With several years of formal and informal teaching experience, Ashleigh Albrechtsen has taught art, science, and English as a second language, with a current emphasis on environmental education. She believes that environmental education should be accessible to everyone and empower students to find meaning in their relationship with the world around them. Currently, her research centers on storytelling, environmental justice, Utah’s environmental history, and climate change.

Ashleigh, UU Environmental Humanities, led an Art-Science workshop with the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Ashleigh presented on the ecology and abiotic factors of the Great Salt Lake, and Annie Burbidge-Ream (UMFA) provided information on land art, including the Spiral Jetty, which sits on the shore of the Great Salt Lake. Annie and Ashleigh focused on change and the way that both the lake and the Spiral Jetty can depict changes in the environment. Students mixed salt into the water to recreate the salinity of the Great Salt Lake before participating in an art project in which they explored entropy by putting ordered dots of paint on a piece of paper before putting the paper in a box with bouncy balls and shaking it up to disorder the paint into new designs.