Red Canyon teacher earns national award for innovative skateboarding class

Kendall Vanvalkenburg — known by her students at Red Canyon High School as Ms. V — first became a teacher because she wanted school to be different for her students than it had been for her.

“I thought that if I could make one kid’s life better by being a teacher then they could impact people in their world, and that was the biggest way that I could make a difference in the world,” Vanvalkenburg said, adding that she wanted to help break the “one-size fits all” and cookie-cutter approach to school.

Vanvalkenburg has worked in the local district for the past eight years at Gypsum Creek Middle School and Red Canyon High School, breaking the mold by using project-based learning with her students for the past five years. However, it wasn’t until the pandemic that she found a way to really break outside her comfort zone and lead a class that would ultimately impact the Eagle County community.  

Living near the Gypsum Skatepark, Vanvalkenburg saw an increase in the number of kids skating during COVID-19, and through Gypsum Creek’s M-Term was able to merge learning with something that students were passionate about. Vanvalkenburg said she was aided in the class by Sam Elliot, the son of one of her colleagues, who helped create a video and inspire what a project-based learning course on skateboarding could be.

When Vanvalkenburg later took a position at the district’s alternative high school, Red Canyon, continuing this course as her specials class there was a natural next step.

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While she had never been a skater, Vanvalkenburg threw herself into teaching the skateboarding class that would ultimately help transform the local skating community and bring national attention to Gypsum and Red Canyon High School.

Not only was the class featured in a national PBS NewsHour segment produced by Elliot and fellow Eagle Valley High School student Langston James, but earlier this summer, Vanvalkenburg was honored with the 2022 PBL Individual Champion Award from PBL Works, a national education institute dedicated to growing and supporting project-based learning in schools.

Vanvalkenburg was honored with the award alongside school districts from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Queens, N.Y. as well as gave the keynote address at the awards ceremony, sharing the value and importance of project-based learning for students.

“It was really awesome to have our little community represented in such a positive light with the other recipients of the award,” Vanvalkenburg said. “I feel like the award is all of ours, not mine. It was cool to put Gypsum and Red Canyon on the map too. It’s so tiny that, it’s cool that we’re making a big impact.”

Receiving the award, she added “shows the need for this type of learning and this type of opportunity and this type of community gathering point for Gypsum. It shows it’s obviously needed, wanted, received, accepted.”

Plus, she added, the award was not just for her, but for all her students and the community that brought the project to life.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s my work,” she said. “It feels like it’s the community’s work and it’s the students’ work, and so I wanted to have all of our skate class at the conference receive the award.”

Skating the course

Red Canyon is a school that really embraces this concept of project-based learning, as it aims to offer a different high school experience to its students.

“It is woven throughout every class that is taught. (Red Canyon High School) prides itself on making learning as applicable to real life whenever possible so students can make the connection to what they are learning to what is happening around them,” said Christina Gosselin, assistant principal at Red Canyon. “When students see how what they are learning in the classroom connects to something outside of the classroom, the learning strengthens and student engagement goes up.”

For Vanvalkenburg and the skateboarding class, she took it one step further and really allowed the students to take the learning into their own hands, which is part of what she felt made the course so successful.

“When a student can see themselves in a project and drive the learning of a project, then it’s more engaging for them and it’s built around what the student is interested in,” she said. “I’m pretty Type A — I like to have everything planned for them — so, letting that go was terrifying and also so rewarding.”

Vanvalkenburg let students drive the class each week with their ideas, and offered the support and structure to explore these ideas and ultimately make them happen. This, Gosselin said, is part of what makes Vanvalkenburg a great teacher at the school.

“I could go into detail about her ability to formatively assess students, create classroom structures that support learning, the purposefulness of her planning, etc., but none of that matters if you don’t truly care about your kids and want to see them succeed,” Gosselin said. “She does.”

When Vanvalkenburg first began teaching the course on Fridays at Red Canyon, she started by having kids explore their identities as skaters and how they could positively impact the skate culture in their community. 

The students alternated every other Friday (weather permitting) between visiting other skateparks and classroom sessions where they’d learn about things like the physics of skating, aspects of community planning around skateparks, and more.

In her keynote address, Vanvalkenburg said that these activities “naturally led to the question: ‘What barriers stand in the way of skateboarding being a positive sport in our community?’”

Through visiting other skateparks as well as engaging with other community groups, organizations and individuals, the students were able to differentiate the difference between good and bad skate culture.

A good skate culture, Vanvalkenburg said, is one that has a welcoming and safe culture; where communication between all users — old and young, experienced and beginner — builds comradery and respect; where all users keep it safe and clean; and where there’s a “good flow.”

This exploration, however, led the students and their class down another avenue: How they could create a good skate culture locally. From there, the project and the class naturally turned into an advocacy project, Vanvalkenburg said in her speech.

“I am not a skater, or I wasn’t at the beginning of this, and I don’t know a lot about this — so I had to show them my vulnerability of, ‘I’m not the holder of all the information here, we need to work together to figure out where we can go and who does know these things and who can help us and who has positive input and the right avenues to go about that,’” Vanvalkenburg said in her interview with the Vail Daily.

Having this vulnerability not only showed her students that they were all learning together, but also that learning doesn’t have to happen in the classroom, and it has the ability to have widespread impacts.

This turn to advocacy spawned collaboration and interaction with many community groups and people including Dutchess Ride, The Skatepark Project (formerly the Tony Hawk Foundation), the Gypsum Rec Center, Eagle Valley students (including James and Elliot), the town of Gypsum and more.

All of which ultimately led the students to the Gypsum Town Council, where they advocated for a revamp of the Gypsum Skatepark. And as a result, in June, the town committed up to $40,000 for the design of a new outdoor skatepark in Gypsum.

This level of community involvement, Vanvalkenburg said, is what she believes led her project to win the PBL award, as the prompt asked: “How have you engaged with your community with project-based learning?”

As Vanvalkenburg allowed the students to drive this class — setting their own parameters for success and letting their interests and ideas lead the way — it not only made the learning more authentic, but it allowed students to see the impact they could have.

And while she learned a lot from the project and class — including, yes, how to skateboard — the main takeaway was that these students are resilient and “have a great perspective on community improvements that would benefit the future or have impacts greater than you can even conceptualize as an adult.”

Plus, as an added bonus, it also opened her eyes to the world of skating.  

“The magic I’ve seen happen at the skate park is like any other student interaction and human interaction than I’ve seen anywhere else; it’s a cool place,” Vanvalkenburg said, adding that she’s learned two big lessons about skateboarding culture and community:

“Concrete treats everybody the same, it doesn’t discriminate and the amount of resilience that it takes to get on a skateboard and get up and try again can transfer to anything in life,” she said. “Also, the transfer that I’ve seen from the skills learned at a skate park to what life presents as obstacles and what life presents as things we have to learn to be human, is amazing.”