into the woods

—meeting at 9am at the Forbes Library, then driving away in the van for our day’s explorations

—arrival a few minutes later @ our field study site in one of the 5 ecoregions of the Nonotuck biome, which has been chosen because it is a fountain of biotic & cultural intensities

—a short talk about the place: just enough to provide contexts, and to cue the campers to the creatures and ecologic systems we are investigating

—”walking”: a) opening 5-senses—seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting; absorbtion, immersion, cognition—FUN!
b) identification—learning the names, behaviors and relationships of the creatures and ecologic systems—EDUCATION!
c) reflection—campers read a little poetry, science and/or philosophy & are prompted to engage critically, aesthetically & imaginatively w/their perceptions via discussion, photography & journal writing—PERSONAL GROWTH!
—a mid-day picnic, chill out & recharge

—”walking” again in a different but allied place

—return to Forbes Library @ 3 pm for pick-up

At the end of 5 days, campers have

—applied the lessons they learned in indoor school to their experiences, gaining a much deeper understanding of abstract concepts

—had the opportunity to see how their own curiosity, enthusiasm and imagination can lead them to profound & enjoyable insights and discoveries, which increases the odds that they will return to indoor school with a hunger for more

—met other campers and, as a consequence of our “walking” together, befriended them on substantive and not shallow level

—learned how the land (soils, waters, creatures & climes) has produced the uniquely vivacious and intelligent culture of the “Happy Valley” & “Paradise City”

—visited a variety of beautiful sites (some well known, some secret) in “our place” that they will want to return to with you

Next time you drive by the Sacred Heart Church on King St. in N'hamp, imagine what it looked like when America's most influential theologian, Jonathan Edwards, lived there

Here’s a cover that might end up being used for grades 1-3:

nature = worlds within worlds within worlds

Our Place summercamp combines healthy outdoors exercise with healthy mental exercise, and this sets it apart from other camps.

For 5 days, campers roam the Valley and are immersed in its biotic vitality. As they have fun romping around, they are prompted to hone their abilities of perception—to see, hear, smell, touch and taste with more focus than is typical. This causes them to notice little things that are not normally noticed—for example, the way that, unlike all other trees, Aspens have leaves that “tinkle like bells.” Once they perceive this, they never forget it; they will spot—or hear—an Aspen wherever they go.

As we walk, a simple perception like this gets linked to other simple perceptions, and soon enough these little pieces fit together and form the basis for a new, and ecologically-based, view of the world.

At the same time, campers are encouraged to apply the background knowledge they have received in regular school to interpret the particular ecosystem we are investigating. By applying what they know, they exercise their critical-thinking skills and become smarter (to put it simply)—and the fact that they’re getting smarter while they’re having fun gives them a new way of looking at their own education.

Instead of regarding education as a ritual performed between a teacher who grades them according to how much rote content they retain, they see education is something else, too: something that expands the boundaries, and celebrates the mysteries and vitalities of their own world.

Biocitizen specializes in this second definition of education that doesn’t have much to do with MCAS, but everything to do with harmonizing the mind and the body, and promoting positive self-development, via full engagement in ecological discoveries.

Our Place cultivates campers’ imaginations because, as Thoreau put it: “The universe is wider than our views of it.” What he meant was: even geniuses will never know enough to encapsulate the variety and trajectories of phenomena that surround us. This is not, for Thoreau or for us, a cause for despair—in fact, it ensures that we will always be discovering new things. That’s cause for celebration!

The faculty of imagination is key in the act of discovery—of both the little things that make life so worth living, and the big things like E=MC2.

I’ll let Darwin prove this to you.

Many times in his life, he said that he never would have boarded the Beagle, and thus discovered evolution, if he had not been exposed to the Personal Narrative of Travels of the Equinocial Regions of the New Continent during Years 1799-1804 of Alexander Von Humboldt. Humboldt is roundly applauded as the first scientist to look upon life on earth in a holistic way. Though he was regarded by his some of his contemporaries as being somewhat of a mystic because of his holistic vision and his interest in understanding non-Western religions, his work provided the foundation for biogeography, which “aims to reveal where organisms live, at what abundance, and why they are (or are not) found in a certain geographical area.”

Darwin carried all 7 volumes of the Personal Narrative on the Beagle. When he explored the jungles of South America, he compared what he was perceiving to Humboldt’s accounts. But more than that, he actively employed Humboldt’s holistic view so that he saw creatures not as separate entities, but as co-participants and collaborators in the larger superorganismic lives that we now call biomes.

Humboldt activated Darwin’s faculty of imagination, which allowed Darwin to see connections between things that no one else was seeing. Without these promptings, Darwin would never have written On the Origin of the Species. As he put it in his journal while off the coast of Brazil:

I believe from what I have seen Humboldt’s glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth. The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind; if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another sun illumin[at]es everything I behold.

Finding its roots in precisely this formidable (but little known) tradition of field environmental philosophy, Our Place summercamp celebrates the poetry and the science of ecology.

And more than anything, it cultivates the imaginations of its campers who will someday assume responsibility for taking care of the living systems of our one and only Earth.

**Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but it belongs to the philosophy of nature, to pause at what is little**
Alexander Humboldt

The exercise of the ecological imagination prepares us for new worlds (including the one on its way), enlivening instincts, awakening dormant abilities of perception and cognition, leading us through the jungle of connections between us and the everything that sustains this:

Mount Chimborazo, Ecuador: 1857, by Frederick Church. In painting Chimborazo, Church drew inspiration from the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). Humboldt explored South America from 1799 to 1804 and described his journey from a scientific point of view in extensive texts. His observations led him to hypothesize that nature existed in a state of interdependent harmony. The theory that the cosmos exhibited a grand and understandable design appealed to the spiritual nature of Church, who often imbued his landscapes with references to the divine. Humboldt likened the grandeur of 'Mount Chimborazo' to Michelangelo's dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, an analogy with a religious connotation Church would have appreciated.

our classroom above the Beagle Channel

Biocitizen is a school that walks.

This makes what it does, in many ways, the opposite of conventional institutional learning; the outdoors is our classroom. When we need indoor spaces to work in, we use public facilities: museums, libraries, town halls, cafes. Our basic philosophy is that the world is our text, and to grasp its meanings we must immerse ourselves in it. So, instead of sitting in a rectangular florescent-lit room, we walk.

Our model is Aristotle’s.

Instead of teaching indoors, he met his students at the entrance of Athen’s temple of Apollo. From there they walked together, discussing the ideas he presented while moving, sensing, experiencing and interpreting the world directly. Learning is alive when it occurs this way—ideas are felt as much as they are thought.

Our model is also that of ecological field studies, where students make direct contact with what they are studying (wetlands, for example) because no book can ever explain what an ecosystem actually is. The only way to understand ecosystems is to marry book-knowledge with actual experience.

Students of all ages and backgrounds benefit from our programs. They are designed to 1) draw upon the background knowledge students acquire indoors, 2) offer new sources of knowledge, and 3) provide experiences that, by inspiring them to use what they know to interpret the world, challenge and expand that knowledge.

Because our programs are designed to engage the full self, and not just the intellect, they are of value to students who excel in traditional classroom settings, and to students who find it difficult to excel in those same settings. “Gifted” and “ADHD” students experience remarkable personal growth when they walk and learn, and share their learning.

And that is why biocitizen is a school that walks.

walking into the text