Erica Haugtvedt

Service Learning at Trinity Eco Prayer Park III: Choosing Native Grasses

Classes, communication

Reflections on Service Learning Lessons with Trinity Eco Prayer Park in Dr. Haugtvedt’s Fall 2025 STEM Communication for Public and Technical Audiences Course

Mario Dominguez: Restoring a Prairie, One Volunteer Step at a Time

When our class partnered with Trinity Eco Prayer Park this semester, I expected a simple clean-up project. What I discovered instead was a living example of how small ecological changes can ripple through an entire landscape. One of the most striking lessons came from learning how invasive species, especially Canada thistle, can spread quickly and choke out native grasses. These native plants aren’t just background scenery; they anchor soil, trap moisture, and support insects, birds, and even the microorganisms underground. Removing an invasive patch doesn’t just make the park look nicer, it helps restore the natural cycles that keep the prairie healthy.

Our time in the park also revealed how restoration is as much about people as plants. Every volunteer who pulled weeds or cleared debris added visible progress, but they also became connected to the ecosystem they were helping. Science communication often talks about “ecosystem services,” but seeing the concept firsthand–cleaner soil, healthier growth, and a space that brings peace to visitors–made the science feel personal. Trinity Eco Prayer Park isn’t just a project site; it’s a reminder that anyone can make a meaningful impact when they understand the science behind their actions.

By the end of the semester, our team didn’t just complete a service project, we contributed to a small but powerful example of community-driven ecological restoration. And that’s what I hope others see when they visit the park: a place where science, stewardship, and community come together to revive a prairie one season at a time.

Lucas Geiger

While our team was researching possible alternatives for the Kentucky Bluegrass lawn at Trinity Eco Prayer Park it became clear that the simplest and most sustainable solution could be found right outside of town. We thought that native South Dakota grasses like prairie dropseed, western wheatgrass and buffalo grass are naturally built for the local climate and would be great options for the park’s ideology. In their own ways, they can all handle droughts, bounce back after foot traffic and survive through large temperature swings. Creating a mix of the three seemed like the best option to maximize each species’ strengths and weaknesses. This is contrary to the existing Kentucky Bluegrass which is unable to take care of itself without significant work.

Choosing native grasses for the park isn’t just a design choice, it fits in with the park’s ecological values. These grass species will help improve the existing soil’s health, support the local insect diversity and create a landscape that changes more naturally throughout the year. Our goal for the lawn conversion was to give the park a stronger connection to South Dakota’s natural landscaping by replacing one of the last non-native areas in the park.

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Park sign featuring QR code.

Service Learning at Trinity Eco Prayer Park II: Installing QR Codes

Classes, communication

Reflections on Service Learning Lessons with Trinity Eco Prayer Park in Dr. Haugtvedt’s Fall 2025 STEM Communication for Public and Technical Audiences Course

Josiah Gibbs

When I first walked into room 206W in the Classroom Building, I was expecting a typical English class. I was not expecting Professor Haugtvedt to outline our main project for the semester as a real-world research project for Trinity Eco Prayer Park in Rapid City, a nonprofit organization. We would not be assigned a prompt. Instead, we would be forming groups and researching problems the park faced, writing first a project proposal, then a recommendation report, then presenting our findings in person to the Board of Trinity Eco Prayer Park.

English assignment? This was more like a senior design project.

I was suddenly excited. When my team of five chose to research how Trinity Eco could install QR codes in the park, I knew our research would impact the Rapid City community. I also knew that, because this was a real client, the project would prepare me for communicating outside of a college environment. Often, classes are a little too “safe” – isolated from industry – but this class was industry.

QR Code Used as a Plant Label at Kanakakkunnu Palace. Photo: ASV Nair, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons.

Our team had a picture of Trinity Eco’s future – we wanted to research ways to install QR codes. In a normal project, that would be the end of it, but here we had to communicate with our client and make sure our vision lined up with theirs. Part of my role was to talk to the park’s director, Ken Steinken, to clarify our budget and make sure our plans would match Trinity Eco’s own picture of the park’s future. And, with five team members, we had to communicate among ourselves as well. Everyone needed to know their role and communicate their progress to the group. This was all besides our main communication with Trinity Eco: the proposal and the report we were writing. To make a real impact, we had to be able to share information on multiple fronts. The same will be true in a career. With this project behind me, though, I know I can communicate on that level. When I stood in front of Trinity Eco’s Board with my team, describing our plans for QR code installation, I realized we had succeeded – the Board understood our research, and they resonated with it. I’m taking that confidence with me into the future. After this project, I know I can communicate.

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Laptop on the grass in a park

Service Learning at Trinity Eco Prayer Park I: Improving the Website

Classes, communication

Reflections on Service Learning Lessons with Trinity Eco Prayer Park in Dr. Haugtvedt’s Fall 2025 STEM Communication for Public and Technical Audiences Course

Krista Burkman

Service learning is beneficial in many ways, from learning more about a local organization to seeing the impact one person or a group of people can have on a community. The project we completed in Dr. Haugtvedt’s Fall 2025 ENGL 289 does just this. Through working to help the Trinity Eco Prayer Park find potential solutions to one of their problems, I learned how a person or a group of people can have a larger impact on the community than I previously thought.

One of the issues the park is currently facing is finding ways to utilize its website to show off all the park has to offer and recruit donors. I spent time reading articles to learn more about the different audiences the park would like to reach and the content each audience prefers. After compiling all my newfound information, I was able to compose a recommendation for the park board. This included several options for creating strong and effective content for their website, which can also be used on social media platforms if the park were to utilize them.

Even though this may seem like something small, this will help the park improve its website and be more well-rounded when trying to create content to entice viewers. This also helps them gain donors, which then helps the broader Rapid City community. The park may have the funds to continue doing upkeep, general maintenance, and taking on new projects to update or improve the park. The park board’s mission is to bring together people in Rapid City. By maintaining the park and creating a safe environment for residents and visitors of Rapid City, they continue to bring people together and strengthen the community.

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Science communication in the community: Trinity Eco Prayer Park

Classes, communication, Environment

By Erica Haugtvedt

Students in ENGL 289: STEM Communication for Public and Technical Audiences are partnering with Trinity Eco Prayer Park to leverage their science expertise and science communication skills to help the park face real-world problems. Trinity Eco Prayer Park is a private park owned by the Trinity Lutheran Church Foundation that models sustainable stewardship of the environment. The park naturally filters stormwater for 2/3 of its concrete-heavy city block through native plant species that represent five local biomes from the Great Plains and Black Hills. 

Director Ken Steinken stands in front of students and rests his hand on a sign about native plant restoration.
Director Ken Steinken stands next to a sign about native prairie restoration.
Buffalo grass with a small sign labeling it.
Buffalo grass.
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Technologies of Communication: STS Faculty Reflect

communication, Technology

This is the beginning of a short series in which several STS faculty share elements of science and technology that they find intriguing or meaningful. This opening post features reflections from Evan Thomas, Erica Haugtvedt, and Olivia Burgess on communication technologies. Their choices highlight both the ways we connect with each other and the role that technology plays in that connection.

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Ada Lovelace: Victorian Computer Programmer

Events

On Tuesday, October 19, from 6-7 pm (Mountain time), Erica Haugtvedt (Assistant Professor of Humanities) and Duana Abata (Professor of Mechanical Engineering) will present as part of the STEAM Café series. This free presentation will take place at Hay Camp Brewing Company in downtown Rapid City (601 Kansas City St.) and will also be available to watch via livestream on Zoom. The talk will also be posted to the SD Mines YouTube channel and the SD Mines Facebook page after the event.

Long before today’s pervasive digital computers, the first computer programmer was arguably Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron). An exceptional mathematician, she captured the essence of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which was conceptualized by Babbage but was not constructed in his lifetime. In 1843, she wrote an algorithm to accompany Babbage’s Engine. Her contribution to calculate Bernoulli numbers with the Analytical Engine has since been successfully translated, with minor changes, to the C++ programming language. Dr. Erica Haugtvedt and Dr. Duane Abata will discuss how this extraordinary Victorian woman achieved her insights through translating between languages, people, disciplines, and between the imaginary and the real.

Watercolor portrait of Ada Lovelace. She is standing with her body turned away from the viewer but with her face turned toward us.
Watercolor portrait of Ada Lovelace by Alfred Edward Chalon (ca. 1838)

STS Faculty Profile: Erica Haugtvedt

STS Faculty Profile

haugtvedt-novum-profile-picErica Haugtvedt is Assistant Professor of English in the Humanities department and regularly teaches both HUM 200 (Connections: Humanities and Technology) and HUM 375 (Computers in Society) as part of the Science, Technology, and Society degree program.

What’s your area of expertise? What do you primarily research and/or teach? And what drew you to this field?

I study the history of fandom. I study the nineteenth-century British novel and its spin-offs as evidence of how people reacted to and thought about narratives and characters. I like to think about how print newspapers, magazines, books, and theatre are all interrelated. Another way of saying what I specialize in is to say that I study the history of transmedia storytelling (for more about what transmedia storytelling means, see Henry Jenkins’ writing here).

I think there were a lot of things that drew me to these topics, but the main memory I’ll relate it back to is being a fan of Harry Potter in high school. Harry Potter books had been coming out since I was in late elementary school, but I hadn’t read them because I thought they were too popular and overrated. Then, during my freshmen year of high school, my best friend convinced me to read Harry Potter around when the fourth book came out. She said that I would love them, and she was totally right. There was a long publication gap between the fourth book and the fifth book (three years), so during that time my best friend and I became part of the Harry Potter fandom online as we waited for more from Rowling. This was a transformative experience for me because fandom was a unique culture that had a sophisticated scholarly apparatus for detailing facts from the books and for interpreting them. You can say a lot about fandom that is derisive, but that mode of reading and looking for more engagement—that really made a lasting impression on me. I’m not active in fandom anymore, sadly, but I will always be ready to defend fans and fandom.

Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com
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