An Interview with Tim Wood from the College School

Tim Wood has worked with middle school youth at the College School in St. Louis, Missouri since 1984.  As the head of their Horticulture Program and a member of the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL) Education Partnership, he has been a leader in linking his school to the broader community in an effort to create community-based change toward sustainability.  He spoke to us about a project he calls The Woodland Restoration Project: an effort to promote the growth of native plants, and increase bird and wildlife species in the community, bringing his school into closer connection with their community. The goal of The Woodland Restoration Project is two-fold.  It seeks to build biodiversity while engaging students with the rich and diverse community that surrounds their school.  The Woodland Restoration Project begins with a park.

Non-native plant species can cause detrimental effects to native species within a given area.  Nested within a larger system, this can also negatively affect insect and animal biodiversity within an ecosystem.  Tim wanted to remove these invasive plant species in hopes to promote native plant growth.  He began by bringing together a dizzying collective of thirty-five people not just within the school, but from the community at-large.  As he explains, “the park next to our school was overrun with an invasive species called bush honeysuckle and so we got students together with park people, and talked to them about removing the bush honeysuckle, and doing it as a school-community project.”  Tim had everyone from kids, to parents, to local business owners, “chain-sawing and running the bush honeysuckle through a chipper.  It’s loud, it’s sweaty, it really is a tough job.”  Through the project, kids are learning and experiencing more than how to cut down the weeds and clear away bushes.

The whole project is an opportunity for students to learn how to care for an ecosystem filled with life.  It establishes:

“The importance of native plants and their connection to these plants and wildlife – what we’ve been trying to do on our campus is to plant native [species], specifically in order to attract wildlife.  Sometimes it’s really specific, right now we’re planting Swamp Milkweed for our monarch butterflies, we actually have a monarch weigh station at our school.  We also plant for humming birds, and for specific butterflies and moths as well.  Our theory is that if you invite insects into your campus, birds will follow; what you’re doing is opening up your campus to a wider variety of wildlife.  What we’re trying to do is make it a natural connection, which will hopefully lead wildlife up to our campus.”

This project has also been a critical opportunity to link students and their community, as they engage together to promote biodiversity, connect to each other, and learn from one another.

A few community members were not originally excited about the restoration project.  As Tim describes, “an older man came right out with it, and said, ‘well you know I’m not sure if I want to pull out all of these bushes, I have chipmunks, rabbits, and squirrels, and I really like to see wildlife’ and I said, ‘well, I respect that, and this is the back of your yard. If you don’t want me to cut it down I won’t.’  So, I came back and told him the reason we were doing it was to increase the diversity of wildlife, to try to bring more wildlife into the area by planting native plants.  He went home and read some of the information that I had handed out, and the next time I was in the area, he was outside cutting down honeysuckle with his chainsaw.”

“For our school, the community is part of the classroom”, says Tim. “It’s been a really enjoyable thing to watch people come out and work together to get something done.”  According to Tim, this entire process has really changed the kids.  “Our kids are out interviewing people, they’re taking local mass transit to get around to places; we have our own school buses, and every day there’s someone using the bus.  Our kids are out in nature, out in the city, they’re just out doing a lot of stuff all the time.”  This project has created within students a sense of place and belonging as a result of promoting the connection between their classroom and their community.

A Collective Vision for a healthy and sustainable future

“There’s this really perfect image that I saw at the SOL Education Partnership workshop last summer.  It is an image of a rubber band.  And on one end of the rubber band, you have what you expect to happen.  And on the other end of the rubber band, you have what really happened. The rubber band [stretched between your vision and your current reality] creates a tension between what you want and what you have, and the question is- do you raise what you have up to become what you want, or do you lower what you want down to what you have?  I have to be honest.  This project was a little bit of a compromise between the two!

When I was at the workshop this summer, they would ask us to take some aspects of the world and envision them the way we wanted them to be.  The thing I envisioned was this project.  I don’t know if I’ve ever spent so much time trying to imagine something the way that I wanted it, and this time it turned out just the way I wanted it!

Expecting and planning for what you want certainly enables you to make what you want happen, and that’s been a powerful learning experience for me.  At the College School, we have come up with a framework for visioning around natural processes, things like community, interaction, adaptation, change, all natural processes.  That’s the focal point, that’s the framework around which we’re going to build our school.”

As Tim describes, the connection between the classroom and the community is vitally important.  Teaching students to look at the world from a different perspective, “taking it from a personal level…to a bigger level of what’s good for the world, what’s good for everything else, that’s the key process of thought for making a positive impact.”