What makes Sunnyside special?

On 16 November I make a return visit to Sunnyside Environmental School in Portland, Oregon, the K-8 (kindergarten to age 14) which I first visited back in May. This time my conversations with the principal, Sarah Taylor, and with teachers and pupils, focus on what makes the school special, and on how best to help other schools keen to start along the path of Place Based Education.

I have an interesting discussion with Sarah Taylor about curriculum planning and assessment. She is about to complete a curriculum framework for the school, a document which promises to be useful for any other school starting out in a similar direction. Its guiding principles emphasise trust, intellectual curiosity, high academic standards, seasonal cycles, the importance of play and time outdoors, mixed age experiences, service learning, gratitude and joy. 'In this framework, schools are seen as satisfying and rich experiences that instill a sense of well being, support and community into its members'. Daily rituals help to bring the school community together. The day at Sunnyside starts with a morning circle, a review of the seasonal calendar, the plan for the day and good news. Breaks for play, fresh air and silence are built into work time. The day ends with a closing circle for compliments and a waste audit. Families and the wider community are included in the life of the school in various ways, from volunteering to family and community events.

The assessment of students' performances is broader than in most mainstream schools. While student progress is measured against State developmental benchmarks for the 'essential skills' - maths, reading and mathematics, much learning is thematic, project-based and cross-disciplinary. The whole school alternates on an annual basis between the themes of rivers, mountains and forests, so that each student gains a good grasp of related local and global sustainability issues. The range of learning that Sunnyside aims to help students achieve is much broader than simply the subject areas of literacy and numeracy. The assessment process is therefore as interactive as possible, involving both parents and teachers in goal-setting. Student portfolios and student-led conferences to which parents are invited allow for a rounded assessment of student development.

This school year is a 'river' year and I sit in on a blended middle school class (Grades 6-8, ages 11-14) and interview long-term substitute teacher Dylan McCann. The students have each chosen a river in Oregon and are researching it independently. They are monitoring the water quality and ecology of a local wetland. History, culture and economic changes along their chosen river will be written as a River Memoir, telling the story of each river from the river's perspective. Creative arts will also be part of a student-organised River Festival.

Dylan is able to compare Sunnyside with other schools he regularly teaches in. Most notable is the culture of care and respect within the school, 'Its very different from other schools that I teach in. It just has much more of a community feeling, so when you walk around you recognise people and they greet you by your first name and say things like ‘nice to see you again’. People treat each other with respect, between students and students and teachers.' I ask whether a school like Sunnyside requires much more time and effort from its teachers than mainstream schools. Dylan convinces me that, while both require good preparation, there are real advantages to this more cross-disciplinary, student-focused style of teaching. He answers thoughtfully, 'I don’t think so. I think as long as you have the mindset you need to be at the school it’s not more work it’s just different. At other schools it’s a lot about lesson plans and tests, correcting and scoring and just so much more rigid. And here the activities that are planned are much more interactive and student-focused, the students lead on many issues and take a lot of responsibility. I think it’s more interesting for the students, and more stimulating and fun for the teachers, very much so. I mean the great thing is so many of the projects here are cross-disciplinary they incorporate math and science and art and language into the same project, rather than studying just math or just science or just writing. So much work incorporates so many facets. As a teacher it’s great because you can really enter into a project, really get so much more in-depth into projects instead of doing it for a class you can do a theme for a week or a month and really explore it. It makes it much more interesting to teach.'

Dylan believes there is a greater breadth of learning for the students too. 'Here they get life skills from this kind of learning, they are learning to be leaders and members of a community. Here they are so much more excited and involved about learning in a school where they are actually doing things, and each lesson is building on the last one and creating. They are interacting with other classes, and they are going out weekly and being members of the community and seeing real things. There is so much more interaction and they get choice in what they do and they are excited about it and they are taking their learning in their own hands, and really dealing with issues.' I ask what qualities he believes Sunnyside brings out in its students by comparision with mainstream schools. He says, 'I think these kids are a lot more interactive with each other and take on more responsibility, having ideas. Creativity is so much better than at other schools because they get a chance to use their imagination.... In other schools it can be just ‘memorise, memorise, memorise’ and that’s all it is. They have no creativity, no originality, no imagination whatsoever. It’s so hard. Whereas here its not memorization it’s learning, it’s getting immersed in it and really understanding what you’re doing and focusing on real issues. So when they’re asked to sit down and write a story about something they can just run with it as opposed to sitting down and saying ‘tell me what to write’. '

The students in the class echo these views when they are asked what they think makes Sunnyside special for them. They identify the sense of community, respect for peers and teachers, mixed-age classes and a family feel as highlights. They also like the themed curriculum and the opportunities for creativity. Emily says, 'The river theme is a lot more fun than learning subjects separately because I love art and when we do themes I get to do more art because we have to illustrate our own river book and if I went to a different school it wouldn’t be so creative' Her classmate chimes in, 'I also think the river and the theme work is cool because at my old school the subjects didn’t link together and I’d get confused about what goes with what.' A girl named Manson, obviously a strong character and very much part of the class community says simply, 'What I really like about this school is that it lets you be unique'.

Later in the day I go outside and help kindergarten kids plant bulbs, under the supervision of Sustainability Co-ordinator Stef Rooney. Her post is funded by the Parent Teachers Student Association and she works 20 hours a week. She tries to get each of the 15 Kindergarten to Grade 6 classes out for at least an hour once a week in the school garden. She has two staff, a farm and school co-ordinator, who co-ordinates school work on Jean's farm, the local urban farm that grows much of the school's food, and an intern. She values the integration of outdoor learning with learning as a whole, and says her work at Sunnyside is, 'a perfect combination of being outside with kids but in a learning setting where it is a part of the school, not just something that’s completely unrelated to what you’re doing in your classroom. It’s fully integrated here. And that’s exciting because I get to see how that works day to day... It’s all about the garden and what needs to happen, but its learning too – not just science but all sorts of other things. Its easy here because it’s all integrated. At other schools I've worked in there was no link and students didn’t see what they were learning from it.'

My final question to Sarah Taylor during our discussion was to ask what practical first steps she would take if she were encouraging a Place Based approach at a mainstream school. This were the six steps she chose:
1. Choose one State Standard and ask each member of staff to find something outside within walking distance of the school - either in the environment or the community - that they could use to teach that Standard.
2. Run staff meetings in a circle and start to model the sort of inclusive, respectful, listening and caring behaviour you would like to see underpinning the school.
3. Run morning meetings until other staff feel able to play a role, again setting an example through your own approach to staff and students.
4. Create a garden plot and get the whole school involved in it.
5. Find a service learning project in the community that the whole school can participate in and celebrate the positive results from.
6. End each day - whether at class or whole school scale - with compliments
Once again, my time at Sunnyside was a fascinating and a lot of fun!

Back to the Wallowas

In October, after a summer working on farms in Washington State, the Gulf Islands and British Columbia and giving my own children (now 4 and 6) a myriad of real Place Based learning opportunities (see http://boydwild.blogspot.com/), we head south with the encroaching winter back to the Wallowas in eastern Oregon.

Amy Busch has taken over at Wallowa Resources (WR) as Education Co-ordinator, so I arrange to meet with her on 11 November to talk about how she is building Place into the WR Youth Stewardship education programme. The aims of the program goals remain inspirational:

1) To increase science literacy and provide context for learning.

2) To develop understanding of the linkage between human and ecological communities.

3) To promote a sense of place and environmental stewardship.

4) To provide exercise and promote good physical health.

5) To educate our next generation of land stewards, decision makers, and community leaders.

Of the aims Amy said, ' All our work is aiming towards better stewardship and citizenship. Once you get to that upper middle school/high school level and start talking about issues and values and letting the kids come to their own conclusion. That’s what education is about, not telling them one right answer, but presenting all the sides and giving them the skills they need to be active citizens, to deduce ‘what are my values, how do I approach this issue and why do I feel this way, how do I work with others who are different, how do we come to an agreement and work as a community?' This very much reflects the philosophy of Wallowa Resources, which aims to nurture good stewardship and citizenship in the local community by supporting problem solving and conflict resolution in the achievement of local environmental, economic and social sustainability.

The OWL programme for local elementary schools, which involves a weeks of outdoor school in the spring and autumn, will continue as before. Amy says 'The OWL programme is the introductory programme, aimed at elementary schools, giving them the basic knowledge of ecology and land use, and getting them excited about these unique places they live in' .

It is the WREN field science programme 'the flagship programme' for ages 11-14 that Amy is most excited about. This covers 8 all-day Fridays outdoors in the autumn and 8 in the spring term. She says, Those kids, if they go through the whole program multiple years I think really get a more in depth sense of place. Its amazing when I go in the classrooms with the other programs you can tell the kids who have been in WREN because they know the answers a little faster. The students learn about the world around them, local cultural, environmental conservation and sustainability issues, linking the local to the global. 'Every day is about Place. For example last week we did the Nez Perce and we hiked up a local hill and Dave shared a great story from Chief Joseph, read from his actual words. Another time we did a day on air quality and put out petroleum jelly dishes, and looked at particulates, and we counted traffic in town. We counted 89 cars and trucks in 15 minutes. We talked about local car pollution and traffic'.

WREN costs $15 a lesson, but around half of the participants are on WR scholarships. WREN does compete with school sports on Fridays, and WR's capacity means that only 14 students can sign up for any session. Nevertheless, WREN provides an excellent follow-on from OWL for middle-school students.

WET, the watershed monitoring programme, continues for High Schoolers and 6th graders. 'The 10th and 11th graders go out and learn how to do water monitoring and within a week the 6th graders go out and the high schoolers teach the 6th graders what they learned. It’s a good mentoring thing, and the highschoolers take it more seriously because they have to teach.' All the local schools, from Enterprise, Joseph, Imnaha, Troy and Wallowa now take part in water quality monitoring each autumn, and each school has two water monitoring sites.

In 2010 for the first time, data trends could be observed that indicate that water quality is not improving. Amy is excited about the possibilities of using the data from this programme to prompt further scientific analysis and ultimately river restoration activities. She says, 'We try to reinforce the sense of Place. The data is now going to a new website called www.streamwebs.org , run by the Oregon Freshwater Trust, a non-profit based in Portland. It's for kids to put data into. It has google maps and you can see all the data across the State.' There are also real possibilities for interchange and learning between the work of WR's watershed manager, Mark Porter, now involved in a large local catchment monitoring programme in the Joseph creek watershed and the WET participants.

The WR HAWK programme, originally designed to match older students interested in sustainability issues with natural resource mentors and businesses in the community, is being developed to provide real career-building experiences for students keen to work in the environment, giving them alternatives to traditional ranching and farming. The ACE programme, a dual college/school credit course for older advanced science students in partnership with Blue Mountain City College, is set to continue.

I asked Amy about challenges for the future: 'The biggest thing is finding funding to sustain all the programmes, with a focus on WREN and WET. OWL is already well-established. I would like to use Watersheds as our Place Based focus and build the whole education programme around watersheds because it ties all the kids to their place. Long-term I’m working on how to make the Youth Stewardship programme more holistic and make it clear that each programme builds on the next.'

The two key issues for WR appear to be funding in the current economic climate, and also the challenge of building sustainability issues into mainstream school 'from the outside', competing for student time with academic and sports puruits. Nevertheless, the Youth Stewardship programme makes a very positive, and certainly the most significant, contribution to learning about sustainability and Place in local schools.

Old skills for a new world

On 29th July I am lucky to spend a couple of hours interviewing Professor Ray Barnhardt, from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, on a skype connection. This visionary man has spent much of his career giving a place to indigenous knowledge and skills in the modern Alaskan American education system. As he says, 'The depth of indigenous knowledge rooted in the long inhabitation of a particular place offers lessons that can benefit everyone, from educators to scientists, as we search for a more satisfying and sustainable way to live on this planet’ (Ray Barnhardt in Gruenewald and Smith, Place-Based Education in the Global Age, 2008)

Between 1995 and 2005 the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative (AKRSI), affecting 287 schools and around 38,000 students across Alaska, set up an education system that integrates native knowledge and ways of learning into the mainstream, ‘western’ curriculum. The brainchild of Professor Barnhardt, the Initiative has restored a sense of ‘Place’ and an awareness of environmental sustainability. It has also increased student achievement scores and the number of students going on to further education, particularly to study science, maths and engineering, and has reduced dropout rates.
Native Educator Associations led by Elders but with a broad mix of community members, draw up the core educational values for their region (for example, respect for nature, responsibility, spirituality, compassion, honesty, caring and hard work), and help to oversee education. The Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools provide guidance for schools, parents and communities, while the Alaska Native Knowledge Network (ANKN) provides a hub for information sharing. Cultural camps and fairs provide practical training in native teaching and learning, and students can contribute their own research to a multi-media ‘Cultural Atlas’. Particularly interesting is a spiral-shaped curriculum framework in which 12 core themes (eg outdoor survival, energy/ecology, health), are underpinned by curriculum resources for each of 12 age groups, rotating in an annual cycle. The resources are available on the ANKN website and have been aligned with State educational standards. There is a strong emphasis on the participation of the community in the education of its children, and on linking the local with the global. National funding for AKRSI ended after 12 years, but the initiatives it spawned have become self-sustaining, largely because of strong grassroots support.

As Professor Barnhardt says during the interview, ‘… We’ve tracked student performance in majors and have consistently demonstrated that students do better in standard academic terms if you start from something that they can relate to within their community and then work out. It’s not creating a parochial outlook but rather a strategy for how you get to where you want to go using the local context to widen the curriculum and give it some meaning for the students.’

Ray Barnhardt has also helped to develop two Charter Schools in Fairbanks with a strong Place and Community-Based focus. The Watershed school, a mixed school for ages 6 to14, aims to take students out into the ‘community’ and ‘outdoor’ classrooms at least 70% of the time. The Effie Kokrine school, for ages 13 to 20, with an early college element, is 95% Alaska native students, and builds a strong connection to the local environment. Both schools are fully subscribed, and have out-performed their counterparts in standard tests.

What has happened in Alaska has been extremely important in redressing a balance between peoples and cultures, allowing the techno-knowledge of the modern age to marry with old wisdoms that are ever more necessary in our over-exploited planet. The lessons from AKRSI are relevant to any strong local cultural identity; in Scotland they could apply equally to gaelic, norse or doric cultures.