The Little School That Could

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Originally appears in the Fall 2022 issue.

By Katherine Jones and Suzanne Brown

Riverside School is a Pre-primary–Grade 8 school located in the rural community of Albert Bridge, Nova Scotia, Canada on unceded Mi’kmaw territory. The school is surrounded by acres of green space on school property. In May 2019, a team of teachers and School Advisory Members envisioned the creation of Riverside’s Knowledge Path (www.RiversideKnowledgePath.ca). The Knowledge Path was a school dream which fortuitously became a reality when it was open for students and community members to enjoy in December 2020 during the global COVID pandemic. After the pandemic lockdown, with school returning to in-person learning with masking and social distancing restrictions in place, the Path became a natural extension of the classroom. It continues to provide students with the opportunity to take their learning outside. 

The Path features outdoor classrooms, a performance stage, a sound garden, sharing circle, storytelling space with outdoor lending library, educational signage, and guided activities, all contained along a well-groomed gravel walkway. Additionally, every year the graduating Grade 8 class designs a legacy project that they work on throughout the year, such as a pollinator garden with a wooden swing and solar fountain. The Path is also open to the public during non-school hours and is used as a space for summer family programs. 

For holidays and special events, classes get to decorate or “adorn” the path with crafts or offerings to nature (like bird feeders). The students are always excited to take their families to the path to show off their creations. The school also provides Instagram-worthy holiday or occasion backdrops like a big red heart for Valentine’s Day to promote the activities on social media. These have been particularly successful ways to get families out to enjoy the Path as well. There has been minimal vandalism along the path thus far, and we believe this is largely due to people protecting what they have grown to love. Students and families have created social and emotional attachments to the Knowledge Path and surrounding environment. Hopefully these connections will continue to be nurtured through outdoor play and recreation as well as ongoing environmental education for students and families. 

Benefits to students, teachers, and community

As educators, we recognize the impact of experiential, hands-on learning on student engagement — especially while exploring the outdoors. On a personal note, one of us became a professional biologist and educator largely due to school field excursions to the marshes and bogs near Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia. Scientific curiosity is piqued when the sense of adventure that comes from exploring nature with classmates is combined with live introductions to curious creatures like carnivorous pitcher plants, dragonflies, and predaceous diving beetles. Field trips form many lasting memories for students and teachers alike. 

There is increasing interest in the outdoor learning environment as a constructive complement to the old-fashioned classroom teaching or indoor learning. In addition to the pedagogical benefits such as improved concentration and enhanced social skills, studies also demonstrate significant health and wellbeing benefits of outdoor learning and the nature connection — including positive influences on mental health, wellbeing, physical literacy, and increasing physical activities. Research has also shown that teaching outdoors has a positive impact on teachers’ job satisfaction. 

Many teachers at Riverside, including Grade 2 teacher Janine Graham, have observed differences in student participation with outdoor learning. “When we do curricular activities along the Path, my students are more engaged and eager to learn… as a teacher, I really enjoy having the ability to easily adapt my lesson plan from classroom teaching to outdoor learning,” she says. “The Path now has Pause, Reflect, and Create stations (adjustable desks) in the outdoor classroom, so it’s even easier to take our lessons outside.” 

Teachers encourage students to spell or make words and letters using the sticks they find along the path. They also use leaves, rocks, and twigs for math and patterns. Grade 3s perform Readers Theatre outside as part of their curriculum, and the middle school classes perform plays for the school outdoors, and everyone has a part whether it be a speaking role, set designer, or backstage assistant. The Path has also been used for a story treasure hunt, where pictures that tell a story (like the Three Little Pigs or Little Red Riding Hood) are hidden along the Path with locations marked on a map. The students have to find the pictures, place them in the correct order, and then tell or write the story. 

Riverside’s Knowledge Path is not only open to the students who attend Riverside School, but also other schools are welcome to visit and explore the Path. Students in Grades 7 and 8 take on the leadership role of Tour Guide for other schools who choose to take a field trip to the Knowledge Path. Riverside students are trained by teachers and are able to lead groups of visiting students and teachers through the Path. This responsibility and leadership quality is a wonderful attribute which allows middle school students to have a sense of pride and accomplishment. 

How it came to be — community engagement is key

Throughout the local schoolboard, across the province and beyond, the Riverside Knowledge Path has become a leading example of a community-engaged school initiative. Without the support of the surrounding communities with respect to volunteerism and financial contributions, the Path wouldn’t have developed so quickly. The Path benefited by being an idea shared between the School Advisory Committee (parents of students) and the teachers and staff. The project initially started with small grants, but those small grants developed partnerships which in turn increased the scope and value of grants. The excitement generated internally by the teachers and staff at Riverside spread to the students who took the ideas home to their families, and, as in many rural communities across Canada, we have come together to help a really great vision become reality. 

One early grant was a Change Lab Action Research Initiative (CLARI) that facilitated a partnership between Riverside School and Cape Breton University researchers. This grant funded a community engagement survey to solicit input on the development of the Path and generated interest via social media and other communications beyond the school community. The CLARI also enabled the creation of the Riverside Knowledge Path Association as a not-for-profit to strengthen the co-management of the Path by the school, community partners, and residents of surrounding communities. 

The Knowledge Path as a National Healing Forest; storytelling by Mi’kmaw elders

The Riverside Knowledge Path officially became a National Healing Forest in 2020. This embeds the Path within the network of action-oriented forested healing spaces across Canada. Peter Croal and Patricia Stirbys founded this initiative to create spaces in nature that serve as places for healing, learning, sharing, and reflection about Canada’s history and the legacy of Indian residential schools. They provide an educational opportunity for Indigenous people to share their experiences and for non-Indigenous people to learn about the realities of these tragedies. 

As a dedication to this, in the spirit of Truth and Reconciliation, the Riverside Knowledge Path has a large, circular concrete slab painted to look like a medicine wheel in red, white, black, and yellow sections. It is circled by benches and the school has used the sharing circle space for storytelling, including inviting Mi’kmaw elders to speak to students. The Path provides an engaging experience for students to learn about traditional Mi’kmaw culture and teachings as well as skills. Gaining an understanding of how to thrive and maintain a balance in the natural environment is at the centre of Indigenous cultures across the world; one goal of the path is to encourage all visitors to make stronger connections with the natural world around them. 

Riverside School is on unceded Mi’kmaw territory, and the Path organizers wanted to ensure that Indigenous elders were integral in its development. Community resident Stephen Augustine, a hereditary chief and Order of Canada recipient, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Path from its inception. “This is actually reconciliation in action. They’re actually reaching out to Indigenous people, local Indigenous people,” he said. “They’re inviting the elders to come here, share their stories with the students, and to come here and share their knowledge.” 

The Knowledge Path group worked with elders from Membertou to assist in the translations of four information signs throughout the Path. The signs provide specific cultural traditions for Indigenous people that the students wanted to learn more about. Birch bark, sharing circles, sweet grass, and the significance of the eagle were translated by Mi’kmaw elders, and their voices were also recorded reading the information on the signs. A QR code allows path visitors to hear the spoken language of the elder so that we may hear first-hand the spoken language of the Mi’kmaw elders. 

Stories contain the wisdom of the world — they teach cultural diversity, preserve cultural identity, and they show us what we have in common with others. Storytelling fosters connections among people and between people and ideas. Stories are more engaging than the “typical” elementary school curriculum like word lists and times tables, but they also build familiarity and trust and allow the listeners to enter the story where they are, making them more open to learning. Kids will sit up and listen when a story is being told, especially when the storyteller is expressing cultural diversity and wisdom.

Local picnic-table storytelling; sense of place and community belonging

Whilst the medicine wheel storytelling space helps students learn about Truth and Reconciliation and fosters a better understanding of cultural diversity, the Path also promotes opportunities for students to reflect on their own communities and connections. At various vantage points along the Path, there are picnic tables that are covered with an individual map of a community from the surrounding the Riverside school catchment. There are QR codes that will take students and visitors to the Riverside Knowledge Path website with video interviews of community members telling stories about each community. Students enjoy exploring the storytelling tables — for fun and personal connection to their surrounding communities. Riverside students cannot wait to take their families to the Path, especially to show them their community’s picnic table and point at the place on the map where they live. There is an invitation to explore further with the map, with a drawer under the table that has “monopoly”-like houses and buildings to place on the map. Teachers enjoy the storytelling tables because they meet several cross-curricular outcomes all at once (related to citizenship, social studies, and language arts, for example) and can help launch other storytelling lessons. 

Lessons learned

Riverside’s Knowledge Path is definitely a passion project, and we are firm believers in the old adage that “where there is a will, there is a way!” Riverside School is a little school in a rural setting, but the Knowledge Path project has brought residents together (even residents who don’t have children at the school) to build a resource that our communities will cherish for decades to come. It would not have been possible without the involvement of the teachers, staff, and students of Riverside as well as the wider community and community partners. Starting small and building momentum has been a good strategy, and the Path is now in a maintenance phase with only one or two small projects being targeted annually. 

We hope that our article has accomplished a goal we have for the Path: “when you leave our Path, our hope is that you leave with your own knowledge, whatever stage you are at in your own learning, that you take something away with you when you go.” We hope we’ve inspired you to see your own school yards or adjacent habitats as new-found potential outdoor learning venues. Start small, but dream big!

Dr. Katherine Jones is an Associate Biology Professor at Cape Breton University. She has won awards for science outreach and communication.
Suzanne Brown is the principal of Riverside School (Pre-Primary to Grade 8) in Albert Bridge, Nova Scotia. 

References:

Eades, Jennifer. Classroom tales: Using storytelling to build emotional, social, and academic skills across the primary curriculum. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2005.

Appendix A