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Burlington City & Life students walking up Pearl Street with teacher Signe Daly
“School has never worked for me. I go in and sit at the same seat every day, and we learn the same thing, and it’s just the teachers talking over and over again,” Winrock said. “Hands-on is really what works for me.” Burlington isn’t the only district to incorporate experiential learning into a traditional curriculum. When the Vermont legislature passed Act 77 in 2013, it formed the Flexible Pathways Initiative, which encourages school districts to develop unique “educational experiences” for students. That broad umbrella can cover early college programs, technical education, and place-based learning like Burlington’s City & Lake. The school launched the program last fall as a partnership with Shelburne Farms, which has supported a hands-on curriculum at Burlington’s K-5 magnet school, the Sustainability Academy at Lawrence Barnes, since 2004. Each entity lends two teachers to the program, but there’s no cost to the school district. Grants and donations cover the program’s $150,000 annual budget, according to Barker. Research from Teton Science Schools, a Wyoming nonprofit that has emphasized place-based education for more than 50 years, found that such programs boost environmental stewardship, social-emotional learning and academic achievement in students. “It’s not that I didn’t care about school or learning before,” said Ruby Guth, a 17-year-old senior who enrolled in City & Lake last fall; she just didn’t connect
academics to “real issues — some that affect our lives so greatly.” For example, plastic pollution seemed far away until Guth saw it up close at Burlington’s North Beach. On a rainy day last November, she and her classmates joined Ashley Sullivan, executive director of the conservation group the Rozalia Project, to collect and sort plastic litter there. In just 30 minutes, students found more than 1,200 pieces of debris. After that class, Guth sought to curb her use of plastic drinking straws by buying a set of metal ones; she said she’s used them ever since. Guth’s mom, Sarah, noticed other changes in her daughter’s habits. For the first time, Ruby came home and talked about what she did in school that day. She went from being a B and C student to a straight-A one. “As a parent of a teen, this is exactly what you want to see,” said Sarah Guth, who is a child psychiatrist. “The interactive nature of it — I think they need that. I think sitting for hours on end and just being lectured at is something no brain is really good for.” As Famo Haji, Guth’s classmate, noted: “It was more interesting to actually see and do than just hear.” Julius Dodson, another City & Lake alumnus, said he liked meeting with experts in their fields — literally, in one case. His class visited the Intervale Community Farm as part of a broader lesson about the local food economy. The farm manager told students that he’d like BURLINGTON 101
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