Sometimes a day is just so rich, so deep, so fun, and so photogenic that it deserves its own post. A recent experience at Shelburne Farms, as the sap flowed and the sping season awakened, was just such a day.

Shelburne Farms has been an integral part of BCL since 2017, when the program was born. The program wouldn’t exist without this unique public-nonprofit partnership. It’s a relationship that helps infuse education for sustainability into our city-based projects, but it also allows Burlington kids to explore the woods and fields.

Gratitude to Emily Taylor, BCL’s Place-Based Education Teaching Fellow and farm staff (and resident!) for designing and organizing our day, and to Mallory Schmackpfeffer, Farm and Forest Educator, for helping facilitate our time there. More broadly, we’re grateful for the Shelburne Farms Education Team that continues to invest time and energy in our collaborative work.

It is the environment here that lets you feel involved in what you learn. I don’t think I could learn about sugaring without the experience I got here. It made learning engaging. And we got to see from the sources and not read text. At Shelburne Farms, I learned from stories.

• Hayden

Spending time at Shelburne Farms deepened my understanding of place by letting me connect to the land. It also deepened my understanding by understanding the community better.

• Jude

Shelburne Farms impacts my understanding of place through seeing how welcoming it is for humans and animals. There seems to be a strong community built there. This community based on dairy and syrup includes all kinds of people and animals. The learning there felt interactive. It also made us use our senses and it used visuals to conceptualize what was taught.

• Eli

I think we should do this more often. It was amazing to let my inner kid out and to let me happiness out today was just amazing.

• Keshon

Learning here gave us more understanding. Learning here we get to see what we’re learning about as well, which obviously helps us understand more. We also will probably retain the information way more than we would if we were to learn it in a classroom. If we learned the same stuff indoors I most likely would forget about it the next day and not really care honestly.

• Nasra

Spending time at Shelburne Farms showed me how much a community can do. I also learned that multiple things make up a community. Not just people. Plus, this experience was fun, and more engaging than classroom work. Period.

• Kali

I loved being able to take advantage of the outdoors. It helped me engage more because I felt like I was enjoying my time while learning. In a traditional classroom it can be difficult to focus or you can easily zone out, but outside was something new all the time.

• Finn

Today was one of the best days… We touched bunnies and goats, and we even got to learn how to tap a tree and did it with cool tools. This place is magical in the way it turns sap into syrup. This place also brings joy. As Dov said, it “brings your inner child.”

• Byron

This place is really special to the community and I haven’t been here like this for a full day before. It was really special. It also enhanced my learning in a way that I wouldn’t have gotten in the classroom. I have always been better about learning hands on and this was exactly that. Being able to see, taste, and smell the learning process was something you never get to experience in a classroom. This was a perfect day and being with everyone together was super fun. 

• Izzy

I really like this type of learning…Being to see (and taste) what we are learning about really makes the whole thing better. Plus that we ran into a random person [who was inspecting tap lines] and learned something new. I think place based learning here vs in the city is different because the space here is the natural world. It changes my understanding of place because I now think of place as more than just a town or building. PLACE is anywhere you feel connected to, anywhere that matters to you or a group of people.

• Amelia

I thought the experience of outdoor learning was really cool and something I would like to do more of as it gets warmer. I think that being outside allowed me to connect with the nature that I was learning about. I also think it was more enjoyable because I got to run with goats.

• Jimmy

Outdoor learning is much much better than indoor learning. Going from literally being in a pasty, windowless high school building yesterday to getting to run with goats in a field and still have it be part of the same school is insane. Shows the true power of BCL.

• Harper