It was cold. A light snow was falling, and it was growing dark. Shouldering our 40-pound packs, we had just spent three hours switchbacking our way up Panther Mountain in the Catskills. For most of us, this was going to be the first night we had ever spent out in the woods. We laid down our packs and fell in a heap. In the group, there was a mixture of excitement, fear, and exhaustion. With numb fingers, my students wrestled the strings of their packs, rummaging to find an extra layer of clothing.
This was my first backpacking trip as an Outward Bound® instructor with the students of New York City's George Washington High School. As the sun set over the black and jagged landscape of the Catskills, I looked at my leather boots caked with mud, my damp and stained wool pants, and my students who were equally disheveled, and it felt strange. Strange, because up to this point I had only seen them wearing their baseball caps and baggy jeans in a brick school building in one of Manhattan's most dangerous neighborhoods. Now, far away from the gunshots and car alarms, it struck me how young they looked, bundled in nondescript wool and fleece. Back in the classroom they seemed older somehow.
Looking back on that initial trip, I can still feel the excitement and challenge of those years as an Outward Bound instructor in New York. Only now do I have the perspective to answer the questions: What made the experience so powerful for me, and What contributed to the students' success?
Starting Our Program
We started the program at George Washington in 1988, funded by grant money from the New York City Outward Bound Center, the Fund for the City of New York, and the New York State “Youth at Risk” program. We were also supported by an existing corporate partnership with Chemical Bank, which had been providing summer scholarships to our students since 1986. I was hired by the New York City Outward Bound Center to collaborate with La Verne Christian, an English teacher at George Washington, in order to create an experiential class.
I wondered if this African-American woman who had grown up in Harlem playing on fire escapes could possibly have anything in common with a white man who had grown up in suburban New Jersey climbing in tree forts. Our relationship seemed to be analogous to the strange union between Outward Bound and George Washington High School. Here was a small, wilderness-based nonprofit organization, known for rock climbing and Birkenstocks, interfacing with a large urban school system usually defined by traditional classrooms, union bylaws, and cement. Despite our differences, we shared a common vision: to create a seamless curriculum that would encompass our experiences in the mountains as well as those in the classroom.
George Washington High School is the largest high school in Manhattan, serving 4,000 students in the Washington Heights section north of Harlem. A transient, immigrant community, it is home to a quarter of a million people. The student population is 75 percent Latino, 15 percent African American, 5 percent Asian, and 5 percent various European heritages. In the neighborhood, guns and crack cocaine are plentiful, and the homicide rate for the precinct is the highest in the city.
That first year we didn't expect much excitement about the program, but we were pleasantly surprised. The 18 kids in our class were a cross section: special education students mixed in with mainstream and academically gifted students. We had Maria, who was quiet and caustic; Ivan, an artist and academic; and Jody, a flamboyant ladies' man and a suspected drug dealer. Students often spoke in Spanish when they didn't want us to understand. Basically, they were typical 9th and 10th grade urban students, but unlike some, they still had hope that they could make it. On our first rock climbing trip they were distant and mistrustful, but by the end of the semester they were a unit.
Building Support from Within
Skeptical faculty members and administrators were initially concerned about the safety of students participating in the program and were unclear about how a camping trip was going to translate into better academic achievement. In order to safeguard the continuance of our class, we began building support on as many fronts as possible. We documented everything we did through slides and student writing; published a student magazine and newsletter; contacted elected officials and the superintendent; made T-shirts and jackets; conducted faculty workshops around team-building; and showed our slides at faculty inservice days. In addition, we found funds for faculty to attend urban and wilderness courses throughout the country. Rather than continually selling the program from the outside, we began to have more voices of support from the inside.
- A committed faculty
- Administrative support
- Kids who wanted to be there
- Adequate funding
- Large blocks of time
- Low student/teacher ratio.
In this time of “break-the-mold” schools, there is much discussion about the need for creating replicable models. I've observed that successful programs are often determined by the intangible chemistry of relationships among teachers and their students, as well as the school's ability to work cooperatively with an outside organization. Money, curriculum, and good people may enable a program to work, but they don't ensure its success.
Creating the Curriculum
Our work with Outward Bound has been called experience-based or experiential education. To some, these terms mean simply learning by doing, but at George Washington we used physical experiences not only to bring students' academic class work to life, but also as a bridge to a greater understanding of their own lives. For instance, we used rock climbing to teach young people about how to deal with the metaphorical walls that we all face in our lives. The primary purpose of asking a student to climb a 40-foot rock face is not to teach about the elements of climbing, but rather to show how to challenge self-perceived limitations, how to trust another human being, and how to break down into small manageable steps the apparently impossible walls one often faces. Our vision in designing this curriculum was not only to excite these young people about their potential as students, but also to involve them as people who could affect their own futures.
The Wall. We began our semester-long journey with an exploration of ourselves. A 4–6 week unit called “The Wall” served as the focus. Students learned the skills of rock climbing, studied diverse cultural backgrounds through literature, wrote autobiographies, and interviewed classmates both before and after the rock climbing trip.
We then explored the idea of “group” through a backpacking trip where the students had to wrestle with what it meant to work together. Most activities on such a trip are group dependent: navigation, food preparation, and tent construction. In all these activities, students had to step out of the comfort of isolation and interact with their peers.
This is what William, a tall, shy freshman, had to say after his first backpacking trip: At first, I felt like I was not part of the group. I changed my way of thinking. I tried to have an open mind. I opened my heart to everybody who needed help. I really felt a change when we were all sitting around the fire talking and making noise. I felt great. It felt like a family.
Because our students had rarely traveled more than 15 blocks from their apartments, we began a study of the communities outside the classroom. Our vehicle for this study was the Urban Exploration, otherwise known as the “24-Hour Experience.” It involved spending a day and a night exploring the arts and culture of another community, perhaps the Lower East Side, Chinatown, or Williamsburg. This trip also involved a service project within that community.
Our curriculum followed this flow of exploration: self, group, and community. Each unit in the series followed a general pattern of engaging the students, introducing relevant new material, and empowering the students to apply newfound knowledge and skills.
Week 1: Engagement. We began by connecting the curriculum with the students' interests. Students wrote about what challenge, fear, and trust meant to them; in essence, what were their walls? (Their walls often involved barriers to graduating from high school or dealing with a home situation.)
We then read “The Wall,” a short story about a girl who shares her fears about her first rock climbing experience. This led to a discussion of how personal fears might relate to the fears associated with rock climbing. (For example, fear of physical inadequacy on a climb could easily parallel one's fear of mental inadequacy in regard to getting into college.)
Reflection was an essential part of the process. The students made brief journal entries each day. These journals helped crystallize their thoughts and provided a frame of reference to reflect on later. This is a sample from Pedro's journal: I was amazed to see how many trees could be in such a big place. It showed me how small my body was and how big my soul and my mind were. When I was in the mountains I felt a strange feeling, a feeling called loneliness. Not the loneliness that anybody would think of. It's the loneliness of the mind. When your mind takes a break it's like an open gate on a river. The flow of water in that river is the things that you have learned.... Quietness is like a door that when you open it you can see what's behind it.
Weeks 2 and 3: Relevant new material. The recycling of one's past experiences is not enough to forward one's intellectual development. Therefore, we introduced new literature and experiences that took the students beyond their current knowledge base.
We began by demonstrating the use of the equipment and techniques necessary for rock climbing. In a field behind the school, we broke into small groups and explained how to use the rope, helmet, harness, and belaying equipment. A practice climb in a tree allowed students to get a sense of what it felt like to hold a climber's weight. We also spent some time bouldering (practice-climbing a few feet from the ground) to get a feel for the rock and how to use one's body on a vertical surface.
Back in the classroom, we read “As I Grew Older” by Langston Hughes. Hughes talks about the metaphorical walls of racism rising and blocking out the light of his dream. We discussed the relevance of this poem to students.
Before the trip we asked the students to visualize and record the type of climber they thought they would be; during and after the climb, we asked them to describe their feelings in their journals. These entries served as a resource in writing a culminating paper.
On the climbing day, we reviewed safety issues and divided the students into small groups for instruction on climbing. At the end of each day, students discussed their high and low points of the day.
Weeks 4 and 5: Empowerment. We measured the success of a unit by the students' ability to take this newly acquired knowledge from a controlled environment and apply it to their own lives. When we returned to class after our climbing expedition, we debriefed them. Debriefing is a crucial step in the experiential education process. Unless the experience is processed with a particular focus in mind, it will not transfer to the students' lives. Although this transference was our ultimate goal, we found that we needed to take the debriefing process slowly.
The debriefing can be broken down into three questions. “What?” entails reviewing what happened the day before. “So what?” involves asking the students what they learned about themselves or their friends during the experience. “Now what?” is the payoff question. What did they learn from the literature and the trip that they could apply to their lives?
After the debriefing, the students wrote papers based on their journal entries. Throughout this two-week period of writing and editing, we gave the class mini-lessons in grammar and spelling based on common errors we found during the revision process. (Lehman College's Writing Project has great ideas on cooperative classroom techniques for revising and editing papers.)
Ben's paper is an example of the kind of reflection we were looking for: Before we went rock climbing I had been so confident of myself. I was looking forward to start climbing. When we were ready to go up I said, “I want to be first.” I started my climb and at the same time said to myself, “This is the easiest thing I have ever seen.”I was having fun until I got stuck. It was a place where there were no holds. It was all flat like the floor. I told myself, “It is impossible to go up.” I looked down on Paul to see if he could give me direction. But he himself did not know how I could go on. I looked up and was near the top. I looked down once again to Paul and yelled at him that I was going to bail out. He said, “No, you can do it. I want you to think real hard.” I was getting real angry at him and upset with myself.Then I thought to myself it would be better if I could calm down as Paul said and follow instructions. That is where the poem that we read in the classroom went into my mind. I remember that there was this person in the poem that could not move because of a wall which represented a problem, but at the end he climbed the wall. I thought of all the problems that I had in my life and how I have to climb my way out of the walls. So, I could not let this wall beat me, this small wall could not be the first wall to conquer me, I was not going to let this wall take the best of me. So I started up real fast, real smooth, just as I said I would in the classroom.
An Argument for Experience-Based Education
- Learning the skills of reading and writing in a compelling and personal context
- Confronting challenges and building self-esteem
- Learning to work with other people
- Building a safe place to take academic and emotional risks.
The adventure component of our program is often misunderstood. I have heard remarks such as, “I think it's wonderful that you take the kids out to the woods, but what are you doing to teach them the three Rs?” Instead of reading about other people's adventures, our students were reading and writing about their own. And it is from this base that we hope to build students' interest in the broader topics of literature.
Critics may say that our emphasis on self-esteem development comes at the cost of academic rigor, but I disagree. I have seen students so paralyzed by a lack of hope that they felt helpless to affect their own futures. This is a quote from a student's journal during a period of reflection on an expedition: Everlasting pain—I'm out here alone—what's wrong?... No feeling why, no answer or question in my mind. I find myself lost with no way back. A lot of things do not matter to me anymore.... I am living in pain and there is nothing nobody can do.
A young person who feels this way will not be able to move forward academically before his or her personal needs are addressed.
Building a supportive classroom environment is important, if not essential, for learning to take place. Some teachers may want to incorporate team-building and challenge into the classroom but feel they do not have the skills or money to lead wilderness adventure activities. This should not be a limitation. Although wilderness and urban expeditions were our ways of creating an adventurous classroom, they are not the only ways. Teachers can design many more experiences that challenge their students in a supportive environment. We need to draw from our own interests and passions to create engaging and adventurous classrooms.
Education should not be merely informing; it should also be transforming. We need to engage students by using their own lives and realities as a point of departure. We can create an environment that encourages positive risks, challenges students with relevant new material, and empowers them to use this new information as a tool to forge their own futures.
