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LEARNING BY DOING: CRMS's Interim Exemplifies Experiential Education
by Katie Hyman
Mount Sopris, despite its grandeur and the tall tales of Roaring Fork River raft guides, is not a volcano. Thus for a hands-on study of volcanology, one must travel a bit further afield than the mountains of Colorado.
This February, ten Colorado Rocky Mountain School students joined CRMS’s geology and videography teachers to do just this, backpacking through Volcanoes National Park while studying the formation of the Hawaiian Islands. They filmed their adventure, created animations to convey the complex geologic processes that they witnessed firsthand, and edited their content to create a documentary.
Every February, Colorado Rocky Mountain School pauses classroom studies for Interim, a two-week immersive learning program that includes sixteen diverse offerings. This year’s
Interim offerings ranged from on-campus craft and arts programming like skateboard building and blacksmithing to off-campus programs like Spanish language immersion in Oaxaca, the study of civil rights and social justice in Georgia and Alabama, and the study of marine biology in Kino Bay off the coast of Sonora.
Since its inception, CRMS has placed education through experience and action at the heart of its pedagogy. Today, CRMS’s integrated curriculum combines academics, arts, service, and outdoor adventure, and Interim (originally incorporated into CRMS’s program in 1972) has become a crowning component of this four-part harmony.
Interim = Engagement + Expertise + Immersion
Kayo Ogilby, CRMS’s geology and biology teacher and the leader of this year’s Volcanology expedition, describes Interim as one of the quintessential CRMS experiences that shapes the soul of the school: “it is the moment when students feel like they’re engaged with something that transcends the walls of a classroom and hits this visceral space and captures them.”
Like CRMS’s wilderness orientation trips, fall and spring trips, work crews, and active programs, Interim provides unmediated physical experiences to enliven, embody, and actualize intellectual inquiry.
For the students studying volcanology, one such moment of unmediated experiential education occurred forty-five feet underground in Kazumura Cave, the world’s longest continuous lava tube. The students explored a mile and a half of the 42-milelong tube (a subway-sized labyrinthine passage of basalt) by essentially spelunking under the Hawaiian jungle.
Kazumura Cave is a relic of 2,000-degree-Fahrenheit lava erupting from a Kilauea vent approximately 500 years ago. When the lava hit the air, it cooled on impact, formed a crust, and hardened into stone walls thereby insulating the river-like flow of molten lava within and creating a massive underground tunnel. It’s one thing for students to read about the formation of a lava tube from a desk in the Lower Jossman geology classroom, and it’s quite another to descend into the lava tube’s plunge pools ladder rung-by-ladder rung, apprehending the scope and scale of volcanic architecture experientially.
If the description of spelunking-CRMS students is starting to seem uncannily like an episode of the Magic School Bus, it's precisely because of Interim’s celebration and pursuit of gritty, authentic immersion.
During Interim, “hands-on learning” is literal: fingers clasp delicate saw blades, carving scalloped edges through silver (Silversmithing Interim); hands grip leather reins and saddle horns, guiding pack horses down Kanab Creek (Grand Canyon Horse Packing Interim); palms clutch halyards, hoisting sails and turning rudders while learning to sail in Mission Bay (Learn to Sail: San Diego Interim). The busy hands of these interims are matched by the zealous feet of others: backcountry skiers steadily trekking up skin paths, earning turns through fields of fresh snow (Backcountry Skiing and Wilderness First Aid Interim) and students walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, following the path of the non-violent activists who marched 60 years ago from Selma to Montgomery to protest racial injustice (Civil Rights and Social Justice Interim).
The Interim equation (engaged students + exposure to expertise + dedicated time in a particular place) yields powerful results and profound learning. The Silversmithing Interim, one of the most popular perennial on-campus offerings, has polished this equation: ten students rapt with attention, reluctant to break for lunch or leave at the end of the day + Lynn Pulford (CRMS’s longtime silversmithing and photography teacher returned from retirement) & Betsy Bingham-Johns (CRMS’s beloved college counselor and ceramicist) + eight hours a day for two weeks of sawing, filing, etching, and soldering in CRMS’s world-class jewelry hogan = intricate, beautiful silver jewelry & creative, accomplished students.
During Amanda Leahy’s Grand Canyon Horse Packing Interim, students travelled on horseback through the majestic and rugged terrain of Kanab Creek, a major tributary to the Colorado River in Arizona. Working with a multi-generational family-owned outfit, the CRMS students learned to tack, groom, pack, feed, water, and travel atop horses. In the evenings, the students and their cowboy outfitters shared stories around the campfire.
They draped headlamps over dummy cows to practice roping after dark. They shared their research about horse cultures throughout history and discussed cowboy culture as a global import through Mexico and the western U.S. And, having formed deep, ineffable bonds with their horses over the course of the trip, they reflected on the power of the horse-human relationship, recognizing the centrality of vulnerability and self-awareness. The learning – layered and rich, historical and intimate – was fundamentally a product of the visceral, immersive nature of Interim.
As Kayo noted, “Interim is essential to CRMS’s heartbeat.” Like Wilderness, Fall, and Spring trips, Interim provides dramatic punctuation to the rhythm of the academic year. For two weeks each year Interim plucks students out of their classrooms and thrusts them into something immediate, unique, and meaningful, facilitating enduring multidimensional growth and learning.
