[Outdoor Learning Store Course] Teaching Imagination in Place: Spring TIPS 2024

The IEE (Imaginative Ecological Education) learning series continues! Last year, we offered the first Spring TIPs program—Teaching Imagination in Place.

Spring TIPS 2023 was an introduction to cognitive tools like metaphor, vivid imagery, rhythms, patterns and so on, that form the heart of IEE and that are so central to A Walking Curriculum practice. Your feedback on Spring TIPS 2023 has helped to shape this year’s learning opportunity. First, you overwhelmingly felt that the focus on cognitive tools helped you get a better sense of this key dimension of IEE. Your feedback also revealed an interest in slowing down and revisiting some of those resources. Imagine that!

Educators slowing down for their own learning!?  Many of you said you did not have an opportunity to fully engage in the self-study questions—these were you-focused topics of investigation that employed cognitive tools to examine your own beliefs about outdoor learning, imagination, and Place.

So, Spring TIPS 2024 offers you an opportunity to imaginatively engage in that cognitive-tool and Place-focused self-study with ongoing support. Rather than just learning about how to use IEE with your students, you will employ IEE Principles of Feeling, Activeness and Place/Sense of Place to your own learning.

Of course, you will ALSO learn more about how to use cognitive tools in your teaching for your students as you connect in a weekly dialogical sessions with members of the IEE instructional team and other educators interested in imaginative ecological teaching practices

In this program you will:

• engage cognitive tools to explore your personal beliefs, values, ideas
• take time to collaborate with the more-than-human world by exploring questions outdoors each week (you choose your special place)
• use your imagination with/in Place
• discuss how specific cognitive tools can be used in your teaching
• connect with others seeking to transform their practice
• learn more about how imagination contributes to your understanding and how it can support your students’ learning

This Spring! TUESDAYS in March  5, 12, 26 / MONDAYS April 8, 15, 22, 29 at 4pm PT / 7pm ET

Each workshop is 60 minutes and will be completely interactive followed by a take home activity that will take 30 minutes each week. All in, a 90 minute investment each week for 7 weeks. Participants will receive a certificate of completion at the end of the course.

• inspired! You will feel a sense of the possibility that emerges when we bring emotion and imagination to the heart of our own learning and of our students’ learning.
• curious and engaged. Dig into your beliefs, feelings and thoughts about what teaching, learning and imagination are all about.
• uncomfortable??? Yes, you might feel discomfort. And that is OK. Especially if we, as a group, can begin to question some of the unquestioned beliefs that exist about education and what we want to change.

Asynchronous component: Spring TIPS 2024 invites you to spend approximately 1.5 hours a week to deepen and expand your understanding of IEE. To maximize your learning in this program we suggest you spend at least 30 minutes outdoors wherever you are located. Strive to connect with the more-than human world around you. Give yourself time to breathe in that living community. If you can spend more time outdoors with the weekly questions, that’s even better! Take this time for you and for your well-being and your learning.

Inspired by the question prompts provided each week, dig into your own beliefs and values about teaching, learning, imagination, and your connection with the more-than-human world. You can listen to the prompts while outside through a short audio recording, or read them. Both audio and text will be sent each week to your email. Use a journal to document your experiences, thoughts, and feelings. OR talk! Audio record your notes, if you prefer. You will also be invited to take pictures; use photography to capture your ideas. Your journals and images will be a central part of our weekly work together.

Synchronous component: Spring TIPS 2024 includes a weekly one-hour on-line discussion facilitated by Dr. Gillian Judson (author of A Walking Curriculum: Evoking Wonder and Sense of Place (K12), Engaging Imagination in Ecological Education: Practical Strategies for Teaching and other imagination-focused outdoor learning resources), Jade Harvey-Berril (Director of Learning, Outdoor Learning Store) and educators from the IEE teaching team (see the team below). (Early Years educators take note! Co-authors of A Walking Curriculum for the Early Years will be there too!) The online dialogical sessions will build on and tap into your experiences outdoors learning with/in Place.

Everyone! All are welcome—those new to IEE and practices like A Walking Curriculum and also anyone who has familiarity with IEE practices but wants to deepen and expand their knowledge of imagination in learning and how to maximize learners’ engagement across the curriculum.

The program is $60 Early Bird pricing ($80 regular) and 100% of proceeds go back through the charitable non-profit to support Outdoor Learning. We are happy to provide receipts for your ProD funding (The team that offers you all those FREE virtual webinar year round!) To support the great work the Outdoor Learning Store does, for every registrant imaginED will donate $10 to their Education Endowment fund as well. Can we make it 100 participants? 150?

Early bird ends February 18th!

Educators are busy. So busy. It is no surprise, therefore, that we most often take ideas and apply them to our students’ learning as quickly as we can. Our priority is student learning.

We are often so focused on making sure our students are engaged, that we may not engage with principles underlying new approaches to teaching and we rarely have time to connect with the more-than-human world ourselves as part of our professional learning.

We focus on you in this short course because we want to go “deep”, as renowned educational change Michael Fullan would say, to explore your beliefs, values and moral purpose, as educators, in doing this work. This is where meaningful and lasting change originates. It is only when educators address their underlying beliefs, values, hopes, and also fears, that meaningful change is possible.

What if our moral purpose as educators also included the well-being of the more-than-human world? We want to form a community of folks interested in getting outside with imagination, but also understanding how imagination shapes all learning and what it means to teach with the more-than-human world.

We welcome you to join our community!