What if you could teach young minds about the earth and the rainforest on a canoe as you slowly drift by tropical birds and mammals tucked away deep in the Amazon? Or teach geography while you navigate by boat, bike and foot along stretches of Kenya? What if kids could learn about other cultures by living and breathing them? What if you could teach kids about math and science while learning how to scuba dive? A school in Houston is doing all this and more, going beyond the textbook and bringing the world into the classroom to prepare young minds for the future.

After teaching in public schools for nearly eight years, Laura and Dan Zimmerman cashed in their teacher retirement savings to create a haven for learning by combining their love for teaching and the outdoors. The Houston Outdoor Learning Academy (HOLA), a fully accredited school in the Houston Heights, is a full-time school for students who wish to combine their curiosity, love of the outdoors and academic growth into a learning environment that uses a hands-on approach to enhance self-esteem, academic knowledge, social skills and personal success.

The school operates under the philosophy that views the outdoors as a resource that can serve as a catalyst for academic growth. Laura Zimmerman maintains that the outdoors provide an ideal laboratory for learning math, science and social studies and a motivating tool to enhance reading and writing skills.

Outdoor Education:
HOLA’s students still take traditional courses such as biology, chemistry and math. Located near White Oak Bayou, students often go canoeing and use the setting as a science lab. They read about PH and water quality but they can also walk down to the bayou, measure them along with turbidity and flow, and graphically plot the results.

Outdoor learning activities include backpacking, rock climbing, biking, and scuba diving. Zimmerman boasts that scuba diving is an excellent way to learn about physiology, math and science and is a great motivating tool because students won’t get certified unless they understand these concepts.

According to Zimmerman, there is a lot of value to what the school does that just doesn’t happen in public schools. “Public schools kids will maybe take two field trips a year. Here we take at least three field trips a week,” she says.

In the midst of all their adventures and activities, students are also required to keep journals about their studies allowing them to develop their writing skills by turning their learning experience into a story, anthology or even poetry.

HOLA’s learning experience even extends into City Hall where they observe sessions to gain exposure to local real world issues that affect them while also learning about government. A recent proposed freeway expansion of I-45 poses environmental impacts and loss of greenspace in the confluence of Little White Oak Bayou, Big White Oak Bayou and Buffalo Bayou near the school’s location. As the freeway expansion project comes closer to fruition, Zimmerman says it is something the students will be involved in.

Community also plays a major role in the HOLA’s learning experience whereby students are required to complete 60 hours of community service each year. Past service activities have included the Special Olympics, Houston Food Bank and environmental projects such as working with migratory bird habitats in Little Thicket Park.

International Trips:
The most exciting time of HOLA’s year is its international trip each spring, a requirement for all students. Trips and activities have included Kenya, where students engaged in an overnight camel safari; Washington DC, hiking the Appalachian Trail; Mexico, participating in the Model UN; and Guatemala where they lived with Q’eqchi Indians and participated in ecological projects.

This year students spent two weeks in Ecuador, canoeing to remote villages in the Amazon and interacting with the Shuar and Kichwa tribes under careful supervision. In what many call “the lungs of the earth” students were confronted with the Amazon’s wonders including its renowned wildlife. But students also came face to face with above ground pipelines, completely in disrepair and other impacts resulting from deforestation and oil exploration.

Zimmerman, an advocate of learning by immersion, says “you can read about all this in a sociology or geography text but it doesn’t work as well as a hands-on approach.”

Zimmerman recreates their adventures by recalling how they spent as much as four days deep in the Amazon without so much as seeing another person while spending as much as eight hours at a time in dug out canoes. She says that by traveling down a river in Ecuador, students learn so much more by the tribes they meet and the food they eat while also developing navigation skills.

Students’ experience on this recent trip was so profound that it prompted them to stand side by side Amazonian tribe leaders in protest of ConocoPhillips’ oil concessions in the Amazon outside this year’s shareholders meeting.

Zimmerman says that they came to realize the company’s business practices were affecting the very rivers they were living on and eating from themselves.

Student Differences:
According to Zimmerman, there’s a very distinct difference that can be seen in students after they have been on one of the school’s trips outside of the country. “It almost changes their whole outlook and the way they interact with other people. When they get back they have a hunger and a thirst to learn more,” she adds.

This transformation, she says, leaves them wanting to know what they can do and how they can participate. As a result there is greater enthusiasm for getting involved. She elaborates on how students begin to realize that they are a part of the environment and not just a consumer of its goods. “I think it makes them think twice about how much Styrofoam packing they use or if it’s really a good idea to dump paint in a gutter,” says Zimmerman.

She continues by describing how upon meeting people from third world countries students think more about their own impact on the environment and about our country’s impact on the environment as a whole.

There’s no doubt that HOLA is run on dedication and pure passion as it continues to bring the world into the classroom through innovative approaches and experiences that are sure to stay with young minds for a lifetime.