AmeriCorps VISTA: Grand Traverse Stewardship Initiative and Bay Area Recycling for Charities

Since mid-August I have been working as an AmeriCorps VISTA through the Traverse City, Grand Vision to Grand Action under the Traverse Bay Area Intermediate School District. The Grand Vision is a document that maps out a 50 year community development plan. The AmeriCorps VISTA program's primary goal is to fight poverty. My particular program is fighting poverty through education; I help develop programming for students and giving them opportunities that they may not have access to otherwise. And yes, that is the simplest description that I can give.

Two of the programs that I'm working on are: the Grand Traverse Stewardship Initiative (GTSI) and an educational program for Bay Area Recycling for Charities (BARC). The goal isn't to brainwash the students into becoming environmentalists, but teach them the curriculum that they are required to learn anyways in a way that teaches awareness to the students. 

GTSI is an educational program that connects Placed-Based Education (a more hands on learning approach) and environmental stewardship. I help the program coordinator with research and programming with two schools within the program. This past week I spent researching Teaching Great Lakes Science which provides free lesson plans, real Great Lakes data that has been simplified for educational purposes, and draws out processes like science based graphing, terminology, and inquiry based questions to inspire student critical thinking. Best of all, is this great resource through National Geographic called Great Lakes Fieldscope. This resource allows students to manipulate several layers of the Great Lakes watershed. Layers such as: rivers and streams, elevation, water depth, watershed boundaries, political boundaries, and land cover. Not going to lie, I wish this was around when I was a student. Alas I'll just have to settle for using it now. The students will be able to hypothesize and virtually simulate their experiments.

The BARC education program has taken a bit more time to figure out. My fellow VISTA and I have been working off of a previous intern's work from last summer. She didn't have a background in curriculum so the lessons need to be cleaned up a bit and clarified. The lessons teach the basics of recycling and if I cannot connect our ideas for lessons to the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle theme then the idea gets nixed. Overall they're a great starting point and without the other VISTA I'd be in serious trouble because my background in curriculum isn't great. What took so long was figuring what we wanted the end result of the program to look like, or our end result after the VISTA year term is finished. Now we've decided on five lessons per grade, connecting each lesson to the Next Generation Science Standards, making each one a hands on, problem solving lesson, and connecting them to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In the new year, I'm really looking forward to diving into this project.

Since I've felt so lost this past year in life, I'm really happy to immerse myself into these programs. Programs that connect with my passions and feel like I can give my all to. This AmeriCorps program is kind of a living experiment for me because I'm seriously considering going into Environmental Education for my masters. If I like the program development aspect then I'd really like to help schools and nonprofits develop more of these program types to be used in the classroom. But all this really is just wishful thinking until I take the GRE.