This past weekend, as students and teachers in New York City were enjoying the waning days of their February break, I was upstate in the Adirondacks visiting the brand-new Wild Center, the Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks. Located in Tupper Lake, NY (a traditional Adirondack town where I spent a lot of childhood summers), the Wild Center is a state-of-the-art interactive and multiuse facility set on a beautiful piece of property that abuts the Raquette River. Outside there are snowshoeing and hiking trails, river overlooks, osprey nests, and a vibrant pond ecosystem. Inside the museum, families and naturalists can explore a living river, from its tanks of deep lake fish and recreated duck ponds, to its shallow streams full of brook trout and gooey bog plants. The exhibits are very thoughtful, interactive, and differentiated - there are multimedia presentations in every room, and touching everything is encouraged. And the interior exhibits of the museum seem in lockstep with their more wild exterior ecosystems. More than most museums, the Wild Center truly seems to embody the philosophies of Into the Outside. It is a place where community resources flow seamlessly between the insides of institutions and the outsides of the natural world.
I know that I write a often about Brooklyn or New York City-based curriculum ideas. But place-based curriculum can enrich any instruction in any corner of New York State. I often hear teachers bemoan that they can't take their students all the authentic field trips that they'd like to, and that often they're hemmed in by regional or logistical concerns. In other words, an overnight trip to Tupper Lake might seem more like a pipe dream. But the Wild Center, and plenty of institutions like it all over the state, are working on exciting distance learning initiatives. if you work with high school students, be sure to check out the Wild Center's Coolest Project competition; it asks high school students to think critically about the conservation of natural resources and to express their opinions and research about the challenges of global warming as they affect their communities.
The work that the Wild Center does in Tupper Lake isn't constrained by its location at all: it can be recreated for students in your local park, or on the Gowanus Canal, or even in examining the plants that peek through the pavement in the schoolyard. Perhaps you could use the Wild Center's spatial layout as a template for your own in-class Natural History Museum of (insert your own community). Natural history interacts with communities everywhere in such interesting ways, and the Adirondack Park is just one tiny microcosm of nature in New York. Even if you can't expose your students to exciting exhibits upstate, you can bring an upstate museum mentality downstate by teaching the Wild Center's mission "to inspire broad public understanding of the systems that shape and sustain life" in your own backyard.



