By Dan Kirk
If our Education Department had a menu and our educators were actually chefs, our signature dish would be Youth Experiencing Nature (a pasta dish with pasta in the shape of smiley faces and redwood trees) with a side of the Watershed Awareness medley. This past year, we would add another popular item called Mental Health Awareness, served raw. Both dishes would pair well with 1999 Unplug-from-the-Device Pinot Noir (tasting notes include: Struggles, soft tannins, clear mind, minerals, mindfulness and nature journals). Like many good chefs, our chefs watch with a keen eye as each meal was served to students, teachers and partners over the universal Zoom placemat to see how the recipients would react – and many would react by simply scribbling a bunch of emojis on the placemat, while a great deal of others would be content with these new dishes and would bravely engage with the bold new flavors. In fact, many students would ask for more!
In my opinion, what I really like about this program is that it involves nature and encourages us to go outside more, and care about our ecosystem and environment. My favorite part was when we had to examine a plant that has flowers, for about 10 minutes, because we had a chance to relax our eyes from our tablets/computers and had a chance to enjoy the outdoors.
– 6th Grade Student, Olinda Elementary
Teaching over Zoom is like the equivalent of a chef using a dull knife. It’s hard, it’s frustrating and sometimes it doesn’t even feel like it’s working! But now that our services are on pause for the summer (HAGS), we are in the midst of asking ourselves the classic question: “What worked and what didn’t work?” Before we can even evaluate, we must first look at what we even did – in brief:
- Engaged 1112 students, worked with 11 different schools and supported 32 teachers
- Assembled and delivered 961 physical material kits for students to have at home (or at school with hybrid learning)
- Partnered with 2 new schools and 21 new teachers
- Created 9 education videos for our YouTube channel
- Delivered 3 teacher trainings:
- (2) Ocean Acidification & Resilience program
- (1) Our Ecosystem, Our Community program
- Attended 2 major multi-day conferences: NAAEE 48th Annual Conference and Bioneers: Beyond the Great Unraveling: Weaving the World Anew
- Hosted workshop at the Annual Junior Achievement SHE Leads STEM Summit
- Restructured our entire programming format, lengthened all of our programs and included asynchronous outdoor watershed engagement activities
- Wrote curriculum for 4 new programs
- Incorporated local indigenous history in all programming
- Incorporated mindfulness in all programming
The short answer is, everything worked and nothing worked. A cook can use a dull knife to prepare food, but when asked if the knife functions, the cook may say it’s a malfunctioning knife. On our end, do we think that virtual field trips work? We may also say it’s a malfunctioning nature outing. But at the end of the day, the cook still makes a delicious meal and we still found ways for students to meaningfully engage with their watershed. Although knives were dull this year, I have a feeling they will be extra sharp next year.
