5 minute read
The First of its Kind
A recent interdisciplinary trip to the Chesapeake Bay invigorates experiential education at EHS.
For decades, teaching, learning, and living at Episcopal has involved leaning into the School's proximity to Washington, D.C. in unique and powerful ways. Our location, the McCain-Ravenel Center's commitment to facilitating experiences outside the classroom and the students' and faculty's willingness to jump into the adventure all combine to make the Episcopal experience unlike any other.
For the first time, faculty leading three different electives — Javier Bastos’ Advanced Environmental Science, Jamie Biondi’s American Environmental Literature, and Molly Pugh’s advanced English seminar Short Story Writing about Climate Change — collaboratively embarked on a curriculum-based, multi-day retreat to the Chesapeake Bay, broadening the reach of the School’s weekly “flexperiences.”
Photo by Zoe Arzt ’23
The trip would not have been possible without the new schedule and Episcopal’s 100% residential community. The block schedule, which debuted at the beginning of the school year, includes closed Community Weekends and McCain- Ravenel Mondays, which are all-day, all-School programs six Mondays a year. These factors freed up participating students from Friday evening to Monday evening, a rare occurrence in a busy high schooler’s schedule, and opened the door to this type of experience.
Episcopal has a long history with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which was founded in 1967 by Episcopal alumnus T. Marshall Duer Jr. ’31 and several of his peers. The School also gave the esteemed Allen C. Phillips Integrity in Action Award to William C. Baker, past president of CBF, in 2016. “We’ve been talking about this trip and this partnership for five years,” said Jeremy Goldstein, executive director of the McCain-Ravenel Center.
To plan and execute the trip, Bastos, Biondi, and Pugh teamed up with the World Leadership School, an organization that partners with K-12 schools to reimagine learning. Selecting the Chesapeake Bay as their focus was an easy choice for the faculty members to make due to the region’s vulnerability to climate change and its proximity to the School.
“The environmental issue is so complex that it requires an interdisciplinary approach to help it make sense,” Bastos explained. Without the science, the teachers say, there cannot be any literature regarding the subject. And vice versa. “Oftentimes as scientists, we just collect the data,” he mused. “This idea of conveying that data to a general audience (and making it interesting!) is not necessarily at the forefront of what we try to do.”
The first two days of the trip were divided into three destinations. One group visited the Harriet Tubman Museum in Cambridge, Md., and took a walking tour of the town. Another explored the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Md., and learned about water quality testing, oyster tonging, and species identification. The third group visited Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge to do water quality testing and hands-on oyster research.
On the final day of the trip, all students went to the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Center in Grasonville, Md., where they seined species in the Bay for identification, applied their newfound water quality testing skills on the Bay and in a tidal pond, hiked around the coast, and pulled up oyster buckets.
While on the tour of Cambridge, Emmie Amason ’23 was reminded of what she has been learning in environmental science for the last year. “The tour guides told us: ‘Your actions matter. Small things do make a change,’” she said.
The trip also was a reminder to the faculty about working together on solutions for widespread issues, no matter what those problems may be. Often, they said, they are siloed within their individual fields and departments, and they rarely have the time to look up and see what their colleagues are doing in other classrooms.
“Interdisciplinary work is really exciting and beneficial,” said Pugh, chair of the English department. “It also requires a real discipline because it’s so easy to stay in your own wheelhouse. I hope the students take away the ability to open themselves up to the experiences, mindsets, and techniques of others.”
Biondi spoke of the students’ willingness to jump in headfirst while on the trip: “High schoolers are better disposed to do this work because they take courses across so many subjects. They go from my class to Javier’s class to Molly’s class, so they’re primed to switch gears and to use multiple modalities to understand the world. The trip served them well in that way.”
Sydney Hopkins ’23 agreed: “Interdisciplinary work is something that’s really important to me. With our friends in other classes, we tried to come together from the angle of ‘Hey, we acknowledge this is what you’ve been learning. How do we take this and apply it to what we’re doing in our classroom?’”
An added bonus of the trip was the bonding that comes with an overnight excursion, which the students hadn’t experienced fully since the Burch trip their freshman year. “I just loved those moments of walking side by side and learning that somebody was really into stars and could point out a number of constellations,” Pugh said. “It felt like summer camp,” Amason added, complete with s’mores by the fire and late-night conversations under the stars.
The faculty has big ideas for the future of this type of interdisciplinary experience that provides real-time educational opportunities relating directly to what is going on in multiple Episcopal classrooms. “And it’s only the beginning of thinking about these things. My dream would be to do this for every single student in the school,” Goldstein said.
To read the stories written by Short Story Writing about Climate Change students following this interdisciplinary trip, visit www.episcopalhighschool.org/creative-writing.
