Good Morning.

And thank you, (Mr. Mayor) Peter, for that kind introduction.

As you just heard, for about the past 30 years I’ve been a teacher– both in and beyond the classroom. It was almost exactly half-way through my career as an educator that everything changed for me– on the day that my wife and I became parents for the first and only time with the birth of our twins.

In the chronology of our lives together that was the big divide– the time B.C. — “Before Children”– and the time A.D. — “After Delivery”.

During the B.C. part of my teaching career, I had the sense that I was a capable and competent educator, but I also had the nagging feeling that something essential was missing– though I couldn’t quite articulate what it was.

Once our children were born and we moved into the A.D. time of our lives,
it gradually became clearer to me what had been missing. But it took awhile for me to begin to name it.

During the first two years of our children’s lives I had a wonderful and challenging opportunity– I took a leave of absence from my job to be a “stay at home” Dad with our kids while my wife returned to her job here in Silicon Valley.

Among the many things I discovered during those two years was a greatly expanded sense of what it meant to be “at home”. Several days a week I’d make every effort possible to get us all outside– to the neighborhood park, into the nearby woods, along the shoreline, onto the hills, down by the creek, over to the lake– where together we could play and discover and frolic and picnic and sleep.

“Staying at home” really became an opportunity to draw a bigger and bigger circle around our house– and in doing so we began to embrace a much larger sense of belonging and community– of what it meant to be “at home”. Together we were discovering our “sense of place”– a powerful and palpable connection to the larger world outside our doors.

When I returned to my teaching position following my leave as a “Manny” (as some of my friends called me) I knew what had been missing–
and what I needed to address if I was to become a more effective educator. I needed to give my students a more intimate sense of their place, a more direct experience with the world beyond my classroom, and a stronger feeling of connection to the living web of relationships to which they belonged.

And, so, I worked with my colleagues to create several new classes– in Earth Science, Environmental Studies, and Integrated Science– which require of each student an additional twenty hours per semester of “beyond the classroom” explorations outside.

The best model I know for how to effectively integrate such indoor and outdoor learning opportunities is the one I have experienced through Conexions– the Exploring a Sense of Place program. Taking San Francisquito Creek Watershed as their local bioregional “home”, the program combines in-class lectures, activities, and discussions with field trips into local parks, preserves, and nature study areas. Over the course of a full year, we’ve not only learned about our local ecology (the word itself literally means “the study of our home”) but we’ve developed a deeper sense of our belonging– with each other, within our community, and in the greater scheme of things.

Recently I adapted this “Exploring a Sense of Place” model in creating a new program for my own local bioregion– in the East Bay’s San Leandro Creek Watershed. This wonderful book — that Sense of Place founders Karen Harwell and Joanna Reynolds created– makes crafting your own “nature discovery” program relatively easy to do.

Our program is called Camp WOW! “Wonders of the Watershed” and is now in its third year. Over the course of full-week sessions, we take middle and high school kids on daily adventures throughout the watershed. We ascend an ancient volcano, ramble through a redwood forest, follow local fault traces, hike into uninhabited wilderness, swim in the reservoir, go birding along the shoreline, fish at the lake, clean up the creek bed, and do a 25K bike challenge to raise money for our neighborhood children’s health center. It all culminates in a family campout in the heart of the watershed.

Here’s how we begin and end each week with our children and their families.

We ask everyone to hold their hands together like this. We imagine our cupped hands to be a model of the landscape– a mini watershed, if you will– and picture water falling from the skies, captured by our fingertips, trickling between our fingers, and collecting where our palms meet.

The uneven tops of our fingers are now mountaintops and ridges, the grooves between our fingers small tributary creeks, the creases in our palms larger streams, the place where our palms meet the main creek channel, and the bottom of our cupped hands the Bay where the water ultimately flows. All one interconnected system, bound by the flow of water, sustaining the community of life found within in it.

When the week begins, this little simulation is a bit of an abstraction. But by the end of our week together, there’s a strong sense among us that we are indeed all a part of something vital, powerful, and life sustaining. Whatever you call it– our watershed, our bioregion, our local ecology– it’s no longer just “out there” but has become a part of who were are “in here”. I think that’s the most powerful lesson we all take away from our week together. And I know it’s the most enduring lesson I learned from my participation in Conexions’ “Sense of Place” program.

I’ll leave you with a final image from one of my students. When I asked for some feedback about our most recent outdoor adventure together, she expressed herself not with words but with a drawing. In it she had taken the image of the cupped hands, and moved them from a position like this (hands upright) into a position like this (hands extended out). And then she had drawn herself, all of her classmates, and me nestled into the bowl created by the pair of outstretched hands. When I asked her to tell me about her drawing she said: “That’s what it feels like when we go exploring outside together. It feels like we’re all being held gently by something greater than ourselves that we all belong to.”

I think that’s a rather cogent summary of what Conexions and Exploring a Sense of Place aims to do– to bring us into a deeper appreciation and understanding of ourselves, our community, and this good Earth.

So when we extend our hands to you like this and ask you to give generously to support this good work, please think of it also as a gesture that reminds us that we are bound together as community and held by something greater than any of us.

Thank you very much.

Tom Tyler,
Chief Financial Officer, Blue Beyond Consulting, and
Director, Camp WOW
11-01-09

Copyright. Permission to reprint can be obtained by contacting Tom via Conexions at info@conexions.org