Before I could Recreate it…I had to Remember it

This post was unplanned. I’m working on more practical posts but before I get to those I realized I wanted to take a step back and talk about how I came to remember the importance of Camp Redwood in my life; and how that remembering got me set on a path to recreate it as a foundation in our home. I’m sharing this for several reasons. The first is, I think there’s some really important epiphanies about our education system in the U.S. within the process I went through of recalling the benefits of my summer camp experience. Second, I wanted to share a story about remembering something so good, even if it doesn’t qualify as worthy by our society’s standards. But most importantly, I want to share with you what can happen when we open ourselves up to remembering something valuable from our past and its potential to impact our own, and our children’s, futures. Sharing Recreating Camp for my family is absolutely about sharing some gems from Camp Redwood and my journey to recreate it with you so you might take away something valuable for yourself and your family. But it’s also about telling a story of empowered parenting. Instead of believing the narrative present today that I’m not good/qualified/educated/knowledgeable/competent enough to parent my child, make decisions for my family, and trust myself I’ve decided to subvert expectations and use my strengths, expertise, and insight from several seasons at summer camp to craft a childhood experience for my son because that’s what I have within me. The biggest hope I have from sharing these things is it will help you remember what it is you have within you to bring to your parenting journey. I hope this inspires you to stop believing you aren’t the best parent for your kid just as you are today and lean into what it is you do have and can bring to craft a childhood for your kids that makes you as excited and happy as recreating camp does for me.

That’s a long introduction. So let me briefly set the stage for you: in 2019 I left my job working in first-year seminars and programming to start doctoral studies in a program called Learning Sciences. This is a sort of emerging field within education. It’s very interdisciplinary and that’s what caught my eye. I’d been teaching honors students for a few years and one of our foundations of honors learning was interdisciplinary; I loved helping my students see the connection between their passion for drumming and that boring biology class or the reasons it mattered they have skills in writing and speaking if they wanted to be a mathematician who explained the complexities of the Fibonacci sequence in nature. It intrigued me a scholarly program would take such an interdisciplinary approach to training education researchers. I didn’t especially want to be a professor at a university or even keep working at one. I really just wanted to go and immerse myself in this new conversation about learning, pedagogy, and education research. I got into the program with the notion I’d research the conditions of empowering learning environments for college learners. 

Then, everything changed.

A week before moving to start the program I found out I was pregnant with our son. The road to pregnancy had been rocky and uncertain. After two years we’d succeeded in the most unlikely of times. I arrived and quickly had to find a support team to help manage my high risk pregnancy. Additionally, I wasn’t assigned to any research or labs dealing with collegiate learners and most of my classes weren’t focused on adult learning either. Everything I was doing was either elementary or adolescent learning, and even a few things we early childhood learning. It was bizarre because nothing was as I’d anticipated but as it unfolded, and with the gift of reflection, I can see how it all makes perfect sense now.

In my first semester I took a class examining the conditions of various environments on human development and learning. The course had several articles as assigned reading coming from the research on positive youth development, most specifically from Richard M. Lerner and his proteges. They were specifically analyzing the positive effects on human development outcomes from children and adolescents who attended 4H programming. With each article I read a little piece of camp would come back to me. I’d be deep in these theoretical and empirical analyses and all of a sudden remember a specific camper who exhibited the kinds of outcomes the authors were detailing, or a time when a whole group of campers had a cool breakthrough. These were memories I hadn’t recalled in a long time because on the surface they might have seemed unimportant, but from the perspective of the case these researchers were making, these seemingly small moments had a big influence on future individual growth. Things like finally being able to cross the monkey bars or working together as a group to set up a spot to have lunch on a long hike; creating the tie dye shirt of their dreams or coming up with a skit for the weekly talent show they were so proud to showcase. It turns out, the researchers argued, these are experiences that lead to confidence, competence, connection, character, and caring and these characteristics (the five c’s as the research team called them) are vital to learning in-and-out of the classroom. I’d walk into class each week trying to think of how to reframe the memories I had into something more collegiate, and would find myself by hour three of the seminar gushing about some camp kid from my past who had one of these incredible opportunities because they went to camp.

I also took a course on learning theories where we covered the landscape of educational research from old to emerging. Mostly we were looking at techniques of education research but to do that we had to look at some actual studies. In preparing an example of the kind of research where kids are actually subjected to a treatment I came across a study from the early 2000’s in which elementary students dealing with ADD/ADHD were pulled from sitting in class for hours on end for one hour every day to dance. I was drawn to it because I love dance. I grew up dancing and worked for a professional dance company briefly (in administration – not on stage!) when I first moved to Atlanta. Dance is one of my absolute favorite things. What the researchers found was, this one hour a day of movement and creativity and fun helped every single student’s in-classroom experiences. Some improved on test scores and other measures, while some even came off their medication. As I read I recalled this same experience happening with kids at camp. They’d arrive at the beginning of the summer complete with a warning label from their parents: this kid struggled so badly in school this year they had [insert any and all behavior problems under the sun]. But after a week or two with us, at camp, a lot of those issues mellowed or even dissipated. Being outside, in fresh air, moving their bodies and doing different things seemed, like the dance experiment, to give kids an outlet for expression and freedom. As I shared this with my cohort in class one night I could hear it again, I was telling camp stories – not college stories – to present my own anecdotal observations of the research findings. 

What was happening to me!? I was supposed to be talking about collegiate learners and their learning environments but all I could think of was camp!

No place was camp experience more present to me than in the undergraduate course I was shadowing and preparing to teach for the duration of my time in the program: adolescent development. I loved the course content but again, felt like I wasn’t supposed to be talking about adolescent learning but college learners. The first semester I was asked to take on a couple units from the professor who was teaching and teach it as a demo to be sure I could take on the course in future semesters. One of the units I chose involved the history of adolescent education. I will never forget the feeling, standing in front of a classroom of future middle school educators and being hit with the realization: our contemporary education system was built to keep workers in factories, not out of some inspirational commitment to deep learning for all. Now let me pause here and be clear, most of the people you meet who are educators are committed, sincerely, to inspirational learning for all. I know so many of them personally, they are incredible, and this is not a knock on them. It is simply a statement of the fact that the system itself was not designed for the purpose we have collectively elevated it to contemporarily. The industrial revolution saw a dramatic change in the way we produce in this country, requiring human hands in factories, along conveyor belts, standing at machines, or loading products up for transport. This upheaval required everyone in the family to work – including children. But the impact on children was horrible so a movement rose up to release children from these labor conditions. That’s all well and good. The problem was, where will these children go every day so their parents can keep working? The solution was compulsory school and baked into the solution was an idea: what if school prepared these kids to take their parents’ place in said factory once they were old enough?

Standing in the front of the room, four months pregnant, teaching this lesson I felt like I’d been hit by a bus. 

The next week I attended my seminar course and the most significant thing happened. We were having a heated discussion about indoctrination in education, the prior week’s lesson still wreaking havoc on my senses. This small discussion style seminar had 12 people in the room, nine of us were born and raised in the U.S. and the three people were from China, Costa Rica, and the UAE – this last individual being our professor. She paused the conversation at one point and, knowingly, asked, “well, let’s just take a step back and ask, ‘what is the purpose of education?’”

In perfect unison, like good little soldiers, the nine of us born and raised (and educated) in the U.S. said, “to create a productive society.”

In that moment I knew, I was no longer going to research what I thought I was going to research. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to research but I knew I wanted to shift from college learning to empowered learning in informal learning environments. 

At the end of my first semester I looked back and realized I’d learned more as a future mother than I had a future scholar. During my second semester I raced to complete my work in double time so I could take an informal maternity leave beginning in mid-March 2020. I wrote my teaching philosophy in those final weeks and relied on a quote from Carl Rogers in his book Freedom to Learn as a bedrock of what I believe about learning.

“[Learning can be]self-initiated.Even when the impetus or stimulus comes from the outside, the sense of discovery…of grasping and comprehending, comes from within…The locus of evaluation…resides definitely in the learner. Its essence is meaning. When such learning takes place, the element of meaning to the learner is built into the whole experience.”

I went on my maternity leave, having our sweet son in the final days of March 2020, completed a few assignments from home in those weird weeks of new motherhood at the dawn of a pandemic. Then, I never went back. I withdrew from the program. I’d gotten everything I needed.

I started listening to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast and reading The Call of the Wild and Free by Ainsley Arment and those were the final pieces to bust the rust off my camp experiences and make me realize, this was the path forward for my family. This was my purpose. All of it had lead to this. Those two resources, the podcast and book, helped me not only bust off the rust but also shift my beliefs about what is “good enough” when it comes to learning. Prior to that fall 2019 semester I’d put all those camp memories and experiences and assets in a box in my brain that said, “this stuff was fun but not really worthy.” Everything I’d experienced made me dust that box off and pull out its contents, holding them up to a new light: this stuff was fun, and that’s part of what makes it worthy. But it’s also worthy because it allows individuals to develop their character, learn outside of a system that wants them to become producers, and have space to create, move, and become. It’s also worthy because it’s a big part of me, and one of the best parts of me, and it’s time I stopped belittling its worth and starting leaning into its value.”

Remembering Camp was the key to believing I should and could Recreate Camp. Remembering Camp gave me my why and allowed me permission to brainstorm the how. What a beautiful experience I had! As the calendar page turned on the new year I started wondering, how many of my past experiences have I labeled as unimportant and filed away when in reality, remembering them might unlock something valuable and insightful for me? How many seasons of my life have I labeled as bad or wasted and filed away, sure there isn’t anything worthwhile to bring into the present? 

You see, Recreating Camp isn’t just about bringing this fun thing from my childhood into my adulthood. Recreating Camp is grounded in a belief I can educate better from the posture I developed there than I can the postures I developed in formal learning because my best strengths live there. 

What might you remember from your own past, files you’ve allowed to become dusty with beliefs of worthlessness, that might actually hold something incredibly powerful for you and your family?

Originally posted 1/9/23 on old website