Interview with Martha Warren, Education Program CoordinatorWhat's New in Education

We’ve been looking at our role in both the local and global community, and have expanded our education program to include a course on Mountain Sustainability. With a grant from GEO Mountains and the Mountain Research Initiative in Switzerland, we were able to collaborate with Michael Allchin at the Arctic Institute and the University of Calgary, and Scott Williamson, now with Polar Knowledge Canada. The result is a set of teaching materials for learners of all ages! We used an international, comparative approach because it’s the best way to show people that mountain sustainability is truly a global issue and that what happens in one place has a huge impact on others. The course is really about shared experience and shared stewardship of mountains around the world. We focus on the "extreme risk" areas of the Hindu Kush Himalaya, South Caucasus, Andes, and East Africa, and on transboundary cooperative efforts.

It’s important to create some sort of bridge between a student’s personal interests and the subject. We needed to find a way to promote empowerment, good citizenship, and civic involvement in sustainability initiatives. For each age group, we suggest 3 Things-to-Do. These will vary depending on the age of the children but also their background, location, and the support they get in their homes and learning environment. For adults, one Thing-to-Do might be to start using a carbon calculator; for a young child, it might be to remember to stay on the trail. We want to help build good habits. All age groups do a weather measurement activity to stress the importance of climate change, and of being active contributors to citizens’ science initiatives. And for all of us, regardless of age, part of our personal development is to figure out what role we can have in sustainability issues. How can each of us make a difference?

Well, the concept of learning equality did come into the conversation. We deliberately incorporated activities requiring varied learning skills in an effort to accommodate different learning styles. Visual and spatial learners, for example, learn well from charts and diagrams. We’ve created Field Guides that allow for a bit of doodling and also appeal to verbal learners who like reading and writing and filling in blanks. Auditory learners tend to like multiple choice and to hear something repeated aloud. We made a conscious effort to include small group work for social learners, and hikes and hands-on activities that will appeal to the kinaesthetic learners, like weather measurements – using sling-psychrometers to test for Relative Humidity, anemometers to measure wind speed, and demonstrations of how chocolate candy bars resemble glaciers. For linguistic learners we have read-aloud opportunities using the Field Guides and some statistics; for logical and mathematical learners we have some independent, solitary work. Most people are a combination of these learning styles. We wanted to be as inclusive as possible! This approach to the creation of the program, along with making the teaching materials publicly available and open educational resources, was really exciting for us!

We make the most of our location. It’s more than an outdoor classroom. First of all, the Sea to Sky Gondola is situated on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples – the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Tsleil-Waututh & Musqueam First Nations. The summit is at 885 metres, just high enough that we go from coastal rainforest at base, to subalpine. And we are located in Átl’ka7tsem Howe Sound, a Biosphere Reserve recognized by UNESCO as being of global ecological significance. This location is uniquely suited to teaching how glaciers sculpt mountains and carve out a fjord. We have everything you need to show how mountains are made and change - the rock cycle at work. With flagging trees and krummholz. With roots growing out of rock. We have regolith and duff, felsic dykes, erratics. We have a local volcano. We can show you how folded mountains are made. It’s the perfect place to learn about mountains.

Absolutely! Our Junior Ranger and Junior Engineer courses are based on the BC curriculum. For example, if you are a Grade 3 teacher teaching food webs to students, you can come and do that with us. If you are Grade 7 teacher covering evolution by natural selection, we’ll teach your students about adaptations in the subalpine. We try to not replicate activities they might do in the classroom and to utilize our unique location as much as possible. There is a transformative power to learning at the Sea to Sky Gondola. You’re out of the classroom and your daily routine. It gives a fresh take on a classroom subject.

Our Backcountry Leadership course is one of our most popular programs. Students learn about hike planning and safety. They do some basic first aid, build stretchers out of tree branches and jackets, and an overnight shelter in the forest. We work through a “What if…” scenario where a simple day-hike goes wrong. It’s an excellent team-building exercise and an opportunity for students to take turns at group leadership and cooperation.

Obviously this was not a one-off. Our goal was to create teaching the material and then share that knowledge. Not only did we create the programs, we made all our teaching materials open source and fully available online for both children and adults, ranging in age from Kindergarten to Grade 12 and beyond; students and visitors to Sea to Sky Gondola, but we also wanted to make the materials open source and available online to anyone, students and interested parties in Squamish, in Kathmandu. You can find them on our web site at https://www.seatoskygondola.com/education/mountain-sustainability-program/mountain-sustainability-materials/ and the GEO Mountains site at https://geomountains.org/resources/training-capacity-development. We’re now developing Case Studies so that each time you visit us, there will new content and activities. A class could do a Case Study in ecological restoration; or a Case Study on the significance of soil temperatures. There’s more to come. Watch this space.