Dear People who care about students,
There’s a lot going on that doesn’t make sense to me right now and I am struggling with the right way to continue advocating for mainstream adoption of nature-based learning in schools everywhere when there is so much trauma: terrorism, death, violence, hate, and what seem like intractable clashes that I don’t understand and feel unequipped and powerless to address.
I sometimes feel this way about climate change too (wrote about it here) – with floods and fires and mass extinctions seeming sometimes remote (though increasingly not-so) and derived from a different type of violence in which I am complicit.
As I was thinking about this and wondering if I can continue filling my feeds – and my brain – with nature-based learning advocacy or videos of Clara and Nora (my daughters) dancing in our living room, I remembered an experience from a few years ago.
Disclaimer: In this substack, I typically focus on routine nature-based learning1 experiences in nearby nature rather than top-of-the-pyramid days-and-nights-under-skies-Capital-N-Nature. This letter is mostly the latter with only allusions to my apple-a-day nature connection drum.
Tl;dr
Regular readers know I usually offer a “too long; didn’t read” section as cliff notes for those who are tight on time. Today I won’t. What follows is a personal story/reflection, not an academic argument. I hope you’ll read it anyhow.
Insurance
It was the day before our class was set to leave on a 5-day, 4-night backpacking trip in Utah’s canyons. Save me and my co-instructor, our group was entirely Mexican-American immigrant teenagers from a Title 1 (aka low-income) public school. This trip was a capstone experience and once-in-a-lifetime for most.
Per policy (and probably prudence too), each student was to have accident insurance in case anything went wrong. However unlikely, costs of a small injury – a broken toe even – get high pretty fast when you’re in a remote backcountry environment.
One of my best students didn’t have insurance.
I panicked. She would not be able to go without it. I left a half-dozen messages on her mom’s phone.
I called again. She finally picked up.
I learned my student’s athlete-insurance policy had just lapsed and her mom (single as far as I knew) couldn’t afford even a short period of coverage. She was waiting for her own new insurance to kick in when she started a new job and then she planned to add her daughter to the policy. But it wouldn’t happen in time for tomorrow.
Paraphrasing here – because this is how I remember the conversation and precision isn’t the point – her mom told me more:
I don’t know if you know this, but her dad just got back in touch. He is in a high-security prison for his involvement with the cartel – and has entirely stopped paying any child support. I can’t afford insurance right now. I can’t figure out how to make this happen.
I hung up the phone and wept.
I did not know this. This student showed up to class everyday smiling, gentle, eager to learn. Zero evidence of anything awry in her world.
I wracked my brain for solutions. I called my friend-supervisor. Surely there was something we could do. Some way.
I’m just going to buy her insurance.
I said.
My friend-supervisor talked me down.
What’s the long game here, Becca?
I don’t have a long game. My end game is getting this student out on this backpacking trip tomorrow!
I shout-cried into the phone.
It was so simple and so unfair. I just wanted my student to be able to go and it felt so profoundly unjust that she – our most engaged of all students – would have to forgo the trip.
And then it felt laughable in a painful haha-funny-not-funny way that my outrage at the world’s injustices centered on a stupid backpacking trip.
I mean, what the hell could a backpacking trip possibly mean to a student experiencing so much trauma?
Did it matter at all?
No idea how, but I got an email an hour later with a short-term insurance policy for my student. I cried again.
Crap
In hundreds of days spent with teenagers hiking through canyons, I have never met one who was so paralyzed with fear as we scrambled through thin slots between rocks and navigated steep terrain.
As I guided her, other students shouted encouragement. She crawled clinging to sandstone, her body contorted with fear.
You’ve got this! You’re doing great!
The other students chorused, seeming to not notice the sun’s traverse of the sky as we made zero progress on our day’s travel or worry about the two miles we still needed to hike after finally getting down the slope.
After she emerged from the slot, I looked at my co-instructor.
Crap. Teeth clenched.
Had we made the wrong decision? Had the insurance stress I’d imposed on her mom been worth it? My gut knotted.
3 days
Time passed. Different canyon. 3 days hiking. 3 nights sleeping under stars.
I’m stemming!
she said, elated, as she used a canyoneering technique (and term!) to explore another slot canyon on a completely optional side hike.
My co-instructor and I looked at each other again. No words. Smiles.
Mattering
I’ve lost her written words – and didn’t record what she said (if only!). Anyhow, I still remember the gist. In my student’s reflection of the trip, she wrote about a profound feeling of calm. Support. Being held. In love with her surroundings. In love with nature. Pride.
In my moments (and sometimes more-than-moments) of questioning my place and purpose on this planet, I often return to this. The backpacking trip wasn’t stupid. This incredible student got a 5-day pause – something she probably never had before and likely won’t again – from the maelstrom of trauma that enveloped her.
Even though she’ll probably not go on a 5-day backpacking trip in remote canyons again, I know she gained durable memories that will carry her.
And she knows that nature is right there in her backyard, too. Holding her.
🙏Thanks for being here with me for a few minutes.
❤️Becca
Nature-based learning is learning outdoors or bringing elements of nature indoors for learning.
This makes me want to take all my students hiking :)