During the Spring Semester of my Junior year of high school, I attended Maine Coast Semester at Chewonki (MCS), a place-based semester-long boarding school located in Wiscasset, Maine. During my semester away, I lived in a wood-stove heated cabin with six other students. We were very much at the mercy of the Maine climate and we were also responsible for chopping our own firewood and heating our woodstove throughout the night. In addition, all members of the community participated in a rotation of chores and work programs, ranging from cleaning classrooms to feeding the animals on the farm. These aspects of the Chewonki living experience, along with many others, really solidified all students’ connection to place and sense of duty towards the upkeep of their environment.

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In addition, the presence of Chewonki’s working farm played a large role in the community’s relationship to food systems, which was emphasized throughout the semester and which I detail in this blog post.

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While I took math and language classes in order to keep up with my curriculum at my sending school, most of the classes that I took at Chewonki were environmentally focused and tied to the local ecology of Maine. In my Natural Science and Ecology Class, I studied the different species, including different types of animals and plants, and environments of Maine, such as forests, salt marshes, and intertidal zones. We explored these environments on our weekly field-labs. In my English class, we used texts such as O Pioneers to investigate different people’s relationship to place and we wrote about our own relationship to home and place. Finally, in my Environmental Issues class, we studied environmental, cultural, political, and economic histories and impacts of climate change.

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At Chewonki, I was surrounded by a diverse group of peers who were all passionate about the environment and who were driven to take this leap and attend an environmentally-focused boarding school in rural Maine. I learned a tremendous amount both from my teachers, whom we addressed by their first names and with whom there was a strong sense of trust, and from my peers. My experience at MCS left me with a heightened appreciation for all that there is to be learned from diverse communities and by immersing oneself in their environment.