The Maple Ridge Environmental School a Case Study: Ten Years as an Outdoor Public Elementary School and What We Think We Know Now

Abstract

This chapter aims to reflect on 10 years in the life of a radical, buildingless, outdoor all the time, public elementary school on Canada’s west coast. In 2011, the Maple Ridge Environmental School opened its “doors” and welcomed 66 students and their families into an extraordinary experiment in outdoor environmental education. Based on the premise that the culture, often known as modernity, and by extension, its public education system, had troubling orientations towards the natural world baked right into it, the school then was about seeking to ecologize education (Blenkinsop S, Kuchta E. Teaching when nature matters: ecologizing education and the challenge of changing culture. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, in press) ‘all the way down’. Ten years later we know more about this project of cultural change. This paper will begin with a short introduction to the school itself, its founding principles, its goals, and its ongoing educative work. It will then point out several of the key, and more generalizable, ongoing challenges – transformations, traumas, and teachers – our responses to these plus a few key learnings and successes.