Getting Educators back Outside

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Originally appears in the Winter 2020 issue.

By Tracy Wheatley-Romano

Okay, full disclosure: I was a fair-weather friend. Quite literally. If the weather was fair, I was its friend. Sure, I knew all of the benefits of being outdoors: increased energy, improved mental clarity, lowered levels of stress, heightened levels of Vitamin K, development of a caring attitude towards nature and the environment, to name a few. And for children, that list may also include improved academic scores, better self-regulation and social skills, and an increase in overall health. But if it wasn’t warm and sunny out, I wasn’t having any of it. So when I learned that my instructional program lead portfolio for the upcoming year was outdoor experiential education (OEE), I was less than thrilled. I wanted to ask if I could put a pause on OEE in early November and pick it back up when the spring flowers had started to bud.

I’m not sure when I became so disengaged with the winter season, since I grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. If you are familiar with the place, you know that it has two seasons: cool and frigid. So cold temperatures were definitely not new to me. And if I dug down really deep, I could recall many great childhood memories of playing outside in all types of weather, but I hadn’t embraced winter in many years. So how was I going to be a lead in this area without being a hypocrite? I had the summer to wrap my head around this question, and I decided that I was going to give it 100%. I loved and appreciated being outside in fair weather, so there was no reason why I couldn’t learn to love the cooler temperatures again.

Thankfully, our OEE team consisted of the board’s Early Childhood Education lead and another instructional program lead, both of whom wholeheartedly embrace the outdoor lifestyle. I took my lead from them and learned some tips and tricks along the way. They had both worked on this portfolio in previous years and shared that the educators who bought into taking their students outside for learning and those who attended OEE professional development sessions were typically the same lot. They already knew the benefits and were avid advocates of the outdoors. The challenge, then, would be to build capacity and reach more educators who weren’t at this stage. Since I was one of those teachers, this was a great opportunity to look introspectively for the ‘why’ and use the resulting information to help both me and them.