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Looking Back on a Banner Year
By James Davis, Education Program Manager
June 2018
Sierra Club BC’s Education Program wrapped up another year of our school-based programming last week, with Kirsten delivering workshops at schools in Terrace and Kitimat and Amira facilitating our new French language workshops for kindergarten and grade 1 and 2 students in Victoria.
Over the past nine months, Amira and Kirsten have worked with over 7,300 students across the province. They facilitated 334 workshops at 116 schools in 25 different school districts. Pretty incredible!
Kirsten and I facilitated professional development training for teachers in Vanderhoof (School District 91), Victoria (School Districts 61, 62 and 63) and Chilliwack (School District 33). We also supported teachers in the Capital Regional District to take their students outside more often for meaningful learning experiences through our monthly after-school teacher gatherings and the mentorship sessions that Kirsten facilitated with teachers at 13 different schools.
We are grateful to the Victoria Foundation, the Greater Victoria Savings and Credit Union Legacy Foundation and NSERC for funding this pilot project and we hope to be able to continue some iteration of it during the 2018/2019 school year.
It’s been a pleasure for all three of us to work with students and teachers across the province and we are thankful for all that we have learned from them. We look forward to helping more students get outside and learn in the fall.
In the meantime, here’s some inspiration for getting the kids in your life outside over the summer break.
And some awesome photos of our team in action from this year:
Photos by Brynne Morrice
North Island & Sunshine Coast Reflections
By Environmental Educator Kirsten Dallimore
View from Port Hardy on the beach
Standing on a rocky beach in Port Hardy recently was quite a surreal experience for me. Although I have had the privilege to travel into a variety of beautiful communities here in British Columbia over my life time, the North Island took my breath away. I was raised in Ontario, but BC has always been such an important place in my life because I have family here, and I am drawn to and deeply connected with BC’s natural places. The North Island has been part of my “dream list” as far back as I can remember. Since I have a track record of exploring the Canadian north, it just made sense to me that sooner or later I was going to have to go north here on the island. Lucky for me, this spring was the year that the education programs were able to be delivered in both Port Hardy and on Malcolm Island!
Highlights from the Journey
Eco Art Club
It was a privilege to spend an afternoon facilitating an environmental education program with the Eco Art Club at Eagle View Elementary School in Port Hardy. These students have created such beautiful representations of mother earth through their art work, which they have displayed throughout their school. I truly admire the ocean theme they have embraced this year and wish them the best of luck in their endeavours to teach and support each other about the protection of our oceans! I look forward to working again in the future with the creative artists and inspiring young environmentalists who live in this community. During the workshop, the students embraced the opportunity to make observations and draw pictures inspired by an orca whale bone, butter clam shells, moon snail shells, deer and moose jaw bones, and local native plants such as salal, sword fern and oregon grape. We created art, shared nature stories, sang songs together and went for a beautiful walk and nature hunt exploration in their local forest.
Outdoor Learning Spaces
While I was teaching on the sunshine coast and the north island this spring, something special that I was able to really embrace and make use of throughout my journey were outdoor classrooms. Wherever there was a forest close by to the school, there had been a transformation of a small part of that forest into an inspirational outdoor learning space. The outdoor classroom space varied depending on the size of the forest, materials used for benches and nature play, exploration, and the distance they are from the school. The things that they all had in common were a central gathering place for students to meet, loose materials for kids to pick up and move around, and a variety of living and non-living things to explore and expand kids’ curiosity. It may be an ambitious hope for all schools here in BC to have access to a nature learning space on their school grounds or close by, but I do hope that one day it will be possible for every student to have access to a natural outdoor learning space.
I sincerely thank all of you for your continued support in our education programs. I look forward to coming back in the Fall for another year of full of amazing nature connection moments spent with kids across BC!
New This Spring: Teacher Nature Mentorship Program
By Environmental Educator Kirsten Dallimore
This spring the education team launched a new program; this time it was for our teachers here in the CRD! The teacher nature mentorship program has already enabled 23 teachers to meet with me for an entire morning or afternoon to design their very own outdoor plan to incorporate into their regular weekly routine.
In each session I have supported teachers to create a plan so they are prepared to take their students outside into a nature space on a weekly basis. This nature space could be on their school grounds or a place within walking distance of the school. I have shared with the teachers a model they can follow when they go out, so they have a flow to their session that is based on the 4 directions, the energy of the group, and the activities they plan to do. I have shared ideas for activities based on their needs and interests such as First Nations’ studies, curriculum links and building local ecosystem knowledge.
To their surprise I have also provided the teachers with prepared materials for them to print and use right away that week. Together we went over what are called core routines such as sit spots, storytelling, and bird language, which are basic nature awareness techniques. Core routines are all done in the pursuit to help students both develop and strengthen their connection to nature, and a sense of place.
On a variety of occasions we went for our own nature walks near the school to a local nature space and went through a plan for how they would get there, where they would bring their students once they arrived and what activities would work in that place. Together we brainstormed topics they felt comfortable presenting in that place and made a list of additional materials they required that I could prepare and send to them to set them up for success. We discussed what would be included in a risk-benefit assessment of the area, and the risks of bringing them out to that location in relationship to why it would be most beneficial to bring their students there.
My job has been to provide teachers with ideas, materials and resources to support outdoor learning opportunities with their students. Some of the topics we covered were specific interests such as how to incorporate First Nations’ curriculum into outdoor learning opportunities, Garry Oak ecosystem teaching resources, biomimicry, nature play, stewardship opportunities and how to incorporate technology into outdoor learning.
We also addressed the needs and concerns coming from teachers such as how to get parent volunteers involved to meet the required adult-to-student ratios, how to involve other classes through creating nature buddies, getting permission and access to local parks as well as how to raise support from administration, parents and other teachers for more outdoor learning opportunities within their schools.
It has been a privilege to work alongside teachers here in the CRD to design an outdoor plan for their students. I truly hope that we can inspire more classrooms to get outside, and that this momentum will keep building as this routine of outdoor learning is modelled throughout schools!
Blankets and Solar Panels
By James Davis, Education Program Manager
May 2018
Spring has arrived in full force here on Vancouver Island! I hope you’re getting some sunny days in whichever part of the province you live. Things are rolling along here in the Education Program, with just over four weeks of workshops before we wrap things up for the school year.
I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity I recently had to participate in a blanket exercise with other Sierra Club BC staff, and members of our board. The exercise was an adapted version of the KAIROS Blanket Exercise and was facilitated by board members Valine Crist and Jackie Larkin. It was a profound experience for me and I highly recommend taking the time to find out about similar offerings in your area and participating in one.
Over the past few years, I’ve learned about many aspects of the damaging history of colonialism and of the terrible impacts on Indigenous communities across Turtle Island, but hearing about them all together in the space of a couple of hours was staggering and made me realize how much work we have to do as settlers to heal broken relationships with Indigenous communities and move forward in a good way.
Film produced by Skidegate Band Council, in partnership with W Dusk Energy and VoVo Productions.
I’ve also been inspired yet again by the leadership that many First Nations communities are showing not only by protecting their territories from damaging resource extraction projects, but also in demonstrating alternatives to heavy dependence on fossil fuels. Check out this video about how the Skidegate Band Council on Haida Gwaii installed the largest community-owned solar project in British Columbia.
Another Indigenous group that are blazing a solar path are the Tiny House Warriors, who are building a series of tiny houses to stop the Kinder Morgan pipeline from passing through unceded Secwepemc Territory. They have already installed solar panels on some of the houses with support from Lubicon Solar and are working towards solarizing all of them.
Join the T’Sou-ke Solar Community Tour this Saturday! Photo credit: tsoukenation.com
Here in Coast Salish territory, the T’Sou-ke Nation has an impressive solar program with their own huge array, solar hot water heaters, and a conservation program. You can find out more here or join one of the tours that our friends over at the Wilderness Committee organize from time to time, including this Saturday.
I hope these examples and the sunny days ahead will inspire you to think about how you can commit to supporting renewable energy projects in your community!
P.S. To learn more about clean energy initiatives in BC, check out Sierra Club BC’s podcast. Don’t miss Episode 4: First Nations Leading the Way.
Feature image by Brynne Morrice.
The Home Stretch!
By James Davis, Education Program Manager
April 2018
Welcome back from spring break! I hope you had a rejuvenating time away from school. I have spent the past couple of weeks catching up from a busy start to 2018, Kirsten took a well-deserved vacation and Amira has been preparing to start delivering our kindergarten and grade 1-2 programs in French. We are looking forward to what the final weeks of the term have in store.
In February we launched our new mentorship and support program for teachers in the Capital Region District. At each school we work with as a part of this pilot project, Kirsten leads workshops for two classes during the morning, and then spends the afternoon with the two teachers. She helps them build a strategy for taking their students outside more often for meaningful outdoor learning opportunities. These mentorship sessions have been very well received and we are excited to work with more schools in the coming weeks, including some that we have never visited before!
Another component of this program is a series of after-school gatherings for teachers. So far, we have hosted two gatherings and are gearing up for a third on April 25th at Rogers Elementary in Victoria. If you are a teacher in School District 61, 62 or 63 and are interested in connecting with others in the area who are passionate about outdoor learning, please join us. Lenny Ross will be our guest speaker this month and will be talking about nature education and connections with the new science curriculum. We are also happy that several local organizations that work to support nature-based learning will be on hand before the meeting from 3 to 4 pm to speak with teachers about the programming that they offer. Groups that will be represented include the Compost Education Centre, the Royal BC Museum, LifeCycles Project, Saanich Parks, the Robert Bateman Centre, World Fisheries Trust, WildBC and Peninsula Streams Society. Please contact me at james@sierraclub.bc.ca if you would like to join us.
Environmental Educator Kirsten Dallimore with students from South Park Family School.
In the midst of all of this, our Environmental Educators will be visiting schools across the province to facilitate our hands-on workshops. In addition to working with schools in the Greater Victoria area, Kirsten will be spending time in Port Alberni and Ucluelet this month and Amira will be busy delivering workshops in the Lower Mainland and Chilliwack. We have been working on some changes to our Climate & Place workshop for grade 6-8 students and Kirsten is excited to roll out the revised program in the next couple of weeks.
Good luck with the home stretch and thanks for all you do to help students get outside and learn!
Feature image by Brynne Morrice.
