Environmental Education at the Princeton-Blairstown Center

Identification chart

Imagine a beautiful forest setting with clean air, miles of trails, and clear streams. Now imagine you were back in school in such a setting. Your teacher gives you a bucket, a net, maybe some petri dishes and magnifying glasses, and a species identification chart. Would you be excited for your lesson?

Environmental education is taught in classrooms around the world but there is something special about learning about the environment, in the environment that you are learning about. The National Environmental Education Foundation reported that students who participate in programs and activities outdoors show an increase in intrinsic motivation and improvement in student’s learning attitudes. You may not have access to a beautiful 268-acre campus like the Princeton-Blairstown Center every day, but that is ok! Your school yard, playground, or nearby parks and public lands work just as well when implementing an immersive environmental education curriculum.

Two students explore the water at the Center as part of their stream study.

Even if you are unfamiliar with environmental education but are willing and able to take your students on a field trip, the Princeton-Blairstown Center is the place to go! We offer fifteen curriculum-aligned programs for students featuring inquiry-based, hands-on science learning. Each program combines outdoor exploration with STEM- and SEL-reinforcing activities to help participants engage more deeply with science and the scientific method. Our environmental education curriculum is aligned to middle school curriculum standards. However, Center staff can help high school teachers plan the use of our outdoor classroom for higher-level, hands-on biology and environmental/earth science classes

Environmental education not only improves academic achievement according to the National Environmental Education Foundation but it also encourages environmental stewardship, deepens personal development and wellbeing, and strengthens communities.

Courses at the Center include everything from forest ecology, stream science, phenology and climate change to ornithology, nocturnal animals, and amphibian studies. Our Environmental Education page has course descriptions and previews.

Many species call the Princeton-Blairstown Center home and your experience may include canoeing by a busy beaver building a dam, listening to owls at dusk, or turning over rocks in a search for salamanders. Whatever program you choose, your experience will be authentic, engaging, and spark an interest in learning.

Students carefully hold salamanders.

Participants at the Center smile about their hands-on experience with salamanders.

STEM, SEL, & PBC

Sometimes it seems like there is a “day” for everything. There’s Pi Day, National Panda Day, National Puppy Day, National Potato Chip Day… we could go on. However, there are two events that the Princeton-Blairstown Center is especially interested in celebrating this month!

Four Summer Bridge participants pose for the camera.

 SEL Day, celebrated on March 11, is a way to celebrate the importance of social emotional learning (SEL). Social emotional learning is a mainstay of the Center’s programming and is woven into every single activity and course. We believe it is important to incorporate social emotional learning into our programming because providing SEL programming allows youth to practice and become competent in social-emotional skills such as learning how to identify and process their emotions, become more self-aware, and develop compassion and empathy for others. To showcase and promote our SEL curriculum and celebrate SEL Day, we shared pictures, videos, and articles on all our social media that relate to social emotional learning. We even share ALL our resources, including our SEL curriculum for middle- and high school students — for free. You can find all of our SEL resources here.

March is also NJ Stem Month! This month, all organizations in the state are called upon to showcase and celebrate their work in STEM. The Center has been actively participating in the month-long celebration of all things STEM by posting photos, stories, and videos on social media using the hashtag: #NJSTEMMonth. You can find all of our #NJSTEMMonth posts on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter!

Summer Bridge participants work together on an assignment.

All our programming has SEL and STEM elements, but we have one program in particular that really focuses on both SEL and STEM: the award-winning Summer Bridge Program, a one-week leadership and academic enrichment program that focuses on developing social emotional learning skills, lessening summer learning loss, and helping students create strong relationships with their peers and with adults. During the week-long program, students are divided into small groups of 10-12 and paired with a trained facilitator and a school/agency chaperone.  Each group spends time engaged in hands-on Literacy, STEM, and SEL activities. Traditionally, the program is held at our campus in Blairstown, but with a global pandemic we decided to bring the program to the communities where our students live in 2021 and 2022.

Two Summer Bridge participants collaborating.

 The Center’s Summer Bridge Program is designed to serve youth from historically marginalized communities – free of charge. We realize that not everybody has the same access to resources and opportunities. This is our way of helping to provide quality SEL and STEM education to everybody!

Because we do want everybody to have a reason to celebrate SEL day and NJ STEM Month with us this March!

Why S.T.E.A.M.?

(Editor’s Note: This post was co-written by Kathryn Cimis-DeBiasse, former Madison, NJ Visual Arts Teacher.)

By now, most people are likely familiar with the term STEM, an acronym that outlines educational instruction and activities related to the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. But what about STEAM?

Students in PBC Wilderness Leadership School classes created their own animals to reinforce a lesson about animal adaptations.

The argument for incorporating the Arts into STEM instruction may at first seem incongruous. But for educators and those who are real-world technology problem-solvers, the connection between art and science is a given. “The connection is obvious for anyone who has ever worked in any traditional STEM career. Everyone from software engineers and aerospace technicians to biotechnical engineers, professional mathematicians, and laboratory scientists know that building great things and solving real problems requires a measure of creativity. More and more, professional artists themselves are incorporating technological tools and scientific processes to their art,” says Mary Beth Hertz, a certified technology integration specialist in her article on the topic in Edutopia.

According to Elliot Eisner (1933-2014), the late Stamford University Professor of Arts Education, there are ten lessons the Arts teach:

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem-solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press.

As we read Eisner’s list, we can see how the study of the Arts links to both science and technology as well as social and emotional learning - both of which are an integral part of the curricula at the Princeton-Blairstown Center.

Summer Bridge Students from an NJIT cohort explain an A.I. software concept using visual aids they created for their pitch.

Eisner’s first item extols the arts as a means of teaching students how to make qualitative judgments. In our data-driven culture, the ability of individuals, communities, and organizations to wisely discern and apply qualitative analysis to quantitative information is paramount for achieving novel and creative solutions to the challenges we face.

In the visual arts, these muscles are routinely exercised as students approach an assignment or project. For instance, within the genre of portrait painting, when students investigate and analyze how artists have approached this topic and how technology, sociology, and historical events have shaped what constitutes a portrait, it releases them to explore a variety of visual vocabulary (and media), and add to that dialogue as they create their “solution” to this visual problem.

Through the critique process students begin to respectfully observe, discuss, and recognize areas of success and opportunities for improvement, both in their own work and the work of others. They begin to see that, unlike some other areas of study, there is often more than one right answer, and shades and degrees of success. In STEM, the pace of technological change and the nature of scientific discoveries require the ability to be open to different viewpoints, and the ability to go where the data lead you. “Surrendering to unanticipated possibilities” is a way for scientists to potentially reduce personal bias in research and be open to whatever the research and data indicate.

Summer Bridge 2021 students created ad campaigns designed to educate and inspire behavior change around current environmental justice issues.

Through visual arts, students also begin to learn that in some ways, a given piece is never truly finished, though for practical purposes we as educators and students may call it so.  This is an important paradigm shift as we realize in many areas of life, we revel in the inclination to check the box and be “done.” Orientation to task completion is a real cognitive phenomenon, and often stands in the way of the most important elements of work. Learning how to spend time in that uncomfortably incomplete grey zone, and subsequently reviewing and revising a project or assignment repeatedly through iterative processing, is a difficult but important skill for everyone. 

For the artist, developing the ability to see opportunities for exploration and improvement is never meant to be confused with the ability to achieve perfection. Rather, it’s about seeing, observing, and knowing what the next step “might be”, but often, accepting that the next step may be something that is explored in a future objective, or assignment, and being comfortable with that. This perspective has tremendous value for scientists, engineers, architects, mathematicians, and other science-based professionals, and the arts can be a fun and creative way to introduce and immerse students in this mindset.

Summer Learning At PBC

It’s National Summer Learning Week! Each year the National Summer Learning Association (NSLA) celebrates National Summer Learning Week to elevate the importance of keeping kids learning, safe, and healthy, ensuring they return to school ready to succeed. This year, the importance of making sure kids are prepared when they return to school is even more important than ever, and PBC is proud to be a partner in this work.

When schools first closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, many of us presumed that it would be a few weeks before students could return to the classroom; some districts did not plan for remote learning but rather used their scheduled spring break days and “snow” days to account for students not being in school for an extended period. As we know, those few weeks turned into months and, in some cases, more than a year of remote learning. Parents, teachers, and caregivers have seen the impact extended remote learning has had on students, particularly in the Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities. Students in these communities were more likely to have remained in remote learning situations longer than others and, according to a report from McKinsey, the cumulative learning loss could be six to 12 months, compared to four to eight months for white students.

Students at Achievers Academy in Trenton try their hand at the “walking A” activity, a teambuilding and communication challenge.

PBC’s award-winning Summer Bridge Program kicked off this month, bringing our summer learning experience to young people in Trenton and Newark completely free of charge. This one-week leadership and academic enrichment program designed to serve young people from historically marginalized communities in New Jersey was honored with the 2018 NSLA New York Life Foundation Excellence in Summer Learning Founder’s Award, which recognizes outstanding summer programs that demonstrate excellence in accelerating academic achievement and promoting healthy development for low-income children and youth between pre-kindergarten and twelfth grade. Summer Bridge is normally held on our Blairstown Campus, but hosting students overnight in small cabins seemed too great a risk given the ongoing pandemic. Therefore, PBC’s staff reconfigured the curriculum and logistics and came up with a plan to bring the Summer Bridge Program to participants in their own communities this year. PBC is continuing to partner with schools and community-based organizations in Trenton and Newark to provide 90 minutes of academic enrichment each day, along with a host of leadership, team-building, and problem-solving activities designed to build social-emotional skills in schoolyards and local parks.

The academic curriculum focuses on STEM and literacy in a series of hands-on, inquiry-driven, interdisciplinary outdoor learning experiences centered on equity and social justice, with a focus on the power of community gardening as a means of civic action and towards food justice. Students also form positive, supportive relationships with peers and adults while increasing environmental awareness and proactive stewardship of natural resources. In addition to meeting a wide range of Common Core Literacy and Next Generation Science Standards, the social-emotional elements of the Summer Bridge Program meet important Career Ready Practices and 21st Century Life and Career Skills that are critical pieces of the revised New Jersey Student Learning Standards.

A summer Bridge literacy lesson, held on-site at Achievers Academy as part of Summer Bridge 2021.

Students from Achievers Academy in Trenton participated in the first week of Summer Bridge and were happy with their experience. One student said she learned how to communicate with others when she was frustrated and another student said that this was the first time she had an opportunity to attend anything like a summer camp and how much fun she had canoeing. If the photos from their day at Blairstown are any clue, it’s safe to assume many other students felt the same way.

And as this year’s Summer Learning Week winds down, we are looking forward to a visit from the CEO of the National Summer Learning Association, Aaron Dworkin! He and several others from the team at NSLA, plus a potential future program partner, are slated to join us for an action-packed visit during a day of Summer Bridge on-site programming. We can’t think of a better way to send off this year’s celebration, and are excited for the many ways we might expand and enhance our partnership with the United States’ premier coalition of summer learning programs.

Virtual Summer Bridge - A New Learning Adventure

Last month we shared the disappointing news that, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Princeton-Blairstown Center (PBC) would be unable to welcome groups of students to the Blairstown Campus for our award-winning Summer Bridge enrichment program this year. As most Compass Points readers know, the PBC Summer Bridge program is designed to ameliorate the insidious “summer learning loss” that particularly affects children in under-resourced communities. What made this announcement even more painful was the knowledge that many children from these communities were already experiencing an academic crisis caused by the hasty, but necessary implementation of online instruction and the broader economic and social distress caused by the pandemic. In fact, a recent study by the Brookings Institution reports that “these additional stressors suggest that the COVID-19 slump might have even more impact on children from under-resourced homes than the [typical] summer slump.” For these reasons (and many more), PBC is collaborating with two Summer Bridge partner organizations, Mercer Street Friends (MSF) and the Center for Child and Family Achievement (CCFA), to deliver an engaging blend of virtual STEAM, literacy, and social emotional learning programming to nearly fifty children throughout the month of July.

Students began the program developing a shared “Full Value Contract” that would govern interpersonal relationships in the virtual classroom space – the same way that we would help groups self-govern if they were physically present on Campus. Students then worked both alone and together to solve an array of STEAM and SEL challenges designed to foster critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and responsible decision-making, while strengthening their social awareness and building strong relationships with their facilitators, chaperones, and peers. Divided into small groups of fewer than ten students, each cohort was led by a trained PBC facilitator and adult chaperone from the partnering organization. This favorable “classroom” ratio enhanced personalized instruction and accountability, resulting in active student engagement during each two-hour synchronous learning session and additional hour of daily asynchronous programming.   

A screenshot of PBC Facilitator Makela reviewing the projects of students from CCFA during their Virtual Summer Bridge session.

During the program, participants contemplated scenarios such as being “lost at sea”, collaboratively prioritizing a list of life saving supplies to be loaded into their imaginary “lifeboat”. They designed and built boats using everyday household items and then developed a sales pitch to promote their model against the “competition.” They designed and played musical instruments built from found objects. They germinated and dissected seeds. They nurtured plant life for an indoor garden. They built and tested catapults, calculating the trajectories of objects launched (safely!) across their bedrooms. They made “Friendship Bracelets” and learned about indigenous American’s culture. They wrote poetry in several formats, including haiku. They dissected owl pellets, watched nature videos, and recorded their own insights in a nature journal. And perhaps most importantly, throughout the program students reflected on their progress and celebrated accomplishments. Our hope is that they also were reminded, discovered, or re-discovered that learning can be fun; working together trumps going it alone; and that there are people beyond the walls of their home who care about their well-being and success.

The feedback from our partner organizations has been uniformly positive. Wanda Webster Stansbury, Executive Director of CCFA remarked, “I want to take a moment to say thank you to everyone for an exceptional experience for all of the students who attended the Princeton-Blairstown virtual summer program. Today I enjoyed participating in sessions conducted by Makela, Handy and Tabs—you were all fantastic and the activities were fun and informative!”  Chelsea Jenkins, Program Manager for MSF, expressed her appreciation for the “original, creative, and engaging curriculum PBC developed for this virtual experience.” While all agree that nothing can truly replace a trip to PBC’s 264-acre outdoor classroom, our Trenton partners were grateful for the opportunity to work with our talented staff to provide meaningful programming that activated and challenged young minds and strengthened community bonds in these troubled times.

In designing and delivering the Virtual Summer Bridge program, the PBC staff lived the philosophy that guides our daily work with young people—growth occurs when we stretch beyond our comfort zone. While 2020 will undoubtedly be remembered for many things, our hope is that the students from CCFA and MSF will look back on this unusual summer and be inspired by PBC staff who put their own 21st Century skills to work to provide a fun and enriching experience. With the continued support of our generous donors, PBC remains committed to providing the very best in experiential and environmental programming—by any means necessary—until all can safely return to our beautiful campus in the woods.

Involve Me and I Learn

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -Benjamin Franklin

The concept of project-based learning has been around for ages. In fact, project-based learning existed long before formal schooling became the norm across the globe. Before the emergence of Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences ever showed up in educational theory circles, The Project Method was being touted as a way to overcome “assembly line education” that some felt had overtaken American classrooms and curricula.

Regardless of its history or origins, project-based learning is one of the approaches used to include experiential education in the modern classroom, and is often cited as a way to solidify instructional concepts and help students develop 21st Century Skills alongside the designated core curriculum. Additionally, there seems to be evidence that, when best practices are applied, PBL can elevate student performance achievement in high-poverty communities.

At PBC, project-based learning has long been a central part of our Summer Bridge Program, to supplement and enhance students’ literacy and STEM instruction during the week they spend at our Blairstown Campus. In the past, our PBL challenges have covered a range of topics, from pollution and environmental justice quandaries, to discussions around current civic issues in participants’ communities.

This year, our Program team is working to create yet another iteration of PBL – service learning. A subset of project-based learning, service learning is “an approach to teaching and learning in which students use academic and civic knowledge and skills to address genuine community needs.”

According to the National Service Learning Clearinghouse, service-learning can benefit both students and communities by “building effective collaborative partnerships between schools or colleges and other institutions and organizations; meeting community needs through the service projects conducted; and providing engaging and productive opportunities for young people to work with others in their community.” Essentially, when implemented intentionally, it can truly be a win-win for students and the community organizations they serve.

Be sure to stay tuned for PBC’s service-learning adventures during Summer Bridge 2020!

Looking Backward, Looking Forward

January Blog: Looking Back, Looking Forward    

We have only just closed the chapter on 2019, and it feels as though 2020 is already picking up speed. The first few weeks of a new year are a time for both reflection and anticipation as we look at how much progress we have made as an organization in the past year, and how we might move from plans to action to accomplish the many goals identified for PBC in the coming year.

In 2019, we experienced several wonderful highlights. Professional achievement included earning an Association of Experiential Education accreditation for the first time, and re-accreditation by the American Camp Association. We also added three new Trustees to our Board who bring diverse strengths, talents, experience, and many other positive attributes to our organization.

This past summer, the rubber really hit the road as 450 students joined us over six action-packed weeks for our award-winning Summer Bridge Program. This six-week-long span included new literacy and STEM lessons based on summer learning loss prevention, in addition to outdoor and environmental education, and good old-fashioned outdoor fun. The participating students’ visits were facilitated through PBC’s new and ongoing partnerships with 13 wonderful community organizations that operate in Trenton, Camden, and Newark, NJ, the majority of whom plan to be back for Summer Bridge in 2020.

Working in the garden with the 2019 LIT cohort.

Concurrently, we were also working diligently to increase our sustainability practices and reduce our overall resource use and impact on our environment. To that end, a geothermal heating and cooling installation was completed as part of the Danielson Lodge renovation (more on that in a moment!); our composting program diverted 200+ pounds of food waste from our dining facility; more than 375 pounds of food were grown in the PBC garden and served in Egner Lodge; and our sustainability committee worked all year to identify and act on additional opportunities to increase sustainable behavior.

Construction continues on the Bass Lake Dam.

In facilities management, in addition to all of the regular maintenance and upkeep that a 264-acre wooded property with nearly 8,000 visitors a year and dozens of historic structures entails, our Facilities team installed a new storage shed for the PBC garden, and oversaw three major capital improvement projects: the repaving of our main driveway, the  extensive renovation of Danielson Lodge, and the ongoing reconstruction of the Bass Lake Dam. Jody and his team had quite a year!

While these are reason to celebrate as we enter the 112th year of PBC, it seems of equal import to think of the goals ahead. For 2020, we are looking to meet the following milestones:

A sneak preview of the Danielson Lodge renovations.

• Completion of the three-year Bass Lake Dam renovation;

• Completion of the Danielson Lodge renovation;

• Implementation of a new three-year Strategic Plan;

• A strong sixth year of our Summer Bridge Program, engaging both new and existing partner organizations;

• Expanded public programming, such as the Homeschool/Afterschool Adventure series;

• Executing two successful fundraising events to offset the costs of our free and reduced-price programs;

• Continuing work in all departments that positions PBC’s facilities and programs as paragon examples of outdoor, experiential, and environmental education. 

That’s our short list! What are you or your organization’s 2020 goals?