This website was created and managed by middle school
members of the pilot group of the Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart Women
as Global Leaders Elwha Experience. Forest Ridge is a Sacred Heart, all-girls
school in Bellevue, WA. At Forest Ridge, we believe all students can be leaders
if they lead from their strengths, passions, commitment to service, and
willingness to stretch. The Elwha experience aims to provide an opportunity for
middle school girls to explore their leadership strengths and stretches by
engaging in a complex, locally-relevant issue. In using the context of the
Elwha Restoration Project, students access the myriad voices, histories,
injuries, hopes, intentions, and concerns that have governed the trajectory of
this particular place. As a way of framing the experience, they explored the
flexible and overlapping perspectives of far past, recent past, present,
immediate future, and seven-generations-out future in order to understand the
complicated and messy relationships between people, nature, organizations,
decisions, technologies, power, etc. In this pilot year, students began
answering the questions: What is the place? Who and what belongs to or exists
in the place? What decisions could have been made and what decisions were made?
How do these decisions connect to what happened before and what will happen
next? How is power harnessed and then used or shared? This group of eleven
students realized that they just scratched the surface in learning about the
Elwha, but they also know that the work they do now will be built upon by future
groups of students on the Elwha.
In preparation for our trip, students participated in workshops to learn the history of dam construction and removal. As part of their five days on the river, they participated in data collection, remembering that river restoration is not static or ever finished, but will need continued attention and flexibility from the leaders in the restoration effort. This provides the platform for understanding that decisions made by leaders are not single-outcome or single-value; instead, these decisions will continue to affect a web of realities and interactions for generations to come and often live somewhere in the balance of compromise and trade-offs. This website is an illustration of their learning and experiences. They have built the foundation for this program to continue growing and expanding of the next several years, and they are excited to see the way the website also grows and expands as new students participate in the Elwha Experience in the future.
In preparation for our trip, students participated in workshops to learn the history of dam construction and removal. As part of their five days on the river, they participated in data collection, remembering that river restoration is not static or ever finished, but will need continued attention and flexibility from the leaders in the restoration effort. This provides the platform for understanding that decisions made by leaders are not single-outcome or single-value; instead, these decisions will continue to affect a web of realities and interactions for generations to come and often live somewhere in the balance of compromise and trade-offs. This website is an illustration of their learning and experiences. They have built the foundation for this program to continue growing and expanding of the next several years, and they are excited to see the way the website also grows and expands as new students participate in the Elwha Experience in the future.