50 results for group: health-and-wellbeing
Taking learning out into the schoolyard: Cultivating connections in challenging times
As outdoor learning enthusiasts, we’re familiar with the benefits of spending time outdoors. Is simply being outside enough, though, to offer students a meaningful connection to nature? One that can support them in challenging times? In this workshop, we will engage in a series of activities that foreground mindfulness, gratitude, honouring difficulties, and finding hope through a sense connection with all of life. These activities can be replicated in any schoolyard, helping us respond to the natural world’s invitation to be present, to find resilience, and ultimately, to know that we belong.
How Does Vulnerability Show up in the Outdoors? PT 1
Karen Lai works as an independent consultant in accessibility and inclusion. She works with businesses and organizations to increase the accessibility and inclusion of people with disabilities. She holds a Master of Arts in Human Kinetics where she examined the social theories behind social inclusion of people with disabilities. She has more than 20 years of working alongside with individuals with disabilities in the field of recreation, employment, government, and other community involvements.
A Collaborative Approach to Outdoor Learning Support in Schools
In this interactive workshop participants will examine an innovative outdoor learning initiative in the Toronto District School Board. Using school yards and local greenspaces, the TDSB’s Outdoor Education department is shifting how and where outdoor learning happens by supporting educators to make outdoor learning a part of student learning. Participants will enhance their understanding of how collaborative inquiry and a co-teaching process supported educators to provide students with increased curriculum connected learning through the outdoors and the benefits for school communities.
Community as Classroom: Connecting with Places and Partners beyond the Exit Sign
Just beyond the exit sign of every classroom are infinite opportunities to support experiential learning that connects learners to place, land and community. Join us for this engaging, interactive workshop to explore the community as classroom. Be inspired by current place and land-based education for sustainability success stories from Metro Vancouver School and Youth Leadership Programs, UBC Teacher Education and colleagues from across Canada. You’ll take away ideas, inspiration and resources to deepen connections with community, place and partners in your practice.
Environmental education and inclusion: Considering learners’ diverse needs when facilitating outdoor learning
This workshop focusses on environmental education that takes into consideration the needs of diverse learners. The purpose is to develop participants’ abilities to plan inclusive experiences whilst using experiential, environmental, and community-based approaches to facilitate learning. Guided by universal design for learning principles, the reflective process will occur by way of a gentle nature walk with participants encountering different "stations" representing challenges-to-learning that students often face (e.g., intellectual, physical, linguistic, cultural, learning disabilities).
Actively Transforming a Space into a “PLACE”
This outdoor, hands-on, session will inspire you to better utilize your local natural spaces to deliver meaningful, creative outdoor learning. Together, we will consider a spectrum of nature experiences; a model of engagement, steeped in place-based learning principles and inquiry frameworks. The model also considers how to move provocations into knowledge building experiences, stewardship initiatives, and meaningful reciprocity. This session will showcase how student’s connection for their special place can then support deep care and engagement when visiting protected landscapes.
Playing, Learning & Growing in School Gardens
In this workshop, expert school garden educators will share their tested and effective core routines for engaging learners across the curriculum in natural spaces. Suitable for teachers with established gardens, as well as teachers who are still dreaming of a garden! Participants will leave with an understanding of the school garden as a metaphor for learning, and an appreciation for the magic that emerges when we slow down, look closely, and learn alongside our students. Bring your school garden questions!
Are you a boy or a girl? Creating safe and affirming programs for transgender, gender-creative and nonbinary children and staff
We step out onto the land together and many of us feel like we belong. But do our gender-creative, transgender and nonbinary children and staff experience that feeling of safety and belonging too?
In this workshop, participants will gain knowledge of the intersecting identities transgender, gender-creative and nonbinary children and staff hold, and how this impacts their experience in outdoor programs. Together we’ll share structural changes, and strategies in play and story, for offering a safe and gender-affirming experience in learning on the land.
“Every season’s fun:” Exploring educators outdoor learning experiences to support increased access
This presentation focuses on a recent study that aims to capture OL experiences within public school boards in Canada. Drawing from our conversations with students and educators, we will discuss factors that can shape OL experiences for children, current practices that educators are engaging with, challenges that educators have encountered and suggestions regarding how to overcome these challenges. We will lead an immersive outdoor learning experience using WorldCafe a collaborative dialogue approach for knowledge sharing, reflecting and learning.
Exploring the antidotal opportunities for gratitude and eco-spirituality
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer offers, “Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance. ... Gratitude is a powerful antidote... A deep awareness of the gifts of the earth and of each other is medicine."
This workshop explores the opportunities (and challenges) for gratitude and eco-spirituality as personal, pedagogical and environmentally revolutionary practices. Drawing on Macy and Brown’s Coming from Gratitude, we will situate our experiences within the wealth of earth-based gratitude and eco-spiritual research and explore possible next steps.
