The story below is an excerpt from our September/October 2017 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, log in to read our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app. Thank you!
Mallory McDuff, Ph.D. teaches environmental education at Warren Wilson College. She is the author of “Natural Saints” (OUP, 2010), “Sacred Acts” (New Society Publishers, 2012), and co-author of “Conservation Education and Outreach Techniques” (OUP, 2015). Her essays have appeared in BuzzFeed, Full Grown People, The Rumpus, Sojourners, USA Today and more.
One summer afternoon, I faced an impending deadline at work and an energetic five-year old at home. As my daughter pushed a baby-doll stroller across the living room, I concocted a strategy to create a window of time for writing at the kitchen table.
“Maya, why don’t you stroll your baby to the library and then come back home?” I asked. Now this is not an advisable parenting tactic in many places, but I felt comfortable sending her on a solo expedition on the campus of Warren Wilson College outside Asheville, North Carolina.
It’s an unusual place to raise a child, or in my case two daughters, in a 900-square foot duplex, where we share a laundry room with the associate director of admissions. But my girls have grown up in this place, with its herd of cattle, a donkey named Tallulah, and a forest, farm, and garden that produces food for the cafeteria. The school is a work college, where students log 10-15 hours a week at jobs such as conducting research in the genetics lab, renovating campus buildings, and weaning pigs on the farm.
Soon after the start of my daughter’s journey, a staff member called on the phone: “Did you know that Maya’s pushing a pink stroller by the library?”
Indeed, this is the place where I feel known and at home.
A week later, Maya got her finger stuck in the circular hole of a piece of wood from a toy construction set in our garage. As her pudgy hand began to turn pink from the pressure, we hurried to the carpentry shop to find supervisor Norm Propst with his full head of white hair and wide-open smile. With the precision of a surgeon, Norm used a handsaw to cut the wood off her finger. Two college students watched in awe as Norm performed the operation, handing my daughter a lollipop to put her at ease.
When Norm died this past year, grown men and women told stories at his memorial of the transferable skills he taught them about working hard, caring for others, and respecting their community.
“Don’t ever be in too much of a hurry that you can’t help someone,” one of his former students recalled as a lesson learned on the job. Of course, an educational model where students practice real-world skills has the potential for both innovation and failure, but so does the actual real world.
My daughters are now 18 and 11 and have seen hundreds of my students leave college and find meaningful work from growing organic vegetables at Beacon Village Farm to monitoring threatened species with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. These summer nights, my graduates bring their own young children to my small house to share stories of work, place, and people in the mountains.