We’re delighted to catch up with EEC Class of 2023 grad Zach Zimmerman, who is now a science teacher at The Perkins School and recently returned to IslandWood with his students through the School Overnight Program.
How does it feel to be back at IslandWood?
It felt surreal to come back as a teacher after working with so many chaperones as a grad instructor! Knowing the trails so intuitively and seeing so many familiar faces (and trees, and rocks, and landmarks) gave me a feeling of calm familiarity – even while wrangling my students through the week. I was grateful to get to see the Artist in Residence and Soil to Snack programs back in action – Joe and Rich were so generous with the kids!
Zach, EEC class of 2023 grad, recently returned to IslandWood’s Bainbridge Island campus with his current students.
How has your perspective changed?
Being an EEC grad was my first time teaching – I had so much to learn about pedagogy, lesson planning, science standards, building trust, working with diverse students and peers, and resolving conflicts generatively. It was often overwhelming to build these skills from the ground up while planning my flow for the week, completing my coursework, managing my health and wellbeing, and showing up for my community when tensions were high. I was also learning more about racial, gender, and disability justice in education, and striving (often failing, then growing) to use those lenses in my work. Looking back, it always felt important to me to design a “perfect” week for my students because they only had so much time at IslandWood, even when I was feeling exhausted or off my game.
Coming back this year, I saw that same level of dedication and intention coming from the current grads and staff instructors. I hope they know that what they are doing is valuable – more importantly, that it is enough. They are amazing, competent, thoughtful educators and the students they work with are getting so much from their experiences. I also have so much more empathy for the chaperones that I worked with – yes, you don’t have to plan the week, but you do have put the rest of your life on pause for 4 days, and your “down time” is still full of kid energy in the lodges!
What do you hope your students got out of their experience here?
I hope that our students got to experience themselves, their peers, and the natural world beyond the routine of their daily lives. Outdoor education trips can’t be everything to everyone – some students need to see themselves as scientists for the first time, others need to discover their own resilience when navigating homesickness or inclement weather, and others just want to spend extra time playing in the lodge with their friends when their instructors insist they’ll have more fun with field time. One thing that I think IslandWood does offer every student is novelty – a chance to simply exist in a new context for a few days. Programs like SOP (School Overnight Program) can give students a chance to learn and try new things at the edge of their comfort zones, especially when instructors work to ensure that what they offer is culturally sustaining and trauma-informed. Our students were appropriately challenged and learned a lot about how to be scientists and thoughtful stewards of their home ecosystems.
Zach, EEC class of 2023 grad, in the mountains.
How do you approach your role as a science teacher at The Perkins School?
Being a dedicated science specialist at the elementary level is a rare privilege, and I work hard to meet students where they are developmentally to make science fun, collaborative, and full of wonder. I emphasize teaching science as a sense-making practice that all humans have access to as we navigate the world around us. Even when we are learning about traditional disciplines like chemistry, engineering, or simple machines, I focus on sensory observation, inquiry, and curiosity to make the content feel relevant, accessible, and fun. I also want them to think of science as a tool for pursuing justice and taking accountability for the harm that some humans have done to our world. Ensuring that all my students have a voice and feel welcome in my classroom is also really important to me, and I am constantly looking for new ways to reduce my own airtime and center their knowledge more. After all, I’ve only lived in the PNW for two and half years; some of my 5th graders have almost four times as much experience living here as me!
What about your time at IslandWood helped you prepare for your current role?
I don’t come from a formal science background – my bachelor’s degree was in environmental studies, and I spent the first 5 years of my career selling citizen science travel programs to high school teachers and their students. I enrolled in EEC to discover what made my clients so passionate and develop my own voice as an environmental educator. I bring many of the philosophies and practices I learned from IslandWood into my classroom. I learned to begin with relationships and move “at the speed of trust” – ensuring that both my students and peers trusted me as a learning partner. My practicum experience gave me space to experiment with different teaching techniques, identify my strengths, and recognize the responsibilities and considerations that come with my positionality. I also loved learning about storylines as a curriculum format that builds on each prior lesson – I now use several IslandWood curricula, including the Community Waters and Changing Seasons in the Schoolyard units to structure lessons and engage students in local phenomena. Finally, my year at IslandWood taught me a lot about my own positionality and how to use my own privilege to challenge patriarchal, white-dominant, and ableist norms in education. I am forever grateful to my graduate cohort for modeling how to be in right relationship with each other, our students, and with nature, and for giving me grace and space to grow and learn from mistakes.
Is there a particular memory you have of your time as a grad student here?
Many! One favorite is teaching students an investigation on decomposers that I co-designed with classmates Will Comstock and Greyson Lee for Dr. Priya Pugh’s Informal Pedagogies class. The investigation asked students to walk a forest loop, inventorying the number of unique lifeforms they saw on newly formed, somewhat decaying, and fully decaying stumps. Our goal was to queer the binary between life and death by showing students how the most “dead” stumps, through decomposition into fertile soil, became nurse logs fostering the most diverse life. Seeing this lesson work as intended was thrilling – both because of the excitement the students showed when peering down at mosses, lichens, and spiders, and because it was one of the first times I successfully co-designed and implemented an investigation. The investigation works particularly well after reading Once There Was a Tree by Natalia Romanova, which launches ideas about all the life that relies on a tree or a stump, and challenges notions of “owning” nature that many students may take for granted!
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