by editor | May 25, 2026 | Arts and Humanities, Environmental Literacy, Indigenous Peoples & Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Teaching Biodiversity Through Local Landscapes:
Salmon, Storying, and Place-Based Learning
Authors:
Poh Tan PhD (UBC, Exp. Medicine), PhD (SFU, Education)
Scientist, Researcher, Educator, Author, Entrepreneur
Non-Regular Faculty, Research Associate, Institute for Environmental Learning; Founder and CEO, STEMedge Academy
Jennifer Wong
3rd Year Student, Visual Arts, Emily Carr University of Art + Design; Certificate of Visual Arts, Vancouver Island School of Art
Sarah Martin
Undergraduate Year Student, Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Lennox Johnston-Yu
4th Year Undergraduate Student, New Media and Sound Art Major, Social Practices and Community Engagement Minor, Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Abstract
In the Cascadia bioregion, biodiversity education is inseparable from watersheds, seasonal cycles, and Indigenous place relations. This article offers a place based case study from my classroom in Vancouver on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh Nations. Grounded in Vision III scientific literacy and guided by seascape epistemology and the Pedagogy of Aloha, the work centres an interdisciplinary student artwork, Salmon Remember, Salmon Return, Salmon Run. The project braided ecological science (salmon as ecosystem connectors and nutrient vectors), urban watershed history (buried streams and grey infrastructure), and arts-based storying as a method of learning. Findings are presented as a practice narrative with transferable teaching moves for environmental educators across the Pacific Northwest and Cascadia, including a “Teaching Biodiversity through Local Landscapes” sequence adaptable to outdoor classrooms, garden projects, and community rooted learning.
Roots begin under our feet: a watershed you cannot always see
The place now called Vancouver sits on the ancestral and unceded lands of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaI (Tsleil Waututh) Nations. Only about 150 years ago, this region was a dense rainforest stitched together by streams, creeks, and tidal flats. At the heart of this waterscape was Snauq (False Creek), a place of congregation whose later industrialization and urban expansion filled wetlands and channelled living waters into buried conduits. Today, more than 117 streams in Vancouver are considered “lost,” and many remaining waterways are threatened by further erosion and development (Martin, Wong, & Johnston-Yu, 2025).
To respond to this history of enclosure, environmental and sustainability education in Cascadia must do more than teach about ecosystems; it must invite learners into an ethical relationship with place. Place based education has long been framed as both pedagogical and political, shaped by the twin responsibilities of decolonization and reinhabitation (Gruenewald, 2003; Greenwood, 2008). In practice, that means learners do not only “learn outside.” They learn with and through place as teacher, attending to what a watershed remembers, what it sustains, and what it has been forced to carry.
This is also why “sense of place” matters as a learning outcome, not just a feeling. Sense of place can be taught, observed, and assessed through changes in meaning, attachment, and responsibility, especially when learning is situated in local landscapes with layered ecological and cultural histories (Kudryavtsev et al., 2012; Semken & Freeman, 2008).
Vancouver’s buried waterways are not only a local curiosity. Across the Pacific Northwest, urbanization has repeatedly produced degraded stream conditions that show up in consistent patterns of hydrologic alteration, habitat simplification, and biological impairment, often described as the “urban stream syndrome” (Walsh et al., 2005). Buried and culverted stream segments can create abrupt transitions in habitat and biodiversity, fragmenting ecological connectivity in ways that are difficult for learners to perceive without guided inquiry (Hintz et al., 2022).
In my teaching, this place based shift is carried by a seascape epistemology, a fluid way of knowing that refuses hard boundaries between mind and heart, self and watershed, classroom and community (Tan, 2024). It is also guided by the Pedagogy of Aloha, a Hawaiian epistemology grounded in stewardship and Aloha ʻāina (love for the land), where teaching is a lived practice of care and reciprocity rather than the delivery of content (Kahakalau, 2022, Tan & Wangsadyjahja, 2026). In Spring, when “roots and renewal” are more than metaphors, my students Jennifer, Lennox, and Sarah and I turned to salmon and streams as teachers.
Salmon are not only a species; they are connective tissue across Cascadia. Pacific salmon link ocean, river, forest, and community through nutrient transfer, food web dynamics, and habitat engineering (Gende et al., 2002; Naiman et al., 2002; Schindler et al., 2003; Walsh et al., 2020). Salmon derived nutrients can extend beyond the stream into riparian forests, influencing growth and productivity and reinforcing the idea that “biodiversity” is always cross boundary and relational (Helfield & Naiman, 2001).
For Cascadia educators, salmon can hold multiple curricular threads at once. As a biodiversity story, salmon make interdependence visible by linking aquatic insects, riparian plants, birds, mammals, estuaries, and ocean food webs through movement, nutrients, and relational webs of life (Gende et al., 2002; Naiman et al., 2002). As a place story, salmon runs are always local and particular, shaped by specific streams, estuaries, and histories, yet they also carry a shared bioregional identity across the Pacific Northwest coast (Schindler et al., 2003). As a seasonal story, salmon make cyclical time teachable through return, spawning, emergence, out migration, and the quiet work of regeneration that unfolds beyond a single lesson or unit. When students learn salmon only as content, salmon becomes a diagram. When students learn salmon as a living relation within a watershed story, biodiversity becomes felt, not only known.
From Vision I and II to Vision III:
Scientific literacy as relationship
A recurring tension in environmental education is the gap between knowing and doing, between scientific information and lived responsibility. Vision III scientific literacy offers one way through that gap by insisting that science learning is always contextual, cultural, and ethical, and that it must grapple with power, place, and pluralism (Roberts, 2007; Sjöström, 2024). In a Vision III stance, multiple sciences are recognized, including Indigenous sciences, and Eurocentric science is treated as one powerful way of knowing rather than the only authority.
This matters in Cascadia because the ecological crises we teach, salmon declines, habitat fragmentation, contaminated waters, are not only scientific problems. They are relational problems, governance problems, and story problems. Which histories become invisible. Which place names are forgotten. Which futures feel possible.
A decolonizing science education agenda in Canada has also emphasized the need for sustained collaboration and structural change, not one off “inclusion,” when Indigenous knowledge is engaged in science learning (Aikenhead & Elliott, 2010). Vision III helps name what many educators already sense: if learners are to participate in renewal, they need more than information. They need relationship, humility, and accountability.
Seascape epistemology and the Pedagogy of Aloha:
How we teach toward renewal
Seascape epistemology, as I describe it, is learning that moves like water: non linear, relational, and boundary refusing (Tan, 2024). Practically, it means I design learning experiences that let students cross borders between classroom and shoreline, data and story, analysis and artmaking, cognition and care.
The Pedagogy of Aloha (Kahakalau, 2022) helps name the ethic underneath those designs. It frames teaching as stewardship driven by Aloha ʻāina, centring reciprocity, responsibility, and love for the land as legitimate sources of knowledge and action (Tan & Wangsadyjahja, 2026). In a Cascadia context, this stance aligns well with place based education’s insistence that the local is not neutral. Place is contested, storied, and shaped by ongoing responsibilities (Gruenewald, 2003; Greenwood, 2008).
The classroom story:
Jennifer, Lennox, and Sarah as co learners of place
Jennifer, Lennox, and Sarah entered my classroom as artists and designers learning environmental ethics through a local lens, each bringing a distinct practice that shaped how we approached salmon and streams as teachers. Lennox is a New Media and Sound Art major whose work revolves around music, live performance, and the craft of audio mixing and mastering, often learning through iterative experimentation and self directed technical study. Sarah is a third year Visual Arts major who moves between mediums, with a particular love for charcoal and gouache, and a draw toward abstraction, pattern, and playful visual “messiness” that holds emotion without needing to explain it. Jenn is also a third year Visual Arts major who works primarily in representational drawing and painting, but came into this term intentionally trying to move away from toxic materials and extractive habits of studio making. Alongside this class, she was taking Prax Field School and actively exploring foraged materials and lower impact approaches to art practice as a way to better connect with local ecology and depict environmental concern with greater care.
Before the students began working with Snauq (False Creek) as a focal site, we visited Guichon Creek on the BCIT Burnaby campus as a field encounter with an urban watershed that has been both buried and brought back into view. Guichon Creek is a quiet ribbon of water threaded through buildings and walkways, but it carries a layered story of enclosure and repair. Once salmon bearing, it was gradually culverted and altered through twentieth century industrial and campus development, pushed underground, and made functionally invisible. Since the 1970s, students, faculty, and community members have returned to the creek with sustained care, restoring riparian plantings and habitat complexity, and undertaking ongoing daylighting work to uncover hidden sections. Walking alongside it, we witnessed restoration as a long practice rather than a single intervention, and we were reminded that ecological healing in urban places is possible when communities commit to it over time.
The Guichon Creek walk also served as a rehearsal for how we would learn throughout the term. We began with a silent observation stretch to tune our attention to water sounds, riparian textures, and the friction between built form and living flow. Students then interpreted the creek through ethical lenses including anthropocentrism, ecocentrism, Indigenous relational ethics, and environmental justice, and responded with sketches and sound captures. These field practices carried directly into the students’ later research and making. Lennox’s sound work treated the watershed as an acoustic archive, while Sarah and Jenn developed visual and material responses that held both disturbance and renewal. The creek became an early proof that what is buried can return, and it helped anchor our later inquiry into Vancouver’s lost streams and the civic imagination of daylighting (Khirfan et al., 2020; Neale & Moffett, 2016; Wantzen et al., 2022).
In their final project, they traced two linked case studies: the disappearance of streams in the lower Fraser River watershed and the cascading loss of salmon habitat connected to that transformation (Martin et al., 2025). They situated their inquiry in Snauq (False Creek), where industrial expansion and infrastructure development reworked the waterscape. Importantly, their language was not only ecological. It was effective and ethical. They linked hidden waters to eco anxiety, grief, and the heaviness of living amid layered ecological loss.This is also where “sense of place” becomes visible in student work. As meanings and attachments shift, learners move from detached description toward situated care, which research suggests can support pro environmental responsibility and engagement (Kudryavtsev et al., 2012; Semken & Freeman, 2008).
The students also paid attention to an emerging practice of renewal: stream daylighting, the re-emergence of buried waterways to the surface. Guichon Creek offered the students a nearby, imperfect, and hopeful example of how daylighting unfolds over decades rather than weeks. Daylighting is increasingly discussed as a nature based solution with ecological, social, and design dimensions, though review work notes uneven coverage and ongoing gaps in how the practice is studied and framed (Khirfan et al., 2020). Daylighting is also a global restoration approach with widely varying barriers and benefits depending on local infrastructure, governance, and community relationships to water (Wantzen et al., 2022). Empirically, daylighting can lead to rapid ecological changes in stream communities, including shifts in invertebrate assemblages, even as full restoration remains constrained by broader urban conditions (Neale & Moffett, 2016). In their reading of Vancouver, daylighting was not only ecological restoration. It was civic imagination: water returning to the surface, and public attention returning with it.
Salmon Remember, Salmon Return, Salmon Run:
Youth art as biodiversity pedagogy
To move from research into felt understanding, the students created an interdisciplinary artwork: Salmon Remember, Salmon Return, Salmon Run (Martin et al., 2025). A short film created and produced by the students documents the project’s soundscape and narrative arc (Figure 1) combined sound, visual, and performative elements to invite audiences to hear, see, and feel waterways and salmon presence. Click on the image to play the video or go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTAyL0hVQ9g
Their intention was explicitly pedagogical: disrupt passive spectatorship and cultivate attentiveness, an embodied noticing of what flows under the city. The form of the work emerged from their practices. Lennox’s sound training led the group to treat the watershed as an acoustic archive, building a soundscape that could hold both grief and return, and using careful mixing choices to make “what is buried” audible. Sarah’s visual practice contributed to the project’s textural and patterned sensibility, using abstraction to suggest interdependence and movement rather than illustrating nature as a static scene. Jenn’s commitment to material responsibility helped the group question the environmental footprint of artmaking itself, and to consider how foraged or low impact materials can function as a method of relationship rather than a decorative “eco” aesthetic. Together, these approaches made storying feel less like a representation of ecological ideas and more like an ethical practice of attention.
Alongside the film, the students also created a hand-crafted artist book that appears in the video as a tactile narrative thread. The book traces the salmon journey through return, interruption, and renewal, using page turns as a pacing device that mirrors movement through a watershed. Figure 2 is a scan of the pages of the book. In class, the book mattered as much as the screen. It gave students a handheld way to rehearse story structure, life cycle, and place relation while staying grounded in material care.
In environmental education, art is often treated as enrichment. In this project, art was a method. Arts based pedagogies can deepen environmental learning by making room for ambiguity, emotion, multiple perspectives, and forms of knowing that exceed conventional academic reporting (Davis, 2018; Niederhauser et al., 2024). Place based art education specifically has been theorized as a route to ecological literacy because it integrates community centred place learning with affective, sensory, and imaginative practice (Inwood, 2008).
This aligns with Indigenous scholarship on story as lived practice. Cajete (1994) reminds us that stories have long been enacted through song, dance, ritual, and art, and that they carry truths that are lived and remembered. In a Vision III frame, such modes are not “extra.” They are legitimate evidence of learning because they show how knowledge is being metabolized into relationship, responsibility, and action.
Renewal as re-storying: shifting the human nature relationship
One of the most powerful learning shifts in this work was movement from “environmental problem” to “relationship in need of repair.” In Cascadia, where ecological change is rapid and grief is real, renewal cannot be reduced to optimism. Renewal becomes a braided practice: ecology plus history plus ethics plus story. Here, decolonial responsibility is not symbolic. Place based pedagogy asks learners to notice how land has been renamed, reorganized, and governed, and how those changes continue to shape ecological outcomes (Gruenewald, 2003; Greenwood, 2008). A Vision III stance deepens that by insisting that Indigenous systems of knowing, law, and governance are not add ons. They are foundational.
This is evident in salmon restoration in particular. Studies in the Pacific Northwest have written of the established Northwest Coast Indigenous institutions and frameworks of governance that facilitated sustainability and resistance in salmon runs (Trosper, 2002). More contemporary treatments of salmon restoration treat Indigenous modes of governance and the ongoing resilience of the ecosystems and cultures they stress in contemporary salmon fisheries (Atlas et al., 2021). The literature on pluralism in First Nations salmon restoration research emphasizes that ‘braided’ approaches involve considerations that stretch from ‘integrating’ information in some way. They involve considerations of the production, value, and use of information in the whole process of governance (Bingham et al., 2021). In the province of British Columbia in particular, cross-cultural restoration efforts in Okanagan sockeye salmon have been isolated in restoration storylines that involve relationship, learning, and responsibility in a process (Correia et al., 2024). These, in sum, establish a start in situating what students felt in their research: salmon restoration is always, in every way, a process that’s not strictly ‘biological’.
Teaching Biodiversity through Local Landscapes: a transferable sequence
Below is a classroom tested sequence you can adapt anywhere in Cascadia, from coastal estuaries to inland creeks, school gardens to urban parks. The goal is to teach biodiversity through local landscapes while holding space for Indigenous place relations and seasonal cycles. The sequence is structured as a field walk that blends observation, ethics, and creative response, modeled after our Guichon Creek visit, a partially buried and partially daylighted urban stream on the British Columbia Institute of Technology at the Burnaby campus that offered students a living example of restoration as long term community practice (Khirfan et al., 2020; Neale & Moffett, 2016; Wantzen et al., 2022).
1. Begin with a place name pause
Invite learners to locate themselves in relation to watershed, Indigenous territory, and a specific more than human relative they might encounter on site (salmon, cedar, heron, salmonberry, water strider). You can do this as a short spoken acknowledgment, a map check, or a simple prompt written in notebooks. This opens learning with belonging and accountability, and frames place as teacher rather than backdrop (Gruenewald, 2003; Greenwood, 2008).
Practical prompt:
- “Where does this water come from, and where is it trying to go?”
- “What is one more than human presence you notice immediately?”
2. Guided observation walk
Begin with a short stretch of silence. Ask learners to move slowly and attend to details: the sound of water, riparian plants, insects at the surface, bird calls, the feel of shade, and the visible friction between built form and living flow. This is not a warm up. It is field based data collection, and it supports a sense of place as an observable learning outcome (Kudryavtsev et al., 2012; Semken & Freeman, 2008).
Practical prompt:
- “Write five words that describe what the creek is doing right now.”
- “What feels alive here? What feels constrained or interrupted?”
3. Map the visible and the buried
Ask learners to identify water pathway clues: culverts, storm drains, channelized edges, fenced banks, sudden disappearances of flow under pavement, or changes in sediment and vegetation. This step makes hidden hydrology legible and supports discussions of how urbanization creates consistent patterns of stream degradation (Walsh et al., 2005). It also connects to research showing that buried or culverted stream segments can create abrupt transitions in habitat and biodiversity and fragment ecological connectivity (Hintz et al., 2022).
Practical prompt:
- “Where does the creek disappear, narrow, speed up, or get quieter?
- “What does the built environment ask the water to do?”
4. Ethical lens reflection
Pause and assign each group one ethical perspective such as anthropocentrism, ecocentrism, Indigenous relational ethics, or environmental justice. Ask students to interpret the creek in front of them through that lens. This step makes values explicit and positions environmental education as cultural and ethical learning rather than only scientific description, aligning with place based pedagogy and Vision III commitments to pluralism and responsibility (Aikenhead & Elliott, 2010; Gruenewald, 2003; Greenwood, 2008).
Practical prompt:
- “What does this ethical lens prioritize or protect here?”
- “What does it critique about how this waterway has been treated?”
- “Who benefits, and who bears the burden of this design?”
5. Creative sketch or sound capture
Invite learners to respond with one creative act that records attention. They can sketch a plant, a ripple, the meeting point of trail and creek, or they can record a short sound sample capturing rushing water, birds, insects, or the contrast between human and more than human sounds. This is not about producing polished art. It is about noticing and translating relationship into a form that can be shared. Arts based pedagogies support environmental learning by making room for emotion, ambiguity, and multiple perspectives (Davis, 2018; Niederhauser et al., 2024), and place based art education offers a grounded rationale for connecting creativity to ecological literacy (Inwood, 2008).
Practical prompt:
- “Choose one sound or one visual detail that symbolizes resilience, change, or healing.”
- “Record or sketch it, then write two sentences about why you chose it.”
6. Post visit reflection
Back in the classroom, ask students to write a short reflection that braids observation, ethics, and creative response. This can be done in 200 to 300 words, posted to a class forum, or used as a seed text for larger projects.
Reflection prompt:
- “What does this creek teach us about healing in the more-than-human world? Include one detail you noticed, one ethical perspective your group discussed, and something from your sketch or sound recording.”
These field practices were the groundwork for Salmon Remember, Salmon Return, Salmon Run, where observation, ethical dialogue, and creative capture were braided into a public facing artwork and short film that invited wider audiences to listen for what the city has buried and to imagine what might return (Figure 1).
Why this matters across Cascadia
Cascadia’s environmental education community is diverse: coastal and inland, urban and rural, Indigenous and settler, K to 12 and post secondary, classroom based and land based. What unites us is that our ecological stories are not abstract. Salmon, forests, rain, fire seasons, shorelines, and rivers are lived realities. Bioregional framing reminds us that curriculum can be rooted in “life places,” where learning supports the capacity to live well with the systems that sustain us (MacGregor, 2005).
This is also where biocultural diversity becomes more than metaphor. Biocultural approaches to sustainability emphasize the intertwined nature of biological and cultural diversity and the need to engage plural relationships with nature in sustainability work (Hanspach et al., 2020). Biocultural approaches have also been used to define locally grounded indicators of well being and success, resisting narrow external metrics that can miss what communities value (McCarter et al., 2018). Recent synthesis work continues to highlight conceptual and empirical gaps, especially around intangible components such as values, worldviews, and traditional knowledge (Otamendi-Urroz et al., 2025).
When students like Jennifer, Lennox, and Sarah create art that makes relationships felt, when a buried stream becomes audible again, when salmon becomes more than a diagram, we see what Roots and Renewal can look like in practice: place based education in action, Indigenous aligned ways of learning through story, and youth creativity that refuses despair.
Conclusion: renewal is a teaching stance
In a region where ecological change is accelerating, environmental educators are not only delivering curriculum. We are cultivating ways of being in relationship with place. Vision III scientific literacy offers a framework for that cultivation by legitimizing multiple sciences and centering context, culture, and ethics (Roberts, 2007; Sjöström, 2024). Seascape epistemology and the Pedagogy of Aloha offer an embodied pedagogy that reconnects mind and heart, knowledge and kuleana, learning and love for the land (Tan, 2024; Tan & Wangsadyjahja, 2026).
Spring is not only a season. It is a reminder: what is buried can return, what is fractured can be storied, and what is taught can become lived. Sometimes renewal begins with students making salmon audible again.
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by editor | Sep 22, 2025 | Arts and Humanities, Environmental Literacy, Language Arts, Place-based Education
Staging Nature
Integrating Place-based Environmental Education, Literacy, and the Performing Arts
by Regine Randall, Rebecca Edmondson, and MaryAnne Young
“Teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher!”
Such a cry is likely to get any educator’s attention—and quickly. Yet, this repetitive call is not coming from a child but, rather, an ovenbird whose common breeding territory includes Acadia National Park in Maine. In a unique collaboration supported by a regional instructional grant, teachers Rebecca Edmondson and MaryAnne Young at Conners Emerson School in Bar Harbor, Maine—the primary gateway for Acadia—developed a musical to integrate multiple elements of the state’s Kindergarten–Grade 5 curriculum while also helping children to take notice of the very special place where they live.
Creating the musical Plant Kindness and Gather Love gave the students at Conners Emerson, as well as the communities on Mount Desert Island, an opportunity to celebrate the 2016 centennial of Acadia National Park and the bicentennial of Maine in 2020. Plant Kindness and Gather Love, however, was much more than that: it served as a much-needed model for creative teaching where learning objectives incorporate important foundational skills with efforts going well beyond screens or a brick and mortar building to raise children’s awareness of the world around them.
The seed of an idea takes root
Acadia National Park draws several million visitors from across the world every year. Yet, Edmondson and Young wondered how well students at Conners Emerson really knew what was in their own backyard? Having collaborated frequently and over time to blend language arts with music, Edmondson and Young observed that this integrated approach had a consistently positive impact on student learning and engagement. Young had a regular practice of sharing books with children in which the lyrics of a song were, in fact, the entire narrative of the story. With books in hand, the students then sought out Edmondson’s help in learning the songs. Singing the text breathed new life into traditional read-alouds. With this in mind, Edmondson realized that she and Young could adapt the same approach beyond a single book or skill (e.g. alphabet learning) to create an original story about Acadia. As noted earlier, the project coincided with celebrations of the centennial of Acadia and the bicentennial of Maine but also tapped into traditional academic subjects and literacy standards. Raising awareness of the park’s natural diversity through the musical was simply one more opportunity for Edmondson and Young to amplify what could be discovered within Acadia but also a chance to join with park associates in highlighting stewardship through family-friendly conservation practices.
Centuries ago, philosophers Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel argued that the best education occurred when children learned with the head, heart, and hands through play (McKenna, 2010; Tracey & Morrow 2012). Plant Kindness & Gather Love became a manifestation, quite literally, of Unfoldment Theory where teachers provided the necessary support for the children’s play (Prochner, 2021). Moreover, Edmondson and Young believed that such a musical would help children as young as kindergarten begin to see themselves as stewards of the earth because coming to love a place foments a desire to know and protect it (North American Association for Environmental Education [NAAEE], 2016). Despite the Herculean effort required to launch any school production, the excitement and pleasure embedded in this creative endeavor optimized learning for students and teachers alike while also forging a stronger and more memorable connection to the natural world. What makes the work unique is that their younger students did not need to wait until middle or high school to “envision knowledge” because this collaboration gave them the opportunity to be actors in sharing what they learned with a community that may or may not have known the same content (Langer, 2011).
From root to branch
Plant Kindness and Gather Love developed into a forty-minute musical with ten original songs written, arranged, and choreographed by Young and Edmondson with parts for fifteen characters. In the planning stage, Young and Edmondson brainstormed ideas for the musical with the Acadia National Park (ANP) Education Coordinator, Katie Petri, as well as other ANP associates. The Park Service went on to provide material support for the production in the form of Junior Ranger hats. The goal of the musical was to expand the venues through which children learned environmental content specific to Acadia and Mt. Desert Island. Instructional activities that supported the production of the musical ranged from students sketching and labeling wildflowers (where they also learned about the Fibonacci sequence) to discussing and illustrating the dramatic seasonal changes in Acadia to determining the components of stewardship and encouraging that we all act upon them. Such endeavors help introduce children, especially those in kindergarten and the primary grades, to all the park has to offer since more formal outdoor education programs (e.g., Young Birder, Schoodic Adventure) often begin a bit later, typically around age ten or fourth grade.
Interest in the musical spread throughout the school and the larger community. Locally, the art teacher helped with scenery and displays, a local greenhouse donated flowering plants and foliage, and parents constructed costumes. To help other teachers throughout the state and New England consider similar projects, Petrie organized a teacher workshop at the Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park based on Plant Kindness and Gather Love as a follow up to performances in Bar Harbor, Maine. Additional workshops on the musical were offered at the Maine Music Educators Association Conference and the Maine Environmental Education Association Conference. Most notably, a copy of Plant Kindness and Gather Love went to Washington DC to be placed on Senator Susan Collins’ reception room table along with other children’s books by Maine authors.
Making music
The songs within the musical Plant Kindness and Gather Love moved from broad concepts to specific ideas. In “Nature Lover,” the introduction began with a simple request: step outside. Jason Mraz had expressed this same sentiment years earlier in a clever rearrangement of his smash pop hit, “I’m Yours” where, during his performance of “Outdoors” on Sesame Street, he sings about the good feeling we get when we’re no longer “trapped between the walls and underneath the ceiling” (Sesame Street, 2009). Edmondson and Young took a similar approach by using song to inspire students to explore, but Acadia was the place to where children were taking a “close look or commanding view.” Only through experiencing the sights, feelings, sounds, and wanderings in a place like Acadia can they promote the desire, as Jason Mraz also reminded us, that “all of nature deserves to be loved, loved, loved, loved, loved” In the musical, a “nature lover” may be one who goes on to identify birds in Acadia by their unique calls or one who takes the initiative necessary to lead for an environmentally literate citizenry as made manifest by Maine’s motto of “Dirigo” (“I lead” or “I direct”).
Thinking, seeing, listening, learning, dancing, singing
Plant Kindness and Gather Love integrated content to develop higher-order thinking skills in identification, comparison/contrast, mapping, synthesis, and representation. Typically, the focus on higher-order thinking characterizes learning objectives in grades six to twelve when basic academic skills are assumed to be more fully developed (Zwiers, 2004). Yet, as Johns and Lenski (2014) note, learning anything requires that we can recognize something for what it is and also know what it is not. Edmondson and Young capitalized on this principle in their musical. For instance, the tempo of the song “Beacon Bills” is allegro (brisk) and includes the calls of no less than ten birds found in the park. Children become acclimated to a “prima donna” cardinal calling “purty, purty, purty” whereas a chestnut-sided warbler is “pleased, pleased, pleased to meet cha.” What is significant here is that students come to know things not through sight or seatwork alone. They can also learn by seeing what gets left behind: tracks, nests, scents, even scat! Not actually seeing but still knowing is the essence of inferential reasoning.
Another song in Plant Kindness and Gather Love has children singing of the wildflowers in Acadia. This scene incorporates movement because the children who play daisies, violets, bachelor buttons, British soldiers, foxgloves, and Johnny jump-ups are “dancing in the breeze” along the sea. Movement can solidify content in long-term memory, and we see this technique in teaching letters through air writing as well as during exercised where children tap out sounds or clap to count syllables (Madan & Singhal, 2012). That said, imagining that the wind off the Gulf of Maine made you sway in the same way as Queen Anne’s lace can fuse children’s personal expression with their connection to nature.
Children performing as flowers may be charming as well as kinesthetic, but it did not veil the very pointed message contained in the refrain. As the “flowers” came together in a true “kindergarten,” they sang out “Don’t pick me” over and over. Children’s growing sense of the natural world develops alongside their growing sense of themselves, as well as others, in the world. By leaving flowers to bloom and go to seed, we are making a promise to those who will come upon them in the next season that they play a vital role in the park ecosystem in addition to being a pleasure we share (Harlan & Rivkin, 2008). Of course, not all plants are equal, and such a song helps elementary science teachers also discuss the concepts of invasive species such as purple loosestrife in the park.
More on reading and writing Acadia
Too often and in many schools, reading and writing activities in the primary grades are taught as discrete skills that divorce them from other content (Gabriel, 2013). With science of reading initiatives, this practice may become even more entrenched with the focus on content area reading and writing not gaining momentum until upper elementary or middle school when curriculum more often reflects scheduling constraints, staffing, or building organization rather than a pedagogical decision (Fullan et al., 2018). Yet, the musical and what children learned about Acadia easily lead to a variety of literacy activities that keep nature and content learning at the fore. For example, children who are developing phonological awareness, an important precursor to skilled reading, can participate in activities where they see pictures of different birds (such as owl, seagull, chickadee), name the bird, and then stomp out the number of syllables they hear in the name. In a word identification lesson focusing on the onset (letter or letters making the initial consonant sound, blend, or digraph) and rime (the vowel that follows and remaining letters) of one syllable words, choosing a word from one of the songs (e.g., “pick” from the refrain “Don’t Pick Me!” in “Wildflowers of Acadia”) so that children can change the first letter(s) to form other words strongly supports decoding and spelling development (tick, quick, stick, chick, etc.). Since students are likely to have been introduced to this vocabulary, the words are easier to decode for two reasons: 1) they are within the same phonetic word family, and 2) they have become part of students’ receptive and expressive language used when learning about Acadia.
Such an activity moves from word and spelling patterns to an opportunity to record salient observations based on what happens in the park. For instance, “Tuck your pants into your socks to avoid tick bites.” Another might be “With a quick dive, a loon snatches a fish.” Or, “Adding a branch here and a little stick there, beavers keep their dam in good shape.” Finally, “Trails to Jordan, Valley Cove, and Precipice cliffs often close in the spring because peregrine falcons nest there and raise their chicks.” In another spin on word learning, the use of rhyming words such as tea, ski, and tree all contain different graphemes (ea, i, and ee) that are among the letter combinations that “spell” the long /e/ sound. Not only do such activities help children learn phonics concepts and other basic skills, but they are also introducing content specific vocabulary (loon, dam), homonyms (their, there), and usage based on context (nest as a verb). Bridging the observation skills that help children notice the macro and micro details within the natural world strengthens their ability to notice patterns and differences across multiple areas.
Speaking from my own perspective as a teacher educator, I welcome instruction that moves away from over-dependence on workbooks and commercial programs. Teachers who understand the scope and sequence of language development are poised to use any text any day to capitalize on how words work (sounds, spelling, syllables) and the ways we use words to create meaning and show what we know. Writing prompts that simply ask children to record what they see (the waves rolling in at Sand Beach), feel (wind at the top of Cadillac Mountain), or hear (the collision of water and air at Thunder Hole) are always authentic in the sense that responses can change day by day, hour by hour, or minute by minute. In terms of checking understanding of key facts or concepts, students can also complete sentence stems such as:
- Hiking in the woods means….(e.g. you might get bug bites).
- Being a park ranger means…(e.g. you have to be good with the public).
- Loving nature means…(e.g. you are happiest outside).
- Going to Acadia means…(e.g. you are on an island, or you could be on the Schoodic peninsula, or you are in a National Park).
Open-ended sentence stems allow children to generate many different responses with varying level of detail. Such responses can also suggest what we need to study further or better understand. It is a low-risk activity that introduces children to multiple perspectives while also enabling the teacher to identify misconceptions or misinformation (Randall & Marangell, 2018). Further, the sentence stems serve as a launch for extended writing on a self-selected topic of interest to the student. Ultimately, though, Plant Kindness and Gather Love went beyond interdisciplinary cross-pollination: it helped teachers understand how nature and place can re-energize lessons to improve targeted skills, expand our ideas of text to include multimodal materials beyond print (artifacts, audio, digital collections, etc.), and facilitate content learning. Historically, we know what engages learners and creates success; the joy and pleasure that went into imagining, producing, and performing Plant Kindness and Gather Love are the same emotions that motivate any learner to gain important skills, understand content more deeply, achieve more, and seek out new experiences wherever they are (Dewey, 1938; Duke et al., 2021; Gardner, 1999; Rosenblatt, 1938).
Show and share how to care
The musical concluded with an ode to the beauty of the park, which is undeniable and fine as far that goes, but also, more pointedly, with a call to be active in its preservation. The different songs, choreography, and even the costuming in the musical all contributed to creating the sense of wonder that comes from living in proximity to the natural world (Wilson, 1994). The score and lyrics for “Nature Lover” in Plant Kindness and Gather Love sets the stage by encouraging discovery, and the North American Association for Environmental Education (2016) described children as naturally inquisitive because “everything” is worth exploring “with all of the senses” (p. 2). So, exploring is for everyone but, perhaps, it is children’s particular ability to notice “a fish, a beaver, or an otter…a little bird…a white-tailed deer” that can reignite our own interest in using natural places as tableaux for learning.
You, too, may live in an area that has of extraordinary natural beauty and diversity, is near a wonderful park, or, equally important, want to make wherever it is you do live more special in the eyes of children. For instance, Last Stop Market Street by Matt de la Pena and Christian Robinson is a children’s picture book of city life where Nana helps her grandson smell the rain, watch it pool on flower petals, and be a better witness to what’s beautiful in people, places, and things. With this in mind, the success of Plant Kindness and Gather Love may be just the right incentive for you and your colleagues to tell the “lively stories” – in any form, not just musicals – of the places and the inhabitants in your community (van Dooren, 2014).
References
Dewey, John. (1938). Experience and education. Macmillan.
Duke, N. K., Ward, A. E., & Pearson, P. D. (2021). The science of reading comprehension instruction. The Reading Teacher, 74(6), 663-672.
Fullan, M., Quinn, J., & McEachen, J. (2018). Deep learning: Engage the world, change the world. Corwin.
Gabriel, R. (2013). Reading’s non-negotiables: Element of effective reading instruction. Rowman & Littlefied Education.
Gardner, H. (1999). Intelligence reframed: Multiple intelligences for the twenty-first century. Basic Books.
Harlan, J. D., & Rivkin, M. S. (2008). Science experiences for the early childhood years: An integrated affective approach (9th ed.). Pearson.
Johns, J., & Lenski, S. (2014). Improving reading: Strategies, resources, and Common Core connections. Kendall-Hunt.
Langer, J. A. (2011). Envisioning knowledge: Building literacy in the academic disciplines. Teachers College.
Madan, C. R., & Singhal, A.. (2012). Using actions to enhance memory: Effects of enactment, gestures, and exercise on human memory. Frontiers in Psychology, 3(507): 1-4. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00507
McKenna, M. K. (2010). Pestalozzi revisited: Hope and caution for modern education. Journal of Philosophy and History of Education, 60, 121-25.
North American Association for Environmental Education. (2016). Guidelines for excellence: Early childhood environmental education programs. NAAEE. https://cdn.naaee.org/sites/default/files/final_ecee_guidelines_from_chromographics_lo_res.pdf
Prochner, L. (2021). Our proud heritage. Take it outside; A history of nature-based education. NAEYC. https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/fall2021/take-it-outside
Randall, R., & Marangell, J. (2018). Changing the narrative: Literacy as sustaining practice in every classroom. Association of Middle Level Education, 6(2), 10-12. https://www.amle.org/BrowsebyTopic/WhatsNew/WNDet/TabId/270/ArtMID/888/ArticleID/918/Changing-the-Narrative.aspx
Rosenblatt, L. (1938). Literature as exploration. Appleton-Century.
Sesame Street. (2009, December 18). Outdoors with Jason Mraz [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrqF7yD10Bo&ab_channel=SesameStreet
Tracey, D. H., & Morrow, L. M. (2012). Lenses on reading: An introduction to theories and models (2nd ed.). Guilford.
van Dooren, T. (2014). Flight ways. Columbia University Press.
Wilson, R. (1994). Environmental education at the early childhood level. North American Association for Environmental Education.
Zwiers, J. (2004). Developing academic thinking skills in grades 6–12: A handbook of multiple intelligence activities. International Reading Association.
Authors
Régine Randall, PhD, is a professor in Curriculum and Learning at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) in New Haven, Connecticut where she teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in education. Her teaching and research interests allow for regional collaboration with K-12 educators on literacy instruction and assessment, student engagement, and best practices in environmental and agricultural education. With roots in Maine, Régine is an avid hiker and biker throughout New England and the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.
Rebecca Edmondson is a composer, conductor, clinician who has taught in both public and private schools in Maine and Pennsylvania for the past forty years. Her school music program was one of 12 in the country designated as a Model Music Education Program, and her writing has appeared in the American String Teacher. In addition to winning composition competitions, Rebecca was named the 2022 Maine’s Hancock County Teacher of the Year. She continues to nurture the love of learning through music and developing children’s books. All this has prepared her to become Liam and Finn’s Grammy.
MaryAnne Young is a lifetime resident of coastal Maine. She comes from a large family tree of educators and authors. After more than 38 years as an educator MaryAnne retired from Conners Emerson School. She engages with young learners as a substitute teacher and continues to write poetry and story songs. MaryAnne is inspired by the woods, waters and wildlife that surround the place she calls home. Her most joyful lifetime achievement is being a proud Mimi to Cameron and Maya…the new generation of Nature Lovers!A
by editor | Aug 26, 2025 | Arts and Humanities, At-risk Youth, Environmental Literacy, Language Arts
By Emilie Lygren
I am a poet and outdoor science educator.” This is what I say when asked what I do for work. For me, poetry and outdoor science are complementary ways of looking at the world. They’re both rooted in common attitudes of attention, curiosity, and humility. They both require being present with the world in a deep way. And both fields of study can support learners, educators, and communities to develop environmental literacy and a sense of place.
My own relationship with poetry and outdoor learning started early. While growing up in the Monterey area in California, I loved spending time outside. I liked to study nearby trees, plants, animals, and bodies of water, and I often composed poems in my mind based on what I saw. Paying close attention to my surroundings helped me feel grounded and connected to place. Learning through my own observations made me curious to know more. In part, these interests emerged from having access to outdoor spaces and parents who encouraged me to express myself creatively. I was also fortunate to learn through an ecosystem of experiences in nature and generous individuals and groups I’d known.
I had a fantastic sixth-grade science teacher who invited students to engage in curious, careful investigation of the mysteries of the world. At the beginning of a class period, he’d hand out binoculars and field guides, then say, “Go out and find out what birds we have on campus. Come back in an hour and tell me what you saw.” Throughout the school year, our class mapped which plants grew around the schoolyard, collected and sketched insects, searched for fence lizards, and discussed how the school’s water use impacted nearby animal and human communities. By the end of the year, I’d gained a set of tools and mindsets for nature study that continues to sustain me to this day; environmental education made a difference in how I perceived myself as a learner and as a community member.
But not everyone has the access to the outdoor spaces and environmental learning opportunities that I did. In fact, access to green space and educational opportunities is often stratified by race and class. Many organizations in California and beyond are working to address these disparities and expand access and inclusion in the outdoors, including affinity-based organizations like Latino Outdoors and Outdoor Afro, education and advocacy organizations like Justice Outside, networking and community-building organizations like Ten Strands, and many more. Policy efforts such as “A Blueprint for Environmental Literacy” lay out a vision and strategies for “educating every California student in, about, and for the environment.” And there are hundreds of providers across the state that offer outdoor learning experiences. The work of all of these organizations is important and necessary to support environmental literacy.
I have spent most of my time in the outdoor education world working with the BEETLES Project, based at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley. Since its beginning in 2011, BEETLES has focused specifically on shifting the culture of outdoor teaching toward learner-centered pedagogy, encouraging instructors to be curious about students’ ideas, to represent science as a way of thinking rather than a list of facts, to help learners develop transferable thinking tools, and to focus on common and accessible parts of nature. BEETLES professional learning sessions, like “Making Observations,” offer learner- and nature-centered practices, paired with research and theory behind why they are effective. BEETLES student activities, like “Discovery Swap,” offer practical, learner-centered resources for instructors to use. Supporting resources, such as “Engaging and Managing Students in Outdoor Science” and “BEETLES Guide for Outdoor Science Program and Organization Leaders,” offer general support for instructors and organizations.
Prior to working for the BEETLES Project, I was an instructor at residential outdoor education schools, where I spent every day outside with students. My goal was to offer learners a range of different ways for being outdoors, from direct observation and close study of organisms to discussions of environmental issues to nature journaling to exuberant play. I also called on my love of poetry and facilitated writing exercises with students. I found that learner-centered, observation-based teaching practices and nature journaling in particular fed easily into poetry. My poetry eye quickly noticed that lists of observations, questions, and connections that students said out loud often sounded a lot like poetry––which is teeming with observations, questions, and connections. It wasn’t hard to encourage budding young writers to transform their scrawled notes, memories, and firsthand observations into poems, which they were often eager to share.
Ada Limón, the national poet laureate, says, “Poetry offers us a way to be closer to who you are.” In my experience, poetry also offers us a way to be closer to where we are through the process of careful observation, as in Brooke Maren Yokell’s poem:
My Backyard in the Spring
Brooke Maren Yokell, third grade
I sit in the backyard for
hours looking up and noticing the
clouds swiftly drift by
When I’m there I hear the bees
buzzing, the birds chirping
and wind gently blowing the trees.
I let the low wind hit my face
with warm spring air.
I let the warm air flood through
my body.
I sink into the
hot grass trying
to figure out
the shapes of
the clouds. The
wind gently pushes the
trees toward us.
Writing and sharing poetry in the context of environmental learning supports learner-centered teaching, making room for students to share their perspectives and experiences, as in Lena Nguyen’s poem:
My Old Old Old neighborhood
Lena Nguyen, third grade
My old old old neighborhood
where I used to live
was a home to me.
It had everything I needed.
Playground behind my house.
And every time I was sad
it would calm me with
sweet hushing rain.
When I was not scared
it would scare me with thunder.
If I was bored it would let
the sun out and welcome me to play.
Every year it would celebrate
with different decorated trucks
depending on the year.
My old old old neighborhood
used to cheer me up all the time.
Writing poetry is also a way to reflect on responsibility, making sound choices, and reflecting how actions may impact communities, places, and people––as in Ada Limón’s “A New National Anthem.” Writing poetry offers a way to slow down, notice, and adorn the ordinary with attention, as the luminous poet Naomi Shihab Nye describes in “Valentine for Ernest Mann.” And, writing poetry can be a way to name and cherish meaningful memories of places, people, and communities, as in my own poem about elders teaching children how to plant seeds.
On the following page are two poetry exercises that integrate poetry into environmental and outdoor programming (suggested for students age seven and older). Use them with groups of students, or respond to them as writing prompts yourself!
Throughout my career in environmental and outdoor science education, reading, writing, and teaching about poetry has helped me to stay connected to purpose and place. I have returned to poetry again and again and been sustained by the joy and perspective I’ve found there. I hope this article offers ideas for calling on poetry as a means to support environmental learning with your students and communities.
Resources for Further Study of Poetry and Science, and Learner-Centered Instruction
Poets for Science, an exhibit curated by Jane Hirschfield
Voices of Nature Series in Poetry of Resilience, a series of interviews with poets who write about nature, facilitated by James Crews and Danusha Laméris
Ada Limón interview “To Be Made Whole,” from On Being with Krista Tippet
Naomi Shihab Nye interview “Pay Attention. Be Kind. Live Large,” on No Small Endeavor
“I Notice, I Wonder, It Reminds Me Of,” a BEETLES activity that can be used to support science learning or poetry
“Offering I Notice, I Wonder, It Reminds Me Of as a Tool for Social Emotional Learning,” from the BEETLES Project blog
Poems with themes of outdoors, place, and observation (a few of many!)
“Everything Comes Next,” by Naomi Shihab Nye
“Sparrow Envy,” by J. Drew Lanham
“What We Were Born For,” by Emilie Lygren
Emilie Lygren’s story was originally published by Ten Strands, a California–based nonprofit working to strengthen the partnerships and strategies that will bring climate and environmental literacy to all of California’s TK–12 students.
by editor | Nov 28, 2019 | Arts and Humanities
Poetry as a Tool for Science Communication
by Whitney Chandler
Funding for the arts is continuing to be reduced year after year. The importance of serving our children’s right brain has been pushed aside to afford them lessons in math and science. However, further research has many teachers advocating for STEM to evolve into STEAM, including arts in the baseline knowledge that our students should be receiving in their education.
I recently completed my master’s pro- gram at the McCall Outdoor Science School, an extension of the University of Idaho. My program focused on environmental education and science communication, during which I served as an instructor for K-12 students in an outdoor learning environment. For my capstone project, I sought out to track phenological changes from winter to spring through my students’ poetry.
Seeing the world through a child’s eyes is an invaluable gift. It can help to remind you of the magic and the details that you miss as an adult. Left to their own devices, they will explore the undersides of rocks,dig in the snow or sand, climb trees and, as a result, show you the world from a beginner’s mind. Children are enchanted by seeing a deer for the third time that day because children feel as if they are in the wild — even in a managed state park — sharing the same habitat side by side with that animal.
When you think that children are not paying attention and are distracted they will surprise you by noticing the rhythmic croaking of a frog that you yourself hadn’t noticed. One student writes:
Birds calling loudly
Frogs are croaking on the shore
Smells are fresh and clean
Kids can seem so distracted and distractible, but when asked to hone in and focus to create a poem about their present moment, there is a sudden stillness, a quietness that takes over like a morning blanketed in snow. By Emma:
We explore the snow
For the subnivean zone
Finding the critters below
Asking children to work with poetry as a means to express what they are seeing is challenging for them. Through my instruction we utilized haiku poems to observe our surroundings. It required discipline, math, and deep concentration. Each word is chosen with intention and purpose when carefully counting each syllable. A collection of haiku poems were taken from different classes of 6th graders over a four-month period. It was hypothesized that there would be a correlation between the recur- ring themes and the dominate words used in their poems with the progression of the winter season as we moved into spring.
Wordclouds can be used to visualize the frequency that certain words have in a word set by displaying the dominating words in larger font size, while those that may have only occurred once fade into the background. Words such as “and,” “the,” “is,” in addition to others are eliminated during this process. The goal of this project was to see a transition of dominate words like “ice” and “snow” to “sun” and “warmth” through the progression of the season. The incessant cold weather that is common in McCall, Idaho from January to March hindered this result.
To facilitate the poetry sessions, we first discussed that some people communicate differently than others. After practicing exercises communicating without words and then using storytelling as a means of communicating science, poetry was then introduced. They quickly grasped that, in a three line poem, you can adequately describe a place or data set that has been collected. The following is an example of describing water uptake in trees during the winter months:
Like straws, water flows
Filling the tree. Help it grow
Shuts off when it knows
There was a distinct difference between the poems collected during the winter months and those written in late April after the sun and spring had decided to return. The dominating themes and words between the months of January and March consisted of the lessons and activities that had occurred that day. For example:
Fun and exploring
Snowshoeing and hole digging
Eat off bandana
Although the hypothesized results were not realized, there is a strong shift between the colder months and when spring finally sprung in Ponderosa State Park. The poems written in late April were more tactile and focused on the connection to place:
Soft fuzzy cattails
Water moving in the breeze
Bugs flying about
However, no matter the time of year, the students wrote about the lessons they had observed that day, and the poetry sessions served as a reflection and way to digest the science they had been taught during their time at the McCall Outdoor Science School.
Rocks break in the water
Sand is tiny particles
Made of broken rocks
There seems to have been a disconnect made between art and science. They tend to be perceived as separate. However, art can be used as a way to explain science to those that think in a non-linear fashion or have an alternative style of learning. Like taught to these students, we all communicate differently. Although the poetry created by the students does not support the original hypothesis, it supports the argument that the fields of art and science are not separate. What other time would 6th grader Issac have sat down, noticed aspens in the winter light, and written:
The eyes of the aspen
Staring down their winter domain
Saving their sunlight
###
Whitney Chandler has a master’s in natural resources with certificates in environmental education and science communication. She writes passionately about nature and the outdoors, human connections and relationships, and nutrition.
by editor | Feb 21, 2018 | Arts and Humanities, Schoolyard Classroom
By Shimshon Obadia
hirty-one degrees Celsius and the air is dry to the touch in downtown Kelowna, BC. I whip my bicycle down the shoulder of Pandosy Street where the bike lane would be until I hit K.L.O. Road where I connect to the actual bike lane embedded in the road with a glowing grass-green path and neon white icons. My body feels like it is being hit with a light rain shower but it’s just my sweat in this Canadian desert’s air. Passing Fascieux Creek on Casorso Road, I glance at the luscious wetland full of tall cattails and a small sign indicating the creek’s adoption by École K.L.O. Middle School where I’m headed in a frantic rush. I switch gears and pedal faster. I cannot be late for this. The school is coming up on my right and checking both ways— the sidewalk is empty — I mount the curb. Launching myself through the pre-teen sized gap in the school’s fencing I walk my bicycle along the length of the garden. This is the garden Michelle Hamilton and her Environmental Education students have planted on the school grounds separating the school from the roadway. I am just on time.
Even though it may cost me my punctuality here, I have a little routine that I’ve taken to since beginning my eco-art work with the students at École K.L.O. Middle School. Standing at the side door to the school, I peer over to the creek that runs through the school’s grounds. Covered in old, cracked, sinking concrete pads with a ripple from the far end of the creek off the school grounds barely slipping through the water where a stream once flourished, this section of Fascieux Creek was once a luscious wetland like the section of it I pass on my way to this school, the perfect learning environment on this school’s grounds. It was covered as a decision made by the school’s administration many years earlier and now the school benefits from a legal-sized soccer field and an uninterrupted sightline across the entire property.
I begin to open the door as it is opened for me from the other side by Michelle Hamilton and her students. These are young people who have pledged their efforts and energy to reversing this concrete problem by way of their time spent in classes as well as the time they volunteer outside of them. These students were originally challenged to raise $100,000 by their school board for this habitat’s restoration; multiple “generations” of students remarkably raised $86,000. As of this writing, the first phase of re-naturalization is nearly complete and funding for the final phase is almost in place. But this community, originally only a few students, now an impressive mass of parents, concerned citizens, local naturalists, and environmental consulting firm, and more, fought for almost a decade against points of concern everywhere from the size of that soccer field to the idea of children-turned-flower-thieves at the sight of fresh, local flora.
This is when I came in. Working with the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Eco-Art Incubator research initiative founded by UBC faculty members Nancy Holmes and Denise Kenney, I have been providing art as a means to attract attention to the work these students have been tirelessly committed to, while simultaneously providing a creative outlet for the environmental concerns directly impacting their education. This is why I wanted to be on time. We were going to the section of the Fascieux Creek on Casorso Road, which has not been disturbed or covered up, to approach this work a little differently.
In my backpack, I had three cameras, and attached to my bicycle were the accompanying tripods. Michelle Hamilton had given up this class (as one of quite a few over the years) to allow the students and me to create videos. Using visual storytelling. At that time, we had just begun tackling the concrete problem in the creek using art.
Fighting for the money to get their wetland restored was only one part of this work; fighting against the mainstream prioritization of what looks good on paper, such as outdated laptops for an entire school, versus what students want and need is another. This is the work these students have tirelessly been pushing for. In a stream like that of Fascieux Creek, fighting the current only gets so much attention; flowing gracefully up the stream can captivate passersby for the rest of their lives. In his book, Conversation Pieces, Grant H. Kester states, “[i]f any collective identity is inherently corrupt, then the only legitimate goal of community art practice is to challenge or unsettle the viewer’s reliance on such forms of identification”. [1] This is where eco-art comes into Fascieux Creek: when everyone else cannot imagine something changing, we began to make that change happen.
So how does art beat concrete? This is a question I asked myself when first starting the Daylighting the Classroom project. I wondered how this partnership with the University of British Columbia’s Eco Art Incubator, and École K.L.O. Middle School students and faculty could be used to restore the wetland habitat. This was a project for the home of Western Painted Turtles, a home currently occupied by the school grounds, and concrete pads sinking into the remains of what was once the main creek flowing through them, Fascieux Creek. I started out by picturing the whole project as a complex version of ‘rock, paper, scissors’; before even getting my feet on the ground, I was looking at a puzzle of what I could do to get the students to create change, or how to get an integrated learning ecological system for the students at École K.L.O. Middle school where they could have a mutually beneficial relationship with nature for the sake of their education. As is popular in artistic practice, however, my initial intentions were very far off the mark.
It turned out that the situation was far more complex than a logical puzzle of figuring out what paper I needed to write to remove the rock. When I first got to the school and met the people involved with this re-naturalization, I realized that a quick fix answer was not what was needed, and more importantly, was not going to get the job done. I became aware that the project of restoring this habitat at the school was a project that faculty member, Michelle Hamilton — the person who first contacted the University of British Columbia with this project proposal — had been working tirelessly towards for years now. More important than this was the fact that the students at École K.L.O. Middle school were already greatly invested in the project, and wanted to see it through for the benefit of their learning, their planet, and their community. Here my project quickly turned all the way around from being meant to restore a wetland through art, into a project meant to empower the students affected by this lack of integration with nature. This was not my own original idea: it was a problem they had already begun fighting for themselves.
As an artist, I drew from my performance background to give these students educational tools that would allow them to express themselves in the area of environmentalism as well as to expand their connection with nature for the sake of a more holistic learning experience. I work in applied drama, a form of performance which Helen Nicholson explains in her book of the same name to be “forms of dramatic activity which primarily exist outside conventional mainstream theatre institutions, and that are specifically intended to benefit individuals, communities and societies”,[2] meaning more or less, drama with an applicable, and direct, intended use. This is a necessity for students in today’s ecologically disconnected world; embodied, creative integration of a subject is vital to the learning of that subject. In his book, Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv explains that our intuitive connection with nature should lie along the lines of existing as “the unquestioned belief that being in nature [is] about doing something, about direct experience — and about not being a spectator”.[3] Entering into this process, I took Louv as my first influence for content, and Nicholson as my initial influence for form. These were the first of many guideposts throughout this continually evolving artistic endeavour, but looking back at where I began now, I see this was where the Daylighting the Classroom project first stood up and began taking a tangible form. It was from these roots that everything else has grown.
In the work I have done thus far with the students at École K.L.O. Middle school, I have seen massive change in how students connect with what they are learning about in nature. This has been generated by both the approaches of Michelle Hamilton and myself, from the moment the students walk into the classroom from other classes, half asleep and in a deep state of non-interest and apathy towards any notion of learning. The difference when they begin their ‘hands on’ work in our classes is that they become alert, attentive and engaged in the work and learning they are doing. In this essay, I will be covering three ways in which I have used art and environmentalism to help these students overcome apathy in the classroom, and positively engage in learning outside the classroom over the course of the first year this project ran: having a class of grade eight students use video and the art of documentation; having grade seven classes put themselves at their ecosystem’s level and communicate with plant life through a participatory performance practice called ‘eco-drama,’ and through a dialogical performance series of lunchtime conversations which employed varying forms of communication between the students, myself and a camera.
Starting to work with such a compelling group of students, a young generation dedicated to saving their currently disappearing world by way of making it more sustainable, my first impulse was to gain their perspective. I wanted to capture that and share it with their community to help them build their own momentum for their own environmental actions, for it is truly an inspiring one to watch unfold. With the help of UBC’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies as well as the UBCO.TV media centre on UBC’s Okanagan Campus, I was able to get cameras into the hands of each of the students in Michelle Hamilton’s grade eight Environmental Education class. There I taught them how to put together a documentary video piece in small groups. Each of these students was passionate about integrating the natural ecological system we all depend on into their learning and every day lives more effectively. To see this through, each had already been involved extensively in initiatives such as the creek restoration, a school compost project, and gardening with local species of plants on school grounds. I had them document these initiatives on video, incorporating subjective and creative elements, to bring out their own points of view on each topic. I had these groups of students use creative storytelling tactics to show, through the lens of their cameras, what they saw in the work they were doing. This gave them the opportunity to creatively integrate themselves with what they were studying and align their passions accordingly. The resulting videos created by these students were inspiring. I saw this in both the positive tone, and their evident commitment. These videos ranged from a spoken word set, to a montage, to songs, and a music video inspired by social media trends. What these students did was share their perspectives, but in the process, they ended up doing what Helen Nicholson describes as being one key goal of drama in application, “traveling into another world […] which offers both new ways of seeing and different ways of looking at the familiar”.[4] Although they were all shooting the same setting, the familiar environment around their school’s creek, each video had a unique perspective to share. For example, the spoken word video just featured one student sitting on a bridge overlooking the flooded concrete covered creek. But when intercut with shots of ducks trying to eat garbage off of the concrete slabs, at the line “they put it there, and they didn’t care,” all of a sudden it becomes overwhelmingly apparent how out of place that concrete creek is in the everyday lives of those students, like the boy sitting on that bridge.
With the grade seven classes, I focused on a different angle. I wanted to take the brilliant Environmental Education class curriculum designed by Michelle Hamilton and provide a creative way in which her students could embody and explore this knowledge. In her classes, Hamilton’s students were already on their hands and knees in the dirt learning about local plant species, face-to-face with them. The class was broken into groups and each group was designated a section of the local-species-garden planted by Hamilton the year before. The school’s prioritizing of limited resources on a tight budget has put the restoration of an embodied natural learning ground below that of items such as a class set of laptop computers. My intention was to provide the students with a different kind of tool: eco-drama, a growing trend in eco-art discourse described by Dalia Levy — an eco-drama practitioner whose participatory research in education has directly influenced my own work: an art form that “employ[s] performance as a tool to explore and learn about complex issues [empowering people] to think critically and creatively, to be vulnerable and engaged, to be active about […] learning about the earth. […] It can take a host of forms and is a consistently inclusive forum in which everyone can participate”.[5]
The students had by this point in the year already developed a deep attachment to their sections of the large local-species-garden and were caring as well as learning from it with great attention. What I decided to do was put them on the next level with their garden by having them communicate with it. To use the term created by Robert A. Heinlein’s science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, I did not want them to just understand the garden they were learning from, I wanted them to ‘grok’ the garden: to understand it as if it lived as part of themselves. In greeting, praising and giving performative gifts of sound and movement to the garden, these students used their knowledge of the plant life to communicate with it on a completely different level than they were used to. This was very well received by them (and the plants) and allowed them to land right into the system of the work they were learning about and from. The earliest of these conversations often consisted mainly of “hello plant, how are you,” but as these conversations progressed, the communication became more genuine. One student even spent an entire class period doing nothing but sitting between a Saskatoon and a dandelion that threatened it. When I asked her what she had done that class, she just told me she was listening to them.
In our information-saturated age, there is no doubt that knowledge is invaluable. We see the advantages the children of today have over the children of only a couple of generations ago such as intimate knowledge of other cultures, not just through websites, but through the kind of online social networking that can connect one to a stranger from the other side of the world at the click of a button. A lot of this is due to access to and availability of an infinite amount of information and opinions on the internet and interconnection through social media between people, ideas and things. However, having online databases and textbooks means nothing without the natural ecological system which can teach hands-on and without the context for information which the natural ecological system can provide. My experience as a performer has led me to believe this is because these sources lack the natural ecological system which can teach this through embodiment. In this practice, I look at that embodiment as the context for information which the natural ecological system which it comes from. A popular truism in the art world is that without context, there is nothing; anything could be anything else but what one is trying to learn about. Context comes from dialogue between the elements that are being explored and learned about and that just cannot happen holistically out of a text alone. One can use an audio/visual interactive software to learn every word, grammatical rule, possible syntax and inflection that could be used to speak a language such as Quebecois French, but when standing in the middle of Rue du Trésor in Quebec City admiring the outdoor oil paintings, you won’t be able to get more than a word in before the local passerby you are trying to hold a conversation with begins talking to you in English out of pity. Technically, your Quebecois French might have been perfect, and yet without learning it from being in contact directly with the culture, it doesn’t take three words to show how little you knew about what you thought you knew. My eco-drama work with the grade seven Environmental Education classes at École K.L.O. Middle school continued with the work Michelle Hamilton had begun putting the students I was working with right into the ecological system they were learning about, this time encouraging their creative faculties to more holistically experience their ecological system. This allowed them to take their database knowledge and place it into a tangible setting. In Conversation Pieces, Grant H. Kester plainly states, “[t]here is nothing inherent in a given work of art that allows it to play [a given] role; rather, particularly formal arrangements take on meaning only in relationship to specific cultural moments, institutional frameworks, and preceding art works”.[6] The formal arrangement here was what I consider to be the original arrangement: nature. We are natural creatures who benefit from natural experience and connection to everything comes out of our original, corporeal, sensory interaction with our natural ecological system. This is where we have come from for millions of years. With education, why would we break away from the very context that, from our origin as a species, has defined us? Through my eco-art work with these students, by pairing the scientific knowledge of the grade sevens with a creative tool to engage the knowledge about the ecological system they were learning in their classes, a context was forged and thus the presence of a noticeably fuller learning was at hand. Using movements and sounds as gifts to their more-than-human natural counterparts in the garden, I observed students beginning to change the simple ways they would interact with the plants they had worked so tirelessly to maintain in their school grounds. Initially, these plants were lucky to be addressed by their species label instead of “that plant there,” but throughout this process, I began to see students talk to me about the plants they were working with in similar ways to how they talked about the events of their day or another classmate, or even used a tone typically reserved exclusively for gossip. In her eco-art text book, To Life!, Linda Weintraub defined the eco-artist’s purpose as having to “align art’s expressive, narrative and ethical significance with the physical components of experience”.[7] This is not the experience gained from studying a plant from a text book. The text book experience is valuable but the very way that information is made available removes the student from what they are studying. Planting these plants to learn that same information brings a fuller connection to them. Then, creatively engaging the natural ecological system creates empathy and allows the student to learn in a fashion that appears to be almost instinctive, like how they might have learned to eat from a parent as an infant.
The eco-art work I have done with the students at École K.L.O. Middle school so far has been surprising, and rewarding. Working with them has reminded me how valuable it is to be able to have expectations broken. Coming in to work on a small summer project, I have now committed to working the next year with these students. They are aware of their natural ecological system and how that directly impacts their learning; they are also committed to taking action to change their world for the better. The dedication I have seen from these students to connect with the natural world that they (as we all do) depend on for survival is extremely refreshing in a world so eager to turn its back on that. But what was missing, and what I felt compelled to provide as an outside artist coming into this school’s ecological system, was an alternative to their school work and school-run extracurricular activities to freely express what these students were thinking and feeling in relation to their current situation. More and more the integration of the natural elements which they are learning about in their world is being blocked. This lack of integration is creating a disconnected form of learning that unfortunately can result in the disconnection of people from education and their world. People like Michelle Hamilton will not let this happen overnight but it is possible that a removed education will become the norm if it is not so already. This is why these students need creative expression. Spending time with roots in hand to learn about local flora will teach a student what the plant is, and planting and watering and maintaining that plant into maturity will teach that student to respect their natural ecological system, but when creatively engaging that same plant, that same student may learn what they didn’t know they could learn: they can learn compassion, they can learn sensation and ecstasy, they can learn to feel and think as their natural ecological system does, and with that they can grow.
Once to twice a week I would hold lunchtime conversations by the concrete-padded creek with a video camera and some free pizza for those willing to share their words — a very effective barter method with middle school students — in which students could speak their minds on environmental issues in an interactive performance-based dialogical series. Through the method of having a conversation and the added presence of a camera, these became a kind of performance which allowed the students to embody what they were talking about and to directly address the issues they care about critically and creatively. The methods we used in these interactive dialogical performances started out simply with our first conversation being a question and answer period on the students’ thoughts on the creek and what they would like to see there one day as well as why. As we gained momentum and a regular group of students began coming to these sessions, we delved deeper into our creative faculties to bring out more interesting ways to engage the issues we were talking about. One day we would only speak in questions: another day, only communicate in statements describing what we saw and what we wanted to see in the creek: and one day only in the animal noises of animals which would have lived in the creek but could not due to the concrete. This allowed the students to creatively express themselves without feeling like they had to fill a check box or pass a test: “working in the ‘imaginary space’ of drama enables participants to juxtapose different narrative perspectives, to fictionalize life as it is experienced and, conversely, to make the imaginary world of fiction tangible and ‘real’”.[8] In these conversations, opinions about the environmental situation I had not previously seen surface with these students came out, and in a way that was very well articulated. The students were adamant that they needed the natural habitat of their school grounds to be restored so that they can experience a better, more integrated, embodied learning. One girl who has been very committed to this project since she started attending École K.L.O. Middle School told me something very powerful that has stuck with me throughout the entire course of the Daylighting the Classroom project: “We learn from the garden so much. There’s lots of plants and stuff we can learn from. If this was a wetland, we wouldn’t even need to be in class anymore, like we could do all our things out here and everyone would actually have fun actually being at school.” She later translated this into an appropriated language of BC’s local Lynx Canadensis with outrageous hisses and growls. That was coming from a student who, when I first met her, would barely speak a word to anyone unless she was asked to recite a fact in class. This was a common trend with even the most dedicated students to their cause. Though they may be passionate about the ecological promotion they were working on, they often would shy away from publicly expressing that. After some time engaging that same passion through eco-art experience, they have become comfortable embodying their own passions. Even though they have only just had a taste of this kind of learning through their work with Michelle Hamilton and myself, they are already fully aware of how valuable it is and how advantageous it can be for them. These students were not talking meaningless “L.O.L.s” as I was at their age; they were demanding that a peaceful coexistence and mutual learning be available for them with their natural ecological system. These students were aware of exactly how valuable their world is and exactly how vulnerable it is, particularly at this time.
Linda Weintraub asserts in, To Life!, “[t]he history of civilization is chronicled as a narrative of yearning and striving, not satisfaction and contentment”.[9] These students are hard set on yearning and striving, much more than I would have ever expected from a group of prepubescent school children. Against every cliché we know of this generation, I have seen students taking real action: building compost, planting gardens, fundraising, grant writing (with the assistance of passionate community members such as the school’s Green Parent committee), and everything else they can do to change their situation for the better just because they’ve had a taste of what they know they can get. What the students I have worked with over the past school term are fighting for is a better future, not just for them in their immediate trajectory, but for us all through better learning which, for reasons beyond reason, is not readily available to them: an embodied, integrated, applied learning that connects students to their ecological system. And that places those learning in direct contact with what they are learning about. Living with such a sense of corporeal connectivity to nature, as if it is living as part of you, is needed for this to work. Clearly these students thrive from this kind of integration. In the videos the students at École K.L.O. Middle School have created, the eco-drama they have done with me and the lunchtime conversation series I’ve conducted where they have expressed themselves and their desire for change in how their future is readied for them, these students have had a taste of the sustainable future they can have, and they see that it is not the world they currently have.
My hope is that these students will not settle for second best in a world that needs this particular brand of care. In all my work so far with these students, I have been a catalyst to help them get where they want and need to go; because of the inspiring spirit I have seen in them, three years later, I find myself still intensely committed to continuing my work with these students — and because of them, now students from many other schools in the Okanagan Valley — to see them gain more tools to help us all move into a better, more sustainable state of being. Art might just beat out concrete after all, if not this round, then in round two or three.
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We are walking back now. The students, Michelle, and I are headed back towards the school. The dry, unforgiving heat of the day has not yielded but instead feels as if it has doubled. I wish I had brought a hat. The undisturbed, wild Fascieux Creek at Casorso Road is behind us, almost as behind as Michelle’s students who are trying to find a balance between keeping up with our pace and talking to each other about the videos they have just shot.
One girl in the class steps up her pace, dragging her two close friends with her until the three have broken clear of the pack and are keeping up with Michelle and me. She begins talking to us about the creek; her and her friends’ video focused specifically on the work the three of them have been doing for the creek’s restoration. She begins complaining about how long it has taken and how they have seen no progress: “I think they should make it easier for this to really happen already,” she complains. “It’s so stupid how long this takes […] we have the money, why can’t we do it already? Can’t [the school’s administration] just let us have the creek? It’s not like it’ll hurt anyone.” Michelle reminds her that they are still about fifteen thousand dollars short of their goal and that it is important to work from within a system to achieve an objective rather than pushing people too far, too fast. It isn’t until Michelle and I are clear of the pack and back at the front of class that she expands on this point.
She told me then, in her warm French Canadian accent, that she wished she could just push all this through, that it hadn’t taken five years, that they had had more support from the school. However, she restated to me what she had told Daylath moments earlier, “You can’t fight everyone, Shimshon. You will be alone if you do. You have to show them why they want what we want. That’s why I have you here. That’s too much work for me to do and teach them. You think I don’t need to eat or sleep too?” She was right. This is not all about the fight to get up the stream; it’s about the flow to get up there pleasurably and playfully so that everyone can learn and benefit.
[1] Kester, “Conversation Pieces,” 159
[2] Nicholson “Applied Drama,” 2
[3] Louv “Last Child in the Woods”
[4] Nicholson “Applied Drama,” 13
[5] Levy, “Participatory eco-drama,” 40
[6] Kester, “Conversation Pieces,” 90
[7] Weintraub “To Life!”
[8] Nicholson “Applied Drama,” 64
[9] Weintraub “To Life!”
Bibliography
Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces. London: University of California Press, 2004. Print.
Levy, Dalia. “Participatory eco-drama: unconventional dramatic forms that foster critical thinking and environmental learning.” Green Teacher 91 (2011): 40-43. Print.
Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods. 2nd ed. New York: Algonquin, 2008. Ebook.
Nicholson, Helen. Applied Drama: the gift of theatre. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Print.
Weintraub, Linda. To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2012. Ebook.
Bio
Shimshon Obadia is an Eco Artist living in Kelowna where he studies Interdisciplinary Performance at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. Obadia has presented this essay in 2014 at the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences annual conference in New York, and the International Association for Ecology and Health’s biannual conference in Montreal. Obadia works as a research assistant for the Eco Art Incubator Research Initiative. There, he is currently leading this project, Daylighting the Classroom, working with public school students to merge environmentalism, education, science and art.
by editor | Jan 26, 2017 | Arts and Humanities
The Value of Creative Teaching
Place-based environmental education through the lens of art and creative writing
by Tess Malijenovsky
lace-based environmental education is taking front seat inside and outside classrooms across the country in part to prepare future generations for the environmental challenges they’ll face ahead. That is, climate change, natural resource competition, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, and rampant species extinction. In the famous words of Albert Einstein, the significant problems we face today cannot be solved with the same thinking we used when we created them.
This is why we mustn’t undermine the value of creative thinking in outdoor environmental education. While our education system tends to emphasize critical thinking skills for good reason, sometimes the critic within must be silenced for the improvisation of ideas and solutions: In a study published by PLOS ONE journal, researchers Charles Limb and Allen Braud found that the parts of the prefrontal cortex associated with self-monitoring and conscious control were suppressed in jazz musicians playing improv. Despite differences in the analytical- and creative-thinking processes in the brain, however, both entail a sophisticated application of knowledge.
Nature-themed art and writing exercises are ways for educators to elicit creative thinking in students when teaching environmental education. What’s more, nature illustration outdoors, for example, can break through learning barriers and focus the attention of students from diverse backgrounds and learning levels while delivering life science lessons, as witnessed by Straub Environmental Center’s executive director, Catherine Alexander.
Alexander recently spent a day at the Little North Fork of the Santiam River with 20 elementary-aged summer campers studying and drawing the plants, fungi, and animals surrounding their beautiful setting in an old-growth ecosystem. The students, representing a variety of learning styles and backgrounds, took their seats on mossy patches of sunlight, encapsulating science concepts in a portrayal of their immediate watershed environment.
Imagine a children drawing an osprey. As she focuses on her drawing, the child listens to her teacher talk about the length of the bird’s wingspan, the purpose of its long, sharp talons, what it eats, and where it lives. According to the brain lateralization theory that more divergent thinking occurs in the right side of the brain, listening while drawing helps distract and relax the student’s inner critic, expanding the reach and flow of new connections in her mind. Less intimidated or hypercritical in the art-making process, the child’s attention focuses on the charismatic creature she is drawing and learning about. The art lesson unravels into an engaged science lesson about the osprey’s ecological niche and life cycle.
“Art is more than a pastime,” says Alexander. “It can be an enabling portal for a number of academic subjects. The summer campers reminded me that art can have rhetorician value for students with learning disability or for whom English is not their first language. It can be a powerful equalizer and high-interest segue into all kinds of educational pursuits.”
One free, online resource to help educators tie art and creating writing activities in life science lessons to Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards is the “Toolkit for Educators,” developed in partnership by Honoring Our Rivers: A Student Anthology, Portland Metro STEM Partnership, and Straub Environmental Center. The toolkit provides teacher-tested life science lessons plans that use Honoring Our Rivers (HOR) with the corresponding learning standards.
The HOR anthology, a program of Willamette Partnership, a Portland-based conservation nonprofit, encourages students to fall in love with rivers and express their connections to them creatively – through art, photography, poetry, stories, and foreign language – in hopes of naturally cultivating the next generation of watershed stewards for the Pacific Northwest species and communities who depend on these vital systems.
Educators who integrate river-watershed-themed art and writing activities into their lessons can not only stimulate the creative minds of their students in an engaging educational way but give them an opportunity to be published statewide by submitting their work to HOR. The program also hosts student art exhibitions and student reading events across Oregon.
Educators can also learn more about nature-themed art instruction at HOR’s upcoming workshops at the Coastal Learning Symposium this Oct. 14 at Newport’s Oregon Coast Aquarium.
Teachers have the power to encourage the creative capacities of our youth while addressing the increasing disconnect between children and the outdoors. HOR exists to help them accomplish this feat. For more information, visit www.honoringourrivers.org, or email info@honoringourrivers.org.
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Tess Malijenovsky is the coordinator of Honoring Our Rivers: A Student Anthology, a program of the Portland-based conservation nonprofit Willamette Partnership. Prior to moving out West, Tess was an environmental journalist and the assistant editor of Coastal Review Online in North Carolina. She studied Creative Writing and Spanish at the University of North Carolina Wilmington
