Nature is a creative endeavor. Every day and night, critters scurry, slither, and sneak, hoping to make a future for themselves in their own unique way. The Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center looked to this creative model to help educate kids about local ecology with a program that started in 2012. The fruits of that program are on display in a new book published by the Dunes Center called, The Dune Forum: Nature is Full of Children and Animals, and Don’t Forget the Plants, too.
The Dune Forum was originally a magazine published by members of the bohemian art community that lived in and around Guadalupe in the 1920s and ’30s, explained Dunes Center Executive Director Doug Jenzen. Jenzen edited old covers of the magazine to include white space where the photo would typically go so kids visiting the center could draw their own covers.
“The organization has always focused on STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,” Jenzen said. “My background is in history, which is more humanities based. So since I came on board a year ago, I have been incorporating more arts in the programs, not just to broaden the appeal of the organization to kids and families, but to appeal to another type learner because everyone learns differently, and some learn better with the arts.”
The kids certainly had a lot to learn. The Dunes Center offers free after-school programs in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties. The new program, which included mostly creative writing featuring information the kids learned about the dunes and wildlife there, received support from the Fund for Santa Barbara after it proved itself popular.
“We recruited an intern to pilot a program with local kids from Guadalupe, and it turned out that it was the most popular program we offered,” Jenzen said. “I think it appealed to more kids because they could be into nature and science, but also be creative and artistic.”
The program was powerful because it was able to pair not just science education, but art education as well, Jenzen explained. On a day when certain flora or fauna were the focus, the students were also taught the structure of an ode, and then combined what they learned by writing an ode to whatever plant or animal they learned about.
“It was really interesting because the whole program was an experiment. This was the first time the organization has done anything like this before,” Jenzen said. “When a kid submited a limerick about turtles and tortoises, they showed that they not only knew how to write a limerick, but that they also knew the difference between a turtle and a tortoise—one lives on land, and one lives in water.”
The Fund for Santa Barbara also helped pay for field trips to the dunes and Oso Flaco Lake for the young, creative students, who were given notebooks and invited to record everything they saw. Though the program focused mostly on writing, the kids didn’t limit their creative output to just words.
“I was really surprised by the quality of the artwork, considering we didn’t ask the kids to draw anything as an assignment,” Jenzen said. “As we flipped through the notebooks we saw all these fantastic drawings in the margins, and those ended up being the drawings we used at the beginning of the chapters.”
The students were also encouraged to flex their writing abilities past poetry and into prose.
“Another interesting concept we utilized as a prompt was storytelling, and the kids dissecting owl pellets, which are the regurgitated material of owls,” Jenzen said. “The kids had to write stories about how the pellets got regurgitated by the owls, so there were all these great stories about mice going about their lives until one day the owl came along.”
The book is the summation of an entire summer’s worth of learning, Jenzen said.
“There was one little boy who actually couldn’t write when he started the program, so our intern had him draw pictures that were related to the prompt,” he said. “By the end of the program he was writing complete sentences, which was really nice for us because we saw that it was having an impact.”
Proceeds from the sale of the book will go back to the program and its future iterations. Jenzen has seen it grow in popularity not just because of its creative aspects, but because of how it gets kids active in education.
“I think this project gives kids a sense of empowerment,” he said. “They know a lot more than they did when they started the program, and skills like writing are essential to being a productive part of society.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne hopes he is a productive part of society. Contact him at [email protected].
