Teaching With Small Boats

Last month Inka Petersen and I attended the Teaching With Small Boats Conference outside of Seattle hosted by Center For Wooden Boats. We started out at CFWB's incredible facility in downtown Seattle drooling over their collection of beautiful vintage sail, rowing and powerboats; most of which are available to rent.

Then we were bussed up to Cama Beach State Park. This is a revitalized fishing camp from the early 20th century right on Saratoga Pass of Puget Sound and consists of about 30 cabins on the water, a boathouse, classroom space, workshop, and large meeting hall with food service. It was pretty impressive! An $18m partnership between CFWB and the Washington State Park system… that makes California closing State parks, look pretty sad.

The 85 conference participants represented 45 programs across the US and Northwestern Canada. Programs ranged in size from several hundred students to start-ups like we were three years ago. There were full-fledged vocational schools, public schools, museums and everything in between represented.

It was a very encouraging atmosphere…everyone was sharing ideas, experiences and resources. The tone and focus of everyone was  “ How can we help each other?”

In addition to presentations and workshops there was a full schedule of hands on activities. I attended session on the art of native canoe carving led by John Mullen, a member of the Swinomish, a local native tribal group. The canoe building traditions of this area are renown and we were lucky to have two of the great canoe carvers on hand to learn from. Saaduuts, program coordinator for the CWB's Carving Cultural Connections, was also on hand and guiding workshops in how to carve native canoe paddles.

I had wanted to attend the conference, both to see what other programs were up to and share ideas, but also to find curriculum resources for our program.  Since we started, I have wanted to integrate science and math into our program; both for its own value and so we could attract interest and possibly work with the public school system.

We got all I wanted and more:

We met Joe Youcha from BuildingTo Teach at the Alexandria Seaport Foundation who provided a wealth of information and access to his website which contains hundreds of curriculum ideas, lesson plans and 8 hours of video tutorials. That alone was worth the trip. We also learned alot about how to work with schools and shared our knowledge with other programs just starting out.

It was an inspiring and fun weekend and I hope to attend again.

Click here for more photos.