Dodge Nature Center Post IV

When we went around the group and highlighted some conflicts we'd encountered at our sites I couldn't come up with anything at all. While having no real issues should come as a comfort, I felt uneasy, as though there was something I was overlooking. I'm still thinking this through.

Working at Dodge Nature Center has been an amazing experience. The Preschool is highly organized, the director has hired an amazing staff, the student teachers are bright and eager to learn, and the kids have access to SO many learning tools. From nature walks to holding newborn chicks, these kids have it all. The curriculum is well developed, with a good balance of kid-directed free play both indoors and out and structured learning. This place has not ceased to astound me.

Perhaps there in lies my issue - this small group of children have the privilege of attending a highly specialized and exceptional preschool - what about all the other 4-year-olds in the Twin Cities? Families pay a hefty tuition to enroll their 3-5 year olds in Dodge Preschool, this was evident from the first moment I set foot inside. Money, it always seems to come back around to money. So should I feel bad for spending my community engagement hours helping out at a specialty preschool? Would my time be better spent elsewhere? A place where I could perhaps play a role in designing environmental curriculum, or work towards granting low-income kids access to woods, farms and wildlife. That said, what about the kids at Dodge? They're great little people - intelligent, inquisitive, imaginative and hilarious- and it's not their fault that their families happen to be able to afford this school

Kids are kids are kids. Everywhere you go, they're always going to be wild energetic curious little ragamuffins. They will always need our support, our guidance, an education and strong adult role models. As I learned from the Search Institute, it's not just low income youth who encounter deficits in their developmental environments, all children are coming up short in some realm or the other, so perhaps my observations concerning Dodge and the preschoolers are too narrow.

Dodge Nature Center Post IV

When we went around the group and highlighted some conflicts we'd encountered at our sites I couldn't come up with anything at all. While having no real issues should come as a comfort, I felt uneasy, as though there was something I was overlooking. I'm still thinking this through.

Working at Dodge Nature Center has been an amazing experience. The Preschool is highly organized, the director has hired an amazing staff, the student teachers are bright and eager to learn, and the kids have access to SO many learning tools. From nature walks to holding newborn chicks, these kids have it all. The curriculum is well developed, with a good balance of kid-directed free play both indoors and out and structured learning. This place has not ceased to astound me.

Perhaps there in lies my issue - this small group of children have the privilege of attending a highly specialized and exceptional preschool - what about all the other 4-year-olds in the Twin Cities? Families pay a hefty tuition to enroll their 3-5 year olds in Dodge Preschool, this was evident from the first moment I set foot inside. Money, it always seems to come back around to money. So should I feel bad for spending my community engagement hours helping out at a specialty preschool? Would my time be better spent elsewhere? A place where I could perhaps play a role in designing environmental curriculum, or work towards granting low-income kids access to woods, farms and wildlife. That said, what about the kids at Dodge? They're great little people - intelligent, inquisitive, imaginative and hilarious- and it's not their fault that their families happen to be able to afford this school

Kids are kids are kids. Everywhere you go, they're always going to be wild energetic curious little ragamuffins. They will always need our support, our guidance, an education and strong adult role models. As I learned from the Search Institute, it's not just low income youth who encounter deficits in their developmental environments, all children are coming up short in some realm or the other, so perhaps my observations concerning Dodge and the preschoolers are too narrow.

More from Maxfield

I apologize for this extra long blog post. I apparently did not post it for two weeks ago, but you will definitely be able to tell the difference in my experience and conundrum.

At the halfway point of my work at Maxfield, I am stuck in an interesting position. I am really pleased to share with you all that my relationship with the boys in my class has really become strong. From the beginning, it has been pretty apparent that they prefer me over the paid worker, mostly because she needs to issue ultimatums and punishment to get them to work, while I have been the fun guy who helps them out with their math, teaches them “tricks,” and also plays basketball with them during choice time. Though all of that has stayed the same, they have seemed to become more attached to me. The last two weeks, they were really excited to see me after the two week break from ACES. They were more than excited than normal when my colleague and I came in, and, while they were working on their homework, Ernest came up to me and started asking me about his science class. This was a first, and it was a bit more alarming because ACES only really addresses math and reading. But really, I was quite glad that he was comfortable enough to come to me and ask me straightaway. So I really feel like my role, for these few boys, seems to be growing.
But, on the flip side, I really feel like my role with the girls has not progressed. It’s not that they don’t follow directions or heed my advice when I work with them one on one. They just seem to be far less comfortable with me than the boys do. For instance, the boys always are more than willing to get up and come over to me and ask me questions when they are stuck, whereas the girls will just sit and not do anything if they are stuck or, far more frequently, they go on to distract the rest of their peers. This is where one of my perceptions changed during this program. I thought it would take longer for me to bond with the boys in the class than it would be with the girls. Given the fact that I have a younger sister and my two best friends are girls, I thought that I would be able to connect with them quickest. I was also under the impression that an older guy in the class may intimidate the boys, therefore making our connection more difficult to establish. Needless to say, both of these theories were completely and totally wrong. What should I do to help my connection with the girls? I really don’t want to only be effective with the boys, with the girls not gaining anything from my being in the program. I really hope that somehow I can sort this out. I want to be helpful for all of the kids in my class, both the guys and the girls.

Now on to the current blog post.

My major concern that I had when I addressed the group as a whole was that my connection with the girls in my class was far less involved than my connection with the boys. The week after I had this conversation with my peers, I attempted to use their insights to try and close this gap.
After the first two and a half hours, I witnessed this gap close, but not in the way I was hoping. Instead of the level of my relationship with the girls rising to meet the boys’ level, the exact opposite occurred. They were unsettled and distracted all day, and when I tried to get them back on task they wouldn’t have any of it. A major launching point for this behavior was the appearance of Hamarian, a boy in their 5th grade class who has been suspended from after-school programming since a time before my arrival at Maxfield. The boys seem to rally around him. He is intelligent, athletic and more physically mature than his peers, and what’s worse is that he knows it. He flies through his homework at the beginning of the session, and instead of constructively helping his peers, like Ernest has in the past, Hamarian prefers to use his free time to distract the other boys. So instead of being focused on becoming more involved with the boys, I spent my whole day trying to find a way to work with Hamarian, and my results proved to be futile.
One week later, I came into class ready to get involved with the girls while trying to find a way to get Hamarian to accept me as an authority figure. The fifth-graders had just completed a state mandated day of testing, so we knew the workload would be light and the rest of the instructors and I all agreed that allowing the students to relax after the testing would be more beneficial than the normal program. Additionally, a different after school program had changed it’s schedule to include Tuesdays. It is a program that is geared toward the boys, however Hamarian was still suspended from participating in it, so he stayed at ACES with the girls.
For the first thirty minutes, he acted out more vigorously than he had in the previous week, so my fellow instructor and I had to remove him from the rest of the class to cool off. In the mean time, I was able to interact with the girls in a more relaxed setting, playing hangman and building a “house”. I felt like my connection with the girls may have grown as a result, but I will know more about that after my session this upcoming Tuesday. Additionally, Hamarian saw how much fun we were having and elected to join in. He was actually very constructive and helped the group solve the word puzzle on more than one occasion. I was able to conclude that, in order for Hamarian to be an active asset in the class, I will need to find a way for him to come to me and interact on his terms, while still remaining within the constraints of a system where I am an authority figure.
One interesting incidental learning experience I have had from my placement is that the students separate classroom interaction from choice time interaction quite starkly. Additionally, some of the more involved instructors prefer to stand away from the group while the kids are playing and observe, rather than get into the activity with their students. It’s interesting that they can be so active in the classroom, but once we get outside, these great instructors seem to care much less about working with their students.

Few challenges here and there, but I am loving it....

The only challenge I came across in my placement is not being able to convince the students that I am here because I care. As I mentioned in my previous blog, I have been able to form friendship with some of them but have not been able to form a good friendship or relationship with more than half of them. When I brought this challenge to my peer workshop, they were very understanding and some of them also had similar challenges. One advice I got was that, as a volunteer I could only do so much. Also to have such a high expectations from few weeks with the students may not realistic, I have realized myself. These students have seen volunteers come and go for years, so who am I to expect that they would think other wise about me?

With the few weeks I have left, at least officially, I am trying to have interactions with most of the students as I can. I am hoping that my plan to continue volunteering during the summer will be a good opportunity for me to connect with the ones I would not be able to by the end of the semester.

One of the science teacher is recovering from a hear attack, so during her period there is less order in the class. Even though most of the students need to work on english, math or social science to earn credits to graduate, most of them do not want to do anything. Now that the weather is nice outside, the students are more being outside than in the classroom. I tried to help Twaine with his math and English credits, but he told me he was not up to it. Well, most of them, including Twian, had the MCA exam, so it is understandable that he is tired. But other students who did not have any exams did not want to do anything. The sad part is that some of these students need just 2 or 3 more credits to graduate. I want them to graduate, as badly as they do, but it is hard to get them to do something.

It is funny you ask about volunteer interactions, because I think I have an interesting one. Over the 3 hours period I volunteer, there are 4 volunteers. I get there first so I am already helping one of the students when they get there. Most of the time I am with Twain, either working on math or art project. However, when one of the volunteers (I do not remember her name) comes, she is constantly trying to take him from me. I honestly do not know why. Sometimes if she is working with him on his art project, I sit with them so I know what’s up and also give ideas and suggestion when I can. However, whenever I talk she totally ignores me. I don’t care whether she likes me or not, but I just want us to behave as grown up adults when we are with him. I don’t know if he notices it, but I get worried this is just a bad example for him. My solution to this is just to keep quite. If I do meet him sitting alone or with someone else, then I will give him my suggestions. I do not know if it is something I said or something I have done, but she clearly does not like me. I have a good relationship with the other volunteers. If one of us come a bit late and do not know what the students are working on, the other volunteer will explain. They are super helpful and new friends!

Generally, I am in a good place with my placement. As I said, I am planning on continuing working for the organization over summer. So I feel like I still have time to get to know and help most of the students.

Last Week of CLUES

This week was the last week of the CLUES Learning Together Program, an occasion we marked with ice cream and a piñata. The piñata event had taken half an hour longer than the usual program time, and we were itching to get out the door. As the last parents straggled out the door, dragging their kids who were struggling to hold on to all of their piñata loot, on of the older kids said rather cryptically, “I’ll miss school on Wednesdays.” The program coordinator thanked us profusely for coming every week, and said that without reliable childcare, the program could not have happened. We thanked her for the opportunity to practice our Spanish and hang out with kids, and then we left for the CEC-sponsored ice cream reflection on the experience. Here are some of my reflections: maybe the frustration I have had with the program for its haphazard volunteer crew assembly, irrelevant curriculum, and the lack of cohesiveness within my volunteer group were much less important to the actual program than they were to my satisfaction as a volunteer, which maybe has more to do with me than with the organization. The program coordinator emphasized the importance of having reliable childcare; while I had been critical of the manner in which the childcare had been carried out, the kids certainly had fun and were safe and the parents could go on with their workshop knowing that their children were being well supervised. And the kids did not notice that we had been unable to implement the lessons suggested by the program, they just had fun running themselves into cranky exhaustion every Wednesday evening. I do think that the process and commitment of the volunteer group is still a valid concern. The group of 5 of us who volunteered at CLUES just signed up for the job without any time of selection process, training, or expectation about our participation in the commitment. We came at it from different places and expecting different outcomes; I think that it would be valuable for future groups to think through their goals for participating in civic engagement and establish a group vision with a mechanism to process, reflect and assess whether or not we are meeting those goals. I think this intentionality would benefit the volunteers primarily, but also improve the interaction between Macalester students, the partner organization, and the participants in the program. I think I learned a little bit about the different advantages students have depending on how capable their parents are at navigating the exosystem and macrosystem through their access to the mesosystem. I think I learned more about my needs in the context of civic engagement activity, and I think I would like to do this program again with a space for more formal process.

Cultural Specificity at Dodge Nature Center

Hey y'all, I completely forgot to upload this one...apologies...

The word culture brings to mind recognizable and well-defined groups – Latino immigrants in the Twin Cities, Native American tribal constituencies, The GLBT community, certain religious persuasions with strong community bonds such as the Jewish or Amish –for example. Each come with a specific cultural framework. Environmental education however, did not make my list. Sure there’s a culture to environmentalism, characterized by certain catch phrases such as: the green movement, sustainable development, conservation, preservation, and many other familiar terms. But in some ways the culture of environmentalism is divisive, pulling each person towards their specific interests and their fight for sustainability, while other cultural frameworks serve as a point of unity.

The Dodge Nature Center is not culturally specific per say, but adheres to a certain frame work – that we are all students of the land and have a responsibility to respect and care for the environment – which, in the end fosters its own unique culture. It acts as a jumping off point for curriculum, the daily classroom atmosphere, and the way teachers approach their work. For example, the preschool teachers are always on the look out for new and exciting ways to team up with DNC naturalists for new class material. In my time there we’ve had the opportunity to tap trees for maple syruping and have gone on countless nature walks. The kids have been able to see lambs and piglets on the same day as their birth and have an astounding grasp on animal tracks, plant biology, and all sorts of interesting topics.

In some ways it is very strange for me to be working at preschool on the grounds of a nature preserve. It seems a bit ridiculous, like it can’t possibly be real, but there it is, right in West St. Paul, on 320 acres of land. I’ve found myself torn between excitement that kids can have the opportunity to experience nature and animals and farming first hand at such a young age and discomfort with the fact that it is a very expensive program which greatly limits the ability for children of low-income families to participate.

It seems to me that environmental based education is either a thing of the rich or a form of after-school program for youth in urban areas. There is a disconnect between sustainability/outdoor education programs and the school system at large. Perhaps this paradigm will undergo a shift soon, we may very well be in the middle of it now.