I was a big nerd when I was a child through my teenage years. (Spoiler alert: I’m still a pretty big nerd now.) I enjoyed academic learning — from multiplication tables to practicing cursive to assigned reading, from Dr. Seuss in elementary school to Shakespeare and Solzhenitsyn in high school. When classmates were looking at SparkNotes for “The Things They Carried,” I was adding a chapter of it to my list of favorite things I have ever read.

My point: Not all kids and teens are like me. I’d wager most aren’t. Academic learning does not resonate with every young person. For some, it can feel tedious and confusing and ego-crushing. For others, they may strive for success, and even achieve it, but experience anxiety and resentment from the obligation to meet test score and grade point average expectations. In many parts of the U.S., it is the minority who enjoy the academic learning process and studying numerical and book-based trivia for its own sake rather than in pursuit of a particular grade. The majority go through the motions, some resigned, some resentful, some actively rebellious.

Experiential education lands rather differently. Schools in the Roaring Fork Valley facilitate their outdoor ed and “ex-ed” programs several different ways. The consistencies experiential education has as a pedagogy (method of teaching) are: adjustability, focus on engagement, fostering of hard and soft life skills and cultivating appreciation of individual and group learning processes. The pressure to memorize mathematical symbols or have perfect sentence structure or recite the countries and month-to-month timeline of Eurocentric 20th-century war is taken away. Investigation of related topics based on individual interest is encouraged, but from the standpoint of curiosity and enthusiasm rather than that of obligation.

Every school in the Roaring Fork Valley has some form of experiential education. Families of students have varying feelings about these programs. Some are enthusiastic and grateful for this complementary education method which fills in skillsets undeveloped by academia. Other families may feel hesitation and skepticism, wondering the purpose of putting their children in potentially risky outdoor or urban environments, especially if they’re being asked to pay a couple hundred dollars each time. Secondary school experiential education is vastly less expensive than private programs for young adults and professionals but still represents an extra expense.

For the latter families, this seems a result of inadequate communication from the schools. This valley is much more diverse than it was when most of these ex-ed programs were started 50, 60, 70+ years ago. It is our failure as a community to assume inherent understanding of the why and how of certain traditions. This disconnect betrays the bubble of privilege in which parents of the former category and many teachers reside — a bubble that ex-ed programs can help to pop. To do that effectively for all students, our schools need to do more to acknowledge and listen to the concerns of families who are unfamiliar with formal experiential education. Only then will the facilitators be able to adequately address those hesitations and demonstrate the added value such programs provide which can carry so much farther than facets of academic curriculum.

This summer, I’ll be writing a series of columns on experiential education. We’ll look into pillars of leadership and social skills cultivated through these programs, the history of ex-ed programs in Roaring Fork Valley schools and resistance to these modules within the Roaring Fork School District. Roses and thorns (favorite aspects and disagreements, respectively, with these columns) are very welcome. Looking forward to learning with you.

Annalise Grueter minored in experiential ed-
ucation during her bachelor’s studies, com-
pleted a National Outdoor Leadership School diploma in 2013 and has facilitated outdoor education for kids in Colorado and Maine.