Why Coulee School?

 

"Our knowledge of the world comes from gathering around great things in a complex and interactive community of truth. Good teachers do more than deliver the news from that community to their students. Good teachers replicate the process of knowing by engaging students in the dynamics of the community of truth....But our conventional pedagogy emerges from a principle that is hardly communal. 

It centers on a teacher who...delivers conclusions to students. It assumes that the teacher has all the knowledge and the students have little or none, that the teacher...sets all the standards and the students must measure up...in reaction to this scenario, a pedagogy based on an antithetical principle has arisen: students and the act of learning are more important than the act of teaching. 

The student is regarded as a reservoir of knowledge to be tapped, students are encouraged to teach each other, the standards of accountability emerge from the group itself and the teacher's role varies from facilitator to co-learner..."  

                                                        - Parker Palmer, "The Courage to Teach", 1998, 2007, 2017

We have always embraced Twelve Mile Coulee as a very special and valuable place for learning since our earliest days as a school when we were housed in seven classrooms at Tuscany School, looking for strategies to be outside in the open air as much as possible. From those beginning days we have taken up the focus of 'place-based learning' as a way to engage our learners in exploring the environment of their community as a way to value and appreciate the patterns, relationships and nuances found in nature, in Indigenous story and in the ways human beings connect with the world in which we live.

Place-based learning is "an approach to learning that takes advantage of geography to create authentic, meaningful and engaging personalized learning for students...(it is) an immersive learning experience that places students in local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities and experiences, and uses these as a foundation for the study of language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum." (Center for Place-Based Learning and Community Engagement, 2017)

For our school, the Coulee has offered easy access to a broad landscape full of engaging, meaningful experiences that is always changing, thought-provoking and offers endless opportunities to pursue the million questions that arise with each visit from the children. Although we visited the Coulee frequently through the first four years and used it as a significant place for connecting and learning, we recognized there were multiple opportunities for learning  that could be maximized with shared intentions and expertise. 

Additionally, each school year, a few classes would apply for and participate in the Calgary Campus/Open Minds off-campus learning experiences that were frequently quite similar in nature to those learning experiences our students were already engaging in during our Coulee adventures. With a highly experienced and visionary staff, we began to consider strategies for developing best-possible learning approaches to being in the Coulee from a whole school perspective, as well as  ways to bring in our Elder, Sa'akokoto, to share Indigenous perspectives  that would assist all of us, students, staff and families, in appreciating and valuing the geographic significance of the Coulee as an impetus to learning in a wide variety of disciplines. 

In the fall of 2019, we formed our initial Coulee School Committee of 6 teachers to begin to brainstorm and research possibilities for creating positive learning experiences across grade levels together.  We worked with Sa'akokoto, with Stephanie Bartlett and with each other to conceptualize, connect to curricular objectives and synthesize a lot of information to create a working operational plan. We continued meeting periodically through the middle part of the school year, anticipating a shared, effective rollout of the initiative.  The week before we were set to launch Coulee School with our staff, the pandemic intruded and all schools were placed in 'closed' mode with teachers scrambling to work from home indefinitely. Coulee School plans were set aside and we focused on home learning as much as possible. 

While schools re-opened to students this fall but with understandable restrictions on external field trip experiences, volunteer opportunities, presentations and guests coming into the school, the prospect of continuing our learning with Coulee School was still a very viable option - made a more desirable option because it got all of us out of doors into fresh air, a key recommendation for reducing possibilities of virus transfer. The Coulee School Committee picked up the work where we had left off last spring, re-visited some of the internal design and documenting aspects and presented it to teachers in late September. Teachers were definitely interested and willing to broaden perspectives on Coulee visits to become intentionally connected, more frequent and aligned school-wide in our learning objectives, goals, tasks, questions and assessments. Over two professional development days, teachers worked together to generate a plan for learning across the grade levels, captured quite beautifully in one of our giant sketch notes by Mr. Kelly and Mrs. Low (pictured here).  Ultimately, we have adopted the mantra 'We Walk This Path Together' to guide our work. And, additionally, we are in the process of developing a multi-faceted web page where each class will ultimately be able to document their students' learnings, insights, questions and new understandings.

So, this is what Coulee School is and will be.  But why Coulee School? The answer to that is found in the Coulee itself and revealed through our experiences there.

As we launched Coulee School over these past six weeks, we have seen the Coulee transformed from golden autumn colours to deep white snowy banks of winter through this past week of late-October unseasonable frigid temperatures, and had the great pleasure to share Indigenous perspectives with our Blackfoot Elder Sa'akokotoo. We have many more plans for Coulee explorations, particularly since each visit brings us back to school with great inspirations for research, questioning, building models, sharing stories, writing stories, reading about life cycles, plants and animals. The Coulee provokes more questions in students in a one hour visit that a whole week of staying in class and trying to find out things using digital resources, books and our own memories and thoughts. 

Children and their teachers visit the Coulee and immediately feel connected - as the children will so often say, 'this is our place!'  Sitting beneath the trees or scattered across the grassy hills, students may be calm or inquisitive, gently listening and exploring or running uninhibitedly through the paths. Regardless of their stance, they are absorbing information about this magical place, sharing Indigenous stories and re-telling tales they have heard before or read, observing and asking questions plants, animals and ecosystems. These experiences prompt learners to explore further - to write, read, investigate, create, innovate and express their understandings from a wide variety of perspectives which may or may not be similar and may prompt even more questions or investigations. This is science, social studies, mathematics and language instruction in its most authentic form - response and reaction to real life and the connections, patterns and relationships evident in that real living. The Coulee inspires and invites a greater commitment to understanding, recognizing, celebrating or questioning who, what, why, when, where and how real living, growth and change is happening in the real world. 

Why Coulee School is to take teaching and learning to the highest level, provoking thinking and engagement of every child. Why Coulee School offers every learner the opportunity to investigate at their own pace with their own questions and then transfer their curiosities to their academic work. As we connect our learnings from Coulee School we build new skills and strategies as learners and broaden our perspectives wider still as we appreciate multiple aspects of life, growth and change that touches all forms of life, human and otherwise.

Why Coulee School offers opportunities to lift children from the tables and chairs they are currently firmly anchored to, bringing a learning perspective to a beautiful natural geographic feature that has a history geographically, geologically, biologically, anthropologically, mathematically, historically, ecologically.  As we explore how interconnectedness lives in the coulee, questions abound - such as these that were generated through discussions with both students and teachers:

What can the past teach?

How might we see through different eyes?

How can we observe our world in different ways?

How does the coulee shape our way of life?

How might we measure/capture/understand natural changes over time?

How are we connected?

What is the Way of the Wolf?

How do we tell our stories of the land? How does the land tell us stories?

How might we use the history of the land to inform the way we engage with it today and in the future?

How do we impact our environment? How does it impact us?

We walk this path together.

What surrounds us-- forms and connects us.

Why Coulee School is the best part of moving our learning ever further onto the land - because it inspires all of us to live in the world in ways that are more intentional, caring and aware. Our perspectives shift, we see with fresh eyes, hear with open ears, notice our surroundings, colours, sizes, shapes, patterns, lifestyles. We are the Coulee and the Coulee is part of us.

And that is why we will spend a great deal of this COVID-19 constrained school year in our beautiful Twelve Mile Coulee.

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal