1 BEGINNING

Old-Growthing the Mind

Here, on this site of colonialization of Indigenous culture and land, this place of changing forestry practice, the children of the Maple Ridge Environmental School are partaking in a way of learning that is at once old and new. Lorna Williams recalls that in the nearby Lil’wat First Nation community, education has always involved storytelling, community, responsibility, free play, and a deepening relationship with “mother earth.”⁸ Lil’wat people, Williams explains, “believe that each child comes into the world with gifts to share.”⁹ The Maple Ridge school seeks to weave into these traditions while still attending to federal and provincial curriculum guidelines. It also embraces cultural diversity and technological tools, such as iPads. In essence, this style of schooling is a way of remembering forward. As Joe Sheridan and Roronhiakewen Dan Longboat suggest, “The status of being and belonging that is reconciled on Turtle Island is not to be someone new but to remain someone ancient and to learn the lesson of being from time immemorial—that one cannot be beyond one’s Indigenous self without devastating effect.”¹⁰

Sheridan and Longboat also suggest that, from a Haudenosaunee (The Six Nations) perspective, human imagination is “understood to be animal and spiritual helpers manifesting their presence in one’s life.”¹¹ In other words, what we tend to think of as our own ideas, our own creativities, our own discoveries of what is possible, are, in fact, gifts from ancient others and our natural kin. Human immersed in the more-than-human. The relationships required for this gifting do not emerge quickly, as Sheridan and Longboat explain: “Old-growth minds and cultures mature, emerge, and encompass the old growth of their traditional territory.”¹² Further, they consider that settler cultures have not yet had time to develop these old-growth relationships and that settlers are still “learning to think as the continent thinks.”¹³

We raise this point to suggest that perhaps part of the ecologizing education project is to allow for gifts to be offered and received. That means giving space for learners, teachers, and community members to build the right relations so that a “gift economy”¹⁴ culture grows and we can properly receive the rich range of gifts being imparted by the land itself. It means acknowledging these important sources of knowledge and moving away from epistemological egoism that situates all knowing, imagining, and thinking in the mind of a singular individual.

In fact, one way to view ecologizing education is to see it as an ongoing effort in maturing our relationships to the natural world. Ecologizing schools is a way of engaging in the old-growthing of the human mind. This effort seeks to reach out to learners, families, and communities within the immediate generation but with an eye toward former and future generations as well. The cultural change project of ecologizing education is a multigenerational vision toward old-growthing. Decisions about the development, style, and daily activities of these schools are taken with greater responsibility when seen with this value perspective.

Responding to Injustices

All the humans who initiated the development of the Maple Ridge Environmental School have deep and personal relationships with land. Clayton Maitland, the school’s first principal, used to take student groups down to the creek site once a week at his former school. These were often the “problem students,” nonconformists, and rebellious young people who couldn’t get on board with traditional school.

But the definition of “problem student” is more rigid in standard schools. There, the definition may include the unmotivated, intellectually gifted student who rarely completes homework and “spaces out” during tests. Or the exceptionally creative student whose penchant for completing tasks in alternative ways has earned them the descriptor “rebellious and uncooperative.” Or the Black student who was sent to anger management counseling after years of subtle and not-so-subtle racism from their teachers led to outbursts of anger at systemic injustice. Or the student whose deeply kinesthetic learning orientation makes them reject the stacks of paperwork required in standard classrooms. Or the student who refuses to attend school because they sense that standard school appears to be more about control of children, maintenance of hierarchies, and lack of actual choice. Some seemingly “troubled” students are, in fact, engaged in active political resistance. Schools often use deficit model thinking in response to students who don’t fit the efficiency model: Sit, be quiet, do what you’re told. Educators who are in a position to choose how students should behave and what they should be capable of inevitably fit into particular sociocultural positions. Unwittingly or not, they use the deficit model in reference to people not fitting their expectations—essentially, that is, not being like them.

Clayton could relate. By the time he graduated from high school, he felt like an idiot. His particular kind of intelligence, in addition to his talents and emotional nature, had been deeply undervalued. Now, as the adult in charge of “delinquents,” he was given specific instructions: “Do whatever you need to do to get them to love learning.” In fact, the creekside park offered all kinds of engrossing learning opportunities. Clayton’s students welcomed the weekly outings, gained more confidence, and began to express natural curiosity. This teaching experience allowed Clayton’s own relationship to the water, forest, insects, animals, and weather in this location to unfold over several years.

He had become a school vice principal by the time he met Jodi MacQuarrie, a teacher librarian. Jodi’s childhood was typical of Canadian settler children a few decades ago. She spent enormous amounts of time outdoors, playing in the woods, riding bicycles down the trails, collecting tadpoles and garter snakes, tobogganing in winter, and generally roaming free until the “whistle” for dinner sounded in the distance. As a young adult, she developed a passion for social justice issues. Her parents were South African immigrants to Canada, and she hated the racism she saw there. She was drawn to support kids who struggled in school, and this led her to working with gifted and ESL students. After a year teaching in scenic Norway, she returned to British Columbia to pursue further studies at Simon Fraser University. At that time, she had the sense that everything in her childhood home was disappearing—the creeks, the hillsides, the forests. She knew the smells of the trees and creeks, the turns and bumps in the trails, but they were being disappeared to make space for human needs. The land was being turned into sprawling subdivisions and expansive strip malls. It was being covered up, polluted, and destroyed.

Jodi became involved in advocacy projects for social justice on campus. There she met Sean Blenkinsop, a professor at Simon Fraser (and coauthor of this book), and that’s when “everything coalesced,” as Jodi says. Sean had adopted the term “eco social justice” for their advocacy work, and this frame gave Jodi a way to reflect on and talk about these entangled issues.

How Far Are You Willing to Go?

Deeply unhappy with the state of education and deeply concerned about the local environment, Jodi and Clayton started to daydream. What were their wildest dreams about education? How could education be an answer to a vanishing landscape, a dysfunctional educational system, and a world in need of social justice? Jodi invited Clayton to Simon Fraser University to meet with her professor, Sean, his colleague Mark Fettes, a professor of imaginative education, and several other interested graduate students. There, they began earnest and illuminating conversations about what might be possible.

Sitting under Cherry Tree on campus, Sean asked, “How far are you willing to go?” He wanted to know how serious they were. Change can be difficult, painful, and challenging, and people need to have the energy and the willingness to suffer through the process. Sean was already thinking along the lines of a new model for public education. By the time he sat on Grass with Jodi and Clayton, he had already been an outdoor, environmental, and justice-oriented educator for nearly thirty years. During this time, he had watched rivers he used to paddle and drink from become polluted and die. He had been feeling the pain of disappearing ecosystems, discussing potential changes with colleagues, and devoting all his free time to being with and learning from the myriad denizens that make up the natural world. He had also witnessed the educational power of the natural world for the hundreds of students he had shared time with on the trail. And he had watched many attempts, within both the formal and informal education systems, to tackle growing environmental problems; in so many cases, these attempts resulted in insignificant, insufficient gains. It was clear that environmental education was losing ground to environmental destruction, and he knew “this tinkering shit isn’t going to work anymore.”

In fact, a number of other environmental educational models had already sprung up and were leading struggling existences or, in some cases, had already failed. Despite enormous efforts and commendable intentions, many of these educational programs, some schools even, had not attended to the need for deep-level cultural change. They tended to approach environmental education from a behavioral perspective, focusing on things like not harming nature, building relationships, and learning more information about local flora and fauna—none of which was in any way wrong per se. However, if the goal is to actually change the deep-seated problems that are part and parcel of the culture, those steps alone were apparently insufficient.

It takes an enormous amount of time, creativity, willingness to risk, and experience in nature to imagine and then pedagogically and curricularly implement new ways of relating to the natural world. One by one, idealistic programs either close down or spend all their time trying to find the money to survive. Innovative schools teeter toward obscurity or are forced to change by the very systems they are critiquing. Eco-imaginative teachers burn out and leave the field, and garden boxes fill with more weeds than possibilities.

Creating School Differently

Clayton, Jodi, Sean, and Mark knew that if they were truly going to create change through education, their model had to be different from the very beginning. Even the development, even the planning, even the coordination would have to recognize the leading role to be played by the natural world and the need for wide collaboration at all levels. From the first day, they made a choice to only have meetings in the presence of actual nature. The team spent enormous amounts of time outdoors in Maple Ridge. In winter, when meetings had to be held at night and coastal British Columbia was being drenched in cold rain, the team found parks with covered shelters, and their discussions were serenaded by falling waters. Even when meetings had to be moved indoors, they placed Willow or Spider Plant on a seat where the meeting took place so nature could not be so easily backgrounded. In addition, they each took time to be alone outside prior to these meetings in order to open themselves up and attune themselves to a growing sense of relationality.

Relationships with humans needed to be built differently too. The original quartet quickly bloomed into an ever-shifting group of graduate students, professors, and teachers. They knew that, from the perspective of the community, new schools tended to “appear” after a few years of closed meetings among administrators, trustees, and civic government. So, in contrast, the environmental school deliberately involved community members in many meetings, right from the start. The team understood that the school was not going to work unless they could help parents and caregivers not only understand their own ideas about what a school is but also imagine what else school could be. Over the course of several years, they built relationships with school board trustees and the superintendent by inviting them to events, having meetings, sharing information, updating them on developments, and gathering resources. They made community allies in the horse club, fish hatchery, city library, Seed Centre, and Alouette River Management Society.

Meanwhile, relationship-building needed to occur in a different way with the local Indigenous community too. Ecologizing education, such as at the Maple Ridge school, has a responsibility to partake in truth and reconciliation processes by acknowledging and honoring those communities and cultures who lived on this land first and who are inextricably woven with the land. Over millennia, they have ensured and continue to ensure the care and sustainable relationships with the land, even as settlers have usurped these ancient geographical homelands. Building relationships within the local Indigenous community means respecting important cultural differences. The Western propensity to silo relationships into either personal or business and the priority to get things done quickly can be understandably met with suspicion. Indigenous peoples have experienced a long history of European settlers grabbing what they want and making off with it, whether it be land, cultural artifacts, information, or easy solutions.

Thus, over the course of several years, Clayton and others built lasting friendships within the local Indigenous community. They brought gifts, such as tobacco, and went out fishing together. These are not business relationships established for the sake of the school but genuine and multidimensional friendships. A couple of the Elders are regular, paid visitors to the school—they tell stories, help children make drums, do Salmon ceremonies, or just sit and develop relationships with the children. The bonds go deep and have lasted beyond Clayton’s retirement, both for Clayton and for the new principals. Understanding that land and language are deeply interconnected, several school community members are currently studying HəDEəmiDəC (Halkomelem), the local Indigenous language. When tragedy, such as a flood or the death of a community member, strikes the Indigenous community, everyone at the school bands together to send meals over. Jodi describes it as “a strong reciprocal relationship.”

Physical and Cognitive Structures of Standard Education

For a while, the group toyed with having some sort of physical structure, a building of some kind, that could be used at least part-time. After all, coastal British Columbian winters are soggy, muddy, and cold. In the end, through extensive conversation and ongoing engagement with their more-than-human cocreators, they decided that any kind of structure would limit the imaginative possibilities. A physical school reinforces the imagined structures of what school is, making it harder to redefine what a school can be. It can be helpful to avoid having reminders of the previous notions, structures, and inherent metaphors contained within human-designed square structures that occupy previously wild spaces.

Indeed, the building itself carries ideas of how power works (tables and desks pointed toward the teacher) and imparts expectations of behavior (sitting, listening to authority, containment in rooms). The desks, chairs, large gyms, and ringing bells all channel teachers, learners, and caregivers into particular ways of being and confirm particular understandings of how education and schooling works. We know where we’re supposed to sit, how we’re supposed to behave, and when learning is supposed to start and end. We see the teacher as “expert” and knower, books as containing knowledge, and the vice principal as the enforcer of rules. Even a typical building’s commitment to straight lines promotes linear movement, social order, and specific thinking processes.

When the group met with the superintendent, they asked for two things: First, no building. And second, a year to work with the school’s teachers to give them new options and space for developing new eco-teaching habits so when the stress of working with students started—and it always does—they didn’t fall back into the troublesome and anti-eco habits of previous practice. The superintendent was fine, with obvious reservations, about having no building. (Of course, one of the advantages to this is that costs are quite substantially reduced—no cleaning, no upkeep, no electricity and heating!) But the second request was tricky. How could the school board afford the expense of letting teachers do training for a whole year? Even more complicated were issues of seniority. In British Columbia, the most senior teachers have first pick of assignment. Logistically, that meant a few near-retirement teachers might choose to “ease out” their last year or two in what some might perceive as a relaxing, alternative setting.

In truth, though, ecologizing work is emotionally, cognitively, socially, and culturally challenging work. It involves introspection, humility, and uncomfortable processes of growth. It entails identifying the ways one has personally acted from a stance of human exceptionalism and then making an effort to dismantle that complex, ingrained machinery. It means having the humbleness to notice when a lesson is being offered by the more-than-human world and deliberately sidelining oneself to let it unfold. It means recognizing that a five-year-old child who has not yet been indoctrinated in Western-style education may viscerally relate more intimately with, as part of, the more-than-human. Learning is not about comfort, and fundamental changes cause pain. Hanging out by the creekside all day may seem like a relaxing venture, but not when part of the project is to radically alter the foundational beliefs that structure the dominant society.

Western engagement with the natural environment—indeed, any techno-industrial culture’s engagement with the environment—amounts to systemic oppression of ecological systems and the diverse entities that exist therein. Since systemic oppressions operate at the level of implicit forces—structuring all cultural decisions while floating mostly just below the level of conscious thought—they are not easily overturned. We need time to learn new habits—and time for these new habits to become instinctual. When facing twenty-five children in a downpour, it is easy to revert to old patterns unless new habits have been thoroughly established. Furthermore, those with more power and privilege in these situations can be reluctant to change. Efforts to dismantle systemic racism and systemic sexism, for example, have been engaged in by multiple generations over hundreds of years, and they continue as painful ongoing processes. Instructors, researchers, parents/caregivers, and administrators undertaking an ecologiz-ing pathway in education must learn to view the process as an ongoing, complex, mistake-filled, and layered experience with no finish line. The gerund “ing” acts as a reminder of this.

For all these reasons, the team needed not only a full year to support potential teachers but also the ability to work outside the seniority system. (Our position was that even one year isn’t really enough time.) Eventually, the superintendent and the union agreed to a certificate program, called “Place Conscious Ecological Practice” (PCEP). The PCEP was a requirement for teachers at the outdoor school, which, incidentally, circumvented hierarchical hiring. This free, one-year certificate training was open to anyone who wanted to take it. It allowed the team to see who was interested, who had the skills, and who might be a good fit. But now that people were starting to grasp the scope of the project, how many of them would really want to teach outside in the rain all year while participating in a massive shift of cultural values? In fact, quite a few.

Hungry for Change

The team was continually surprised by how many people were hungry for change—and how hungry those people were. Over and over, parents, administrators, union specialists, school board trustees, and teachers expressed their frustration with standard schooling. They knew the old system wasn’t working. It was stuck in the inertia of preparing students for a world that no longer exists. It wasn’t successful in reaching most kids and wasn’t responding to the diversity of needs, challenges, cultures, and gifts that fill twenty-first-century classrooms. And it certainly wasn’t answering the call toward a more just social and ecological world—a call heard through Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, the MeToo movement, and the environmental student strikes. Many parents, teachers, and administrators yearned for an alternative to standard education—even if it was to be a radical one. Some adults were still wounded from their own schooling traumas; some teachers were frustrated by their inability to change their own classrooms; some parents were watching their children lose motivation and grow despondent inside standard schooling.

Of course, not everyone understood the aims of this new alternative schooling. Thinking back to a couple of specific administrators, Clayton recalls, “They think we’re playing in the dirt out there.” But even those administrators got on board with the plan when they saw the great push—a tsunami, really—toward that type of education. There was even federal support, as Mark and Sean had just secured a government grant (from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [SSHRC]) to facilitate the development of the school and subsequent research.

While the team had initially anticipated that just a few outdoor enthusiast teachers or parents would attend meetings in the small town of Maple Ridge, often twenty to twenty-five people showed up. The Place Conscious Ecological Practice program included a lot of time outside at different sites, participant-designed lesson plans, curricular evenings, and philosophic discussions on the deconstruction and reimagination of educational theory. It also included workshops on the experiential learning cycle, plant identification, and outdoor safety and risk management. These events gave adults the opportunity to experience for themselves what ecologizing education might look and feel like in action, which is important since people typically don’t adopt pedagogical practices unless they have actually experienced them.

Much of this time, the work appeared to be at the limits of people’s imaginations. People had difficulty visualizing this kind of education. They simply couldn’t see it as possible. No building? No bells? No hierarchy? Natural world as teacher? What? This wasn’t really a surprise. People need time to imagine, time to learn, time to experience different ways of being and teaching in the world, and, ultimately, time to transform. They need a community of support to help them through the process. Where some institutes have offered three-day workshop intensives, the team understood that people need months, if not years, to have deep-felt experiences with nature and with these new concepts. In fact, brief periods of training may end up being worse than nothing because they give people a false idea about their own preparedness. Superficial preparedness most often leads to failure. Furthermore, those whose goal is to secure profit and power through the trend of “greening” education can emerge from these short workshops with all the right language and none of the right intention.

Guiding Principles and Values

Influenced by various eco-philosophers, nature writers, critical eco-thinkers, eco-feminists, and Indigenous theorists,¹⁵ the collective team slowly and carefully developed five values, or principles, for the Maple Ridge school that were guided by an ecological worldview and that shared a number of common characteristics. First, they were understood to be open-ended—not the final word or commandments or in any way the end of the discussion. Second, they were meant to serve as guidelines, much like a rope guides hikers through a dangerous mountain trek: the rope acts to support while also pointing us in a direction. (In this situation, likely many other tracks could be chosen for this climb.) Third, these values served as explanatory tools that could be offered to parents, caregivers, and educators to reflect on. Lastly, they were reminders of what this school community deemed important—which can be helpful because once immersed in the actual doing, especially if it is doing differently, it can often be difficult to remember. Thus, these principles can become a heuristic, something to walk with and push against, a kind of corrective, a reminder, and a commitment to change as well. They also may offer some direction, inspiration, or a push-off point for others in thinking through their own educational projects.

The First Weeks of the Maple Ridge Environmental School

Finally, after three years of preparation and the involvement of Indigenous neighbors, administrators, parents, community members, and dozens of researchers, along with the Alouette River, Douglas Fir, Raven, and other beings, the Maple Ridge Environmental School officially opened. On the first day of school, eighty-eight students were cared for by four teachers, one resource teacher, three educational assistants, several researchers, and a temperate rainforest ecosystem. It might have been a momentous day, a grand achievement that evidenced years of hard work … but none of the original team remembers. That fact might be chalked up to busyness or to the plethora of memorable events that came later. More likely, it speaks to the values of the team. As Mark explains, “I’ve learned from working with Indigenous people that it’s more important to have a good process than to have good goals.”²¹ The opening of the school wasn’t as important as community-building and relationship development in the local more-than-human or the ongoing process of learning how to be a human differently in relation to the natural world.

Besides, the start of the school wasn’t exactly smooth. While the children were joyful, one educational assistant quit after two weeks of being drenched by rain. The remaining teachers tried to figure out how to manage stacks of sopping wet notes before largely abandoning paper altogether. Also, learning didn’t come entirely easily—at least not for the teachers, who struggled against their own preconceptions and ingrained experiences of what education looks like. Perhaps because they expected a radically different kind of pedagogy, they often didn’t trust their teaching instincts. They figured they couldn’t do what they had done in the past, but they also had no clear idea of how to move forward. They struggled with mixed messages when the school’s principal told them to “forget everything they know” while researchers pointed to rich learning opportunities being offered by the local kin. Their love of the outdoors did not necessarily translate to a creative and attuned sense of how to learn with and from more-than-humans. Mark adds, “The teacher certificate training was an introductory set of lessons and fell far short of what is needed to change practice. It was a consciousness-raising program but fell short of what teacher training might look like.” With eighty-eight kids to suddenly attend to, teachers fell into habits of hiking, playing games of chase, and building wooden structures in the ever-expanding student village.

In those early days, parents struggled to understand what their children were learning. Several parents told researchers their children claimed they were learning nothing. In fact, many children who had already been in standard schooling did not associate learning with “fun” and so didn’t realize that measuring raindrops in vials, reciting limericks about weather, and hearing Indigenous histories is learning. Some nervous parents wanted documentation of their children’s learning—familiar things like completed math handouts. For the most part, though, the children didn’t do math practice on paper. They did it on wood while building an outhouse, or they recorded it with a stopwatch while racing twigs and leaves down River. These immersive, embodied learnings can be harder to evidence than practice on paper, particularly if your experience has come solely from one way of learning. Two families pulled their children out of the school after a few weeks out of concern that “real” learning—that is, measurable, pen-and-paper, abstracted learning—wasn’t taking place. And in many ways they were correct. Teachers were still trying to get their feet under them, and this new kind of education wasn’t readily recognizable as education.

Sharing Learning and Expanding the Teaching Pool

One interesting discovery for all involved was how easy it was to overlook the range of learnings that can happen—that were happening—and how hard it was to come up with good systems for recording, displaying, and even just convincing others (and ourselves) of these learnings. Early on, the teachers landed on two successful modes of communicating with parents and caregivers. First, teachers began reporting “learning stories” for the children. That is, teachers wrote down stories about each child that illustrated their learning and advancement. This break from traditional documentation proved to be more work for educators but was well received by parents. Secondly, educators began reporting on student progress using an online site for parents. Here, they uploaded photographs of children studying salamanders, measuring river currents, and discussing the history of place. They also uploaded photos of the many artifacts that evidenced learning (but were not the usual paper handouts), such as wooden structures lashed with sophisticated knots, ephemeral natural art projects made of ice and leaves, and temporary calculations drawn in the sand with sticks. As part of the school’s commitment to break down “professional” barriers between teachers and families, parents and caregivers were also invited to add to these online spaces by documenting the kinds of learning children were doing at home, such as reading a novel, listening to Grandma’s stories, and counting change at the grocery store.

A further, more expansive strategy developed by the school was to actively bring parents and caregivers into the teaching ranks. Being naturally porous, the walls of the school made this invitation more possible than in typical educational settings and allowed for a kind of pedagogical transparency: one could always see what was happening at any given moment in a child’s “classroom.” Also, given the more inclusive nature of the educational project (that is, adding nature as a co-teacher and decentering the human), it made sense to explode learning beyond where it is often positioned, inside a school.

This invitation to have parents/caregivers actively engaged in the educational process was extended for a series of reasons. First, it makes learning a more seamless and ongoing process. Second, it was a conscious step toward breaking down some of the hierarchies that currently exist in schools, where one group of adults is professionalized as educators/experts and another group remains separate from learning while doing drop-offs and making lunches. Third, it was a way to educate the community: it not only helped all involved to understand about this unusual form of education but also served to further the project of cultural change. If the aim is to change culture by working with children, it is helpful for parents and caregivers to recognize this and even further it outside the school. The fourth reason—admittedly less on the radar when the school opened—was to help parents and caregivers step into learning gaps that might be occurring for their children because of such a radical change.

Many caregivers could see and were heartened by the effects of this educational approach: the building of deep relationships with peers and community, rich knowledge of the place and the more-than-human, and sophisticated language and concepts with regard to their own positionality. They could also see that their children were more confident, happier, much more physically and politically engaged, and using fine motor skills exceptionally well. However, when measured against standard schooling, some educational experiences were missing. Rich, more wholistic, integrated, place-based, and experiential learnings take time, and as a result, choices have to be made about priorities. In this case, things such as ongoing focused scaffolding and even numeracy and literacy drills were getting shorter shrift than they would in a more standard classroom. So, even though an expansive culture of orality, diversity in the ways of reading the world, and practical immersion in numeracy existed, some children were not getting enough support at the school to bring particular skills together. They were having trouble becoming literate and numerate. Ultimately, most parents, caregivers, and even teachers have accepted that they will have to do things differently in order to best “cover” the standard curriculum because they also understand the rich benefits of this kind of education. In this way, the active invitation to be involved, the enacted openness of the school, the online platforms, and the many parent meetings allow the children’s many teachers to come together to meet the fullest range of needs and possibilities.

One final note: the parents and caregivers were not, in general, an overly privileged group such that they had the time, fiscal ability, or education to provide these extras. Rather, they were seeking different opportunities for themselves and their children and making choices and sacrifices in support of that. Historically, while schools were responsible for doing literacy and numeracy, families were responsible, either explicitly or implicitly, for all the other stuff that might or might not be considered important. At Maple Ridge, some of those “other” things were prioritized to the level of school, which left families with different options for their own learning time. In some ways, ecologizing education asks those involved to engage in a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to learning and to consider whether to include learning possibilities that are not currently part of most schooling. For many families and children at Maple Ridge, the social, emotional, and ecological benefits of the environmental education far outweighed the disadvantages. The choice was easy.

Reading in the Rain

Nonetheless, the Maple Ridge Environmental School has struggled, still struggles, and will continue to struggle to meet some of its curriculum expectations. How does one scaffold toward rich numeracy in a drizzling rainforest? How can children grow their literacy while also deepening relation to place? How does learning get organized and ordered so that older children are ready for the depths and complexities of literacy and subject matter study?

Of course, improvements occurred over time, as teachers better understood the places where school was happening, what could be done in the rain, and the many affordances that the natural world provides as the human teachers have become more ecologizing. The students do practice creative writing and scientific reporting in journals that work in the wet and the dry. During winter, they regularly visit the library and sit for reading hour. Additionally, as teachers have considered the trajectory of learning across the school—from kindergarten to grade 7—they have begun to recognize that engaging, meaningful, and kinesthetic lessons tracing river currents, reading tree rings, and tracking animals also, in time, build out skills of tracking letters of the alphabet within words and onward to a rich literacy that is more than just interpreting words on a page.

Children can also develop the deep foundations for print literacy that floats on a sea of talk (to paraphrase James Britton²²) through reciting local or famous nature poetry, engaging in analytical discussion, telling stories, hearing stories from Elders, and recording oral stories on rain-protected iPads. Both younger and older students begin to understand literacy as being related not just to words on paper but as semiotic, a world filled with signs and symbols and their interpretations. In this situation, semiotics becomes eco-semiotics because it expands beyond just human signs and symbols. It includes sophisticated ways of reading the world through weather patterns, animal tracking, soil analysis, and the whys and wherefores of flora growth. As for numeracy, which has been a hard nut to crack in ecologizing ways, the challenge includes rethinking the street-level understanding of math that permeates public schooling in North America—a subject that always has a right answer, that can resolve any trouble, that is somehow perfect in its implementation, that straightens the lines of the world and abstracts the encounters of its beings. Oddly, the creative, entangled, poetic, and incomplete nature of math doesn’t tend to appear until one reaches university, and by then, for many, the damage is done. Ecologizing education is still wrestling with how to “do” numeracy, but conversations in Waldorf and in posthumanism offer some intriguing avenues as we start to consider what a post-human-entangled relational math might look like in practice. Some of these ideas have yet to become steady features of the Maple Ridge school, and parents and caregivers have, at times, stepped up to play important teaching roles as partners, particularly in the literacy and numeracy projects. Most of those engaged with the school, including some of the original founders, are still critical of how these are understood and experienced and are working on developing better strategies.

Success and Enacting the Vision

Two students are standing near River. It is fall, water levels are rising, and the whole school has been waiting expectantly for the first Salmon to appear in this ancient home and rich spawning bed. But they are late, and the word from scientists is that the entire migration this year is in trouble. Overfishing, rising water temperatures, and summer droughts are all part of the problem. And these students know it, feel it, and understand this crisis at a very deep level. For if Salmon fails to return, then, as one student points out, “Orca can’t be Orca.” To which the other responds, “and Kwantlen [the local First Nation] can’t be Kwantlen.”

Ten years after its opening, the Maple Ridge Environmental School is still evolving. On the bright side, the students are thriving. They love the immersive, imaginative learning style that centers less on teachers and more on plants, place, animals, elements, and the children themselves. Parents/caregivers, still hungry for alternatives to outdated standard education practices, have flocked to the school as well. The current waitlist is three times the size of the current student population, and they have already added two more classes. When British Columbia eased its COVID-19 restrictions in May 2020, children at all BC schools had the option of returning to school for the remaining month of the school year. According to Jodi, 80 percent of the environmental school children returned to school, compared to only 20 percent in the rest of the school district.

More important than the numbers, these children have a deep ecological understanding of where they live. They comprehend and have respect for local water cycles, salmon life cycles, seasonal changes to flora, and the impact of weather patterns in visceral ways that most college students couldn’t fully grasp. They understand that the Land beneath their feet is the ancient and current home of the Katzie and Kwantlen First Nations and that there is a bond between people and place that is ontological. (Remember: “Kwantlen can’t be Kwantlen” without Salmon.) Students have been regularly gifted with some of the stories and traditions that have bound humans to these waterways, this forest, and this landscape since time immemorial. By listening to and learning from local Indigenous Elders, they have become active in the slow reconciliation processes so necessary—and so overdue—in this country. One day, when an Indigenous Elder, a regular contributor to the children’s education, was drumming for the children, Jodi recalls that she looked at Clayton and smiled. So far, this was the closest enactment of the school they had envisioned together.

And yet the school still grapples with significant challenges. Changing the larger culture is another nut that has yet to be cracked, even though changes at the level of individuals have been in some cases quite dramatic. And although the school has succeeded in the undoing of some of the troublesome tropes of a system that tends to be anti-environmental in its orientation, many other habits have yet to be located and undone. At times, the radical positionality as an “out there” school can foster complacency and a self-congratulatory feeling that is both good (for respite and honoring all the hard work) and worrisome. Yet maybe the real successes of Maple Ridge can be seen in its ability, at the national and global level, to inspire others into ecologizing education in their own places, not as replicas thereof but by inspiring whatever form of ecologizing makes sense in a particular place.

Struggles and Successes for Graduates, Parents, Educators

Ecologizing education is not easy or quick to implement and is not a panacea to everything that ails us. Challenges exist within the process; these include, for example, finding ways to do literacy in more ecological ways, changing teacher practice such that it honors the natural world as a co-teacher, and recognizing and responding to the limits of our own imaginations when it comes to changing culture. Challenges exist as well between the ecologizing program and the larger culture—where trees still don’t have rights, where all voices are not honored and listened to, where humans, some humans more than others, are still the absolute center of everything. We envision a culture where the more-than-human world is a partner not just in ongoing learning and teaching but also in what the world is to become going forward.

Some graduates of the school have struggled upon leaving. Their educational experiences at the environmental school may have completely transformed them, but education at standard schools has not transformed in their absence, nor has society at large. Transitioning back into high school has been a confusing, disorienting, and sometimes unbearable step for which some were underprepared. Two students dropped out of schooling altogether. Another took up the superficial values on offer at her new school and eventually became hooked on drugs.

In contrast, some graduates are having great success while still critiquing the standard education system itself. One student became a nursing major at university but continues to express concern to her teachers that the program requires an unhealthy amount of sitting. Another student, dismayed at the lack of experiential learning and creativity, dropped out of standard schooling in grade 9. Later, he returned and completed grades 10, 11, and 12 in a single year so he could fulfill his goal of becoming an environmental scientist. Clearly, graduating students need increased preparation and ongoing support for whatever they transition into.

Part of this preparation might also include skills useful to the entire ecologizing education community. At Maple Ridge, the changes in language, in ideas around schooling, and in relationships and responsibilities toward the natural world are not immediately recognizable by or acceptable to the larger culture. This suggests that ecologizing education community members will need thoughtful training and support in order to translate these experiences and ideas for the larger culture to understand, to maintain those changes in the face of potential pushback, and to become politically able to advocate for change. Some of these skills might include finding allies, building community, thinking critically, developing a sophisticated understanding of rights, and more. These skills, then, become “tools in the toolbox” of critical change agents, helping them both advocate for their vision of a changing world and protect themselves from the challenges they will confront. After all, the broader culture might not understand what is being suggested and is, at the very least, not totally amenable to the changes being advocated.

Of course, children aren’t the only ones learning at the environmental school. Because of their children’s coaxing, many families now spend more time outdoors and have become more actively concerned about environmental protections. One parent of three boys at the school has also become a teacher there. For many parents, the school hasn’t been just about building relationships with the environment—it is also a part of their own healing process. More than one parent at the school has reported that their childhood school experiences left them feeling painfully unvalued, deficient, and even traumatized. However, at the environmental school, several have reported feeling valued as knowledge holders and seen as individuals, and they experience a meaningful sense of belonging with the school community.

Even researchers have been transformed. The researcher Yi Chien Jade Ho reports that her personal sense of identity and belonging have shifted. Having spent her childhood and young adulthood living in numerous countries, she says she has often felt that she doesn’t belong anywhere. After three years at the environmental school, however, she is experiencing a “heightened place sensibility.” She explains, “I am the embodiment of all the places I’ve lived, not just physical place and land, but the cultural and social encounters that I’ve had, and my own connection with the natural world.”²³

Expanding the Possibilities

This book is not really about a single school. In fact, schools all over North America are experimenting with pedagogy, spending more time outside, and working to prepare children for the world to come. The COVID-19 pandemic has many recognizing the value of the natural world and realizing that being inside is not as safe as previously assumed. Nonetheless, the Maple Ridge Environmental School is a pretty sweeping example to consider, and since ecologizing education is seeking to radically change the culture, it seems a good place to start. Every school engaging in this ecologizing work will have its own unique set of ecological, social, cultural, and political circumstances to negotiate; not every ecologizing school starts, or needs to start, in this more seismic way of Maple Ridge. A group seeking change doesn’t necessarily have to start a brand-new school, conduct 100 percent of their education outdoors, forgo buildings completely, or have a research team present all the time. As such, we offer here a brief introduction to three other schools, each with its own unique origin story, with the intention of expanding our imaginative range as we continue to explore ecologizing education.

Risks: Cougars, Needles, and Strangers

Inaudibly, Cougar pads onto the road a short distance from the children at the Maple Ridge Environmental School. He weighs as much as a full-grown human, is twice as long as the giant Alaskan malamute, and can sprint at 70 kilometers an hour. Undoubtedly, Cougar represents the worst fears of many parents. Indeed, parents who pulled their children from the Maple Ridge school cited the lack of physical boundaries, such as fencing, as one of their key complaints.

But the environmental school has carefully prepared for such moments. Although cougars are very rarely seen in the area, teachers, parents, students, and researchers know to keep an eye out for them and are trained to recognize their tracks and respond appropriately. When he was principal, Clayton would arrive early every morning to do a small gratitude ceremony, monitor for bear and cougar tracks, and check for damaged tree branches that could fall. And at NEST, students are actively brought into these assessment and decision-making processes, which helps them develop the comfort and awareness needed to be outdoors. As a result, for example, children know to stay within certain boundaries despite the absence of fencing, and they know why.

On this particular morning, Cougar traveled down the road and thus left no tracks for adults to observe. Initially, he wouldn’t leave the road. Clayton reports, “Nobody panicked. Everyone knew what to do, even the kids, because we had rehearsed that scenario many times over.”²⁷ After one of the parents spotted Cougar, the forestry service was called, the children were corralled into a tighter space, and several adults went up and banged pots very loudly to scare him off. Then they tracked him into the woods to make sure he wasn’t lingering nearby. They moved school to a different location for the following week. Meanwhile, the forestry service located and removed a deer kill nearby, motivating Cougar to clear out of the area.

The dangers of outdoor schooling are real and need to be carefully assessed and prepared for. However, the story of Cougar speaks to successful preparation and an ultimately peaceful negotiation of space between humans and indigenous more-than-humans. Cougar was not harmed, merely deterred from the area. Presumably, he returned to the nearby forest and mountains. The children were safe—and felt safe. Established protocols were followed and proved successful.

Not every school or family has access to forests and mountains containing cougars, and there are risks and challenges to being outdoors in urban centers, where most schools are, as well. Many ecologizing teachers confront issues such as traffic, trash, needles, meddlesome humans, and a lack of “wild” space. Yet, if this work is going to be successful in its mission to radically change education, it must be where most learners are. Wild Wednesdays or Freedom Fridays or Nature at Noons have become an accepted part of many elementary classrooms across Vancouver and Southern British Columbia, and teachers have become adept at finding tiny pockets of green in parks, ravines, empty lots, and hedgerows, where encounters with nature might happen for their incredibly diverse charges.

Risk management work has evolved too. Advance completion of paperwork allows teachers to more spontaneously decide when to head outside, and information sessions prepare parents and caregivers for these occasions. Many schools have collected appropriate clothing from donations and the lost and found to properly outfit all students. Because of the ongoing nature of some of this work, teachers have also built relationships with the local human community. For example, locals come in to help with the gardening or to be on the lookout for exciting encounters with nature that they can share or to assist teachers in cleaning the areas in a well-used park where trash and drug paraphernalia are quite common. The work and risks may be different than those inside the classroom, but learning how to build community and developing the ability to assess local risks are important not only for the ecologizing educator but for the students as well.

The Unseen Risks of Indoor Schooling

Upon hearing that Cougar came near the Maple Ridge school or that urban educators are having to remove hypodermic needles before every visit to a park, some parents may dismiss outdoor schooling as too risky. But, in an odd way, outdoor schooling may in fact be less risky, since the risks are better known and, as such, can be better prepared for.

In Slow Death by Rubber Ducky: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health, Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie point out that seemingly ordinary objects in our indoor worlds pollute the human body and that exceedingly little research has investigated the consequences.²⁸ In their 2014 study, Philippe Grandjean and Philip Landrigan note that a few common industrial chemicals often found in paint and fluorescent lights and used as wood preservers cause “neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and other cognitive impairments, affect[ing] millions of children worldwide.”²⁹

All of these authors lament the lack of research into thousands of everyday chemicals that may be putting children at risk. What chemicals have been sprayed on the school lawns? What chemical varnishes have been used on the school desks? What is the impact of years of exposure to off-gassing linoleum floors? These are some of the more urgent questions, but one might also wonder about the impact of light and noise pollution or the long-term health implications of reduced physical activity in indoor settings. Humans and their ancestors have lived alongside cougars for hundreds of thousands of years. But humans have only ramped up the intensity of indoor spaces replete with artificial chemicals and other hazards in the last century or so.

The risks of indoor schooling may be poorly understood and analyzed, and this lack of knowledge and awareness may induce a false sense of security. An interesting activity that we have developed for graduate students in our ecologizing programs is to have them do full risk assessments for their indoor classrooms like the kind demanded of them for any outdoor time. The results are illuminating.

In fact, the general public’s whole notion of safety may be ill-informed. In the past decade, only two people have died from cougar attacks in all of North America. Meanwhile, toy balloons are considered the number one cause of choking deaths in young children.³⁰ There are noticeably greater dangers—from falling down a flight of stairs, from school shootings, from being crushed by a piano,³¹ and from getting into a collision while being driven to school—than the danger from wild cougars and supervised visits to the local park, even in places where children regularly play in cougar habitat.

Additionally, as the educational researcher Chris Beeman argues, outdoor ecological education may be safer than standard education when considering long-term benefits to mental, emotional, and physical health.³² Beeman points out that the predictability of standard, indoor educational settings does little to prepare children for the unpredictability of life—a life that is clearly getting even more unpredictable as we venture into the Anthropocene. Wild spaces foster embodied learning and quicken reaction times. Children who live almost entirely indoors have significantly reduced opportunity to practice balance, coordination, problem-solving, responding to uncertainty, and strength-building, Beeman notes. In the indoor classroom, students sit at tables while the teacher explains how worms aerate the soil. For the moment, their bodies, whether squirming or still, are irrelevant objects. During this same lesson in the outdoor classroom, one student balances on a rock, several others squat, and a few others are learning that a fallen tree branch seat will support only two of them. As Beeman suggests, short-term “cuts and bruises” may usher in greater self-awareness, ability, and responsibility that prevent more serious injuries later in life.

Being cut off from the more-than-human world may also lead to lifelong difficulties for children because a “potentially healing relationship and a place of growth is also lost,” Beeman argues. He recognizes that Indigenous students, in particular, may experience this loss as devastating. Furthermore, students in standard education may simply have fewer opportunities to truly live, to fully experience what it means to be alive and human. Who wouldn’t want to enrich their life by listening to an Elder recount ancient raven stories as actual ravens chortle from the breeze-blown treetops overhead? Who wouldn’t want to race leaves and twigs in a mathematics game down the rushing spring river while nibbling on nearby salmon berries?

Learning in wild spaces is an experience of being more immersed and involved while engaging all of one’s senses and capacities. Beeman summarizes, “Despite the difficulty in doing so, care and concern for the welfare of students and teachers, and a minimization of all kinds of injury, especially those that may be more difficult to discern initially, may emerge later in life, or may persist throughout life, ought to be at the forefront of policy and practice.” The critical question is: What are we risking if we don’t act to change education as it currently stands? Maybe the answer is: Much more than we think.

Right Action and Overcoming Obstacles

Despite their careful management of known risks, the Maple Ridge team understands why some parents are reluctant to send their kids outdoors all day. Indeed, the fact that so very many parents over the previous decade have sent their kids is a testament, in part, to the degree of suffering that standard school has caused their children and themselves. While the schools mentioned here continue to address areas of concern—in literacy learning, in safety management, in reconciliation processes, in changing culture, in co-teaching with nature, in gentrified school districts—they all offer immersive, embodied, experiential, and ecologically responsible and attuned learning that is unmatched by standard schooling. The creation of these schools required careful attention to complex sociocultural, educational, and geographic conditions. The Haudenosaunee might say the Land itself is helping in this endeavor, by gifting humans with insights, goals, and creative solutions. The Maple Ridge school team repeatedly noted surprise at their ability to overcome so many seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Anishinaabe Elder Alex Mathias revealed to Beeman that when the hunter brings right manners, right respect, the animal will present itself.³³ Perhaps because the Maple Ridge school emerged out of thoughtful, respectful practices, the world presented what was needed to turn vision into reality.