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OUTDOOR EDUCATORS MEET to Safeguard Future of KIDS in the Wild
A HEAVY COURSE LOAD IN OUTDOOR EDUCATION
“THE ADMINISTRATION’S ATTITUDE seems to be, ‘Don’t go outside, it’s dangerous out there,” says Brad Ipp, a teacher at Toronto’s Forest Valley Outdoor Education Centre. Ipp says he has to first climb a mountain of paperwork before he gets approval to plan outdoor activities like canoeing. To Ipp, school boards seem more concerned with protecting themselves from insurance costs and litigation than allowing kids to learn from the outdoors. “Te school board sees outdoor sports
as high risk, even though they are far less dangerous than a high school football game,” says Ipp. If school boards are reluctant to let kids
1 4 n C A NOE ROOT S early summer 2006
loose in the wilds, it may be because past approaches to outdoor education were sometimes laissez-faire, with untrained physical education or geography teachers taking their classes on wilderness field trips without safety protocols in place. Add to this the media storms that surround ac- cidents like the drowning of 12 students in a 1977 canoeing disaster on Lake Temiska- ming and the avalanche that buried seven students near Revelstoke, British Colum- bia, in 2003 and it’s little wonder that school boards are nervous. To address this nervousness, more than 175 teachers and education administrators
from across Canada will attend Algonquin College’s Risk Management Conference for Outdoor Education in late May near Pem- broke, Ontario. Matt Cruchet, a risk management con-
sultant, is organizing the third-annual con- ference to discuss how teachers can address the safety concerns of school boards and how those school boards can make it easier to have outdoor programs approved. Cru- chet would like to see both sides eventually agree upon a set of safety standards. “Te wilderness is a different type of
classroom,” says Cruchet. “Tere are dif- ferent risks, but they’re manageable when training and standards are in place. Tere’s no reason why outdoor education shouldn’t be commonplace.” Brad Ipp would like to see teachers do
a better job of championing outdoor ed- ucation’s benefits—things like improved teamwork and judgment skills which are all but ignored in mainstream education but are hard to avoid on a wilderness ca- noe trip. And, he says, getting students outside is
more important now than ever before. “A lot of my students have a tough time
conceiving of playing anywhere there isn’t an electrical outlet to plug their video games into.” —Conor Mihell
ROBERT FAUBERT
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