In the Wild
The Next Generation of Outdoor Educators
—Hannah Rook, Education Technician
McCarthy Blue Oak Ranch Preserve
Several days a week in the spring, Blue Oak Ranch Preserve in Springville comes alive with field trips. In the beginning of the school year, students in grades 9–12 interview to be an intern in the Education Department’s Sequoia Environmental Youth Leaders (SEYL) program. This year SEYL interns hail from Granite Hills High’s Academy of Careers in Education and Monache High’s Environmental Science Academy in Porterville.
Once accepted, they meet in classroom sessions and field trips to Blue Oak for the first semester because the goal is for the students to find an ecological topic that interests them. With their topic in hand, they begin to create a lesson plan by referencing a variety of information such as Project Wet or Project Wild to write a lesson and inform at least one activity.
Some of the topics for this year are: the water cycle, adaptations, tectonic plates, plant cycles, predator and prey relationships, and macroinvertebrates. These lesson plans also include activities that range from painting rocks to tagging to competitions. By the beginning of the second semester, the students’ lesson plans should be almost complete, and one final field trip is taken as a practice run of their lessons before they are running them in truth.
Snow people that the high schoolers lovingly crafted, which were quickly sacrificed for ammo in the snow ball fight!
This is only one part of the program. The other piece is the audience for these lessons. The SEYL program is grant-funded by Prop 64, which focuses on creating outdoor experiences for underserved students. There are a handful of elementary schools that have their field trips fully funded by this grant, and each year, on average, 60 students in grades 1–5 take a field trip to Blue Oak. They break into smaller groups and rotate stations. At each station, the SEYL interns teach the elementary students their lesson and run the activities with support from SRT and AmeriCorps staff.
The interns quickly realize that the stations rarely go as planned, so adaptations and changes are made for each new station. Before they leave for the day, the staff do a debrief with the interns on what went well and what could be improved. From that information, the interns make changes to the lesson plans and try the new ideas the next time they teach. At least once a week, one elementary student exclaims, “This is better than Disneyland!” At the end of the day, both the SEYL interns and elementary students leave exhausted but enthusiastic.
These SEYL-led field trips run from February–May. The elementary students get a positive experience in nature while the high school leaders serving as interns get to explore a potential career in education. The interns experience lesson planning and classroom management with a wide variety of backgrounds. Watching the lesson plans change and the interns grow in confidence has been such a fun journey, and I, for one, am excited to see how the program continues to grow year after year.
