Glen Canyon Outdoor Academy,
GCOA , is a K-8 outdoor-based public charter school serving Page, AZ and surrounding Navajo Nation Reservation Communities. In their 3rd year of operations, the 24-25SY, GCOA will serve 192 students. Surya Zoba Studies developed GCOA’s academic portion of their charter, collaborated with the founding team for strategic planning, and developed a custom tailored expeditionary learning curriculum that integrates all subjects into thematic units called Expeditions.
In 2019, we designed a
biodiversity curriculum for the National Park Service Headquarters that is currently available to all National Parks in the United States to engage visitors and youth in citizen science experiences to help park partners design immersive educational experiences with a focus on biodiversity and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math). This project blossomed from a partnership with the Muskogee National Historic Park to design a Bioblitz camp for the Muskogee Nation.
Since 2014, our executive director Justine Carryer has co-facilitated river trips on the San Juan and Colorado Rivers alongside
Grand Canyon Youth . We have supported over one hundred youth, primarily at-risk and Native youth, to attend these life changing river trips that focus on community service, citizen science, and place-based learning.
Our pilot project, STEAM in the Canyon, began our focus on innovation in education with a free educational adventure to explore the local landscape and design innovative solutions to local problems in the Page, AZ and surrounding Navajo community. For four weeks we toured Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, the Rainbow Bridge National Monument, the Navajo Generating Station (which has since ceased operations), the Glen Canyon Dam, and the Dangling Rope Marina Solar Farm to gather data and observations of local issues, discuss and compare existing solutions, and design our own engineering solutions. We discovered the engineering process by building a shed with no utilities, which is a common phenomena on the Navajo Nation Reservation. This shed project sparked long-term inspiration to research housing innovation for the Four Corners Region including Navajo Nation and the Taos Pueblo.
