ALL PROCEEDS GO TO RE-NATURALIZING THE CONCRETE COVERED CREEK ON THE KLO SCHOOL GROUNDS INTO AN OUTDOOR CLASSROOM. www.ShimshonObadia.com www.EcoArtIncubator.com My name is Shimshon Obadia, I'm an artist and researcher leading 'Daylighting the Classroom, ' a project in partnership with The University of British Columbia's SSHRC funded Eco Art Incubator research initiative, running out of École K.L.O. Middle School in Kelowna, B.C.. This project's mandate is to use eco art to re-envision education and the role of the natural world in school curricula. For the past year, I have been using eco-art to connect middle school students with their more-than-human community. This project is also designed to bring attention to these students' now 7-year struggle to restore the often flooded concrete-covered wetland habitat that once ran through their school grounds. Initiated by students' discovery of blue-listed Western Painted Turtle eggs in their long jump sand pits, this school's community, with the guidance of science and environment teacher Michelle Hamilton, began to restore the species' disappearing habitat. Originally challenged to raise $100k by their school board for this habitat's restoration, multiple "generations" of students remarkably raised $86k. Unfortunately, in an updated quote, these students recently discovered their project will now cost half a million dollars. Although dismayed and disappointed, through work on this issue, the students and teachers involved ended up creating a process of discovery- how the natural world is an educational resource gold mine. Through eco art implementation in their education, these students have shown an aptitude for learning far beyond what is regularly observed of middle school students in a traditional classroom setting. This project focuses on the completion of this endeavour, and helping students negotiate the disappointments and obstacles of bureaucratic intransigence and even, of dismissal of children's right to learn from and steward the natural world. Middle School students today have unparalleled access to information databases through the internet with carts of laptops in every classroom and smart phones in every pocket. However, with all this recent influx of technology, one fundamental database with even more information is being overlooked; the more-than-human natural world. This is why the students at École K.L.O. Middle School, with eco artist Shimshon Obadia, are building their knowledge database of the natural surroundings that educate them into a book. But this is not the kind of data than can be translated into binary code, this is experiential information that comes out of each student's individual response to their environment and their environment's response to them. This is not the slactivist generation usually associated with preteens; when given direct creative exposure and experiences with nature, these "slactivists" can change the world. In this book, 'This is my Classroom, ' the students at École K.L.O. Middle School have put together, in a variety of mediums, a compilation of creative reflections; these are focused on who and what they see as their more-than-human educators which they have found in their natural environment. As well as showing the rewards of the 'Daylighting the Classroom' project, this book is directly contributing towards this community's long term habitat re-naturalization project for the Western Painted Turtles on the École K.L.O. Middle School campus. All funds from the sale of these books go directly towards the creation of an outdoor learning environment which will be mutually beneficial for its human students as well as its more-than-human students like those new, wide eyed Western Painted Turtles that hatch here every year with a whole world of opportunity to discover.
About the Author: Shimshon Obadia is an artist who's focus lies in interdisciplinary community work educating and empowering people and their environments. In 2010, he founded the 'Best Plays Ever festival' (Toronto, Ontario) to enable aspiring youth in the arts to generate performative works, in response to the specific lifestyles created by their urban surroundings, on a semi-professional level not normally available to them. Currently he is working with the students of École K.L.O. Middle School (Okanagan Valley, British Columbia) in a partnership with the University of British Columbia's SSHRC funded Eco-Art Incubator research initiative to offer them an alternative mode of learning through a creative and embodied engagement of the more-then-human natural world.