Creating and Planning an Outdoor Learning Space (2012)

Undergraduate: Mallory Nickel

Faculty Advisor: Kevin Stewart
Department: Geology

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Environmental and experiential education provide teachers and students in North Carolina schools unique opportunities to explore environmental concepts. The goal of my project is to work with a school community to create an outdoor learning space that could be used by teachers of all subject areas, but particularly for science classes. To achieve this goal, focus group meetings with teachers, student design projects, and meetings with local experts determine what would be valuable at the specific school. Parent, teacher, and student work days throughout the summer and school year of 2010 to 2011 created a useful outdoor classroom. To promote the longevity of the project, grant writing enables continued funding for the project. A year later, a second focus group with teachers is used to revisit the project. Overall, this project provided the school community with a valuable learning space that can extend curriculum and it provided the school with a network of contacts to enrich the curriculum and school community. This project also showed that similar projects are site specific, time-consuming, and require networking in the larger community but do have valuable outcomes.