My goodness has it really already been two weeks? Has it ONLY been two weeks?
So much has happened and I am definitely not the world’s greatest blogger so please forgive me for falling behind. I have so many things I want to write about and my mind is swirling with ideas and images and impressions I want to capture.
Travis is doing a much better job of journaling every night. He is great at documenting facts. He dutifully writes down what happened when and where. I am more of a feelings and impressions writer. Which means I am losing some of the details already. Maybe one of these days he will let me add his entries.
For now, though, I have really been thinking a lot about something that happened this week when my girls had their first Zoom call with their classmates, and I want to be sure to capture my feelings and impressions of this.
For context, the girls are going to be calling in once a week to our home school, St. Paul School of Northern Lights. I wanted them to be able to keep in touch with their friends and our community while we travel and we are so fortunate that our school has teachers and administrators who are excited to partner with us and follow our travels.
Anyway, during the call, their classmates asked questions, and one friend asked, “Why are you traveling for a year?” To my dismay, both kids shrugged. One of the girls even said, “I have no idea. This is all our parents' idea, and I wish we weren’t here.”
My heart sank. Not only because she admitted to her whole class that she didn’t want to be here but also because–hadn’t we explained this a million times? Hadn’t we talked to them over and over about why we are traveling? The mom part of me felt pretty heartbroken right about then.
But the teacher part of me kicked in, and I realized we thought we had taught it, but we hadn’t. And if we did, the lesson didn’t land.
So we spent some time that evening talking about the WHY.
There are a lof of "whys." We love to travel. We want to see as much of the country as we can. We are interested in history and culture. We love our National Parks and want to share them with our girls. We want to share new experiences as a family.
But at the heart of my “why” is a fancy term tossed around loosely, and often incorrectly, in education sometimes: Place-Based Education. This, for me, is why we are out here. I believe that people–not just kids–but people can learn so much more when their feet, their bodies, their hearts, and minds are physically there in the place they are learning about. Place-based education takes this approach and highlights the idea that when a person immerses themselves in a place's history, culture, heritage, landscape, and opportunities, and further when a person works to participate in service for that community, their learning goes deeper.
This idea means more than just taking a field trip to a place. But for me, a field trip is where it started.
I was a pretty disengaged student–the kind of kid who stared out of windows a lot and didn’t pay attention in school at all. I had a hard time connecting with anything my teachers were droning on about. I dutifully copied stuff off of overhead projection sheets and read out loud when it was my turn, but I was completely disconnected and uninterested. The world was happening outside, and I wanted to be there, not indoors, filling in worksheets.
And then I remember visiting Four-Mile Historic Park in Denver on a field trip. Here, they talked about butter-churning while we got to try out butter-churning ourselves. They spoke about the area's history while we stood right where it happened. I was in 5th grade. I remember every detail of that trip. I have no idea what happened in the classroom the day before or after that—but that day lit me up.
I have had so many days like that since but almost all of them have happened outside of the classroom when I was traveling. When I roadtripped with family around this country. And when I backpacked around Europe. When I lived in Korea. When I visited Peru. When I honeymooned in Iceland and stood at the foot of the pyramids in Egypyt. Places that I had seen in books came alive when I was there and the things I learned found their way into my soul.
I want that for my girls.
I want them to stand in the same places where the people that came before us made history- the good, the bad, and the ugly history that makes us who we are. I want them to touch the sand of dunes and the waters of oceans and breathe mountain air. And even though we worked really hard to find a school that aligns with our education values and our school does not give out worksheets or make kids copy off of overhead projections sheets, these are experiences you can’t get inside a classroom.
And in just two weeks, we are already finding so many opportunities to learn. For example, when we went to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, the girls learned about rock layers and stratification, something I probably learned about in a book somewhere along the way. And something that is actually a 4th-grade science standard. But they could learn it while looking out over a huge, beautiful cliff on the shore of Lake Michigan. They can both tell you that the color red in the cliff is there because of iron deposits and the colors green and blue are there because of copper. This is place-based education.
Or take Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. I had seen videos and read about it. I knew I wanted our girls to experience this place firsthand. And yes, we got to go to the top of the big huge dune in all the YouTube videos and watch people try to climb it on all fours. We marveled at the views and gasped at the steepness of the drop.
But this was also where place-based education really came alive.
We were fortunate enough to be able to meet with one of my sister, Chris’s colleagues from National Parks Conservation Association, Kira Davis. She hooked us up with an old friend of hers, Eric Hemenway, who is the Director of Repatriation, Archives, and Records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians of Waganakising—The Land of the Crooked Tree—located in the northwest portion of the lower peninsula of Michigan.
Eric gave a fantastic talk about the Indian Removal Act and how it affected his people, the Odawa. He told the history of one of his ancestors, Chief Waukazoo, and the treaty he negotiated to keep his people here.
While Eric was talking to us, he was able to point right over his shoulder to the area where his ancestors canoed out of the bay on their way to Washington to negotiate that treaty. I am positive that even with the best intentions of our school’s teachers, my girls would not have heard that history elsewhere. This is place-based education.
The girls also learned how sand dunes formed and were able to go out and touch and feel and investigate sand dunes up close. By the end of the day, they could explain how the wind and ocean tides create dunes. They felt the sand run through their fingers and got to feel the sand slip beneath their feet as they ran. This is place-based education.
We visited a sweet little historic village called Glen Haven Historic Village and speculated about how our lives might’ve been different if we lived there in the 1800s. It was a lot easier for them to make those connections when they were actually standing there looking around than I think it would’ve been for them if they were reading about it in a book. This is place-based education.
Kira also tipped us off to a sweet beach where we were able to watch the sunset. The girls were able to look out to the islands and retell the Native legend of how the Sleeping Bear Dunes were named. This is place-based education.
Later in the week, we visited the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, a sort of arboretum/museum/sculpture garden in Grand Rapids, MI. We spent almost five hours here, exploring gardens, sculptures, walking paths, a children’s area, and taking a tram ride. The girls were the ones who didn’t want to leave! At the end, I had them draw one thing that they liked about the visit. They both chose to draw a picture of a sculpture called Mad Mom.
Eva got hooked on the carnivorous plant exhibit and came home and immediately started researching carnivorous plants all on her own. She now has an extended independent research project on carnivorous plants going, and I am letting her just run with it. This is place-based education.
And yes, place-based learning is bigger than learning “in a place.” It is immersing yourself in “local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities, and experiences, using these as a foundation for the study of language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum.” (Center for Place-based Learning and Community Engagement).
Right now, we are immersing ourselves in the Great Lakes region as we constantly explore how people have impacted the lakes and the land around them and how the lakes have supported the people. The next level of PBE would be service and community projects. We will get there. I am just happy that for now, the girls are engaged and starting to find their own interests. I am hopeful that will spark ideas for those kinds of projects.
I used these examples to explain to the girls why we are traveling. I highlighted all the things we have learned in just two weeks that we might have read about in a book, sure, but that might not have made as much of an impact.
I think they got it. I hope they got it. I am sure that by the end of this, they will.
And maybe they will still feel like they don’t want to be here when they talk to their friends on Zoom calls each week. They are bound to feel homesick now and then. But my greatest hope is that when they are grown, they can look back to one of the days or some of the days or most of the days on this trip and have the same crystal clear memory of being lit from within and filled with curiosity and the drive to learn that I felt when I first experienced place-based education at Four-Mile Park in Denver all those years ago.
In the meantime, I am working on not taking anything they say to their friends personally. Besides, I am still getting to experience my own place-based adventures. And some silly, frivolous ones too. This afternoon we are heading to the house where “A Christmas Story” was filmed. My all-time favorite movie! After all, we love to play just as much as we love to learn. and so for sure one of our "whys" is to see as many weird, wonderful, goofy things as we can along the way.
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