‘To reflect and learn’: HTHS outdoor classroom conjures sense of Thoreau cabin

Forty years ago, Kurt Kristensen was a high school senior in Massachusetts, helping fellow English classmates build a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin. 

Individual students from subsequent classes spent a night or two in the cabin, practicing reflective writing. 

“I kind of wonder if it’s still there,” Kristensen said.

Kristensen, an AP biology teacher at Hewitt-Trussville High School since 2015, no longer must let his mind wander north. Trussville does not have Walden Pond, but it does have the Cahaba River, and now it has the Amerex Outdoor Learning Center, a covered classroom for outdoor learning whose exterior eerily resembles an enlarged version of Thoreau’s cabin. 

The classroom was a collaboration with Amerex Corporation, the Cahaba River Society, Faith Community Fellowship and Trussville City Schools. Teachers introduced the concept of the outdoor classroom so that students could have better access to learning along the Cahaba River. Kristensen got that conversation started in 2016. 

Amerex provided the funding. Faith Community Fellowship provided building labor. ArchitectureWorks designed the classroom, which was constructed without the need to cut down any trees. Hewitt-Trussville High School Electrical Construction Academy students helped add electricity and fans. 

“The campus just sits on an amazing piece of land,” Kristensen said. “This is probably one of the prettiest campuses in the state in terms of the resources, the river right there and the woods around it, and so on. It was kind of a whole community project, which was kind of cool about it.”

Construction began sometime in 2018 or 2019, Kristensen said. The COVID-19 pandemic slowed progress. It was dedicated with a ribbon cutting at its official opening last fall. Kristensen has held classes in it several times already, as have other teachers. There is a schedule that teachers use to book class dates and times at the outdoor classroom. Its heaviest use, he said, will come in April and May.

As Thoreau wrote in “Journal” in March 1853, “At the end of winter, there is a season in which we are daily expecting spring, and finally a day when it arrives.” It’s been 170 years since he wrote those words, but it resonates today. 

“I can get the kids outside,” Kristensen said. “The more I can get them to appreciate it, the more they understand it, the more like it, hopefully the more they love it, the more they’re going to be willing to learn more about it and protect it.” 

This spring, Kristensen plans to set up permanent 100-meter study plots around the outdoor classroom’s immediate area for students to take temperatures and tree measurements, review leaf litter changes, and compare photos of the tree canopy throughout the year. 

“The more people get interested, the more they know, the more they’re going to want to hopefully preserve and do changes, donate, whatever, to keep it going,” Kristensen said.

Josh Haynes, a history teacher at Hewitt-Trussville High School, said he has not yet used the outdoor classroom, but hopes to take his classes to it when they study transcendentalist writers such as Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. A fitting topic for that location. 

“The location of the classroom provides such a peaceful and calm location for students to reflect and learn,” Haynes said. “The sound of the river is incredibly relaxing, and I know the students have a lot of fun spending time by the river.”

Kristensen is already thinking ahead to a potential storage unit, solar panels and more. He might end up using the outdoor classroom as more of a base of operations versus a static space to have class. Regardless, it seems apparent that if the weather is cooperative, then a class will be using it.

“I hope teachers really embrace it and bring their students out for all sorts of reasons,” he said.