Sixteen-year-old LaTisha Hines was not enthusiastic about having to attend summer school— even less so when she learned most of her two-week science and sociology session at Patrick Henry High School in Minneapolis would be spent outdoors.

“I’m more an inside person,” said Hines. “When I heard we’d be digging in the dirt, and going on hikes and going down to the river, I was like, ‘No way—I like my clothes to stay clean.’”

Hines and her classmates needed a little nudge to get into nature, and teachers Kent Piccott and Tom Murray were happy to provide the push. The interdisciplinary summer school program they started four years ago immerses students in the environmental and political history of the nearby Shingle Creek/West Mississippi Watershed by asking students to test water quality, identify plant and animal species and bait their own fishing hooks with live worms.

Hines’ favorite summer school assignment? The morning she spent floating on a raft on the Mississippi River for the first time, experiencing the power and flow of the river she sees almost every day, though rarely notices. “I think once you really see how beautiful it is, you want to do what you can to keep it that way, or even make it better, so that everybody can enjoy it,” she said.

This lesson is one that educators and environmental groups are hoping more kids will take home from the Mississippi, its tributaries and rivers in general. Thanks to a host of new outreach efforts and education projects—including “River Watch,” which teaches Red River Valley kids about water quality—students across Minnesota and Wisconsin are getting in closer contact with their rivers.

“Rivers Are Alive,” a fourth-grade curriculum developed by the National Park Service and the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, highlights the underwater river habitat and the connections that people and all living things at the river share. The heart of the program is a field trip to the St. Croix to go mucking, where students get in the river with a dip net to see what they can catch. They find diverse life and learn how that diversity reflects water quality.

WET LAB: Henry High School students use dip nets to explore Shingle Creek’s aquatic life.

“The program literally teaches kids to look beyond the surface,” said Julie Galonska, the chief of interpretation, education and cultural resource management at the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway (National Park Service). “It sparks their imaginations about discovering hidden things, exploring new areas and topics and seeing the world from a different perspective. Appreciation and understanding of the river is the foundation for growing its future stewards.”

Teachers are also getting important lessons about the history of our waterways that they then take back to their classrooms. The Duluthbased Minnesota Power Foundation developed and sponsors “Watershed Workshops for Teachers” to educate teachers about the Mississippi, Rainy, and St. Louis rivers and their watersheds. “Each watershed workshop takes teachers on a chronological journey down a given watershed, from prehistoric times to present day,” said John Paulson, the land and real estate manager at Minnesota Power. “Weaving the history of human use of watersheds is important for kids to see how we have always used riverways for water, food, travel, trade, forest products—as well as electric energy and industry. And on an equal basis, it's important for children and adults to see how and why environmental awareness of our impacts has grown into environmental protections, regulations and obligations.”

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"I've never met a parent who didn't want a better relationship with their kids and a reduction of their own stress.  Going out in nature will do it."
- Marti Erickson, Ph.D.

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It’s a message that resonates with river experts. “The Mississippi is one of the planet’s truly special places,” said Lyndon Torstenson, an education specialist with the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. Torstenson says the river’s history and environmental impact are often overlooked by Minnesotans. That’s one reason the National Park Service partnered with Minneapolis-based Wilderness Inquiry, the Department of Natural Resources and the Minneapolis Public Schools to create the Urban Wilderness Canoe Adventure program, an ambitious effort to introduce predominantly inner city kids to the world-famous river.

“A lot of the kids we’re serving live within a mile walk of the river, but 90 percent of them have never been there before,” said Wilderness Inquiry associate director Sarah Milligan-Toffler. “One of our park rangers starts every trip by saying ‘Welcome to your National Park. This belongs to you.’ It’s a powerful statement and the kids love it—they realize this is a shared resource, not something reserved for the rich, and that we’re all responsible for it.”

Since the program started three years ago, more than 14,000 students have taken part in these guided tours, seeing the river from a whole new vantage point—the bow of a 24-foot Voyageur cedar-strip canoe. “You can almost think of it as an interdisciplinary ribbon that connects so many things—English, natural and cultural history, science and math,” said Milligan-Toffler.

	INTO THE WILD: “Nature deficit disorder” expert Marti Erickson, Ph.D., points to a growing body of research that shows time in nature relieves stress and improves concentration.

“The river is a natural starting point’’ for a host of academic inquiries, according to Meghan Cavalier, executive director of the River’s Edge Academy, a St. Paul charter school that incorporates the Mississippi into nearly every lesson plan. The school, which recently partnered with Outward Bound Twin Cities, provides “expeditionary learning” experiences to its 55 9th-12th graders, with required field work around the river that includes pulling invasive species, testing the water quality at nearby Pickerel Lake and building canoes. Students from River’s Edge are so well-versed on the river that they recently made their own recommendations for the Great River Master Plan, the city-wide effort to reconfigure St. Paul’s relationship with the river.

Getting students interested and invested in the river while they’re young is one of the best ways to grow the next generation of river stewards— clearly one of the goals of the National Park Service’s “Big River Journey” curriculum taught between 4th and 6th grade at many St. Paul Public Schools. But Marti Erickson, Ph.D., co-founder of the Children and Nature Network and an expert on “nature deficit disorder,” says that creating the next generation of conservationists is just the beginning of the benefits to come from encouraging a two-way relationship between kids and the natural world around them.

In fact, a growing body of research shows that time spent in nature relieves stress, improves concentration and creativity and creates closer relationships and community bonds with the people we share it with. “I’ve never met a parent who didn’t want a better relationship with their kids and a reduction of their own stress, said Erickson. “Going out in nature will do it.”

And the benefits don’t stop there. LaTisha Hines’ outside-theclassroom experience has changed her outlook in many ways. “I always like to walk,” she said. “Now I know there are some beautiful places I want to go to.”  IQ

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