Red Canyon skateboarding class covers full spectrum of project-based coursework

When local teacher Kendall Van Valkenburg and the Gypsum skate park made national news earlier this year on PBS, one small detail didn’t make it into the piece, which focused on Van Valkenburg’s innovative skateboarding class.

A lot of the students were skipping school when the class was scheduled to visit the Gypsum skate park.

Van Valkenburg is a teacher at Red Canyon High School, an alternative expeditionary learning high school that uses project-based learning models in the classroom.

Upon joining the staff at Red Canyon three years ago, Van Valkenburg had already determined that a skateboarding class could be a good fit for project-based learning based on a class she had taught at Gypsum Creek Middle School.

The original mission of the class was to identify how students’ individual identities could improve their communities, and because it was a skateboarding class, that task involved an examination of how the students’ shared identity as skateboarders could positively improve their surroundings. They started visiting different skate parks to identify positive impacts those parks had in their communities.

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“We noticed there’s this natural mentorship that occurs, this self-policing that occurs, and it’s a place where people can take risks, learn from those risks, develop resilience, and have interactions with older and younger people who wouldn’t necessarily cross paths in other ways,” Van Valkenburg said. “We were visiting different skate parks and watching this go down, and when I came to Gypsum with the kids, a lot of the kids didn’t come to class that day.”

Van Valkenburg soon had a new mission for her class, to figure out what was missing from the Gypsum park. She started spending more time there.

“I noticed that many of the kids who were old enough to drive preferred to drive to Edwards,” she said. “So that natural mentorship stops at eighth grade (at the Gypsum skate park).”

The class then pivoted to study the social aspect of what type of skate park redesign would make more people want to spend more time at the Gypsum skate park.

“During the spring of 2022 we started doing all of the research about what intentionally goes into skate parks to make the culture we were seeking,” Van Valkenburg said.

In a civics portion of the course, the students visited the Gypsum Town Council to see if there would be any appetite on the council for a skate park redesign. The council committed funds for design and the students drafted a request for proposal.

Grindline Skateparks was selected, and then the math and science portion of the class began to take form.

On Thursday, Grindline held an open house in Gypsum to show a potential park concept.

“We showed them how we use geometry, how we use math during construction layout, how we use the Pythagorean theorem and how to read construction documents,” said Matt Fluegge with Grindline.

Fluegge said Grindline often visits schools to discuss skate parks, but usually just for a single-day talk.

“This is the first time we’ve had students so involved in the whole process,” Fluegge said. “They also came to the project kick-off meeting, which I do typically with just city staff, where we talk about the goal of the project, scope inclusions and exclusions, budget, site topography. So we went through our usual spiel, but then we’d stop and explain to the kids what we were talking about. They were really receptive and really interested.”

On Thursday, in a meeting with the Red Canyon students, “we got deep into an Excel budget sheet,” Fluegge said.

Physics and physical education are also obvious components of the class, and “in January and February, we’ll be grant writing,” Van Valkenburg said. “That’s our English class.”

Van Valkenburg said while she had a feeling skateboarding could help her drop into a full run of coursework, the class itself has evolved organically.

“I’ve had a lot of help,” she said. “We’re just working on it as it comes up and developing true, authentic, project-based learning.”