Seeding the Future: Our Seniors Designed a Place They'd Graduate Before Using
By Janis Boulbol and Abbie Castriotta, Woodstock Middle/High School
There was a morning in the middle of winter when we looked at the weather and decided it was not a great day to go up to the King Farm. Our students thought we were crazy. “What?! We're not going up?” They had been on that land every school day since September, and by then the trip up the hill was not something we did to them. It belonged to them.
The King Farm is a Vermont Land Trust property across the street from our school, about a two-minute drive up the hill. It has been quiet for a long time. There is a capital campaign underway to turn the barn into a classroom and community space. Last fall, our CRAFT class went up for a fifty-minute period every single day to learn different aspects of permaculture design and then apply them to the landscape, as a way of guiding what the future of that space could look like.
These were seniors. Whatever eventually gets built at the King Farm, they will not be students when it happens. We could have given them a project with a finish line inside the school year. Instead, we asked them to design something for the students who come next. We wanted them to have a voice and a feeling of agency about the future.
What they came up with
They started with the land itself, including its history and how it came to the Vermont Land Trust. Then they designed.
They proposed a classroom space away from the school building, with a less traditional classroom feel. They looked at a red pine stand with almost no diversity in it and reasoned their way to a crop. As one student explained it: "Red pines make the soil quite acidic, and blueberry bushes thrive in that environment." They planned forestry management, pollinator habitat, and a native plant nursery. They also designed in a playground. "A playground could be a nice thing to do, just a space where people could go." Not one of them will ever play on it.
Part of their design included a native plant nursery, and somebody had to grow the plants. That somebody was them.
So they built small beds out of lumber donated by the national park. Chestnuts, aronia, and other natives that do well in restoration work. In a bed one foot by two feet you can plant hundreds of seeds. They processed black walnuts by hand, which is far messier than it sounds, and hosed the husk off until clean nuts came out. Someday a lot of those trees might end up at the King Farm, plugged into the permaculture design the same students were drawing that fall.
Sitting still
The thing that really seemed to grab their hearts and minds was the sit spots. We would send them out to a spot of their own and have them pretty much do nothing, which is not something they usually do in school. It was a hard adjustment at first. By midwinter they were the ones asking. Are we doing sit spots today?
That is the piece we would tell another teacher to take. It costs nothing. You need a place, a protected block of time, and the nerve to let students be unproductive in it. You might be amazed at what emerges.
What we'd say to another teacher
Two years ago we ran a riparian planting project where the need was obvious, and we set the frame. This was different. We had literally no idea what the end product was going to be. The students really developed that. That was uncomfortable, and that was the point.
At the end, we had them write about the King Farm ten years out. If you're here in ten years, what are you seeing, what are you hearing, what are you feeling? One student wrote: "The farm looks alive! There's people, it's no longer a ghost town besides our class."
In the spring, our seniors spent a morning planting natives with preschoolers, showing much smaller hands how to get a plant into the ground. You could feel the connections between the little ones and our graduating seniors, like a connecting thread through time. Our seniors graduated, but they’re excited to come back someday and see what it has become. We think they will.
For more information, contact Janis Boulbol and Abbie Castriotta at Woodstock Middle/High School, or the Equitable Climate Action Project at uvtpc.com/hopefulstories or bit.ly/hopefulstories.
