With a wall of trees as a blackboard and wild grass as desks, 19 students from Bowden Grandview School participated in a unique outdoor learning program last week aimed at teaching them natural sciences.
From October 7 to 9, the Grade 10 students travelled to Red Lodge Park northwest of Bowden where they learned and practised outdoor survival and navigation skills in what instructor Jerry Fochler called a “field school.”
“It helps the students get additional credits, it gives them a little bit of getting them out of the classroom, giving them hands-on (experience) giving them a look at how to take the academic and put it into an applied,” said Fochler, an outdoor education and skill development instructor from Spruce Grove-based Inroads Mountain Sports Ltd.
The program, which is being offered through the school for the first time, is part of a five-credit forestry course developed through the partnership of the school, the Alberta Distance Learning Centre and the Woodland Operations Learning Foundation where students can earn three career and technological studies credits for the three days of work at the park.
Fochler said students who successfully completed the course would receive credits in mapping and outdoor learning and the program's curriculum at the park included learning how to build fires in the wilderness, blending mapping, compass and global-positioning system (GPS) skills in the field, creating survival and safety plans and shelter building.
At one point in the course, students were spread out through the park using compasses and measuring tools to develop maps.
Afterwards, they built small fires in groups using tools such as batteries, cotton dipped in petroleum jelly, steel wool and spark-producing kits.
Then, students had the chance to win rewards such as chocolate bars by successfully using GPS systems to find hidden items in the woods.
Fochler said the message he and another instructor from his company were trying to get across through the course was how to take skills learned in school and apply them to outdoor survival and navigation.
For example, he said, the students could use their math skills from the classroom to figure out distance scales on maps.
“So to be able to take simple math and go ‘Ah, there's an application.' So that's a valuable thing, application of academic.”
He added that he hopes the course may reignite an interest in learning in some students who are not enjoying the traditional school setting.
“Maybe if they can get some credits that can light the light bulb and make them feel a little better about the learning process, then we can help increase the graduation rates,” Fochler said. “Not everybody learns the same way.
“So getting that hands-on (experience) may be the difference between a dropout and a student who finishes Grade 12.”
The skills learned in the course might also open the door to some unique career choices down the road such as jobs in the oil and gas, forestry and fish and wildlife industries or even working for Google Earth
“If something here lights your fire, then maybe that's a career choice,” Fochler said.
Student Corbin Houchin said what he actually learned in the three days at the park defied his expectations.
“I'm out quite a bit and I didn't know you could just eat any twig and it has nutrients in it and bugs are like the best nutrients out there,” he said, adding it wasn't hard for him and his schoolmates to put in only a few days of work in the outdoors for a great deal of academic credit.
“Three days and three credits. We only get five for a whole semester. It's quite enjoyable. You're not just sitting and doing nothing as in a classroom.”
His schoolmate, Rebekah Aplin, agreed that having a chance to learn some “hands-on” outdoor experience was a great opportunity and she believed what she learned through the course would help her in the future.
“If I decided to go into fishing or forestry, it would definitely be good experience,” she said.
Whether the course becomes a permanent fixture at the school is unknown, but the Bowden students who took part in the pilot program this year are already asking to return to the park next year, even if it's just to put some of the components of their in-school physical education and social studies classes into practice.
“They seem to be really taking to it,” said Dana Hannett, a physical education teacher at the school. “There's a lot of outdoor kids in this class that this kind of thing, they thrive on.”
She added that the skills and methods of learning they were exposed to during the course have brought out an enthusiasm in many of the students that was not previously there.
“They've really gone outside their comfort zone. They have improved on working as a group, working with peers they're not used to working with, learning a ton of new things that they normally would never have access to, I don't think, through our school anyway.”
According to a letter sent home to parents from school principal Jeff Thompson, students who complete the Fall Field School will be chosen to participate in a pilot project in the spring where they will receive simulated instruction on forestry equipment.
