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By Janet Rodekohr
rodekohr@uga.edu
When Diane Davies came to the University of Georgia in 1979, she had a $300 budget and an  impossible assignment: design a 4-H environmental education program for the Cooperative Extension Service in six months and make it work. Twenty-two years later, it more than works.
The impetus for the program was to make year-round use of the 4-H facilities. Today, the 4-H environmental education program attracts 35,000 students a year from six southeastern states, making it the largest residential environmental education program in the country. It has expanded from one campus at the Rock Eagle 4-H Center into three other
4-H centers at Jekyll Island, Wahsega (outside of Dahlonega), and Tybee Island near Savannah.
“We use the outdoors to study school subjects,” Davies says. “We want to make learning relevant to their lives, to bring their class assignment into the real world.”
In the early days, this Pennsylvania native taught all the classes herself, designing curriculum and incorporating willing teachers, scrambling from the ropes course to the pond class and over to the orienteering group in the woods.
Today a teaching staff of 45, who compete for the experience from all over the world, marches students deep into the woods, down to the ocean and up into the mountains to see how math, biology, social studies and other subjects relate to the natural world. School groups pour into the 4-H centers for an afternoon or for several days. Competition for prime dates is keen. Within hours of opening the schedule books, most of the spaces will be filled.
“Teachers tell us after kids come here, student performance improves and career ideas open up for them,” Davies says.
In fact, the 4-H environmental education program is one of the few field study trips and residential programs approved by the Georgia State Department of Education for full classroom credit.
But Davies didn’t stop there. In the early ’90s, she focused on the next phase of the program: a natural history museum at the Rock Eagle 4-H Center. With a $200,000 challenge grant in hand, she built the museum. She has filled it with exhibits on natural science, forestry and agriculture. Exhibits also tell the history of the Native Americans who built the Rock Eagle mound and of the 4-H Center that now surrounds it.
“We’ve raised close to $750,000 for the museum over the years,” Davies says, “and since 1986, we’ve raised more than $1 million for the environmental education program statewide.”
It couldn’t have happened without that financial support, but it wouldn’t happen at all without Davies’s commitment to learning—and to children.
“When I sit in my office just down the hall, I love to hear the kids walk in and say things like, ‘Oh, wow, this is so cool!’ That just makes my day because I know they’re ready to learn,” Davies says. “With the environmental education program and the museum, the one comment I’ve never heard is, ‘Why are we learning this?’ ”
Davies shares a child’s curiosity about the world and she never tires of learning. In the ’90s, she was one of 45 selected out of 846 applicants as a Kellogg National Fellow. The three-year personal leadership experience took her bush camping in Kenya, where she met with Richard Leakey to discuss the future of Kenya’s national parks. In 1998, she began another three-year project, working with Partners of the Americas and other UGA extension service educators to develop an environmental education program in Brazil.
Davies also finds time for scuba diving and white-water canoeing. Back in the ’70s, she worked as a horse wrangler at a ranch in Wyoming and climbed the Grand Tetons, rode motorcycles and played drums in a rock-and-roll band. In the ’80s, she bought an old but sound sharecropper’s house outside of Madison and rebuilt it.
One theme runs throughout Davies’s personal and professional life: real world learning. As she says, “you can never go wrong with that.” |
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