Fall 1999

[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MARCH 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: FALL 1999.]

South Side Tour Guides:
Where Nature and History Merge

By Jean Pascual

Move over Fodor and Frommer and Michelin. Make room for Washington High School's new guide to wonderful destinations, Chicago's Southeast Side: Historical Cultural Ecological Environmental Tour. Two hundred students who actually live there authored this one.

This is an area where black-crowned night herons nest against a silhouette of the mountainous Paxton Landfill, where it seems that every vacant industrial site was a former steel mill, and where some of the city's oldest churches grace the neighborhoods. The National Park Service has proposed that this area be designated as the Calumet National Heritage Area.

Rod Sellers, a 30-year history teacher, and Rita Koziarski, his long-time chemistry colleague, collaborated on the project funded by the Annenberg Foundation. Eva Aseves and Barb Oliphant, both biology teachers, joined Rod and Rita after its first year pilot.

Their project connected the biology, chemistry, and history curriculums and incorporated the community that spans roughly a seven-square-mile area from 79th Street on the north, 138th Street on the south, Lake Michigan on the east and Lake Calumet on the west.

The idea was that chemistry students would conduct water and soil analysis, biology students would do wetland and prairie restoration work, and history students would collect historical data. Each class would compile its results at the end of the term, and a tour book would be born.

What actually happened was much more than that. "I've never seen the kids go so far beyond the boundaries of their assignments before," says Rita Koziarski. "It showed how much more there is to education than preparing students to take tests."

All four teachers attribute the students' enthusiasm to the fact that they were learning about their own community. "They were empowered in a way that other projects don't give them the opportunity to be," Eva Aseves says. "Rita's chemistry students were coming to me for field guides because they wanted to know what that yellow bird was and whether what they found was an owl pellet or not."

Even Rod Sellers, co-author of Chicago's Southeast Side, says he learned something new. "I know what purple loosestrife and phragmites are now, and I know they're a problem." Both are invasive plants that dominate degraded wetland sites.

He can thank Eva's and Barb's students for that. Participating in a program headed by Illinois Natural History Survey and funded by US Fish and Wildlife and Chicago Wilderness, the students wore T-shirts emblazoned with "The Beetles Are Coming — to a purple loosestrife area near you." These students, aided by students from Bowen High School and the kindergarten class at Arnold Mireles School, cultivated purple loosestrife plants from roots, and then raised a species of beetle that has been shown in some studies to feed exclusively on loosestrife and thus help reduce the plants' invasive growth. In May, the students released hundreds of the beetles at 122nd and Torrence, adjacent to Indian Ridge Marsh. That stretch of property is now noticeably less purple than are its neighboring sites — not devoid of loosestrife, but making headway.

Barb Oliphant, who grew up in Hegewisch and attended Washington High School herself, says, "I've lived here all my life and I never knew 122nd and Torrence was such a spot of interest. It needs protecting."

One of the project's most dramatic discoveries was a hybrid of history and nature that students learned about through one Hegewisch resident's inquiry about some old memorial markers at William Powers Conser-vation Area, known locally as Wolf Lake Park. The students found a map from 1946 that showed 104 stone memorials had been placed along the entrance to the park. They explored and found 98 veterans memorial stones amidst years of overgrown grasses and brush. A living memorial tree flanked each stone. Local veterans organizations and Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops helped restore the stones and planted replacement trees for those that had disappeared.

Of the collaboration between the students, the school, and the community, Sellers says, "Kids tend to think there's nothing special about where they live, and local residents tend not to appreciate the positive things kids contribute to the community. This project has done a lot to get the community and the kids working together."

Aseves says that regardless of what direction the project takes in the future, she and her students will continue to cut buckthorn and pull garlic mustard. It's that kind of perseverance that supports Sellers' belief that this project has helped the kids understand "it's the little guys who have always made things happen, and that they live in a really special place."