What kind of teachers does an eco-school need?
As the eco-school community clarifies its vision, its values, the role it sees for nature and its understanding of nature, all these things have implications for what kind of teachers would be suitable for working at the school.
The associations of “eco,” “nature,” “environment” and so on tend to attract teachers who have some connection to the outdoors—perhaps they are a skilled canoeist, fisher or gardener. A school might require that candidates have their wilderness first aid certificate, as an indicator of someone possessing significant outdoor skills. But although these skills are great to have and can sometimes help in teaching, there are others that we’ve come to see as more essential. Here is a list of six capacities that we see as closer to the heart of effective eco-practice:
- lateral thinking, curiosity and flexibility of mind;
- responsiveness to the unexpected and emergent;
- constant reflection on practice (why are we doing this, how are the students doing, where does it make sense to go from here);
- ability to create a rhythm and shape for each day and week;
- attentiveness to individual students and their readiness for trust and risk;
- cultural and eco-political awareness (decolonization and re-inhabitation).
Teaching in nature invariably involves the unexpected, such as finding that the normally placid creek is turbulent and full of debris as a result of the morning’s thunderstorm. The eco-teacher needs to be flexible and to adapt to where nature is at. They also need to adapt to where the kids are at, and know when to raise the level of challenge or reduce it. And, assuming the school is to be place-based and closely connected to the community, eco-teachers will be needed who can work with diverse community members, with each other, as well as with nature.
All this being said, there is no sure-fire formula for selecting teachers. Teachers who are new to the profession may be more open-minded and flexible in their practice, while teachers with more experience may have a greater repertoire of strategies and knowledge of curriculum and students to draw on. We have found the most effective eco-teachers have humility, self-reflectiveness and a willingness and desire to learn and improve. The hiring process should include ways of assessing these qualities. You might want to interview the teachers out on the land, and ask them to talk through some of the teaching possibilities they see there. And because you want them to put the school’s vision into practice, you might ask them what “strengths and stretches” they see in it for their own growth as a teacher.
The professional development of eco-teachers
The shift from conventional schooling to place-based ecological learning takes a while. It’s therefore vital to support teachers’ ongoing professional development in place-based learning and all that it implies (see next section). Schools generally schedule a certain number of days per year for professional development, and eco-schools need to be thoughtful about how they use this time. Sustained engagement with a particular focus, for instance the use of nature journals or the development of math concepts in nature-based learning, yields much better results than one-off workshops on a range of issues.
One of the key learning processes involves getting to know the places where learning and teaching happen in the eco-school. Since places change with the seasons, this means becoming familiar with the learning opportunities at different times of the year, and maybe in different weather conditions as well. Depending on their prior knowledge, teachers may also have a lot of learning to do in natural history: what plants and animals are present, what are their life-cycles, how do they interact, how has the ecosystem been changing over time. Then there will also be the cultural knowledge related to various sites. Some of this learning can happen “on the job,” but preparation before the school year opens or during breaks in the teaching schedule may well be part of what teachers find necessary in order to teach creatively with place. In many respects this resembles the way teachers in conventional schools may read up on a topic before they teach it to their students.
The stories of a place are an important part of its teachings. Thus the eco-teacher should also be learning about a place’s history, from indigenous, settler and more contemporary perspectives. This might entail questions such as the following:
- What are the geological stories of the site in “deep time” and in more recent millennia?
- What indigenous traditions are associated with the site, and what meanings does it hold for contemporary Indigenous people? What families and knowledge holders have a strong relationship with this place?
- How did the early settlers see the place? Was it merely as a storehouse of resources waiting to be extracted or were there attributes of place that left them awed that they sought to steward? How did the land come to have its present form?
- Are there contemporary controversies or struggles involving this place? What pressures on this place are ongoing and what restoration has been attempted or is being contemplated? What groups, organizations or communities feel a connection to this place?
- What events have the rocks, trees and streams witnessed and what disturbances, both human and natural, have they survived?
Knowing the place in these different ways adds up to the teacher having a much deeper understanding of the range of educational possibilities it offers.
Supporting your eco-teachers
Teaching is a challenging job in any setting, and the challenges of an eco-school are distinctive in many ways. For instance, the eco-school teacher needs to be focused on safety in a very different way than a teacher whose day-to-day teaching takes place within the confines of the classroom, with occasional forays out into the schoolyard. Many of the familiar structures of school (bells between periods or for recess, walls and desks, whiteboards and textbooks, clear transitions between subject areas) are absent in outdoor settings, and depending on the school’s philosophy, many of them may be absent from indoor settings as well. Heat and cold, wet and wind can all pose difficulties. Teachers will need support as they navigate these challenges.
There is often a group of parents who form particularly close relationships with the teachers and who are available to help out in various ways. They can become effective mediators with the rest of the school community, able to see the school through both the teachers’ and the parents’ eyes. Sometimes this group comes to see themselves as protectors of the school vision, or spokespeople of the school as a whole. This gets back to the need for good community-based process mentioned in an earlier section. While support for the teachers is important, it’s also important that parents with doubts or criticisms be able to express them and have them heard. The school administrator can play a key role in helping the community find this balance.
Creative thinking is often needed. For example, in one public eco-school, questions arose around the value of the prep time (i.e. non-instructional time) scheduled into a teacher’s day. At 40 minutes, this time was too short to be really useful—not nearly enough, for instance, to enable a teacher to visit a site and plan an activity. So the school reorganized the school week in such a way that the teachers got a whole day of prep time every two weeks. In the context of the rhythms of the school day and the demands of outdoor teaching, this was a much better solution.
Eco-schools tend to be small, so if even one teacher gets sick, the whole school can feel the effects. This points to the need to have some teachers on call who understand and support the school’s vision and teaching philosophy, who have familiarity with how it runs day-to-day, who know the outdoor sites the school uses and the kind of gear required, who have the requisite first aid certification, and ideally who embrace teaching with the natural world as a partner. This is a tall order! If the school occasionally hosts professional development days open to teachers from other schools, this can be a good way of starting to build those relationships. Ideal would be to offer mentoring opportunities for teachers with a particular interest in working at the school.
The eco-school principal/administrator
The importance of finding the right person to act as a principal for the eco-school should not be underestimated. Even though many eco-schools will strive for a less hierarchical power structure, the principal will nevertheless have a lot of influence on interpreting the school’s vision and mission, in offering guidance to teachers, and in interactions between the school and the outside world.
Ideally, the principal will share many or all of the characteristics of an eco-teacher, as described above. Since the principal will often be outdoors with the teachers and students, it is really helpful if they have a comparable range of skills and knowledge. In addition, just as teachers assess the capacities of individual students, the principal needs to be able to do this with respect to teachers, observing where their practice is solid and where it could benefit from a reminder or example or provocation. The principal also plays a vital role in setting the expectations and tone for visitors to the school.
The creative thinking required to help the school function in spite of pressures to conform must often come from the principal—though if they are wise they will seek to foster this kind of thinking in the school community as a whole. One example that we witnessed had to do with the collective agreement provisions for the teaching staff to have breaks and to have access to facilities like a staff lounge. That provision was going to be very difficult to meet in outdoor settings, so the school administrator had a conversation with the teachers and the union about how to meet the intent of that provision. At first they settled upon having a tent as their private space. Over time, the teachers adapted the concept further, so that the tent became a space where support teachers could sit with students and have conversations.
The role of the principal with respect to the school community as a whole can vary. At the least, they are the primary conduit of information about the life of the school as a whole. One way to think about the principal is as a translato—between the daily activities and happenings at the school and the larger arc of the students’ learning journey; between this and the mission and vision of the school; between all of these and the languages of the school board and the more conventional educational system. This can be a demanding role to play, and good communication skills, both oral and written, are an essential part of the job. In a sense the principal acts as a buffer between the school and the outside world. This is, in part, a protective role which allows the teachers to focus on teaching without feeling that the larger system or a skeptical public is constantly looking over their shoulders. It is also a catalytic role, in which the work of the school helps spark wider conversations about the purposes of education and the appropriateness of mainstream schooling to the needs of today’s society.