Environmental Educator Burnout & Building a K-12 Farm Program From Scratch |Charlie Kahn, Westgate Community School

What it took for one educator to almost leave the field entirely -- and the "great white buffalo" of a job she found before she had to.

When I taught elementary school, I ran an activity I called self-control bubbles. A

bubble machine goes off the second kids come in from recess, and every single one of

them starts popping bubbles on sight -- they can't help it, there are bubbles in the

room. After a few minutes I'd turn it off, bring everyone to the rug, and ask them,

sincerely: what happened? Why were you popping the bubbles? It always turned into the

same conversation about impulse control. Then we'd turn the machine back on, and

they'd have to practice not popping them.

I thought of it as a classroom management trick at the time. I know better now -- it

was regulation practice with a visual you could watch kids get better at, in real

time, in front of you.

Charlie Kahn on the farm at Westgate Community School

Charlie Kahn has spent the last three years building an entire environmental

education program out of exactly this kind of thing -- small, specific, hands-on

moments -- for a K-12 charter school of more than five hundred students. A working farm. Three beehives. A flock of chickens. A service-learning curriculum she designed herself, from scratch, because when she took the job, service learning existed as a line in her job description and nothing else.

She built it as what she calls a department of one.

Charlie Kahn with the campus beehives

Charlie grew up what she calls a nature kid -- the kind who wants to be in the dirt,

not just near it. She and her sister built bug houses. They broke branches to build

forts. It sounds destructive, she told me, and it was -- but she thinks kids need that

kind of unsupervised, low-stakes destruction in nature to actually learn from it. In high school, an AP Environmental Science class with a teacher named Mr. Georgie took her out to the marsh behind her school to watch birds and hunt tadpoles in rain boots.

A class trip to Point Reyes sealed it. She knew what she wanted to do with her life

before she'd finished being a teenager.

Knowing what you want to do and being able to keep doing it turned out to be two

different problems.

After a summer running all-day outdoor programming at a nature center in the Colorado

mountains, the season ended, and Charlie went looking for the next job. What she found

was how few full-time, benefits-eligible roles exist anywhere in environmental

education. So she took a desk job at a Pilates and physical therapy studio -- answering

phones, sitting at a desk all day, something she says she hasn't done since, in this

career, before or after. She hated it. She kept job-hunting in the evenings anyway,

and eventually found the opening at Westgate: full-time, year-round, benefits

included.

I call positions like that the great white buffalo of environmental education. They

exist. Finding one is closer to luck than to career progression -- and that gap is

costing the field some of the most capable people in it, not because they stopped

caring, but because caring alone doesn't pay for health insurance.

Charlie Kahn's third and fourth graders working the farm

What Charlie built once she didn't have to leave is genuinely a full system, not a

single program. She broke service learning into four stages -- investigating,

researching and designing, taking action, and reflecting -- and mapped a different

real-world project onto each grade level: kindergartners investigating pollinators and building bee bundles, third and fourth graders running the farm directly, fifth and

sixth graders mentoring the grades below them, seventh and eighth graders running a campus food-security drive. She partnered with the local high school's veterinary assistant program, so CTE students now teach her third graders animal-care stations on the farm -- goat hoof trims, listening to a rumen with a stethoscope, chicken care -- as their own final exam.

None of it came from a template. Most of it came from her own research, in her spare

time, while also running the program day to day.

The idea I keep coming back to from our conversation is one Charlie picked up in her

Charlie working in the field with students

own graduate program: the purple chair theory. Take something a kid is already

completely comfortable with -- eating lunch, say -- and change one variable. Eat it

outside instead. The chair is still a chair. It's just purple now. That small a shift

is sometimes all it takes to turn a routine moment into a memory a kid actually keeps.

If you work with kids in any capacity, Charlie's challenge is a simple one: pick

something they already do without thinking, and move it outside. Lunch. Reading time.

A five-minute check-in. You don't need a farm or a beekeeping certification. You need

one purple chair.

Listen to this week's episode of Hopeful by Nature wherever you get your podcasts.

-- Scott

Wildward Institute supports organizations, educators, and parents building meaningful

relationships between young people and the outdoors. Learn more at

wildwardinstitute.net.

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