Earning Criteria

• Demonstrate wilderness skills during 12 days/nights camping, hiking and climbing. This includes safely and correctly setting up camp gear including tents, stoves, and water purification methods; safely using ropes, harnesses, and belay devices to climb and descend vertical rock; practicing leave-no-trace principles; using maps and other navigational tools to establish a physical sense of place and move through the landscape; and practicing hygiene and self-care in a wilderness environment.
• Demonstrate successful leadership and personal growth throughout the expedition. This includes fulfilling various leadership roles in camp, and demonstrate knowledge of when to step up and when to step back, evaluating self-status and needs, communicating and advocating for personal needs; explaining and reflecting on different communication styles and modes, and describing and applying strategies for effectively resolving conflicts.
• Work in a small group to design and implement an experiment in a wilderness environment and present findings. This includes asking questions based on observations; formulating a testable hypothesis; designing and implementing data collection process to test hypothesis; recording systematic observations of natural phenomena in a science field notebook; analyzing and synthesizing data; and presenting about the research findings including introduction, methods, results, conclusion and discussion.
• Present research findings. Include: 1) Introduction - explains research, its purpose and why the research is important/needed. 2) Methods - explain how research was done, including where data was obtained and the steps to collect data. 3) Results - display results in meaningful graphics, table or illustrations. 4) Discussion/Conclusion - puts results into a comprehensible context. The discussion addresses: Do the results answer the questions that were asked in the introduction?
• Explore a variety of art forms and storytelling methods and discuss and reflect on different ways of knowing
• Learners will individually complete a three-part self-assessment that includes a learning artifact that demonstrates their learning.