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Journey to knowledge

At DHS, Expeditionary learners explore rivers’ uses, history

Expeditionary learning, one of three pedagogical approaches to education at Durango High School, lives up to its name.

By the end of the semester in May, five sections – about 130 students – in teacher Ryan Montgomery’s sophomore English class will have learned water hydraulics on a classroom water table, visited the hydroelectric plant at Tacoma on the Animas River north of Durango, rafted on the Animas River and spent three days at Glen Canyon Dam, Antelope Canyon and the Powell Museum in Page, Arizona.

The students’ river-oriented adventures started with reading The Emerald Mile. The story by Kevin Fedarko relates how three men in a wooden dory, the eponymous Emerald Mile, set the human-powered record for covering the 277-mile length of the Grand Canyon.

The trio launched at Page, Arizona, on June 23, 1983, at the height of the biggest flooding on the Colorado River in two generations. Rowing furiously, they reached the Grand Wash Cliffs in slightly less than 37 hours.

By comparison, rafters cover the distance in 2½ weeks and motorized boats take about a week.

Fedarko characterizes his book as a love letter about the awe-inspiring Grand Canyon and the river people associated with it that he came to admire through working as a lowly baggage boatman for six seasons on Grand Canyon rafting runs.

Behind the adventure story is the broader theme of people’s ambivalence about the environment. They want to preserve its naturalness and beauty but at the same time dominate it for utilitarian purposes such as building dams, generating power and, very recently as proposed by a business group, constructing a 1.4-mile tramway that could take 4,000 visitors a day from the rim to a restaurant and amphitheater 3,200 feet below.

Overall, students find that The Emerald Mile deals with science, history, environmental studies and English vocabulary and grammar.

As the students work their way through the book, Fedarko spent two days with them last week, meeting separately with each class. Fedarko didn’t lecture, but took a Socratic approach to draw reaction from the young minds.

Celia Hall many times has heard her father condemn the construction of Glen Canyon Dam to create Lake Powell and forever cover the striking gorges and million-year-old rocks. She intends to form her own opinion.

“I want to get a different perspective on the canyon and the dam,” she said. “I want to hear some other ideas.”

Sophia Meiers said the Grand Canyon is thought-provoking.

“I have mixed emotions because of the battle between our desire for material possessions and what we want for our Earth,” she said.

It’s a tough choice, Fedarko said. He was anti-dam, he said, until he tracked down the engineers who built the dam and learned how proud they were of the project how it provided a commodity used by so many people.

Montgomery’s class is a typical example of expeditionary education.

The other approaches to learning at Durango High School are STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and math) and the International Baccalaureate, which emphasizes global issues and the inter-connectedness of people and events.

Upon entering DHS, students and/or their parents choose their niche. All students take the foundational subjects required to graduate. Electives determine the individual paths to graduation.

daler@durangoherald.com



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