To view the photo-rich magazine version, click here.

Originally appears in the Spring 2022 issue.

By Lori York

LEAF pedagogy

As a third-generation Canadian of western European descent, I have wrestled with my place on the land, in the wild nature of Canada. I feel at home here, yet I have not known my Indigenous countries, landscapes, languages, or places. I am what you might refer to as “naturalized.” I am trained in environmental education and spend a great deal of time connecting to natural places. Although, within the confines of a traditional secondary school setting, I struggle to find time in the rigid block structure to teach experientially outdoors in natural places. I found that several of my colleagues were interested in exploring ways we might work within the school community to create more time and space for environmental education. Many of us were doing lessons here and there, but we wanted to try to make environmental education visible in our school community — visible and valued. A group of us came together as a group to form a collaborative inquiry that addressed the question of how to incorporate more time outdoors in our whole school community. Though the focus of this article is secondary school teachers and students, the framework described here can be applied across grade levels.

We came up against many barriers. The block structure, bell schedule, and rigid timetable of a Day 1/Day 2 secondary school has a lot of sticking points. We researched many different structures, such as cohort models, mini schools, and blocking teachers back-to-back to create a longer chunk of time. We looked at out-of-school programs like summer camps and scout groups. We looked at online achievement or badge-based structures. Nothing really worked at our school. One year, I developed and taught an elective called Environmental Leadership 10, but it was extremely difficult to run the outdoor field experiences due to supervision ratios and I was doing all of them during my prep block, so I was losing the planning time required to run this type of programming successfully.