By Jesse Pyles, OA Director
As we circle up each semester with new students and their families, our welcoming words are clear: “The Outdoor Academy is first and foremost a school.” For us, the learning is the thing. Students are here to participate in an educational experience of the highest caliber. It’s why Intellect is the first of our four Cornerstones, followed by Environment, Craft, and Community.
At OA, we make learning and living indistinguishable. This happens both by design and in practice. Each semester, we aim to create in students a disposition for learning, cultivated through a number of OA traditions intended to build habits of lifelong learning. Yes, we offer rigorous, honors-level classes in Math, English, Environmental Science, History, and Spanish. However, what makes an OA education transformational for our students is the immersive, supportive learning community they find here.
How do we create such a community? I believe that many of our traditions promote community formation and habits of intellect outside of academic classes. Here are just a few:
Morning Watch: Each class day on campus, students gather to silently climb the hill behind the dorms. There, they greet the rising sun in a moment of quiet reflection. Morning Watch is about routine and intention and observation. It’s about committing yourself to a practice.
Work Crew: Weekly Work Crew projects, daily chores, and regular meal prep and cleanup promote the value of pitching in to care for your place. Work Crew is about identifying needs and jumping in to fill them. It’s also about knowing the impact you can have individually and collectively.
Community Meeting: Our weekly, student-run Community Meeting is an opportunity to express gratitude and address group concerns. It also allows students to continually practice communication, planning, and leadership skills. Community Meeting is about listening carefully, speaking thoughtfully, and making room for different perspectives. It’s about exercising your agency and engaging fully in your surroundings.
Giving Day: Students and staff work secretly all semester on a meaningful, hand-crafted gift for their Giving Day recipient. Giving Day is about careful planning, deep engagement with a skill, and time management. It’s about establishing objectives, and then revising, refining, and fine-tuning. It’s about sharing your best self with others.
Goodnight Circle: Every night, students circle up on Cabin 7 Field under the stars to hold hands and sing a quiet song before heading to bed. It reminds us of our place in the full group. Holding hands and singing together at dusk can help us to shed pretense, to buy into the life of the community with little thought for superficial appearances. Goodnight Circle is about leaving the work of the day behind and settling in to rest.
These traditions and so many other daily functions of OA build a trusting and vibrant Community. This allows us to so fully explore the intellectual lives of our students in the four short months of one semester. All of this work and learning is further integrated with and complemented by opportunities to grow skills and leadership through our Outdoor Programming (Environment) and Craft curriculum. The OA faculty and staff work tirelessly to craft this learning experience with intention. They also beautifully model these habits of intellect through committed engagement in the full life of the community in and out of the classroom.
When students leave OA, we want them to remember how they learned here, even more than what they learned. These traditions are unique to The Outdoor Academy. However, the lessons they promote are universal learning tools: routine, proactivity, responsibility, inclusion, persistence, belonging, wellness, and more. We want students to know that they have an impact on their communities, agency over their lives, and a real responsibility to care for themselves and their places.
I’ll leave you with one final example. After lunch, students and faculty set aside an hour of their day to engage in independent pursuits during Office Hours. Faculty are available to check in with students about their work, or to dive deeper into an interesting topic from class that day. You’re also likely to find community members taking this time to learn a new guitar chord from a peer, paint or collage in the Art Room, or walk one of the campus trails. Office Hours is about making time in your day to explore and engage in new pursuits.
Now, it’s your turn: How might you incorporate similar daily, weekly, or monthly habits of intellect into your own life?
-Jesse
Contact Jesse at jesse@enf.org