FROM THE FIELD
When most people hear the word “school,” a very particular image comes to mind. It is the schooling most of us grew up with—desks in rows indoors, worksheets, tests. It can be hard to imagine anything else.
This is not the way that Watershed Schoolhouse looks.
Students are outdoors more than 50% of the time. Learning is woven into hands-on, long-term, and real projects. Students learn by doing, not by memorizing. And worksheets, well, worksheets are more likely to be tinder for our Thursday morning fires than the basis of a day’s lesson.
From the Field offers a window in.
The World of Food
Food connects us deeply to the world around us. As our first year theme, we have been deeply immersed in understanding food. Where does it come from? How do we grow and gather it? What makes for healthy food? Students have volunteered on a farm, visited the local farmer’s market, gathered and processed “wild” foods, and built a garden from scratch.
Our study of food includes looking at food and cultures around the world, food justice and food sovereignty, and home food inventories.
The Gift of Fire
We have had the gift of a visit from Margo Robbins, a Yurok cultural fire practitioner, and are learning about the long history and current leadership of Indigenous Peoples, including the Mechoopda, in working with fire to create health and vitality in the lands and waters, and thereby, the people too.
Fire is a powerful element in our world. In a community that has suffered from consecutive mega fires in recent years, rather than teach children to fear fire, at Watershed Schoolhouse, they learn how to live with fire in a beneficial way. This ranges from building a safe fire pit, cooking over fire, participating in pile burns to make biochar (for the garden), and tending fire.
What’s in Your Watershed?
Water, that miraculous, interconnected, source of life on earth, is precious. If we are to have healthy water, we must learn how to keep our water clean. We must learn to care for our watersheds, and to do so, we must love our watersheds.
Mud Creek, which flows through the middle of the campus has been a source of delight every day. From finding fish, frogs, crawdads and kingfishers, to building rock check-dams to slow and spread the water, the water is a part of every day at the school. With weather journals to track rainfall, the real impact of the weather (and seasons) is not just an idea, but a felt sense as the creek swells in the winter.
Learning in Context
Watershed Schoolhouse is nature- and equity-based education. The goal is to put learning (and young people) back in the context of the real world. This does not mean that all of the traditional academic subjects are tossed out the window. To the contrary, they are fully part of our learning. The difference is, they support and are supported by a holistic curriculum.
We learn to measure because we need to learn to measure. We learn to read because reading helps us in our work. And we write, because we each have real stories to tell.
