By Aidan Daly (Science Teacher, Dean of Academics, and OA Semester 42 Alum)
Students touring the Transylvania County Landfill for Bridge class.
One of my favorite weeks of class is our waste week. Waste is something that has such a huge impact on our environment, but for many it is out of sight and therefore out of mind. When I ask our students where their waste goes, for many the answer is the trash can, or to the curb once a week, but this week, our classes encourage students to dig deeper into what is actually happening to the things we regard as useless and give them a window into the true price of overconsumption.
In their English class, students continue work on their Place Ethic essay, answering the question: How do you live well in a place? Students are on to their second draft and can include concepts of how we use and reuse items to care for our place. A newfound understanding of how their consumption impacts their environment or “place” deepens the ethic they are working on.
In both United States and World History, students read about the history of garbage, in the U.S. and on a global scale, and how humans’ conceptions of waste have shifted over time. In U.S. History, students read an excerpt from Susan Strasser’s Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. Students gain a better understanding of the shift in waste in the twentieth century and the manner in which consumption has changed with a shift away from bulk goods to single packaged goods that were not as easily recycled or reused. In World History, students read Sarah Hill’s Making Garbage, Making Land, and Making Cities: A Global History of Waste in and Out of Place, which explores similar themes of the way humans’ understanding of waste has shifted over time.
In my Science class, students read a chapter from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, “The Sacred and the Superfund,” to understand the astronomical impact improperly disposed of waste can have on communities. Students have the opportunity to see the old Ecusta Papermill site right down the road from us which became a Superfund site following its shut down. We also visit our garden on campus to better understand the compost system we use to divert food waste from our landfill and turn it into fertilizer for our plants; a great example of a closed loop system.
Student feeding the goats during a visit to Grazer’s Glade Farm in Balsam Grove.
In the middle of all of this, on Tuesday afternoon, we all load up onto a bus and drive 20 minutes up to the top of a mountain with 360 degree views of the beautiful Appalachian landscape. It is on top of this mountain that the Transylvania County Landfill sits. A trash mountain made not from millions of years of geological processes, but 20 years of human consumption. Students come prepared with questions for the manager of the landfill to better understand what really happens to our trash when we put it on the curb of our houses. They leave feeling inspired and empowered to be more conscious of the waste they produce and to live better in their place.
OA’s Bridged Curriculum, or “Bridge,” began as an idea to get students off campus and into the real world, engaging with the community that surrounds our campus on 43 Hart Rd. As a school that believes so strongly in experiential education, teachers are constantly seeking opportunities to get students outside the four walls of a classroom. Our name “The Outdoor Academy” likely elicits images of students in forests, on rivers, and scaling rocks, and while those experiences will always be central to students learning, Bridge allows for opportunities for students to better understand how humans interact with the natural world with a place-based focus on Western North Carolina.
When former OA science teacher Emily Cava Northrop and humanities teacher Chelsea Staunton looked at the schedule a few years back, they saw an opportunity. Their classes, Environmental Science, English, and History were back to back, giving them a four hour chunk to bring the classes together to explore the world, and thus Bridge was born. Beyond an opportunity to get students into the world talking with local “experts”, Bridge has made way for our interdisciplinary curriculum in which themes intertwine across students’ classes and they are able to look at topics through the lens of a writer, a scientist, and a historian.
Our Bridge themes and field trips shift from semester to semester as we continue to build connections in the community and seek out organizations whose specialty would benefit our students’ learning. This semester’s Bridge field trips included the Transylvania County Library local history section, Grazer’s Glade Mountain Ranch, the Landfill, trail work with Carolina Mountain Club, Hood Huggers in West Asheville, downtown Brevard with Brevard City planning, and a live Moth Storytelling event. Each of these field trips, in tandem with the Science, English, and History curricula, expands students’ understanding of human interaction with the environment.
Aidan and students during their “Origin Stories” Bridge class.