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What You Should Know

Outdoor Classrooms
Two recent research publications- NFER/King’s review of research on food and farming education, and a University of Bath/Council for Environmental Education study of the Growing Schools Initiative- have highlighted the need for stronger empirical and conceptual understandings of learning in the outdoor classroom.  It focused on the processes, impacts, planning and evaluation of outdoor learning and identified a growing concern about declining opportunities for outdoor learning and low levels of understanding amongst young people.  One of the key findings included, “The foci of outdoor education can include learning about: nature; society; nature-society interactions and oneself.  Outdoor education can involve working with others, developing new skills, undertaking practical conservation and influencing society.  The intended outcomes of such experiences can encompass: knowledge and understanding, attitudes and feelings, values and beliefs, activities or behaviors, personal development and social development.”

According to Ann Coffey, the Coordinator of the School Grounds Transformation Programme at the Canadian Biodiversity Institute in Ottawa, Ontario, “ School grounds projects designed to bring nature back into our daily lives are crucial for the long-term conservation, protection and restoration of wild places.  Most young people never have the opportunity to experience wilderness, and many living in urban settings have few opportunities to explore natural environments.  The danger exists that learning about the natural world will increasingly depend upon printed and electronic materials.  Teaching in this way is largely an academic abstraction; it cannot foster the kind of lifelong ecological consciousness derived only from learning through the senses in natural settings throughout childhood.  Nature, as it has often been repeated, is our best teacher.  There can be no better place than our schools for beginning humanity’s greatest task – that of reconnecting ourselves to the natural world.”

Rain Gardens
Stormwater runoff is the leading source of water pollution in America. (Rainbow and the City of Chesapeake public service announcement)
Rain gardens allow a natural filtration of water and restore wildlife habitat by attracting creatures such as insects, butterflies, birds and the like. (Chesapeake Bay Foundation)