JUNE 25, 2009 ISSUE
Third Year of Rolling Academy a Great Success
The third year of Mountain Alliance’s Rolling Academy took students on an 11-day trip across the eastern United States, including Charleston, W.Va. Photo by Shelly Crandall
“The anticipation was exciting. Sometimes they wouldn’t tell us what we were doing that day until we got there and then it would be like ‘OK guys, you’re working on an Amish Dairy Farm today,’” said William Tsang, a rising senior at Watauga High School, on June 19 at the 3rd annual Rolling Academy Symposium.
Tsang was referring to his recent trip with the Rolling Academy, an expeditionary learning group that is the brainchild of Todd Nolt, executive director of Mountain Alliance at the high school.
Each year, Rolling Academy selects 10 students to go on a trip with Nolt and his fellow supervisors, Joel Barricklow and Shelly Crandall, in the green Mountain Alliance bus. The students spend 11 days on that bus with no cell phones or iPods, traversing both urban and wilderness environments as they learn about different people and places.
The day that they return, the students host the Rolling Academy Symposium at Grandfather Mountain’s Cafeteria and Nature Museum. The symposium is a chance for them to do a presentation about their journey for their family and friends.
At this year’s symposium, the returning travelers served their guests dinner and treated them to a slideshow and a video documentary prepared by the students on their last night before returning to the High Country.
The students’ first stop this year was at a coal mine owned by Pritchard Mining in Charleston, W.Va. They spent the morning driving coal trucks and learning about the life of a coal miner. Then, in stark contrast to their morning, they spent the afternoon with Larry Gibson, a dedicated environmental activist who has devoted his life to battling mountaintop removal by coal mining companies.
“We thought we’d start off the trip by making them squirm,” said Nolt, who believes that particular day was an excellent method of teaching the students about the complexity of a subject like that.
Apparently, the squirming didn’t stop there. The student’s video documentary showed them over the next few days experiencing challenging moments like climbing the cliffs at Seneca Rocks in West Virginia and running across the George Washington Bridge in New York City as part of Race for the Cure.
The students also got a taste of the simpler life working on an Amish farm in Pennsylvania, a day which many of the travelers recalled as one of their favorites on the trip.
Other activities included touring Washington, D.C., hitching a ride on a boat with the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), working with an artist in Bethesda, Md., and cooking and sampling Polish food.
The students also presented speeches at the symposium. They all discussed the various themes and greater life lessons that they learned while on the trip. After that, they said farewell to their new friends and returned to homes and families that they hadn’t seen in nearly two weeks.
The 10 students who made the trip this year are Jenna Bryson, Alex Jolly, Anna Lowe, Edward McDonald, Jessie Nash, Steven Rosander, Marlie Shelton, William Tsang, Katy Hopkins and Miguel Noriega.
According to its website, the “Rolling Academy uses expeditionary learning to emphasize individual growth and group development. Students learn by doing as the joy of new friendships and discovery merge with new lessons and skills learned in towns, fields, and wilderness.”
For more information and to learn about enrolling your student in next year’s Rolling Academy, click to www.rolingacademy.org or call Todd Nolt at the Mountain Alliance office at 828-263-0383.
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