Tangible Connections
The Value of Community Agreements
by Alyssa Caplan and Summer Swallow
ABSTRACT
Student-generated community agreements serve to create a positive learning community in residential outdoor environmental programs. This activity is essential and creates opportunities to reveal connections between people and ecosystems by weaving together Native Education, diversity, team building, and hands-on learning. Visualizing connections make community agreements both tangible and meaningful for students. In fostering these connections through collaboration, students are introduced to stewardship through four lenses (Embracing Adventure, Helping the Environment, Exploring Here and There, and Living and Learning in Community). Students reflect on time spent building their community and experiences of stewardship by creating a web out of yarn.
The world is full of connections, and as educators we strive to facilitate appreciations and awareness among students by helping them to see the benefits of diversity, and how, through our differences, communities become stronger. As instructors at IslandWood, an outdoor school in the Pacific Northwest located across the Puget Sound from Seattle, we provide an immersive residential outdoor educational experience for fourth through sixth grade students. We have four days to create memorable experiences for our students, and this hinges upon quickly creating a community of trust and support, especially given that many students who come to us have spent little to no time in a forest setting.
The Four Pillars of Stewardship
At IslandWood, our goal is to create positive and impactful experiences where children are engaged with their natural environment while also connecting with IslandWood’s four pillars of stewardship: Embracing Adventure, Helping the Environment, Exploring Here and There, and Living and Learning in Community. While at IslandWood we encourage students to “Embrace Adventure” by trying new things in the garden, climbing the forest canopy tower (a 118- foot tall retired fire lookout station which allows students to see the various layers of the forest canopy), participate in a night hike, work as a team to ‑complete challenges and more. Students “Help the Environment” by reducing food waste, learning about compost, becoming a lifelong member of the ‘Dirty Pocket Club’ (picking up trash) and learning the principles of “leave no trace”. We help students to “Explore Here and There” by making connections between IslandWood and their home communities such as helping them identify fauna and flora they may see at home. Our last pillar of stewardship is “Living and Learning in Community”. Students are constantly engaged in this pillar with community agreements, trail roles, repeated opportunities to turn and talk about a prompt, meet people outside their normal friend groups, and meet children from other schools in the dining hall and during group games. Throughout the week we honor moments in which we see students exemplifying these pillars and ask them to reflect upon moments in which they saw others doing the same. This scaffolding encourages students to take responsibility for their impact upon the community and realize their individual influence.
In order to create a positive community atmosphere and set our students up for success, our team collectively creates a Community Agreement, which elicits knowledge from the students about what makes a caring and healthy community. Using a scaffolded approach, we begin by asking our students to reflect on community agreements they may have already encountered at their schools, in their classrooms, or with sport’s teams. Most, if not all, of those elements are applicable here at our IslandWood campus, as this is a “School in the Woods” not a sleepaway camp. There are many ways to make a community agreement, some of which are thematically illustrated in the form of a tree or tea, others can simply be a list of ideals. Specifically, we would like to focus on the construction and implementation of the Community Web, our twist on a communtiy agreement. Regardless of the theme, the Community Agreement is a living document and it can be added to and adjusted as different situations arise within the team.
Creating a Community Web
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”
—Chief Sealth (Chief Seattle)*
Field groups read this quote out loud to initiate a conversation on the concept of community. Additionally, it is used for brainstorming who Chief Sealth was and his impact on creating connections between native and non-native people (for more information on teaching children about tribal sovereignty, see resources below). Many of our students, being from the Puget Sound region of Washington, know a little about Chief Sealth’s impact. When asked to recall information we often hear responses such as “he was a famous Native American chief who talked with settlers.” Recognition of the historical importance of Chief Sealth and how he contributed to building bridges between people is an example of how one can strive to increase connections and strengthen positive interactions within diverse communities. This also pays homage to Chief Sealth and his people, whose ancestral land we now occupy, helping students to forge meaningful connections between their neighborhoods and IslandWood.
Once we’ve discussed the power of interconnections and prior experiences with community agreements, we then unveil the template for our team agreement on a large piece of butcher paper. In the center is the foundation of our web with the title, “[Team Name] Community Agreement” surrounded by a strand for each of our students, chaperones and instructors (Figure 1). Before we begin filling it out, we discuss characteristics of each visible aspect. Each team member chooses a strand to which they add their name and a strength that they will contribute to the team this week, it is important that they then share that strength out loud to the team. Generally these strengths are characteristics such as humor, artistic, problem-solver, helpful and kind. Occasionally, students respond with traits such as ‘crazy’, without context this could be misinterpreted, for this student it meant having lots of energy and therefore carried a positive connotation. By verbalizing traits, not only are we checking for understand but also learning how students view themselves and how they are comfortable contributing towards the team. Once each team member has added their name and positive attribute, we then brainstorm what sort of behaviors we want to see within our team. The goal with this is to establish team behavior norms to ensure we have a safe and fun week of learning and exploring. Behaviors brainstormed here generally include: be respectful, listen to each other, have fun, to be safe and neighborly (Figure 2). We explain that as team members exemplify these behaviors, they will get to draw a line that connects themselves to that behavior, thus increasing connections between team members and showcasing personal growth. In acknowledging the daily progress of our students, we are tapping into the reward pathway of the brain (Zadina, 2014, p. 102).
At the end of each day we revisit and review the community agreement, add our behavior lines and a loop around the outside which symbolizes team building and connections becoming stronger between the team members (Figure 3). These additions enable the students to literally see the connections being created within our team, being able to visualize these connections adds meaning to the activity and utilizes the visual oriented regions of the brain (Zadina, 2014). This can be used as a formative assessment to see how connections between students, and behaviors of an individual, have changed over time.
Creating these tangible bonds allows us to take the web a step further and make an analogy in which we discuss how our community is similar to those within a natural ecosystem. Different organisms rely on one another for support and if one were to be removed from the web, the whole system would change. This then leads to conversations about interdependent relationships occurring in nature, as well as discussions about how diversity make a system stronger. This can begin with a conversation on diversity within natural ecosystems – the more connections within a system, the greater the resilience in the face of change; “higher-diversity communities generally are more productive and are better able to withstand and recover from environmental stresses, such as droughts. More diverse communities are also more stable year to year in their productivity” (Reece, Wasserman, Urry, Minorsky, Cain & Jackson, 2014, p. 1217). This same principle coincides with diversity within human populations – the stronger and more diverse the connections, the stronger the community, “students benefit from exposure to cultural as well as intellectual heterogeneity, and they learn from one another” (Haberman, 1991, p. 294). This allows for a transfer of learning to the classroom or home community, and can lead to discussions about how students can increase their connections and build bridges between communities. For example, teachers could create opportunities for service learning projects in which students are directly interacting with their larger ecological and personal communities such as habitat restoration projects. As Haberman puts it in his article, Pedagogy of Poverty versus Good Teaching, “we need graduates who have learned to take action in their own behalf and in behalf of others” (1991, p. 293). With such a project, students would utilize elements of collaboration, apply practical skills and continue their engagement with the four pillars of stewardship.
Tying It All Together
We end the week in a circle around our community agreement, for a final review, we reflect upon the connections we built this week and the ways in which we have engaged in stewardship. During a quiet minute of reflection, we prompt the students to think about how they have honored the agreement, and how their teammates have done the same. Students use the four pillars as a framework for sharing a time they themselves exemplified a pillar and then honor a moment they saw a teammate doing the same. Once everyone has had time to collect their thoughts we pull out a ball of yarn and explain that they will be creating their own stewardship web. One student begins sharing how they accomplished a pillar and then, while still holding the end of the yarn, passes the ball to any teammate and shares with the group a moment they saw that member demonstrate a pillar. Whoever receives the yarn does the same, first for themselves, then for a teammate. This continues until the last person to receive the yarn honors the first person who spoke. Once someone has received the yarn, they may not receive it again. The yarn is then tied off, the web having been completed (see photo above).
We ask the students to hold the yarn loosely in their hands, then together take a collective step backwards and ask if they could feel the yarn being pulled through their hand. At this point we revisit the words of Chief Sealth and explain to our students that everything they did this week impacted everyone in the team. That all of our actions are truly connected, no actions truly occur in isolation. We tell the kids how proud we are of their hard work and dedication during our week together, asking them to remember this team and community as they prepare to leave IslandWood. We then invite them to break off a piece of the yarn to carry with them, as an ever present reminder that they, and their actions, matter.
Our ultimate goal towards creating a positive learning experience for these students ideally is then transferred to their regular school and home life. The strength of connections is fundamental to becoming an active world citizen. Highlighting the contributions of all team members serves to illustrate the value of diversity and inclusion. Regardless of their young age, the power of their actions creates a ripple in the vast and ever-changing web of life.
Author Notes: More information on teaching children about Tribal Sovereignty can be found through the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s (OSPI) office of Native American Education’s curriculum: Since Time Immemorial: Tribal Sovereignty in Washington State (indian-ed.org)
Summer Swallow, an avid bryophyte enthusiast, and Alyssa Kaplan, a passionate social justice advocate, enjoy spending their time teaching 4th – 6th graders at IslandWood, an residential outdoor school, on Bainbridge Island, Washington while working on their Master degrees at the University of Washington.