What Can Kids Do?
This morning I was made aware of a very powerful web site called What Kids Can Do. WKCD’s purpose is to promote adolescents as valuable resources (rather than as problems) and to showcase the power of what young people can accomplish when given proper opportunity and support. The Feature Stories and Special Collections sections of WKCD contain wonderful case studies of young people in action reforming schools, creating new knowledge, and even learning how to subsist in rural Alaska.
It was the latter that provided my introduction to WKCD. A student of mine from Russian Mission, AK wrote a compelling blog post about how the school there handles the subsistence issue in rural Alaska. Many rural Alaskans depend on fishing, hunting, and gathering to provide food for the winter, and this sometimes conflicts with school schedules. (You know–the schedule that lets us out in the summer months to work on the farm…) Following the author’s suggestion to google “Russian Mission school subsistence” led me to WKCD and a wonderful article (“Outside Is Our School”) about Russian Mission’s school-based subsistence program. I won’t spoil the beauty of the words and images contained in the article, other than to tell you that I learned something very important today. You can too.
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Skip, this is a good website! There is a also information provided for grants! I plan on looking into this later when I am not in a class via audio (SHHHH). Thanks for sharing! Good stuff!
What an interesting article about kids learning from their environment. This is being taught to survive at the base level and will stand these kids in good stead for many years to come. The fact that so many are choosing to return is encouraging.
The Amish, who live a very structured life with none of the modern conveniences are losing their kids to the lure of the big city but sadly they show no sign of altering their lives and will thus continue to lose their kids.