Grade 10 students work on a collaborative mural from drawing outdoors; it became part of a LEAF project. The LEAF Project Toward an interdisciplinary, decolonized model of environmental education By Lori York LEAF pedagogy A
S A THIRD-GENERATION CANADIAN of west- ern European descent, I have wrestled with my place on the land, in the wild nature of Canada. I feel at
home here, yet I have not known my Indigenous countries, landscapes, languages, or places. I am what you might refer to as “naturalized.” I am trained in environmental educa- tion and spend a great deal of time connecting to natural places. Although, within the confines of a traditional sec- ondary school setting, I struggle to find time in the rigid block structure to teach experientially outdoors in natural places. I found that several of my colleagues were interested in exploring ways we might work within the school com- munity to create more time and space for environmental education. Many of us were doing lessons here and there, but we wanted to try to make environmental education visible in our school community — visible and valued. A group of us came together as a group to form a collaborative inquiry
Page 38
that addressed the question of how to incorporate more time outdoors in our whole school community. Though the focus of this article is secondary school teachers and students, the framework described here can be applied across grade levels. We came up against many barriers. The block structure,
bell schedule, and rigid timetable of a Day 1/Day 2 second- ary school has a lot of sticking points. We researched many different structures, such as cohort models, mini schools, and blocking teachers back-to-back to create a longer chunk of time. We looked at out-of-school programs like summer camps and scout groups. We looked at online achievement or badge-based structures. Nothing really worked at our school. One year, I developed and taught an elective called Environmental Leadership 10, but it was extremely difficult to run the outdoor field experiences due to supervision ratios and I was doing all of them during my prep block, so I was losing the planning time required to run this type of pro- gramming successfully. Over the course of our collaborative inquiry research, readings, and discussions, we identified four pillars that
Green Teacher 131
Photos by Lori York
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
