Letter 2: Who Am I?
Letter 2: Who Am I?
And why am I soap-boxing about nature-based learning?
Hi! We haven’t seen each other in almost a month. And, when we do connect, the kids are just at those ages that make it so hard to really carry on a full conversation about anything. So, in case my whole letter-writing kick seems a bit out of left field for you (NB: I need to actually look into that expression sometime), I want to take a moment to share a bit about me: my story – who I am, how I got here, and why I’ve started soap-boxing about nature-based learning.
First things first. How are you?
👂👂👂👂👂👂👂👂👂👂👂👂👂
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And, while you’re at it, please
Anyhow, I think we were camped in the canyons
of southern Utah the last time we really got to chat. It was night 11 of a two-week expedition and we were perched on a slickrock bench immediately adjacent to the spaceship rock above the drop into Long Canyon.
No, wait…I think we were hiking in Gates of the Arctic National Park in the BIG AK – waiting for the Koyukuk River to drop or to find enough braids so we could cross to get to the airstrip on the other side – where we would meet up with our precious re-ration (more peanut butter!).
Or, we were enjoying those incredible “chai” cinnamon rolls (secret ingredient = ginger paste) on a frost-covered subalpine morning before attempting to summit Mt. Harvard in the Collegiate Peaks just south of Leadville, Colorado.
We might have actually been paddling toward the tail end of that seven-week canoeing expedition in the Canadian arctic. Do you remember the flowy slip-and-slide of class 1-2 whitewater on the Kunwak and then seeing the circle of musk oxen (wooly mammoth contemporaries, I swear) on the far shore, the little guys surrounded by the big ones? I had been waiting to see them for the whole trip; I didn’t expect we’d be able to smell them! Cool in its own musky (stinky) way.
I guess it could have been a gazillion other nights or days under the skies – whatever sun-rain-snow-sleet-wind-storms-stars they were serving – during a “Capital-N Nature” experience. Immersive. Transformational.
I have been fortunate to log more than a calendar year of these Nature experiences during my days on the planet. To be honest, I haven’t updated my outdoor resume in a minute (*cough* more than a decade), so it might even be creeping up near two years when you really add it all together. From the Bolivian and Patagonian Andes to the Canadian and Alaskan Arctic to Nepal and India’s Himalaya – I’ve been beyond fortunate to commune with Mother Nature across cultures and hemispheres.
I am so grateful for these nights-and-days-under-the-skies. Perspective and humility in spades. And somehow, too, affirmation.
So I Became a “Capital-N” Nature Professional
After years as a camp counselor and expedition leader for Camp Manito-wish YMCA and then guiding international adventure abroad experiences with Where There Be Dragons, I sought out ways to parlay my wilderness addiction into a bonafide career.
As the daughter of two medical practitioners – a nurse and a surgeon – going into medicine was the obvious path. Back when I was clearly spending way more time in the woods and Nature than your average pre-med, my dad sent me a packet about being a flight-for-life doc. The glossy cover featured badass-looking nurses and doctors next to helicopters on glaciers with mountain backdrops. Tempting.
But by the time I was grappling with my direction most, I already knew I loved working with campers and students way too much. I loved being an educator.
Enter a period of 2 decades where I found ways and incredible places to merge Nature experiences with being an educator. I started teaching in an official K-12 setting in Bend, Oregon (where my husband grew up). REALMS was an early public charter expeditionary learning school. In addition to doing various odd jobs (including filling in as a Humanities and Spanish teacher) and absorbing a tremendous amount of knowledge from my co-teachers about authentic, hands-on, place-based, and student-centered classroom learning, I got to co-lead the 8th-grade Travel Study program in the 4-corners region on the border of UT, NM, AZ, and CO. This included, to my delight, a 5-day backpacking trip in Grand Gulch (arguably one of the most archaeologically rich ways to possibly spend 5 days backpacking in Nature). I was hooked.
As if in a dream, I found a little private school nestled in the high mountain town of Leadville, Colorado. The High Mountain Institute was (is still) “where nature and minds meet.” I got to be part of a legitimate school where students come from all over the country to spend one semester their junior year of high school. They continue with their “normal” junior year curriculum (I taught Spanish 3, 4, and AP, for example) and fully 6 weeks of the 16-week semester they head out to the backcountry on Nature backpacking and ski touring expeditions. And I got to lead those expeditions.
My husband’s job then took us to Durango where I enjoyed two years at a rad – and nascent – Project Based Learning charter school - Animas High School. My Nature time was mostly confined to personal adventures for a bit, but I did become an avid mountain biker (thanks to the badass women riders of Durango!) and spent ample time in lower-case nature. And, I learned from inspiring colleagues about the beauty of the Project Based Learning pedagogical model.
But, we missed the scrappiness of a hard-scrabble mountain town and our peeps back in Leadville. And I missed my professional Nature fix - so Eric and I made the move back to Leadville and I rejoined the High Mountain Institute, this time as Dean of Students. I worked with awesome humans – both colleagues and students – and I got to learn about being an administrator. And, best of all: I got to lead Nature expeditions again – facilitating transformational nature experiences for teenagers (and getting my Nature fix too!).
Now my educator quiver held a whole sheaf of arrows: Spanish-language curriculum development and instruction, outdoor and adventure education facilitation - including leadership, communication, and group skills (now often headers for the long list of “21st Century Skills”), environmental ethics, scrappy start-up skills, Expeditionary Learning and Project Based Learning pedagogical models, curriculum design and teaching chops, generalized teaching skills like: classroom management; scaffolding, sequencing, and supporting; assessment and the like, and administrative skills. It was all blending together into my “path” – however winding it might look to a bird from above.
Speaking of birds…
“Eaglettes in, Eagles out.”
That’s what one of the co-founders of the High Mountain Institute used to say about the transformation students experienced during their semester there. A remarkable transformation, no doubt. In fact, facilitating this bit of metamorphosis through immersive, days-and-nights-under-the-skies wilderness trips became part of my Nature obsession.
Still, I just got itchy. Something was missing.
You see, I’m an activist too. For nature, humans, and humans-and-nature (I know we are part of nature…it’s just I also know that’s not exactly how things manifest these days). As an 8-year-old, I dog-eared my copy of One Hundred Things Kids Can Do To Save the Earth. In college I blockaded streets in San Francisco protesting the war in Iraq. I rallied to unite Stanford students and subcontracted (ergo, non-unionized) employees in pursuit of collective bargaining rights. I went to college with the express purpose of studying civil engineering so I could – with science and non-violence – blow up dams ruining river ecology across the globe (I didn’t take to civil engineering though – trying to trust a pen being mightier than a sword…).
So – as much as I loved it and for as many incredible Eaglettes-cum-Eagles as I got to meet and connect with at the High Mountain Institute – I knew there were other birds. More importantly, not everyone is born into the rarified circumstances of a protected National bird. I fledged from the nest of high-pedigree plumage – and through a set of timely community circumstances and experiences, I found a new nest (about a mile, as the crow flies, from the High Mountain Institute) with the Lake County panthers.
Of necessity, and for your sanity, I’m grounding my bird metaphor now.
I joined a local coalition brought together around a grant to connect children, youth, and families facing systemic barriers and injustices to nature access. Boiling it down, we asked these questions of our community:
Do you want to connect with nature?
If yes, how?
What’s getting in the way?
To get these answers, we assembled a diverse coalition. 6 Latina promotoras (community health connectors) conducted interviews in the majority Latinx neighborhoods around town and 6 youth researchers imagined what they and their peers wanted to see pending funding to connect children, youth, and families with nature. Representatives from our public school district, local agencies, politicians, and even small business-owners made up the balance of our coalition. It was a powerful and messy collective leadership and community-based, design-thinking exercise.
Still, the answers were clear:
Yes.
Lots of ways.
Lots of stuff.
So we wrote a grant application to overcome barriers and implement our community’s vision to connect with nature.
Among the array of solutions, the youth researchers said, unequivocally:
If you want youth and children in our community to have access to nature, you must do it through the public schools because that’s where children and youth are.
I flew (whoops!) at the chance to unify my passion for education, working with young people, social justice, and nature. I headed over to the “Panther’s Den” in Lake County School District in Leadville, Colorado.
Here’s a recent snapshot of LCSD from the Colorado Department of Education’s District and School Dashboard (note, these are post-COVID stats; prior to COVID we had just over 1000 students and a higher percentage “FRL eligible” (Free/Reduced Lunch eligible - an oft-used proxy for low-income).
I took a role as “Community Learning Director” in our local schools. My job description read: “the director will work with teachers and community partners to enhance and support academic learning experiences…; work with school leaders and community partners to enhance and support…the development of school culture through grade-level outdoor and community experiences; and work with the high school leadership team and community partners to enhance and support student access to career pathways related to the outdoors.”
I worked hard to honor the community’s request for more nature connection in schools. And, I now know I used my lived experience to curate nature connection in the way that resonated with me: nights-and-days-under-the-skies-Capital-N-Nature.
We had lots of successes with this model. I still remember the chamber choir campout where students explored their leadership preferences, engaged in team building initiatives and a wonder circle, and then – around the campfire – roasted marshmallows for s’mores and sang campy songs, the full choir’s voices threading through Lodgepole pines and out onto Turquoise Lake.
We also had failures – programs with partners who just didn’t adapt their programming to be truly inclusive of our students, or programs where things felt like partners were doing outdoor education to us, rather than with us. Or programs that were flawed in their design or “fit.”
Even though the successes outweighed the failures, and the failures pointed toward opportunities for further learning, it all just didn’t quite feel right.
The last bullet point in my job description read,
The director should plan to build capacity and systems during the three-year grant period so that the programs s/he puts in place are self-sustaining beyond the end of the grant.
Umm…
I can streamline, systematize, highlight, and vomit checklists with the very best. I cut in half or better the amount of time needed to pull off Nature experiences with partners. But just as the idea of carbon neutrality continually evades us, I could not figure out how to make these programs self-sustaining.
That impossible bullet from my job description sent me into a spiral of doubt about the meaning of all of this. About the whole premise of nature connection. To what end? Why? For whom? Is this really what families in our community wanted?
Had my fiendish obsession with days-and-nights-under-the-skies Nature experiences led me down a path to nowhere?
So I went for a bike ride. Or a ski. Or a walk. Or a run. I’m not really sure precisely what I did – just that I’m sure it involved going outdoors and moving my body in nature to find clarity.
And, I also thought a lot about what it was we were trying to achieve and why. I asked lots of whys. Why connect with nature? Why connect with nature in schools? Why does this matter? Why have I been defining nature as “out there” rather than right here?
I zoomed out and took a bird’s-eye 😉 view of the situation. And I also spent a lot of time thinking about the research about nature connection that I had been pouring over outside of work.
The answers were there in the research and in the people – students and educators – with whom I worked. And, in nature. Right in our “backyard.”
Why do we want to foster nature connection for students in school?
🌈It is good for student health. This includes both physical wellbeing and mental health (Note: Although I reject the dichotomy between physical and mental wellbeing, it is worth naming BOTH here as the mental health benefits of nature connection are critical in this moment).
❄️It is good for learning. Nature-connection boosts cognition including focus, attention, retention, and transfer. It also supports higher levels of engagement – a CRITICAL condition for learning.
🦉It is good for
developing 21st Century Skills yadda yaddasupporting the development of good people. Nature has been shown to boost so-called 21st Century Skills including collaboration, problem-solving, and creativity. Moreover, research shows how play in natural environments are more supportive of positive relationships and even bridging diversity – where kids are more likely to play with others who don’t look like them when on a green schoolyard as compared to a more man-made playscape. (NB: I need to find this exact study; it was referenced by Richard Louv in his July 2021 interview on the Coconut Thinking podcast)🌿 It is a step toward greater health and educational equity. As an “equigenic” intervention, nature connection in schools closes opportunity gaps and has the greatest benefits for children and youth who face the most significant barriers to accessing nature and its benefits in their daily lives.
🌍 It is good for our planet. Nature connections in schools can establish a foundational connection to our planet and foster positive attitudes toward nature, which translate into later dispositions for conservation.
I also did some soul searching about this question:
Why have I been defining nature as “out there” rather than right here?
It had to do with my own love for and experience with nights-and-days-under-skies Nature experiences, my obsession with the transformational power of those experiences, and my myopic sense of Capital N Nature as being the way to connect with nature.
Now I know. The whole time people all around me had been telling me there are MANY ways to connect with nature and, while they genuinely liked the idea of nights-and-days-under-skies Nature experiences (I didn’t totally make this up, I swear!), they also believed in the power of backyard, relevant, contextualized, accessible nature connections.
Coupled with the impossible task of “creating self-sustaining programs,” those answers sent me on a systems design-thinking exercise where I explored:
How can we embed nature connection into the very way public schools function?
The answer? Make nature-connection a fundamental part of the way teaching and learning happen.
How? Nature-based learning pedagogical practices (like moving learning outside to nearby nature spaces) and classroom design (like playing nature soundscapes - birdsong, rain, ocean - in the classroom).
As a reminder: nature-based learning is learning outdoors or bringing elements of nature indoors for learning – in any grade level and any content area.
More on that next time, as that was a lot from me and about me. I just wanted to give you some context for this journey to frame my letters.
Now, it’s your turn. Tell me a bit about you in the comments so I can get to know about your relationship to the power of nature connection.
Be well.
Until next time,
💚 Becca