Buoyed by the backing of various teachers in the region, a Victoria whale-watching company hopes to keep its floating class above water.
The first question Kathryn Cook fields from students each fall is frequently about whether they’ll get aboard a whale-watching boat with the Exploring the Salish Sea program through Eagle Wing Tours.
“It’s part of our classroom and school culture,” Cook said. “As a marine educator and a teacher for over 30 years, I’m so grateful they’ve got this program because it allows me to take my students beyond the beach when we’re doing marine studies and learning about their own backyard.”
She aims to foster a sense of belonging and connection, and Eagle Wing does that seamlessly with incredibly gifted educators who connect quickly with the kids, Cook said.
Currently teaching at both Ecole Margaret Jenkins and South Park Family School, Cook discovered the program at its inception in 2018.
The exhilarating, place-based, hands-on exposure connects them to the marine ecosystem and “stays with the kids an entire lifetime,” Cook said. It’s also incredibly easy to tie into any area of the B.C. curriculum; science, English, math, history.
“So many kids are spending way too much time in front of screens. It gets them out into that natural world to make that connection and make them feel like they’re part of something bigger,” Cook said. “You can go anywhere with it depending on where the students and the teacher want to take it.
“It’s so rich for the kids.”
Connecting to a place through experiential learning creates an emotional, physical, cultural and social connection – goals shared by both the business and the educators.
“It is simply all about trying to foster and develop an emotional culture to the Salish Sea,” Eagle Wing co-owner Brett Soberg said.
Understanding “the power of information and education,” the company set out to create the right program to foster positive change. Born and raised in Victoria, Soberg has been in tourism since 1992, in whale watching since ’97 and an owner since 2005.
Feeling fortunate to have grown up exposed to nature, camping and Indigenous culture and history, building a program that crosses into schools was a longtime goal.
“It’s not lost on me that some kids don’t have that ability or exposure,” he said.
In 2018, 750 kids experienced Exploring the Salish Sea. That doubled in 2019. It survived the 2020 break, maintaining 1,500 kids when the program returned in 2021 and doubled in its fourth year to more than 3,000 kids. With 3,800 students participating in 2023 and 2024, Soberg anticipates there’s still room to grow.
It’s intentionally built as a four-part, immersive experience.
“The first part is really all about building a relationship with the kids,” Soberg said.
There's a fluidity to the program, which starts with a classroom introduction and topic question, allowing teachers to guide its direction and align it with their curriculum. The session primes the students for the second part – the experience on the water.
While aboard a whale-watching boat, students are introduced to birds, kelp forests and other marine mammals over the two-hour tour.
“The ocean is very different from day to day. It’s a classroom in itself," Cook said, adding the program goes to different places each year.
The third part is another hands-on experience – a beach cleanup, a visit to a salmon habitat or playing games in the classroom that reinforce the topic question.
The fourth element is a celebration culmination of the program. Each class makes artifacts based on what they’ve learned and how they connected. That result frequently invites the public into the conversation as classes across Greater Victoria open their showcases to the community.
At Centre Mountain Lellum Middle School, teacher Kathleen Meiklejohn and her class turned a spare classroom into a sea forest complete with scale models of animals created by students. Each of them also wrote an artist statement – tying the project to several curriculum areas – arts, science, and language.
Meiklejohn recalled the first time she discovered the program on a professional development day tour.
“It was just a wild experience and we couldn’t even imagine taking 50 middle school students,” she said.
Now it’s tough to imagine going without “watching students’ faces light up on the boat.”
“If we want to engage our learners and create people who are going to be stewards of this land, they really need to have that connection,” Meiklejohn said.
As funding demands grow in public education, it’s not a given school districts can budget for the program, and all involved hope to keep the floating class above water.
Eagle Wing technically loses money keeping the venture afloat.
“We’re trying to make it free for the kids; there’s no money being made here,” Soberg said.
On average, the hard cost is $45 to $55 per student, taking into account subsidies, with the actual cost at just over $70 per student.
Eagle Wing customers help offset the program, paying a $5 wildlife conservation fee and the company makes contributions adding up to $80,000. The total program cost for roughly 3,600 students is just over $258,000.
Soberg would like to see it available at no charge to all students in grades 4 to 8 in Greater Victoria.
“I don’t think you can put a price on a program such as this,” Cook said. “Unique is an understatement, there is no other program that does this or anything remotely like it.”
The two schools Cook works at vary in approach to funding. At South Park, the parent advisory committee has embraced the program as a funding partner, at Margaret Jenkins, families are asked to pay.
“Funding is so tight. If we can get an outside source of funding that would make it so much more affordable for families," Cook said.
Meiklejohn added that at Centre Mountain Lellum Middle School, they have "done everything you can think of" including selling apples, crafts, popcorn and earrings.
It’s worth it watching some students start to figure out who they are and what they want to do, who they want to be.
“To watch them discover that through this type of teaching, it’s amazing to watch students engage with the natural world. The floating classroom is something that’s invaluable to my teaching for sure,” Meiklejohn said.
“It really is, at the end of the day when we teach kids and we hope to inspire kids, it’s so they can be stewards and have that connection that they would like to care for our planet and our space … that’s ultimately the goal.”
Learn more about the endeavour at eaglewingtours.com.
