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.
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.
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