Debbie Brawn steps out of a commuter bus and onto a floating dock swaying with the current of the muddy waters below. She stops, closes her eyes and inhales deep, savoring the air of the Amazon basin, pure and pristine, tinged by the aroma of ripe fruit and rich and damp earth.

“I’m home,” she says to no one in particular as students ramble past her, their bulging suitcases click-clacking against the dock‘s wooden slats as they board the Iracema, the three-story wood-paneled riverboat that will serve as the study tour’s floating home for the next nine days.

It is Brawn, the administrative director of the University Honors Program, who first dreamt up the idea of bringing students to the Amazon after visiting the area in 2007 as part of a study trip led by tropical ecology expert Cindy Howard, a biology and environmental sciences professor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. The experience proved so transformative for the ardent nature lover and sustainability advocate that she returned with Howard again in 2009.

“This experience profoundly changed me,” Brawn said, “The Amazon is the most mystical and enchanting place I’ve ever seen. Going on that trip better informed my perspective of who I am in this world, the choices I make and the impact those choices have. I knew I wanted it to be an honors seminar class.”

That hope became reality when UC launched its first study tour to the Amazon in 2012 as part of a partnership between the University Honors Program and the Environmental Studies program in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. The experience has since become a biennial one, offered again in 2014 and 2016 to a waiting list of students.

Joining the tour as the lead faculty member proved an easy sell for Jodi Shann, a biology professor and Environmental Studies program director. Shann, whose more than 25 years of research centers on the cleanup of highly contaminated locations designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as Superfund sites, knew that what would keep students most invested in the imperiled fate of the Amazon would be to experience it firsthand.

“Students definitely do better in classes where they have an active learning component in which they have to participate in what they’re learning. This just takes that to the extreme,” Shann said.

“These are the same students who performed very well on their tests and classroom projects and discussion, but the reality of the trip puts them into an environment that they thought they knew,” she added. “They discover there’s a big difference between theoretically understanding something and really knowing.”