This month, the Cedar Coast Field Station had been featured in the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation magazine in an article written by Andrew Wood – an CCFS educator.
The change we may never know
Lessons on the impact of place-based education on inclusion and empowerment from a first-year teacher
By Andrew Wood
I wake up to the sound of water dripping on the roof over the canvas wall tent, but I’ve learned it isn’t raining. The fog rolling off the Pacific Ocean condenses on the spruce boughs overhead, collects on the prickly needles, and falls onto the roof. This morning the campers will arrive. Shortly after the sun and wind have cleared the fog, I will welcome eight youth to our first Empowerment Camp at Cedar Coast Field Station. I cannot wait to share what I love about living off-grid on Vargas Island with the next generation.
Last summer, I received my Bachelor of Education through the University of British Columbia. Before starting my first year of full-time teaching, I accepted a summer job running camps on Vargas Island, five kilometers north of Tofino, BC. My task was to create a Youth Empowerment Camp for Cedar Coast Field Station. Cedar Coast is a not-for-profit organization offering placebased education and ecological research in the Clayoquot Sound. It is an off-the-grid property and can only be accessed by boat. I wanted the camp to include both art and leadership challenges as ways to explore empowerment on the individual, group, and community levels.
What I didn’t know was how influential this camp would be on how I approach inclusion of children with special needs in my classroom.
We were set to welcome eight campers, two of whom have special needs—one child with autism and one child with anxiety and a service dog. To accommodate their needs I made small adjustments to our structured outdoor solitude and overnight camping trip. The camp was a hybrid of local knowledge, adventure-based learning, and community service. Highlights for the campers included meditation on the beach, ecological research, kayaking, and swimming with bioluminescence at night. A highlight for me, a first-year-teacher-to-be, was learning valuable lessons about planning for inclusion. I learned creating meaningful educational experiences is about building supportive, safe environments while maintaining flexibility. When campers weren’t engaged in evening workshops and wanted to throw rocks into the ocean, I joined them and shared genuine conversations about how the ocean made them feel or if they missed home.
I learned, by ensuring activities had adaptable challenge levels, my campers were able to choose variations based on their experience. Most importantly, I found inclusion to be about ensuring equitable participation because it increases the number of chances for meaningful peer-to-peer interactions.
During our fire-building challenge, one camper (an experienced fire builder whose goal from day one was to light a fire with a flint and steel) had been shaving tinder from a piece of driftwood for over an hour. Despite his best efforts, the tinder wouldn’t catch. He decided to share his resources with our youngest camper, described by his parents as “highly functioning autistic.” This camper had never lit a fire before.
They arranged their kindling, and they practised striking a match into the centre of the structure. Again and again they tried, and finally the spark turned into a flame! We all shared in the magic of watching these campers light a fire by working together. The youngest camper completed his victory dance beside his first fire, silhouetted by the setting sun, and encouraged by our big, genuine smiles. Inclusion is more than good planning, it is about creating environments where kids feel safe to fail and giving them room to discover that empowerment can be shared. Inclusion is ensuring meaningful peer-to-peer interactions and knowing as educators that authentic inclusion can lead to impactful changes that we may never, truly, know.
To view the full online Teacher News magazine, and to learn more about British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, please visit the following link:
https://www.bctf.ca/publications/TeacherNewsmag.aspx?id=53586
