The following is from an email sent out by Urban Adventure Squad's founder on Jan. 1, 2016. To offer feedback, ideas, or advice, please email us! To join our email list, click here:
The future of UAS. It’s hard for me to believe that the Urban Adventure Squad (UAS) will be officially two years old in 2016 (unofficially, we’ll be 3!). We have been extraordinarily fortunate to have been accepted by the community so readily. We’ve received incredible access to community resources and support from parents who have shared their children with us. We’ve been lucky to find smart, talented, warm Squad leaders who teach Squad members at every program day. And I am personally thankful to Christy Brock, our director of programming, for her meticulous, inventive research and curriculum planning.
We started UAS to provide enrichment programs on days when schools are closed, but the last three years of envisioning, planning, and offering programs has shown us that we are more than a childcare solution. We provide a model of experiential learning that is increasingly absent from the school curriculum. We build our curricula meticulously using community-based free and low-cost resources that both enhance learning outcomes and keep our programs affordable. We also realized that we potentially have access to schoolchildren 70 days a year, which is the average number of parent work-days (250) less the average number of school days (180). Seventy days is a significant amount of contact time—more than a third of the school year itself—and we intend to make it count.
What follows is an attempt to articulate this vision; we hope that we can win your support and benefit from your advice, help, and partnership in getting there. UAS is—and will always remain—a work in progress. We change, experiment, and improve because of the feedback, ideas, and participation we get from Squad members, Squad leaders, and you.
If after reading this, you feel that you want to be a part of UAS; or if you think you have an idea that we can use, partners we should engage with, or grants we should apply for; or there’s something you think we’re doing wrong, please get in touch with me or with Christy. We always love to hear from you.
Our short history, by the numbers
Our first official programs began in summer 2014 with just six participants for each of our two summer sessions. That fall, we began taking our first online registrations, offering one or two program days a month on days when the D.C. Public Schools were closed. There were a few dozen families on our email distribution list.
In the summer of 2015, we offered three weeklong summer sessions, and by fall 2015, we were offering four to five program days each month. We also expanded to several public charter schools in Washington D.C.
Since 2014, over 250 children have tried UAS; many return regularly. Our gap-day programs are now waitlisted and our distribution list includes several hundred D.C.-area families. We now offer programs in northeast and northwest DC, and over the next year, we’ll be seeking opportunities to run programs in southeast and southwest DC.
The UAS Model
The UAS model is built on four pillars: 1) leveraging community resources, 2) meticulous curriculum development, 3) hands-on and physical learning, and 4) curiosity and fun.
Leveraging community resources. UAS programming is driven by the belief that children learn as much when they are engaged in their communities as they do in schools. We have visited car dealerships to learn about cars; restaurants to learn about food preparation and preservation, culture, and running a business; environmental organizations to learn about invasive species and erosion; and urban farms to learn about agriculture and sustainable farming. We have worked with composers, singers, athletes, DJs, painters, writers, and dancers to develop curricula. We rent space that is not used during the day from local churches, synagogues, yoga studios, and social clubs. The more integrated we are in the community, the more we can leverage community resources, which enhances experiential learning, helps keep our programs affordable, and supports local businesses and organizations.
Meticulous curriculum development. Effective use of free and low-cost community resources requires detailed lesson planning. We spend an enormous amount of research time identifying subject matter, content, and medium of delivery. We don’t shy away from complex social or scientific problems, and we find ways to make them age-appropriate. We now have more than 100 unique days of curricula that use community resources in the Washington, D.C., area, and we are continuing to develop more. We offer our Squad Leaders paid time for developing and testing new curricula.
Hands-on and physical learning. We develop curricula that include hands-on learning and lots of physical activity. We build, we cook, we hike, we visit, we observe, and we are building research designs to address social and scientific problems. For example, when we learned about erosion, we hiked along Rock Creek and examined the banks and the running water. This past week, we learned about the effects of trash on the environment by creating a winter carnival almost completely from recycled materials. We incorporate physical activity into every program day. On most days, Squad Members walk between two and four miles, hiking through neighborhoods and on trails as we learn about trees, plants, erosion, neighborhood history and culture, and map- and compass-reading.
Curiosity and fun. In emphasizing education goals, we know that UAS programs must excite the curiosity of our Squad members and make learning fun. We take seriously our Squad members’ interests by soliciting their feedback and by routinely use their questions to build future programs. We have a regular module called “Curiosity Corner,” where Squad Members submit questions, and we create new programs around those questions. When a Squad member asked, “Why do trains run on tracks?” we Metro’d to Silver Spring’s B&O Railroad Station and met Jerry McCoy, the president of the Silver Spring Historical Society. Through Curiosity Corner, we’ve also learned why Swiss cheese has holes, how ChapStick was invented, why we have eyelashes, and much more.
Our Goals in 2016
We’re reaching wide audiences of elementary schoolers now, and we’re starting to see that our programming resonates with middle schoolers. We’re making inroads with the homeschooling community, and we’re experimenting with programs for even older Squad Members. We are working hard to expand to more schools across D.C., and to neighboring counties. Our focus will remain on community-based learning—we’ll engage local businesses and nonprofit organizations, rent space that would otherwise go unused during the day, immerse ourselves in the history and culture of the places we’re in, and find ways to serve the community. Specifically, our 2016 goals are:
City- and Region-wide Access: We want to be in all four of D.C. quadrants and in neighboring counties. We began this effort in 2015 by offering programs at two charter schools in northeast: Inspired Teaching and E.W. Stokes, which was recently featured in the Washington Post as the most racially diverse among D.C. public and charter schools. We’d like to offer more gap-day programs at schools around the city that offer access to hiking, history and culture, architecture, and public transportation.
Programming for older Squad members. We would like to expand our programming to include middle and high school students. We currently enroll 6th graders, but we think the content could be adapted for older children. We are talking with experts in different fields such as video editing, geographic information systems, food preparation, and tool handling to help us to develop new UAS-model curricula.
Free UAS programs. We are actively seeking ways to offer free UAS programs to underserved populations and low-income families, including by pursuing grants in partnership with community health centers and schools with high proportion of low-income families.
UAS Curriculum in schools. We would like to bring UAS inside schools by offering curriculum that integrates learning objectives with the UAS model of community-based experiential learning. We have well-developed programs covering botany, environmental science, engineering and architectural concepts, history, and economics. We are able to offer these programs in the classroom as well after school.
Not-for-Profit UAS: We want to create a separate UAS not-for-profit arm that can compete for grants that will allow us to offer free programs. We missed opportunities last year to partner with the National Park Service and a local community health center because we were not organized to do this.
UAS @ Conferences. We would like to bring UAS to conferences in the D.C. region, so that the children and partners of conference attendees can see D.C. in a unique way. To do this, we need to be able to connect with as many conference organizers as we can, and we need to do that in the early stages of conference planning. If there’s a conference you attend regularly, if you’re part of a conference planning team, or if you work at/with a D.C. conference-hosting venue, we would like to connect with you. We can work with organizations to develop programming that appeals directly to conference attendees, and which will make it easy (and an excellent opportunity!) for attendees to bring families with them.
Staff Development. The success of UAS depends on our ability to hire and retain talented, engaged, creative Squad Leaders. Rather than see UAS as a temporary opportunity, I encourage Squad leaders to think about experiential learning as being a part of any career, and UAS as a path in that direction. Our Squad leaders don’t need to give up their dreams of becoming a rocket scientist, a rock climber, a doctor, or a writer, but they will be better at all of those things if they have a chance to teach it at the Squad. In the process, UAS Squad leaders will generate and test new ideas that will bring much-needed reform to our education system. We want to partner with colleges and universities to bring in their students as Squad Leaders and provide them a lab for testing their ideas.
Community Advisory Board: We want to bring together community leaders, parents, and education experts to constitute our first-ever advisory board. If you know anybody who you think can help us, including yourselves, please let us know. We hope the board will be 8-10 members with rotating terms so we can keep our ideas renewed.
Our Dreams beyond 2016
The community-based, experiential learning we’re pioneering at UAS should be integrated into our education system, particularly as solutions to problems of affordability and quality. In the future, we hope that UAS programs will help shape school curricula. Our focus on the outdoors and hands-on learning is an important counterweight to school policy that emphasizes more testing and less recess time.
We have found a niche in gap-day programs, but along the way, we have found a new way to supplement and enhance the current K-12 education. Potentially, we can reach schoolchildren for 70 days every year. That’s a third of the school year and significant contact time in which to have the impact we are looking for.
As we grow, we hope to develop a UAS farm, where Squad members can spend long days and, eventually, overnights, engaging in experiential learning projects. They will grow and harvest food, cook meals, create murals, conduct science experiments, hike, write, and much more. We would also like to create a maker-space with real tools and equipment, a performance theater, a film and audio studio, and a teaching kitchen. We’re also discussing a news service run by Squad members, a published UAS Guide to Washington, D.C. (and other cities!), and a mobile app that lets people see D.C. through UAS eyes.
We are seeking ways to formalize our Squad leader training—perhaps through Squad Leader Training Institute—so that we are developing young teachers who will bring our unique approach to experiential learning and community engagement to the larger education community.
Yes, I am going to say it now, UAS is an education start-up!
If you’ve read this far, thank you, and I hope that you’ll take a moment to join us in some way. Send us an email with suggestions or feedback, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our email list, send us your children on program days, or tell friends with children about UAS.
Thank you for all of your help, advice, and questions, and we look forward to working with you in 2016!
Elana Mintz
Founder, Urban Adventure Squad
www.urbanadventuresquad.com
Twitter.com/UrbanAdvSquad
The future of UAS. It’s hard for me to believe that the Urban Adventure Squad (UAS) will be officially two years old in 2016 (unofficially, we’ll be 3!). We have been extraordinarily fortunate to have been accepted by the community so readily. We’ve received incredible access to community resources and support from parents who have shared their children with us. We’ve been lucky to find smart, talented, warm Squad leaders who teach Squad members at every program day. And I am personally thankful to Christy Brock, our director of programming, for her meticulous, inventive research and curriculum planning.
We started UAS to provide enrichment programs on days when schools are closed, but the last three years of envisioning, planning, and offering programs has shown us that we are more than a childcare solution. We provide a model of experiential learning that is increasingly absent from the school curriculum. We build our curricula meticulously using community-based free and low-cost resources that both enhance learning outcomes and keep our programs affordable. We also realized that we potentially have access to schoolchildren 70 days a year, which is the average number of parent work-days (250) less the average number of school days (180). Seventy days is a significant amount of contact time—more than a third of the school year itself—and we intend to make it count.
What follows is an attempt to articulate this vision; we hope that we can win your support and benefit from your advice, help, and partnership in getting there. UAS is—and will always remain—a work in progress. We change, experiment, and improve because of the feedback, ideas, and participation we get from Squad members, Squad leaders, and you.
If after reading this, you feel that you want to be a part of UAS; or if you think you have an idea that we can use, partners we should engage with, or grants we should apply for; or there’s something you think we’re doing wrong, please get in touch with me or with Christy. We always love to hear from you.
Our short history, by the numbers
Our first official programs began in summer 2014 with just six participants for each of our two summer sessions. That fall, we began taking our first online registrations, offering one or two program days a month on days when the D.C. Public Schools were closed. There were a few dozen families on our email distribution list.
In the summer of 2015, we offered three weeklong summer sessions, and by fall 2015, we were offering four to five program days each month. We also expanded to several public charter schools in Washington D.C.
Since 2014, over 250 children have tried UAS; many return regularly. Our gap-day programs are now waitlisted and our distribution list includes several hundred D.C.-area families. We now offer programs in northeast and northwest DC, and over the next year, we’ll be seeking opportunities to run programs in southeast and southwest DC.
The UAS Model
The UAS model is built on four pillars: 1) leveraging community resources, 2) meticulous curriculum development, 3) hands-on and physical learning, and 4) curiosity and fun.
Leveraging community resources. UAS programming is driven by the belief that children learn as much when they are engaged in their communities as they do in schools. We have visited car dealerships to learn about cars; restaurants to learn about food preparation and preservation, culture, and running a business; environmental organizations to learn about invasive species and erosion; and urban farms to learn about agriculture and sustainable farming. We have worked with composers, singers, athletes, DJs, painters, writers, and dancers to develop curricula. We rent space that is not used during the day from local churches, synagogues, yoga studios, and social clubs. The more integrated we are in the community, the more we can leverage community resources, which enhances experiential learning, helps keep our programs affordable, and supports local businesses and organizations.
Meticulous curriculum development. Effective use of free and low-cost community resources requires detailed lesson planning. We spend an enormous amount of research time identifying subject matter, content, and medium of delivery. We don’t shy away from complex social or scientific problems, and we find ways to make them age-appropriate. We now have more than 100 unique days of curricula that use community resources in the Washington, D.C., area, and we are continuing to develop more. We offer our Squad Leaders paid time for developing and testing new curricula.
Hands-on and physical learning. We develop curricula that include hands-on learning and lots of physical activity. We build, we cook, we hike, we visit, we observe, and we are building research designs to address social and scientific problems. For example, when we learned about erosion, we hiked along Rock Creek and examined the banks and the running water. This past week, we learned about the effects of trash on the environment by creating a winter carnival almost completely from recycled materials. We incorporate physical activity into every program day. On most days, Squad Members walk between two and four miles, hiking through neighborhoods and on trails as we learn about trees, plants, erosion, neighborhood history and culture, and map- and compass-reading.
Curiosity and fun. In emphasizing education goals, we know that UAS programs must excite the curiosity of our Squad members and make learning fun. We take seriously our Squad members’ interests by soliciting their feedback and by routinely use their questions to build future programs. We have a regular module called “Curiosity Corner,” where Squad Members submit questions, and we create new programs around those questions. When a Squad member asked, “Why do trains run on tracks?” we Metro’d to Silver Spring’s B&O Railroad Station and met Jerry McCoy, the president of the Silver Spring Historical Society. Through Curiosity Corner, we’ve also learned why Swiss cheese has holes, how ChapStick was invented, why we have eyelashes, and much more.
Our Goals in 2016
We’re reaching wide audiences of elementary schoolers now, and we’re starting to see that our programming resonates with middle schoolers. We’re making inroads with the homeschooling community, and we’re experimenting with programs for even older Squad Members. We are working hard to expand to more schools across D.C., and to neighboring counties. Our focus will remain on community-based learning—we’ll engage local businesses and nonprofit organizations, rent space that would otherwise go unused during the day, immerse ourselves in the history and culture of the places we’re in, and find ways to serve the community. Specifically, our 2016 goals are:
City- and Region-wide Access: We want to be in all four of D.C. quadrants and in neighboring counties. We began this effort in 2015 by offering programs at two charter schools in northeast: Inspired Teaching and E.W. Stokes, which was recently featured in the Washington Post as the most racially diverse among D.C. public and charter schools. We’d like to offer more gap-day programs at schools around the city that offer access to hiking, history and culture, architecture, and public transportation.
Programming for older Squad members. We would like to expand our programming to include middle and high school students. We currently enroll 6th graders, but we think the content could be adapted for older children. We are talking with experts in different fields such as video editing, geographic information systems, food preparation, and tool handling to help us to develop new UAS-model curricula.
Free UAS programs. We are actively seeking ways to offer free UAS programs to underserved populations and low-income families, including by pursuing grants in partnership with community health centers and schools with high proportion of low-income families.
UAS Curriculum in schools. We would like to bring UAS inside schools by offering curriculum that integrates learning objectives with the UAS model of community-based experiential learning. We have well-developed programs covering botany, environmental science, engineering and architectural concepts, history, and economics. We are able to offer these programs in the classroom as well after school.
Not-for-Profit UAS: We want to create a separate UAS not-for-profit arm that can compete for grants that will allow us to offer free programs. We missed opportunities last year to partner with the National Park Service and a local community health center because we were not organized to do this.
UAS @ Conferences. We would like to bring UAS to conferences in the D.C. region, so that the children and partners of conference attendees can see D.C. in a unique way. To do this, we need to be able to connect with as many conference organizers as we can, and we need to do that in the early stages of conference planning. If there’s a conference you attend regularly, if you’re part of a conference planning team, or if you work at/with a D.C. conference-hosting venue, we would like to connect with you. We can work with organizations to develop programming that appeals directly to conference attendees, and which will make it easy (and an excellent opportunity!) for attendees to bring families with them.
Staff Development. The success of UAS depends on our ability to hire and retain talented, engaged, creative Squad Leaders. Rather than see UAS as a temporary opportunity, I encourage Squad leaders to think about experiential learning as being a part of any career, and UAS as a path in that direction. Our Squad leaders don’t need to give up their dreams of becoming a rocket scientist, a rock climber, a doctor, or a writer, but they will be better at all of those things if they have a chance to teach it at the Squad. In the process, UAS Squad leaders will generate and test new ideas that will bring much-needed reform to our education system. We want to partner with colleges and universities to bring in their students as Squad Leaders and provide them a lab for testing their ideas.
Community Advisory Board: We want to bring together community leaders, parents, and education experts to constitute our first-ever advisory board. If you know anybody who you think can help us, including yourselves, please let us know. We hope the board will be 8-10 members with rotating terms so we can keep our ideas renewed.
Our Dreams beyond 2016
The community-based, experiential learning we’re pioneering at UAS should be integrated into our education system, particularly as solutions to problems of affordability and quality. In the future, we hope that UAS programs will help shape school curricula. Our focus on the outdoors and hands-on learning is an important counterweight to school policy that emphasizes more testing and less recess time.
We have found a niche in gap-day programs, but along the way, we have found a new way to supplement and enhance the current K-12 education. Potentially, we can reach schoolchildren for 70 days every year. That’s a third of the school year and significant contact time in which to have the impact we are looking for.
As we grow, we hope to develop a UAS farm, where Squad members can spend long days and, eventually, overnights, engaging in experiential learning projects. They will grow and harvest food, cook meals, create murals, conduct science experiments, hike, write, and much more. We would also like to create a maker-space with real tools and equipment, a performance theater, a film and audio studio, and a teaching kitchen. We’re also discussing a news service run by Squad members, a published UAS Guide to Washington, D.C. (and other cities!), and a mobile app that lets people see D.C. through UAS eyes.
We are seeking ways to formalize our Squad leader training—perhaps through Squad Leader Training Institute—so that we are developing young teachers who will bring our unique approach to experiential learning and community engagement to the larger education community.
Yes, I am going to say it now, UAS is an education start-up!
If you’ve read this far, thank you, and I hope that you’ll take a moment to join us in some way. Send us an email with suggestions or feedback, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our email list, send us your children on program days, or tell friends with children about UAS.
Thank you for all of your help, advice, and questions, and we look forward to working with you in 2016!
Elana Mintz
Founder, Urban Adventure Squad
www.urbanadventuresquad.com
Twitter.com/UrbanAdvSquad