I Love Journeys: Interview With a Journey Lover: Part One

I recently published a bunch of comments about Journeys that were written by people who responded to a survey I did on GSUSA programming.  Most of those comments were pretty anti-Journey, anti-TAP.  That blog post garnered a couple of comments that were extremely supportive of Journeys and so I went back to the Facebook groups where I had posted links and posted that I really wanted to talk to those pro-Journey people.  Nicole came forward and offered to talk to me.  

I spoke to Nicole and her wife for about forty-five minutes and from that conversation I have created this blog post and others.  If you read this after it was originally published, I will hopefully have links to the others posts here.  While I have formatted this post and the others as a Q&A, our conversation was free-flowing and not this structured.  I wrote the exact questions when writing this post and used Nicole and Emily's words as the answers.  After the post was written, I sent it to them for review, comments and corrections.  

Ruth:  Hi, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed.  Can you tell us a little about yourself?

Nicole: Sure. I was a Girl Scout my whole life K-12. I took a break to get a STEM degree and when I was done, I went to my local council to move my lifetime membership to it.  They said they were looking for someone to do outreach and entry level outreach coordination and facilitation. So that's why I started working for Girl Scouts. 

Along the way, I've had pretty much every job that I could with Girl Scouts.  I did outreach. I worked as an outdoor adventure facilitator at camps. I worked at resident camp. I worked in the cookie cupboards and then I got a full-time job coordinating outreach for a few service units, but also taking on a membership specialist position for more service units as well. So I was doing the recruitment, placement and membership support for a while. Then I moved out to Colorado and became a volunteer support specialist for Girl Scouts of Colorado for a while before moving into an adult training position.  I am loving that. I've been doing that for about a year now. 

Ruth:  So you are coming at this from a staff perspective.  Have you ever led a troop?

Nicole:  I haven't had the typical experience of leading a troop through a whole year, but my job has included bringing the Girl Scout experience into the community.  I've led groups that met at lunchtime in public schools.  One program I did was at a local women's  correctional facility.  I'd go there twice a month--once to plan with incarcerated mothers, and then once on visitation days with them and their Girl Scouts. So I got to help them lead their Girl Scouts too. It's been really rewarding. I haven't been in a fully volunteer position for a while but I just love getting out and helping not only the girls themselves but also volunteers.

Ruth: It sounds like your whole perspective on this is different than that of the helium-handed mama.

Nicole:  Yeah that's absolutely true, but I do work very closely with volunteers and service units especially as a volunteer support specialist where I would step-in as a service unit, level volunteer, when those positions left unfulfilled for a while and get my hands dirty and plan Journeys in a day stuff and all that jazz. That was fun.

Ruth.  So, now on to the subject of the interview:  Journeys.  I'm not a fan, but you are.   I can tell you that the absolute worst programming I've ever seen out of Girl Scouts is the Daisy Welcome to the Flower Garden Journey.

Nicole:  Yeah. It was pretty rough. And it was like one of the first ones?

Ruth:  The very first. 

Nicole:  So yes, the the first Journeys are very rough. They're getting an upgrade though and I'm very excited to see what they turn into.  But yeah it's it's hits and misses out there.

Ruth.  But you say you like them. I  guess the first question is,  if I say the word "Journey" to you, what does it mean?  What is a Journey?  

Nicole:  A Journey is the intentional act of teaching leadership to Girl Scouts. And we know that this kind of three-part model where we are exposing participants to new ideas, having them do hands-on, age-appropriate, connecting activities and then guiding them through the taking action step that puts what they've learned into action.   We know that process teaches and passes on the skills that we need for  leadership. It's why it so closely mirrors other successful programs. The army uses "Be, Know, Do"; Four H has "Head Heart Hands" and the National Park Service uses "Explore, Learn Protect"

Journeys do that in a structured guided way. So GSUSA is providing the curriculum, sometimes successfully sometimes, not so successfully, for leaders to do this leadership journey cycle with their Girl Scouts.

Ruth. Sounds great. 

Nicole. Yeah, and there's a ton of variation and how it actually goes down. I also like to remind folks that we as leaders learn just as much with our Girl Scouts as they do.   You're not going to get it probably right away and that's okay. It's all about attitude, not aptitude and practice, not perfection. 

Ruth:  That all sounds really great. But I remember that first year of Journeys.  At that time I was on an email list with someone else who had a child my daughter's age.   This woman had never been a Girl Scout. She knew very little about the organization, she just knew that when the paper came home, her daughter wanted to do it, and they needed a leader.  She was not a professional educator but she was a graduate of a women's university and believed in the power of all-female spaces.  She went to the training and they handed her the Journey book and said, do this. And she said by the end of the year, both she and her daughter had had more than enough. 

I had a lot of prior experience with kids, but they were generally in second or third grade.  Kindergarten kids were new to me.  I took the Journey book and leader's manual home and reviewed them and my first thought was that this wasn't going to hold the girls' attention.  However, I gave it a chance, figuring that GSUSA probably knew more about kindergarten kids than I did.   I did the first couple of sessions, including reading those stupid stories. One of my moms was a kindergarten teacher, and I looked at her after it was over, and asked if it was me or the material.  She said that sometimes as a teacher, you have to adapt the material.  I adapted it by dropping it and figuring out how to spend two years earning the Daisy petals--and no, I didn't read the Flower Friends stories for them either.  

If you're telling me that Journeys are a good thing, I guess my question is, "How do I make them a good thing?"   I'm the helium-handed Mom who has never done this before. Give me something I can work with. If you're telling me I should like this, what's there to like?   

Nicole:  That's where experience comes in and the three processes are a great kind of like checks and balances in my head on what GSUSA puts out. Everything that we do in Girl Scouting should be as girl-lead, experiential and cooperative as we can possibly make it. Sitting down and doing these Journeys from the books is almost never a great idea except for that like very green basic leader, who's going to probably really quickly release realize that the girls aren't engaged and will try to figure out how to make it more engaging. And that's where we turn back on our three processes--how we do Girl Scouting and part of the reason that I do love Journeys the most is because how flexible they let us be. So if your Girl Scouts are interested in one particular thing or have a wide variety of interest, I think it is so exciting and gratifying and fun to kind of bend the Journeys to what they're interested in and really customize it so that they can have a great time.  

Ruth: Have YOU ever done that?

Nicole:   We did the Brownie WOW Journey looking at it globally, we focused on a side quest, basically. And we talked about all the different ways people and girls their age interact with water. I know that there's some kind of seeds of this in the journey book but we really honed in on what waters are in different fruits and vegetables that grow around the world because I know Brownies love to eat!  So we got to have snacks all the time during our Journey weekend. 

We looked at what people around the world do for clean water too. So we took a hike outdoors, on our wonders of water journey, carrying water like, Girl Scouts their own age around the world might have to do, and I did have some moms that were like, "Oh no, you're making them carry their own water. They're not going to like this" but the Brownies begged to do it again after we had hiked up from the lake at camp with the gallon jugs full of water and talked about what it might feel like to have do that every day instead of going to school.  So we really took that one on like the subjects of global food and water.  The Journeys I think are really fun to adapt towards STEM, but  that's where like my background is. You can go into  the science of water. So if I know that the home scientist badge or making slime really interested my Brownies,  we can look at  bubbles and the science of water and cleaning up oil spills and things like that. The girls can get a much more tailored personalized hands on group of activities.

We don't ask our leaders to be the subject matter expert in these things. Part of the reason GSUSA  does require a Journey before the highest awards is not as hoop to jump through but as a progression.  Our highest awards and any meaningful activism that we want our adults to be able to do have to be done with the community, not just for the community. So we're teaching these skills.  We want them to look around  their own community and recognize problems, and from start to finish, figure out how to solve them. We're teaching them actively how to reach out to the community, figure out who's already doing this work and what type of things are age-appropriate for them to do to help? Having them solve a problem that they came up with with their community? That's fun. I like it a lot.

Ruth:  Well, I think you definitely are in the minority on that.

Thanks to Nicole for taking the time to talk to me and to review the draft post and provide even more information. Read Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.