This is the first year in which a Burlington City & Lake Semester Teaching Fellow has left BCL and continued their career in world beyond Burlington. In the first of what we hope to be an annual tradition, this post offers an update about life after working with BCL and Shelburne Farms, and explores what elements of the Fellow's time in Vermont they have carried with them into the world. 

This inaugural piece is from Annika Brinkley, who moved from the West Coast of New England back to the West Coast. In her letter, Annika reflects about place, vocation, and values. 

Greetings, friends and fans of BCL! 

My name is Annika and I was the AmeriCorps member serving at BCL last school year. I am currently writing from Seattle, Washington, a place I am from and had greatly missed while I was living in Burlington. As much as I love the Green Mountain State, I needed the constant rain and coastal proximity of the Pacific Northwest back in my life. 

(Don’t tell anyone, but it actually doesn’t rain that much in Seattle, and when it’s sunny and clear you feel on top of the world. We just tell everyone it rains every day so they don’t move here…)

I am currently working at the Maritime High School in Seattle. When I tell people that, their eyes get big and they ask, “What is that?” I generally give everyone the same explanation. The school is designed to get students jobs in the maritime sector when they graduate, which is high-paying and also in desperate need of a set of diverse young people to replace the aging, old, White, male population. The Maritime High School is a public high school that any student can attend, and they learn science, math, and humanities just like any other school but those subjects are centered on maritime-themed projects. Students also learn maritime-specific skills, which is where I come in. I have been teaching vessel operations, navigation on the water, and boat building.

Much like BCL, MHS is place-based, project-based, and centered on community. Students demonstrate their learning through hands-on skills and projects, rather than through tests. In this post, I am will tell you about some of my students’ learning, the ways I’ve been involved, and the connections to BCL that I’ve drawn upon to inform my teaching. I hope you enjoy reading about my adventures.

The Maritime High School operates a retired passenger ferry called the Admiral Jack to use as a floating classroom for students to learn about vessel operation and navigation. Like BCL, MHS is designed to be place-based. Students become acquainted with the local watershed by traveling up and down the dredged portion of the Duwamish river on the Admiral Jack. This portion of the river is lined with shipping barges, cranes, and processing plants sending goods to and from Alaska and other Pacific regions. 

I teach students how to read charts to plan a voyage onboard Admiral Jack. I also teach safety, knot tying, and other basic maritime skills. In the Fall, students synthesized their vessel operation knowledge with the history and ecology of the Duwamish that they had been learning in their other classes to prepare a river tour onboard Admiral Jack. Similar to BCL projects, the tours had real world impact because community stakeholders were invited on the tours to learn about the past, present, and future of the Duwamish river. I supported students as they wrote scripts highlighting the impacts of dredging and industry on the ecology and culture of the Seattle community. 

Of course, any ambitious project that involves multiple groups of stakeholders comes with the risk that it won’t go smoothly. On the first day, students did an excellent job giving a tour of the river! On the second day, the group ran into a problem. As we were traveling upriver, the captain noticed several police boats operating an ROV. Suddenly, the police were radioing us in distress. Their ROV cable had become entangled with our propeller! We were interfering with an official Seattle police search for a body that had been dumped in the river. The tours were delayed for an hour as the police sent divers down to detangle their cable from our ship. Parents who were waiting onshore for the next tour were very concerned. Fortunately, the students did a good job staying focused and improvising their tour scripts while police boarded our boat and milled around.

One highlight of the year was our overnight trip to Blake Island. Blake Island is the legendary birthplace of Chief Sealth, the namesake of Seattle. Students spent two nights there learning the cultural significance and ecology of the 1-square-mile island, which is a state park. I taught a lesson on the intertidal zone and its inhabitants. In true place-based Pacific Northwest fashion, it rained for three days straight for the entire trip. To stay dry, students got to wear very attractive orange foul-weather suits like fishermen wear (called foulies for short). 

The island was also infested with very bold racoons who wanted our food. What could go wrong? Fortunately, no students were bitten by racoons. Instead, the hiccup came on the last day. The Admiral Jack took all the students back to Seattle, and I stayed behind on the island with the gear. Unfortunately, Admiral Jack broke down coming into the marina in Seattle, leaving me stranded on Blake Island. I waited six hours alone on the island for a solution to arrive. I was fully prepared to spend a third night on the island – after all, I had all the gear! Finally, we had to call a vessel called the Pacific Arrow to come and pick me up. I got a luxury, high-speed ride back to Seattle that only set the school back a grand or so.

The project that I have learned the most from was the boat-building project that we did with students this winter. I didn’t know anything about boat building or power tools. Fortunately, I had my BCL and Shelburne Farms experience to inform how to engage high schoolers in a hands-on project. All of the parts of the boat were measured, cut, and glued or screwed together by students, under our guidance. Practically, this meant that I taught 50 9th graders how to use drills, jigsaws, and power sanders.

We built two Goat Island Skiffs: 14-foot sailboats that can also be rowed. They still need paint as of writing.

The project was hot, dusty, smelly, and loud. I created a music playlist to motivate students, who didn’t always feel like cutting wood and putting on plumbers’ suits to apply chemicals. For the most part though, students enjoyed the hands-on component and were happy to create something tangible at school. Later in May, we will launch the boats so that students can enjoy the fruits of their labor. 

All of these maritime projects remind me of BCL units, because they connect students to their community while also teaching them important skills like project design, community networking, and communication. It is encouraging to see that there are high schools on both coasts that are doing the work to offer alternatives to traditional education models. I have been very happy to be immersed in Seattle and the unique problems that it faces, because Washington is my home and I am connected to the community here. However, I am so grateful for my time in BCL because it gave me a vision of what education is all about – empowering young people to make differences in their communities. I hope that many more options like BCL and MHS emerge around the country that center on their communities, whether that focus is the future of maritime, sustainable cities, or anything else that feels relevant to that place.

To my former students from BCL, I hope you are doing well and are loving life. Dov and Signe, I miss working with you and am so grateful for everything I learned from you. To the folks at Shelburne farms, THANK YOU for the year I spent connecting and collaborating with you, and I hope things are as idyllic as ever. To the Burlington community, I hope you are thriving!

With love from Seattle,

Annika