Rate My Professor Sarah Karle

Karle’s research investigates how landscapes shape identity and learning, spanning cultural heritage conservation to children’s early experiences in nature, with an emphasis on place attachment and ecological systems. She co-directs the LEAF (Learning Environments for All to Flourish) Initiative, a university Grand Challenges-funded interdisciplinary project promoting outdoor learning in early childhood education. She also directs the Prairie States Forestry Digital Archive, which documents the New Deal’s Prairie States Forestry Project and earned the 2022 Outstanding Paper Award from the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture. Her scholarship includes the book Conserving the Dust Bowl: The New Deal's Prairie States Forestry Project (LSU Press, 2017, with David Karle), “Digital Cultural Heritage and Rural Landscapes: Preserving the Histories of Landscape Conservation in the United States” (Built Heritage, 2020, with Richard Carman), “A Cultural Landscape Archive: Digitizing the New Deal’s Prairie States Forestry Project” (CELA, 2021, with Laura Weakly and Gary Bentrup), and “Design of Productive and Regenerative Food Systems Through a Landscape Architecture Studio Framework” (Landscape Research Record, 2023, with Gary Bentrup). An accomplished educator, she has taught studios, history/theory seminars, and design thinking courses, receiving the College of Architecture Distinguished Teaching Award (2017), Hawthorne Award for Service and Collaboration (2023), Omicron Delta Kappa Professor of the Month (2014), and multiple certificates for contributions to students. Karle mentors undergraduates via UCARE projects, supervises capstone designs, and leads a summer study abroad program in Rome focused on historic and contemporary landscapes. She serves as an affiliate fellow at the UNL Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, fellow at the Center for Great Plains Studies, and board member of the Dimensions Educational Research Foundation.