, connecting philosophical insights from their readings with their experiences in the ocean. Before hitting the waves, McMillan has his students hand-copy a passage from one of the readings into their “surf journal,” so they’re contemplating the material while they’re out on the water.
“When the students paddle back in, they do some more reflection,” he said. “How did their time on the waves that day connect with whatever it was they’re supposed to be thinking about?”
At the end of the semester, they turn in their surf journal, “telling the story of their time in this course.” By combining these practices, McMillan hopes students can uncover their own answers to the guiding question: “What can surfing teach us about living a good life?”
A key reading for the course is William there’s more than work that makes Finnegan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life” which delves into Finnegan’s adventures in the surfing counterculture of the 1960s and his reflections on the joys, challenges and spiritual aspects of surfing.
“If the canon of surf literature tells us anything, it’s that surfing is nothing if not a spiritual endeavor,” McMillan said. “Just look at Jamal Yogi’s ‘Saltwater Buddha,’ Nachum Shifren’s ‘Surfing Rabbi,’ or Steven Kotler’s ‘West of Jesus’—all works that show how the world of wave-riding allows us to tap into worlds beyond.”
Given the mental health crisis students face today, driven by job market pressures and technological alienation, McMillan believes this lesson is incredibly valuable.
McMillan challenges the stereotype of surfers as aimless “bums,” a notion popularized by Jeff Spicoli from the 1982 film “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and his infamous line: “All I need are some tasty waves and a cool buzz, and I’m fine.”
“Spicoli made it easy to laugh at the surfer,” McMillan said. “But the whole point of my bringing his character up in class is to have students reconsider the type of laughter they’re doing. When we take a deeper dive, examining Spicoli within an expanded cultural and historical context, we can finally begin to laugh with him—taking ourselves less seriously, locating unparalleled pleasure in the natural world, discovering the more in less.”
He references books like “Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport” but includes various works on surfing as a spiritual and philosophical pursuit.
“To the Hawaiians, surfing was no mere recreation,” McMillan said. “The refusal of daily tasks for the call of the sea was what created community... So, when Spicoli tells us that he doesn’t need to work, that all he needs is the water, he’s not voicing anything countercultural at all. He's simply reminding us, following the example of the Hawaiians, that a culture.”
Through class discussions, McMillan leads his students to ponder questions like “How does William Finnegan use surfing to live out the dreams of medieval monks?” and “Has Jeff Spicoli actually been reading Thoreau?”
“Weirdly enough, maybe!” McMillan joked about Spicoli’s philosophical pursuits. While we can’t say for sure if Spicoli read Thoreau’s “Walden,” his focus on surfing and the joy it brought him over societal pressures reflects Thoreau’s ideals of living in the present and appreciating nature. McMillan also noted that Spicoli’s philosophy parallels medieval monks who laid the foundations for the Liberal Arts by abandoning material pursuits to focus on higher contemplation, rediscovering Greek and Roman classics, and shaping our modern education system.
“Flagler exists because these monks, like Spicoli, chose a life of renunciation,” he said.
