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Phoebe Munch and Sage White Cloud came to �պ����� asking how they could combine their personal passions with professional studies. Their solution? Design their own majors.

The two students are among the first in the College of Education and Social Services (CESS) to declare an Individually Designed Major and pursue a Place-Based Education Certificate. They like to think of themselves as “guinea pigs” showing how the path they took can be successful.

The Individually Designed Major (IDM) in CESS allows students to be a proponent of their own educational journey.

“I found my way to connecting all my passions together,” said White Cloud, an inaugural recipient of �պ�����’s First Nations Scholarship awarded to students interested in issues impacting communities of Indigenous peoples. “My major is fostering environmental ecology, sustainability and equity in place-based and social justice education.”

WhiteCloud's ancestors are Abenaki, Mi’Kmaq, Comanche, and Kiowa. When he chose to attend �պ�����, he wanted to work on challenges facing Indigenous communities, particularly water quality issues. After arriving on campus, he discovered the problem of low graduation rates among Indigenous people and wanted to explore that too. Since he couldn’t find a way to address both topics through one traditional major, his IDM ties everything together.

Phoebe Munch came to �պ����� as an undeclared major. She knew that working with kids was her passion, but wasn't looking to take the traditional education path. She wondered how she could combine human development and environmental studies.

“I was stuck between a bunch of different things that I wanted to study and didn’t feel that I fit in any mold of a classic major,” she said. “I really wanted to be able to carve my own path.” 

Ultimately, Munch chose to pursue her IDM focusing on outdoor education and place-based education.

"I spent a lot of my time outside as a child learning about myself through the environment," she recalls. "Once I started working with children, I realized how impactful learning through experience in nature can be and that I was once in the same position that these kids are now."

Both students have a place-based component to their majors — meaning they learn through community-based experiences off campus while deepening connections to people, places, and the environment. Currently, they are interning at ECHO, Leahy Center for Lake Champlain, a science and nature museum on the Burlington waterfront that works closely with a consortium of organizations for public and academic engagement.

Their ECHO internships gave Munch and White Cloud a unique opportunity to develop skills in a different environment than a classroom. Working as gallery docents who educate guests, they learn how to gauge and interact with varied audiences, changing communication style between, for example, a mother and her toddler, a group of middle schoolers, or someone in their 80s.

When they are not in the field, both are studying readings about memory and environmental impacts. Through this, they are exploring how to best educate someone who wants to learn a few facts from the museum but not feel bombarded with information. The ECHO internship has been a catalyst helping each of them learn how to communicate and educate most effectively. 

Prior to ECHO, both students participated in other field-based internships – Munch at the Crow’s Path school in Burlington, and WhiteCloud at the �պ����� Morgan Horse Farm in Weybridge.

Crow’s Path uses hands-on learning to connect people of all ages to the natural world. Their outdoor classroom allows children the ability to play and be creative. During her time there, Munch led day trips for students, including birding, canoeing and more.

“It’s a whole other world, this magical place in the woods,” she said. "It brings a lot of different kids together, including certain children who would sometimes be left out in a traditional classroom, or those who have trouble in a typical school environment. It really provides the opportunity for any individual child to thrive. There is much more freedom and you’re not asked to sit in one place all day long.”

This past summer at the �պ����� Morgan Horse Farm, White Cloud helped build and repair trails while working to expand the group’s target audience to younger individuals. He also completed a personal project developing a plan for an outdoor classroom on the Farm. “I picked a spot, started laying the groundwork and then talked about how the staff could accomplish this within the next five to 10 years,” he explained. This work would include building a timber frame without a roof to create an open yet structured space accommodating a diverse range of learning styles.

The pair’s unique IDM pathways gave them the freedom to challenge educational norms. “This is really about discovering how you want to become an educator in a multifaceted realm and not just focused on being an educator in the traditional classroom sense,” WhiteCloud said.

Now he is putting his learning into practice by helping professors incorporate information about Indigenous rights into their curricula. White Cloud and fellow classmate Maddie Henson are also co-founders of the Indigenous Peoples' Collective at �պ�����. “Being Indigenous is who I am,” he said. “They go hand in hand, my education and my culture, and talking about those things is really important to me.”

As the two students come closer to graduation this spring, both want to pursue careers outside traditional classroom education settings.

Working at ECHO reaffirmed White Cloud’s love for educating kids. “This is why I want to become an educator, for these interactions, and it doesn’t have to be in a standard classroom,” he said. “It can be in a science museum or out in the middle of the woods.”

Munch hopes to go to graduate school or be an outdoor educator. “Working at a forest school or an outdoor program working with children in nature would be ideal,” she said.

Place-based education with internships at ECHO, the Morgan Horse Farm, and Crow’s Path, all encapsulated by their individually designed educational pathways, were first tested and proven to be successful by WhiteCloud and Munch.

Both students’ experiences opened their eyes to what education can be for students. Outdoor classrooms and a shift to place-based learning demonstrate that traditional approaches are not the only way to educate.