With Outdoor Ed. Movement, Signature Trips Gain Currency

An increasing number of educational researchers and teachers are recognizing the benefits of this kind of beyond-the-classroom learning as they make new findings and develop new philosophies about the importance of first-hand outdoor experiences. Outdoor play, ropes courses, wilderness challenges, hiking, group games, and even camp chores such as preparing food for peers and digging outdoor latrines are now seen as not just activities to enjoy or challenges to be endured, but as rich intellectual, social, and emotional experiences that pay big educational dividends, and help children acquire critical skills such as resilience and cooperation which they draw upon all year long.

At the youngest ages, education researchers and writers such as Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, make a direct connection between unstructured outdoor time in natural environments and creativity, social connections, empathy, and even self-control. Noting an increasingly test-centric model of education reform and a corresponding decrease in the prevalence of recess in American elementary schools in recent decades, Louv argues, "Ironically, the detachment of education from the physical world ... coincides with a growing body of evidence that links physical exercise and experience in nature to mental acuity and concentration."

Children in upper elementary and middle school grades see benefits of their own. Coiner of the term "nature-deficit disorder," Louv reports on studies that show experiences in nature may be useful as a therapy for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and anxiety, even replacing medications or behavioral therapies in some cases. Certainly, teachers at Shore and elsewhere say their students are more engaged, focused, and motivated when the classroom curriculum is allowed to "come alive" through real-world experiences. Topics in science, history, English, art, math, and engineering all are reflected in the natural enironment, and teachers are increasingly augmenting classsroom teaching in these areas with hands-on, outdoor extensions.

In Shore's Upper School, experiential education goes well beyond the curriculum in the classroom. Frequent community service opportunities and challenging excursions in the untamed wilds of Yarmouth Island and Squam Lake ask older students to examine their place in the environment, to learn to give and accept help from their peers, to face risk and even failure in difficult situations, and to find sustenance in the community that they help to build with fellow students and teachers.

As many advocates of outdoor and experiential education argue, learning is not a special skill that happens separate from everything else, guided solely by teachers in a traditional classroom. It is fundamentally about raising children who are curious and engaged in the world. And for Shore's ninth grade students, the world has indeed become a classroom: new, week-long trips to Mississippi and California—along with a well-established winter week at Vermont's Mountain School—situate students within unique and unfamiliar environments that challenge their view of the world and require them to undertake the hard work of observing, questioning, and understanding communities and environments they've never encountered.

All of these experiences—from Pre-K walks in wintertime woods to Mississippi house-building in Grade 9—speak to Shore's long history of educating its students outside of school. The transformative power in children making discoveries and connections for themselves, in witnessing and owning their own experiences, inspires Shore students for the rest of their lives.