Teens and Team Leadership11thMarch
I am great fan of experiential education: ropes and challenge courses, belaying and rappelling, rafting and visiting foreign countries. They really can teach you how to be the best "you" possible. And its not enough. The greatest challenge for teenagers today is not a lack of self esteem or confidence, it's a lack of feeling useful or of real value to their community. Through these opportunities, self-esteem naturally follows. High school can be a numbing experience. In those hallowed halls of secondary level education you will not find dirt under your fingernails, natural foods or fresh air. Instead, the days of our teens are spent under the pressure of tests and good grades. Their job is to separate themselves from the pack and excel as an individual. Their job is to distinguish themselves as leaders.
Its incredible how such a seemingly benign concept of leadership can be enmeshed in so many social challenges and issues. The road to heck is paved with good intentions, even great ones. What if, instead of focusing on making our children exceptional leaders, instead of putting them at the head of the class or pack, we focus on how well they tend to their relationships? A novel concept but not really. Everyone is trying. Even schools and teachers do their best with limited resources, limited time and limited freedom. Even experiential education camps and TrackersNW can only do so much. The task requires more than restoring a fabled teen idealism, it requires serving life.
Teens and even children living in cultures that move at a slower and more human scale have a clear role in caring for family and the land. Young adults (ages 10-19) find useful niches in feeding, sheltering and clothing those they love. They do more than take out the garbage; they collect firewood, gather food and hunt. They make preserves, tend to the a garden and harvest eggs from the chicken coop. They listen to rivers, feel the wind and get that dirt underneath their fingernails. There are no leaders in these worlds, well, not in the way our culture thinks about them. There is family wisdom from elders, parents, peers and the land. I'm not saying one is better than the other, this tale is offered as a simple contrast to our modern life. We spend a lot of time teaching values to our teens and less time letting them experience care for their community. The irony, is that teenagers who contribute for their family's needs both physically and emotionally become natural leaders. They are people who listen, masters at asking for others input and young adults who cultivate an effective culture of support for their peers.
The name experiential education says it all, "education through experience". Yet we need to take it to a new level, one where creation of community is an intricate part. One where we truly bring home experience that feeds our grandmothers and grandfathers, our sisters and brothers, our mothers and fathers and the younger generations to come.
Our Teen and Tweens camps work to recreate village life. We offer experiences where teens and tweens participate and become engaged in the land and world around then. We take camps beyond adventure, they are stories of evolving accountability both on a personal and community level.
The Tribe, Middle school village: Come together for 6 days to form a tribe in the wilds.
The Umiak, Build a boat: Help us build a traditional 30 person traditional whaling boat, called an umiak.
The Tribe. High school village and reality web cast: Become a tribe and produce a daily web cast that regales their adventures to hundreds and thousands of viewers.
Build your own kayak: Build and take home your own traditional skin on frame kayak on a permaculture farm.
Learn more about our teen camps
