An education in peace
Local school plants the Quinisa Memorial Learning Garden

A group of Fort Lewis Mesa Elementary students put their backs into it at the Quinisa Memorial Learning Garden last Thursday. When complete, the garden will offer a variety of hands-on learning opportunities./Photo by David Halterman

by Amy Donahue

Becca Conrad-Whitehead lightly brushes her fingers over the luminescent stones that adorn the wooden pole and make up the word “m’tendere” – “peace” in the Malawi language, Chichewa.

“The words don’t stand out as much as they could have with less people working on it,” says Conrad of the tile mosaic pole, which is at her home in Hesperus. “But part of the point of the project was that we are all unique and all have equal contributions.”

The pole is a peace pole covered with stones, tiles and shiny marbles, each placed by an elementary school student at Fort Lewis Mesa Elementary in Hesperus. Running down each of the pole’s four sides are the words for “peace” in eight different languages, each chosen by one of the classes at the school. The preschool class helped place the pearly white, blue and grey tiles that adorn a dove at the top of the pole.

Three years ago, the Braided River Mediation Center distributed poles to artists and schools in the Four Corners area to decorate and display at the annual Cinco de Mayo celebration in Durango. Conrad-Whitehead said that Fort Lewis Mesa Elementary never got around to decorating its pole that year, but that the creation of a school garden seemed like the perfect opportunity to incorporate the peace pole as garden art. “Every children’s garden needs art,” she said.

Third-grade teacher Carol Calkin agreed. “The pole was just sitting there, and it was eating away at me,” she said. “We try to teach nonviolent mediation and the idea that students have ownership in the peace process, and the pole is a good visual expression of that.”

Although the peace pole serves as decoration amongst the shrubs and flowers in the garden, it also serves as a reminder for students and teachers alike that elementary school students are living in a somewhat tumultuous time.

“It occurred to me that we are now dealing with children who, since they were born, have lived with the United States being at war,” Calkin said. “The pole is a constant visual reminder for world peace and the fact that these students will have choices in the future that will be very important.”

The peace pole will be placed in its permanent home in the Quinisa Memorial Learning Garden behind Fort Lewis Mesa Elementary School on Thurs., May 22. A dedication ceremony in which each class will present a song, poem or story to commemorate the event will begin at 10:10 a.m.

The garden contains nine raised beds, each bordered in a different way, everything from stones, boards and horsehoes to the cobb style of the Anasazi. However, the parcel, now a source of pride and excitement for the school, was not always that way. After remodeling the school in the fall of 2004, many of the classrooms looked out on a courtyard that housed a huge mud pit, or eye sore, as Calkin put it.

The idea for a learning garden emerged out of this, as well as a number of other motivations, including the desire to create a memorial for student Quinisa Rayburn, who recently passed away from cancer. Rayburn’s brother Mason now acts as the garden foreman, said Shari Fitzgerald, a parent and member of the Learning Garden Committee.

Fort Lewis Mesa students help hold the new peace pole in place as its base is filled in with dirt. The pole was an all-school effort and will be a centerpiece of the school’s community garden./Photo by David Halterman.

Conrad-Whitehead said that kindergarten teacher Kristi Wiebel thought the space lent itself nicely to a garden, so she got the project started. At the time, three of her students had parents who were experienced landscapers: Julia Anderson, Jessica Cobb and Fitzgerald.

Each class was charged with creating a raised bed in the garden that would be home to a theme of plants and decoration, Anderson said. From the preschool’s bean and morning glory tipi to a third-grade berry garden to a fifth-grade “cowboy” garden, each of the classes has planned and worked on a section of the garden, Fitzgerald said.

Another important motivation for creating the garden was its value as a teaching tool.

“Teaching in the outdoors is always something I’ve believed in, and this garden has added something to the school that I felt was missing before,” Calkin said.

The planning, design and creation of the garden have become hands-on learning tools for the kindergarten through fifth-grade curriculum, Conrad-Whitehead said. The garden fits into math, science and writing lessons, to name a few. The peace pole project also helped to tie in a study of language, culture and geography.

And just as the garden has been a large part of the academic environment in classes this year, it will continue to be such in the future, Fitzgerald said. The hardscaping and most of the planting will be completed within the next two years, but the maintenance and further development of the garden will continue to play a part in school academics.

For example, the garden is designed in such a way as to illustrate four different growing zones that will be helpful in third- and fourth-grade science curriculum.

The alpine and subalpine zone will resemble a mountain top with spruce, pine and aspen trees. The mountain zone will be based on the Durango area, featuring junipers, oaks and sumac. The high desert will mimic the local Hesperus climate, and the low desert zone will most likely include cactus and other desert plants, Fitzgerald said. Eventually, the zones will be used to teach about wildlife specific to those ecosystems.

Calkin said that she uses the garden to talk about environmental studies and the study of different biomes in her third-grade class, and that she would like to use the peace pole as a backdrop for peace stories from world cultures.

“It’s also a great outlet for parents and the community to interact with teachers,” she said. “It’s been great to work with the parents; I can’t imagine a more supportive community.”

Conrad-Whitehead said she estimates that about 25 percent of the parents at the school are actively involved with the garden, a high rate of participation for a rural school, she said.

During the summer, the maintenance of the garden will be left in the hands of those involved, which means that parents, students and teachers will coordinate on summer work days. “During the summer it’s a chance for the kids to get to play with each other,” Anderson said. “It becomes a social area.”

The garden serves many different purposes in the community, bringing together community members, parents, students, teachers and administration.

“It’s integrated into every grade level and all the curriculums,” Fitzgerald said. “It also serves as a quiet reading place and a place of inspiration for writing. It has to do with the emotional and social development of the school as well as the academic side of things.” •