Hands-On Learning With the Smokies’ Classroom Ambassador
Melissa Crisp has had a few twists and turns in her career thus far.
She was a high school history teacher, and then she was an archeological technician for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. When the grant funding supporting the archeology position ran out, she found a new calling. Since 2009, Crisp has been the Parks as Classrooms coordinator for Pi Beta Phi Elementary School in Gatlinburg, a position supported by the Great Smoky Mountains Association. Around for decades, Parks as Classrooms is an educational collaboration between area schools and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park that brings students to the park for hands-on learning spanning a variety of curriculum topics.
What does the job of a Parks as Classrooms coordinator entail?
My job is to make sure we’re meeting the mission of both the park and the school system. So we’re meeting park education goals but we’re also meeting the curriculum goals in helping students prepare for their life. Some of the lessons I will get a hand in—we have an archeology unit, so I get to relive those glory days, but mostly it’s ranger-led and there’s teacher-led units. Each of our grades go on between three and five field trips out to the park per year, and they’re all related to multiple curriculums. It’s never just science or just social studies. We work in math, we work in language arts, PE, guidance; so curriculum from across the board.
What does a typical Parks as Classrooms lesson look like?
They will look for and collect data. Sometimes we meet historical figures. For example, (those) in second grade go on an amazing trip to the Little Greenbriar Schoolhouse. They carry an old-time lunch that our cafeteria worked up for them, and they’re in pails. They get to walk the trail up the schoolhouse just like they would all those years ago, and they meet the schoolmarm. She takes them through what a morning at school would have been like back when it was Little Greenbriar Schoolhouse.
How does the Parks as Classrooms program benefit students?
It’s a great equalizer. It allows everybody to have that success. In the classroom your traditional learners, they get to experience success because they can learn by reading or listening, but learners of other types have a lot more trouble with that. When you don’t experience success in education, it’s demotivating. So by having these experiences where they feel excited and they can be the ones that’s getting something right and doing something right, it motivates them to enjoy their education a lot more and try a lot more. We have a huge number of special needs and English language learner students, and they love it. They love going out on the trips because they don’t feel lost. Sometimes you feel lost in the classroom when you’re not a traditional learner. It makes it real for them, so it makes it easier for them to shine and show they know this knowledge, and when it comes to test time your brain stores that in a much different way as a memory, versus as something you’ve read or done a worksheet over. So it’s much easier to retrieve it.
How does this program impact the community aspect of education?
A lot of parents have been on these trips and seen and done these things, so I love this program because it brings in so much parent involvement and so much community involvement. The community really supports us and helps us fundraise for things like covering the cost of the bus and some of the materials that we need. It’s a great way to bring everybody together and create that community effort in education.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.