This school year, KLCC is celebrating educators through our series Inspiring Minds: Spotlighting inspiration through education.
We recently put out the call for community members to share their stories of educators who go above and beyond to instill their passion for learning.
In just weeks, we’ve received an overwhelming response from you, our friends and neighbors, sharing your stories.
Ryan Collay has years of experience as an environmental educator and volunteer in the Eugene area. When he heard that we were looking to honor educators, he asked himself who embodied the idea behind inspiring minds.
“Who has that community capacity, is a strong communitarian, a really good listener, a really good organizer, lots of experience in lots of hats,” he thought. “And the name that came up was Emma Garner."
Emma Garner is the Education Program Manager with the Middle Fork Willamette Watershed. They work with formal and informal educators across the Upper Willamette to provide immersive and hands-on learning activities to connect students to local outdoor spaces. This often involves organizing field trips for area students to local waterways and riparian areas.
Love brought Emma and Ryan together to learn more about the work, and how Emma inspires others through education.
Emma Garner: Our programs are organized around providing the students an opportunity that's connected to something that they're learning in the classroom. So we're bringing students out and sometimes it's checking the water quality and we talk about what is the water quality looking like? What's happening around us that might be influencing us? What changes might be made to help the water quality in the ecosystem thrive a little bit better or better support aquatic species?
We are really intentional at our program about bringing in time for students to just be in those spaces. So to ask those questions, to find the answers, but also sit and think, what does it feel like to be outside? What does it feel like to be near a stream with your peers, with your friends with yourself? And have conversations around that too, which are my favorite parts of the job. It's where the really amazing things come together.
Ryan Collay: I look at these experiences and, and look at these rich contexts and how we can connect for this middle schooler or some message about their own capacity, some message about their own value, some message about who they might want to be when they grow up and just have an opportunity to look around.
Emma: I'm really grateful that this style of learning that you often see in environmental education is provided for students. You see a lot of really wonderful things come out of it and a lot of connections being made. You can talk about it all you want, but then you're in the water and you talk about how the trees shade the water to lower the temperature, and so it's healthier for aquatic species.
And then kids get in the water and they feel how cold it is and they pick up a rock and they find a bug on the bottom of a rock and we had a huge fish swim through the legs of five students, and they're all giggling and laughing and getting really excited.
And that connects in a different way than if I had a more structured approach with pictures and data and graphs and talking to these students about it.
But to really get in there and experience it and say, how did that feel? What does that make you think about? We notice the size of the fish and what color it is and how that helps it live in the environment that we're in and blend into its surroundings. It brings up a different type of learning and a different type of discussion.
There's a really important relationship that environmental health is human health and environmental well being is human well-being. And we hear from a lot of students that it might feel intimidating. They might associate environmental spaces, learning relationships with sciences, that maybe they don't understand or they don't feel as strongly connected to.
We had a busload of 100 kids and a teacher came straight to me right before they got off the bus and she said none of these kids have been in the woods before. I'm perfectly comfortable being in the outdoors, but that's not the case for everybody.
And those connections can be so important at any level. Maybe you can always remember what a maple tree is when you're walking downtown and there's one growing in the city because of the shape of the leaves and how big it is.
Maybe you connect through photography and journaling and art. You feel safe to express yourself and hang out with your friends and just exist in these beautiful places and you know where to find calmness, where to find peace, where to find adventure. And that's the piece of environmental education that I think is so important.
If students choose to do this as a career, that's wonderful, and we're here to support them and guide them and answer their questions. And if it's not something that they want to do, they still have an opportunity to form a connection that can additionally impact them for other reasons for the rest of their life, and hopefully knowledge and care and kindness that they can share with themselves and with others.
And that is a healthy foundation and support for students, which in turn is also a healthy foundation and support for the environment and health and how it all comes together.
I didn't grow up doing a lot of outdoor recreation or, being outside in that way. I didn't go fishing. I had the wonderful privilege of working in it and I saw salmon for the very first time when I was 25-years-old because it was my job to count them while they were spawning.
And it is still one of my favorite moments at work where I get to share and relive that first time experience with a student or their parent or someone else who's joining them, a teacher. And we get to see these beautiful fish doing what they're here to do to spawn and finish the end of their life cycle. And sharing in that wonder with students is truly one of the greatest experiences.
Environmental education, especially outside of the classroom- you can give them hope and inspiration by being a part of it.
So we've had students plant trees in the burn scar up on the McKenzie. Some of the students had to evacuate that area during the fire and it meant a lot to them to plant a shrub near the river and think," I could come back to this and this is going to be something and this will be green again one day. And I was a part of it."
And I also think as adults, it gives us hope and inspiration for the future because they care so deeply and they have so much passion and energy around it. To get to see that as a grown-up and think that that is a person who is going to care a little bit differently for the rest of their life, and all of these amazing people working in education who are working towards that- that's a lot of impacted people that are going to change something in a really wonderful way.
And it is really inspirational and hopeful for everybody of all ages.
Ryan: The caring is profound and it matters. It's the rock in the pond. Those ripples move out, they impact other people and sometimes in ways that I'm not sure we always appreciate. But the thing is, I do appreciate it and I do see it and I do hear in the rumor mill, the impact that your work has on the community writ large.
And thank you very much for all of it and I hope you do all kinds of wonderful things in the next years of your professional career. So thank you.
Emma: Thank you Ryan, that means a lot to me. It's just such a lovely compliment and it feels like an honor to have my work recognized in that way. I feel very grateful that every day at my job is a favorite day. I love what I do.
And I love that I get to connect students to the outdoors and connect students to wondering and asking questions and feeling empowered and guiding themselves through these learning journeys that we take together.
So, to have that be recognized from the outside is something that is impactful and making a difference means a lot to me. Thank you Ryan for your kind words and thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
