A group of high school students were scattered around Pyramid Island creating land art, July 17. They came from across the province, and were in the middle of Grande Yellowhead Public School Division’s career and life management course.
CALM is a required course in Alberta high schools. Normally it’s taken throughout the year, but students who take it through The Learning Connection—an alternative education centre run by the GYPSD—get an intensive, week-long course in Jasper National Park.
Under the guidance of Kim Wallace, the group spends a week living at the Palisades Stewardship Education Centre, learning strategies for managing their lives, and integrating that learning with experiential activities around Jasper—activities like rock climbing, rafting, canoeing and hiking.
The group ranges from Grades 9-12 students. Wallace, who taught three of the week-long courses this summer, explained that the program is all about decision making, and there are “three main strains” to that: career and education decisions, resource decisions and health and relationship decisions.
Each day of the course she spends half the day in the classroom with the students, teaching them about everything from personal finance to how their values impact their decisions.
“I hope that they begin to think about how they make their decisions—we talk about values, and often when conflict arises it’s often because people have placed values at different weight levels—and just to become more aware of that,” she said of her goals for the course.
July 18, the last morning of the course, a group of students sat at a table after finishing breakfast. It’s an age-old high school survival tactic to adopt an attitude of practiced nonchalance, and the CALM students were no exception. As they reflected on their week they threw rubber balls at one another, and answered most questions with sardonic grins.
“It’s less time than actually having to do it in school,” Emma Grant said, when asked why she took the course.
Before long, however, glimpses of their affection for one another, and the value they placed on what they learned, slipped out.
“Before I was just making decisions based on how I felt, but now I make decisions based on what I think,” Grant said.
“I really had to get out of my comfort zone,” Bailey Fourier said, talking about the group’s rock climbing and horseback riding excursions. “I never did any of those things. It felt terrible, I almost started crying while rock climbing, but the point is I did it.”
Lauren Pelkey, a tall and bubbly girl who was often smiling, said that her biggest accomplishment was learning to leave her shell.
“I’m really shy, and in this camp I’m trying to work on being outgoing,” she said, as the other students gasped in surprise.
“It’s true. I worked really hard this week, I kind of feel like a magician,” Pelkey responded.
Wallace hopes that some of that magic will stick with her students when they leave the course.
“I hope they have fun learning about themselves and learning about each other, and recognizing that relationships that they have with self, others and environment are probably the most important thing in life,” she said.
Trevor Nichols
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