We are engaged in teaching paddle strokes and portage techniques, in erecting tents and building campfires – the physical stuff of the canoe trip. However, we are about instilling a sense of wonder and unbridled joy for the world; about teaching kids to live with each other, to work together through difficulties and differences; about awakening a dormant awareness to the glorious thrust that is the flapping, crawling, breathing world; about understandings which come as much through the heart as they do through the head; about building a richness in life constructed from personal meaning, not material possessions; about learning the names of plants, not celebrities; about teaching care and respect for the natural world, one's communities, and oneself; about discovering that we can accomplish far more than we ever knew; about coming to know that the moon still rises over the schoolyard and rain still falls on the shopping mall, and that, wherever we live, we live in the natural world; about seeing, with our own eyes, the beauty of the world and knowing, with our own hearts, that we belong to it.

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In short, we use the canoe trip because the canoe trip is about good teaching – about the types of experiences which lead to good people.

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​It has been said that "what gives each person his or her personal identity is that person's private store of recollections. If so, then people should be careful curators of the assortment of memories that they collect over the years" (John Locke, Kathleen Dean Moore). Memories make us who we are – the experiences and ideas that are powerful enough to remember are the ones which come to form the character of our lives.​ Canoe trips are essential in this. We want students to be able to say things like:

 

"I am a person who remembers the feeling of looking out from a small, rocky island under the centre of a starry sky. Perched on a lake as calm and black as the night, enveloped both above and below in quiet darkness, with stars like a pattern on the heavy quilt."

 

Or, "I am a person who remembers turning a bend in the river and being presented face-to-face with the overwhelming majesty of a moose knee deep in the mud, grazing on boundless grasses."​

 

Or, "I am a person who remembers bearing witness to the rare beauty of a unseen loon calling longingly across a lake, reverberating it's sound across the rocks, echoing beyond the trees."

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To see more about what our canoe trip programs are like, read about the Headwaters Experience.​

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