Environmental School Project -
a very inspiring story begins in 2008
Regardless of the weather, be it dry and somewhat
comfortable or below freezing with snow floating down, the School
District 42 students, ranging in age from four to 12, would have been
outdoors, as they have been the majority of the school year.
Clayton
Maitland, coordinator and administrator of the Environmental School
Project, believes the program is the only one of its kind in Canada.
The
unique experiment in public education has school lessons delivered in
parks, at picnic tables, alongside streams, under tarps and tents, in
gardens, libraries, restaurants, fitness centres, and even municipal
council chambers, when they're available.
According to the
program's website (es.sd42. ca), "The theory and practice of the project
is supported by Place-Based, Imaginative and Ecological Education.
Learning and teaching will be experiential, in context, and through
activities that engage the mind, body, and heart."
Maitland himself didn't find his passion for learning in school, but rather, outside the confines of school walls. "Mostly, my mom taught me about the natural world and outside," he said.
Looking into the needs of students, Maitland said "experience" usually tops the list. "A
lot of primary experiences that are holistic in nature, are missing,"
he said. "They sit in rows, they sit in desks, and they have a box, and
they have the school, and the school itself creates that metaphor."
Maitland said the natural world offers "a totally broader, deeper sense to learning."
Like any other school, classes start at 8: 30 a.m. and run until 2: 20 p.m., five days a week.
"We
have the potential to do what we want with that Monday through Friday,"
Maitland said. "We have that opportunity to put learning in context."
In
any activity, the basic components of education, such as reading,
writing, mathematics, and science, can be mixed together, so they
interact with all subject areas, Maitland explained. "A cedar
stump that's 100 years old or 1,000 years old, you can dig deep into the
histories of what's going on through that whole time period, so that
stump itself becomes reading, math, history for humanities everything
mixed together," Maitland said.
Some of the activities this year
have included studying the anatomies of salmon, human bodies, and trees,
and the three are compared to discover the similarities and
differences.
"All breathe, all need water, and they think and eat
in different ways," Maitland said. "There are different systems in the
salmon, the human, and the tree that all work together."
Students of varying ages are mixed depending on the activity, Maitland noted.
The school's progress is being monitored by Simon Fraser University researchers, who obtained a $1-million federal grant for that purpose.
Read more: http://www.mrtimes.com/news/Kids+classroom+moves+outdoors/5983609/story.html#ixzz1w0HCsWxd
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