Telluride Institute is committed to place-based education and stewardship
From the Telluride Daily Planet
By Ellen Metrick Planet Contributor
Jan 20, 2025
Many area high school students remember field trips up and down the San Miguel River watershed, special snowshoe overnights at High Camp Hut, and water studies along the valley floor.
Telluride Institute (TI) has been helping the region’s schools with place-based education via its Watershed Education Program for more than two decades, but it’s been a little quiet for the past few years. Today, TI staff is revamping the program to roll out a new curriculum and offerings.
“Everyone we’ve talked with is excited to jump back in,” said TI consultant Chris Medary.
Medary is working to help TI realign and refresh the Watershed Education Program (WEP), which has yet to fully recover from COVID-19 shutdowns.
“WEP provides schools with a mix of field trip and project-based learning that complements the existing curriculum,” Medary said.
Medary originally joined TI in 2021 as a Master in Environmental Management (MEM) student in a collaboration with Western Colorado University. Now, he is TI’s program coordinator for the Telluride Mushroom Festival and acts as a consultant for WEP and TI’s Telluride Environmental Science and Engineering Laboratory (TESEL).
“It’s my job to take an honest look at WEP in its entirety, figure out what worked best, what impeded success, and review state teaching standards and beyond to build a clear curriculum for late summer/fall of 2025,” Medary said in a recent interview with the Planet.
Vicki Phelps, once a West End Schools teacher, directed WEP for a number of years until handing it over in early 2020 to Garrett Smith, just before COVID-19 dictated a then-indefinite hiatus for field trips.
“Some teachers took four field trips a year with WEP,” she said. “Having been a teacher myself, I know the demands. It’s hard to organize and do field trips, and WEP did all the footwork. We teachers just had to get permission slips, have the kids wearing the appropriate clothing and book a bus. WEP did everything else for free.”
Phelps said the program is important not only for teachers, who helped tailor the programming to what they needed, it is also important for the students.
“Laura Kudo and I called it STREAM learning because we focused on science, technology, reading/literacy, engineering, art and math. Including all of these allowed students creative ways to express their learnings about the watershed.”
Phelps and Kudo co-directed WEP from 2014 until 2018. Kudo, also an educator, had been directing WEP for eight years before Phelps joined her.
“This program is about getting students in touch, connected with their natural surroundings to have a broader idea and experience of all the life forms and diversity in their watershed,” Phelps said.
Collins added, “The original vision came from the fact that we have a one-million acre neighborhood that is the San Miguel River watershed. That comes with stewardship, and we can focus on this region to learn to be better stewards to the place.”
Importantly, the field trip curriculum, which focused mostly on elementary and middle school age students, incorporated the state educational standards that guide teachers in every subject and at all grade levels in public education.
“As early as 2008, WEP staff were building and sharing our curriculum that included and centered on Colorado State Department of Education teaching and learning standards,” said Collins.
WEP started in the late 1980s, when Pamela Lifton-Zoilne, TI founding trustee and vice-president of the TI board of directors, was writing place-based watershed curriculum. That’s according to the WEP Menu, a 33-page program guide distributed to teachers in the watershed in 2008. Jeanne Stewart, who recently retired from Wilkinson Public Library, was teaching in the program in 2002. Collins joined as TI board president in 2008.
Collins teaches in Arizona State University’s (ASU) school of art and also works with the university’s Center for Biodiversity Outcomes and is a Senior Global Futures Scholar in the Global Futures Scientists and Scholars program.
Collins developed a similar, though broader water education program for older students through ASU called SCAPE, for Sustainable Communities and Place-based Education. SCAPE’s focus is on the Colorado and now Columbia rivers watersheds and is in numerous schools around the West. The program was funded with a $300,000 Environmental Protection Agency grant from 2016-2020 and included input from TI, as well as specialists from ASU.
“That curriculum,” said Collins, “is our model for the depth of the new WEP curriculum. Ideally, in the long run, WEP will be providing a set of resources and financial incentives for teachers to be engaged in watershed education here.”
Of course, that’s contingent on grant writing and funding, he added.
Medary has been busy in the past months interviewing educators and past WEP directors to learn about WEP and plan for its future and rewriting the mission.
“The way I have it written right now is, ‘develop critical thinking, systems thinking, and scientific skills for youth (K-12) in the San Miguel River Watershed through place based and project based learning,’” Medary said.
Beyond organizing and leading field trips for students, WEP provides the community with programming for all ages. The Wild Mountain Puppet Theater is a traveling educational adventure for young and old, especially visible during Bear Awareness Week every autumn. Adult excursions include visits to the area’s fen study areas. Citizen science programs include wildlife and water monitoring practices.
“Overall, we want to reanimate the program by starting small. Maybe just focus on fourth- through sixth-grade students, employing the best of what WEP has been, and expand from there,” said Medary.
More information will be available as the program is updated. Check our website as summer nears, or contact Medary at chris@tellurideinstitute.org.
