Why the box?
The final capstone course in the MAEEC program, EECO 680: Leadership for Environmental Action (instructors: Milt McClaren and Peter Norman), focused on personal and strategic leadership, the fundamentals of change, and life-long learning.
Milt commissioned the construction of a box, a box so beautiful that the Royal Roads University carpenter created a box for the box, a container for the container.
Part time capsule, part symbol, part communication tool, the box idea arose as a unique way to build on Royal Roads University emphasis on problem-based learning. In the final residency, the students were invited to reflect on their first two years of the MAEEC experience, particularly the struggle to create a thesis or major project, and pack the box with artifacts and helpful advice for the next cohort.
Why a box?
A box might be considered a container for content. Of course, some boxes are ends in themselves, valuable objects of beauty without any consideration of their contents.
Why this box? Most boxes are a means, their value determined by how well they care for what they have inside. Boxes offer us an invitation: put something in me. Boxes can hold gifts, can hold legacies, can hold histories. The box is only a frame, six wall: it’s the space inside that is important.
Peter and Milt invited the learners to think deeply about the meaning of their experience across this novel educational program they had just traversed. These instructors considered an important audience for the students coming to the end of their program to be the students who would follow them, and invited members of the first cohort to consider what would they want to leave for the next cohort that would tell them something of their thoughts and experiences and in turn, invite that group of students to create a legacy and gift for those that would come after them.
In essence, the box became a means to communicate their experiences and insights for the cohort that would follow them.
On the final day of the final residency, the artifacts and ideas generated were carefully packed in the box, secured by two brass locks, and ceremoniously presented to the following cohort with instructions to open it one year hence. Each year thereafter, the final residency began with the opening of the box and the process repeated itself in a tradition that extended from the first graduating cohort in 2005 through to 2022, when program changes eliminated the third residency
Such is the MAEEC box.
“The Box is made of wood, with a hinged lid, that closes over the box and that can be locked. The box encloses an open space that is on top of a remaining section that includes two drawers that have the same general external dimensions as the overall Box. The top of the Box is enclosed in a hinged lid, capable of being locked with a hasp and padlock. The wood of the box is stained and varnished. There are two handles on each end of the Box so that it can be carried by two or more people at a time.” Milt McClaren
And so the tradition of each year’s graduating cohort, guided by the team task, placing into the box their memories and meanings, began.
