Exploring Connection and Community (extended version)

Skagit Watershed at Diablo Lake. 

On a dreary September morning a team of 6^th grade students from Seattle's Westside School upend cobble in Deer Creek while searching for macro-invertebrates - living clues in the mystery of this habitat's health and the quality of the water cascading downstream. Their giddy grins and eager body language belie the soggy impediments to learning that characterize Pacific Northwest weather this time of year.

Weeks later, on a crisp October afternoon, seven 5^th grade students from Bellingham's Happy Valley Elementary grapple with the concept of a watershed while scanning the snow encrusted peaks which ensnare Diablo Lake. Narrating the life of a raindrop, they trace its course from cloud to ground to river and eventually the sea. Participants delight in the chance to imagine water flowing through their world passing places they may never go.

Sourdough Creek connects sub-alpine meadows with the rest of the world.

As an educator and lifelong science enthusiast I am quick to assign my own value to these experiences and the concepts they explicate. For one, these are classroom lessons come to life. I can recall cartoonish diagrams illustrating watersheds projected from transparencies onto my 5^th grade classroom wall, but these children skip rocks on the water of Diablo Lake and then, when they leave, gaze out the window of their bus at the same water as it runs the Skagit River toward Puget Sound. Similarly, the 6^th grade students from Westside School will spend an afternoon chasing dragonfly nymphs around with a microscope lens while my memories of macro-invertebrates, like the memories of many youth, are seen through the warped glass of a specimen jar.

Apart from the transformative nature of these place-based experiences, there is a deeper value in the concepts that we, as instructors, strive to impart to participants. Ideas like watersheds and ecological connectivity are stepping-stones to the broader skill-set of systems thinking. Understanding a place and its connection to other places is a mental exercise whose resultant fitness is transferable to an ever broadening set of challenges looming large on our shared horizon. 

Fungus are royalty when it comes to connections with the rest of the world.

 

I first became familiar with teaching to such outcomes while working with teens. Some of the 'advanced' programs I designed and taught for the aquarium were prime opportunities to draw attention to the complexity of the world and encourage participants to dig deeper into the concept of interdependence and connectivity. The youth came with a wealth of knowledge but in many cases the linear nature of their classroom experiences had constrained their ability to picture or analyze the complexity of the world. There in lies the opportunity. When an individual expects simple one-to-one causal relationships or questions with single answers it becomes easier to provide discrepant events which lead to questions and deeper inquiry. By pin-pointing student misconceptions about the relationships between elements within a system a relatively simple cascade of learning was set into motion. For these teen participants, after the chain reaction began the teaching was relatively hands off. 

 

Given my enthusiasm for this way of thinking I was eager to find ways that similar concepts could be introduced to a younger audience. Having limited experience with 5^th and 6^th grade students I wasn't sure to what degree I would be able to accomplish these things. In reviewing the Mountain School curriculum for the first time I came upon a few key areas that could be opportunities for addressing systems. What is a watershed and why is it important? What formed the valley near the ELC, glacier or river? How are glaciers connected to the light bulbs in your homes in Seattle? How are producers, consumers and decomposers connected in a forest community? Is a food chain the best way to describe the connections within an ecosystem? How does the health of the forrest around the learning center impact the lives of people in Anacortes? For some Mountain Schoolers these questions form the basis for a new way of thought and allow for us to take steps toward accomplishing one of the larger and more challenging outcomes of the curriculum.

Me and my watershed.

On the last day of each session participants engage with the big ideas of Community. By this point the concept is far from foreign, as each individual has already explored the complexity of Northwest foodwebs and other interdependent systems. What separates this culminating foray into Community from previous learning is the place of the Individual within the system. The question of where and how you connect to the larger world is one each of us wrestle with in our lives and, in many ways, how we answer shapes the way we create identity for self and community.

There are many laudable audience transformations we strive to make during a single Mountain School session. Participants leave with a deeper knowledge of the ecosystem, more comfort in spending time outdoors, and stronger science literacy, but I personally ascribe the deepest value to an individual leaving with a newfound ability to see the connections between things which, until then, seemed so far apart. This is the seed from which deep understanding and lifelong stewardship will grow.

I'm lucky to still have relationships with a good number of the teens I mentored while living in Chicago. I receive email updates and links to news articles that show me a deep understanding of the world. Now young adults, these great thinkers have deconstructed the world into component parts and reassembled it just the way a budding mechanic would rebuild a lawnmower engine. The knowledge they gain through this process works in tandem with their ability to think critically and independently about their decisions and the impacts they have on a larger system. I'm confident that the skills they began to develop as first year high school students are the same skills that make them informed and engaged citizens. So my challenge is to better understand how the work I do now may connect to learning that will most certainly come later. How do skills like critical and systems thinking grow after 5^th grade and to what areas of participants lives are these skills readily transferable? 

This is an extended version of a similar post published on North Cascades Institute's Chattermarks blog.