- Explore what literacy looks like at The Nature School and the significance of its whole school approach.
- Consider how your school can take literacy beyond the classroom and into the great outdoors.
- Understand how outdoor experiences increase authentic purposes for English.
In this session, Catherine Oehlman tells us all about The Nature School in Port Macquarie while encouraging each of us to take learning outside, no matter what that looks like. In your individual school contexts, it could be the school grounds, kitchen gardens, a local park, or just a patch of weeds!
She considers what it might mean for students, in any of these settings, to take literacy education beyond the walls of the classroom and out into the great outdoors: there are many benefits to outdoor learning.
The Nature School is able to take these benefits to the max: nature pedagogy is at the foundation of what they do, and they have adventure days (outdoor excursions) each fortnight. They have to think carefully about meeting curriculum outcomes when they are approaching learning so differently.
What do English and Literacies look like at the Nature school? They are a community of readers. “We read as a cultural practice… On Monday mornings, the whole school comes outside at the same time and we all sit and read under the trees together.” Reading is also the only homework they have at the school, because “We read to understand all the things we want to understand… the reading is its own reward.”
Catherine then asks: how often do we provide opportunities for students to not just be readers of the word, but readers of the world?
The next part of The Nature School’s Literacy education is “Talking up” to students. The richer the dialogue teachers can provide for students at school, the more vocabulary they will have access to.
“Education is is a dialogue between the more experienced and the less experienced.” -Jerome Bruner, 1996
The school also teaches authentic writing purposes; writing becomes “so that..” rather than “so what?”. As an example of the concept, they don’t teach fire just so students can light a fire (so what?), they teach it so that they can be warm or cook something. How often do we tolerate inauthentic purposes in writing?
Finally, Catherine address the risks of not providing children with experiences beyond the classroom. To be able to write what they know, children must begin to know the world around them.
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