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WALC maintains four central goals
1
To increase student achievement by providing an alternative, relevant, experiential, and academically rigorous education.
2
To facilitate students’ examination of their own connections to the environment and environmental issues by using outdoor experiences as a springboard.
3
To assist our students in becoming successful scholars and healthy human beings by addressing their personal as well as academic needs.
4
To involve more people of color and working class people in addressing the environmental issues that have a disproportionate effect on their lives by facilitating student participation in environmental stewardship activities and community activism.
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WALC works toward our goals primarily through four corresponding pedagogical strategieS
Integration:
Environmental education and outdoor experiences provide an integrating framework for teaching academic subjects and academic skills. Within the context of physical places and natural processes that can be experienced and felt, students are able to understand the relevance of their learning and achieve greater academic success.
Access:
Exposing students to wilderness areas they have never before experienced can alter their world views and help them realize that the “wilderness” is a part of their world. After visiting and interacting with natural areas, students develop a relationship with the earth and are subsequently more interested in environmental issues
Balance:
Outdoor experiences and hands-on activities allow students to learn and achieve in a variety of ways. First hand wilderness experiences particularly address students’ needs to learn affectively as well as cognitively and to learn about themselves as well as about the subject matter. The interpersonal team emphasis in WALC further considers the whole student by allowing teachers and students to know each other deeply and support one another personally as well as academically.
Activism:
Awareness and understanding of the environment instills a sense of responsibility within students to positively affect their immediate environments—where they live, work, play, and learn—as well as wilderness environments. WALC curriculum is designed to help students learn to articulate their concerns about the environment effectively, as well as organize actual projects to address environmental issues.
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