Project Description
Caroline Baillie & Eric Feinblatt – Part 2
(Forest School Exploratorium)
Sullivan 180 Presents…
TAKE FIVE!
April 27, 2021
Here is Part 2 of our Take Five! interview with Caroline Baillie & Eric Feinblatt of Standing People Together to discuss forest school exploratoriums. Learn how you can help make forest schools possible within Sullivan County, how to stay up to date with Caroline & Eric’s programming, and how to volunteer as a supporter during forest school sessions.
Sullivan 180 Presents…
TAKE FIVE!
April 27, 2021
Here is Part 2 of our Take Five! interview with Caroline Baillie & Eric Feinblatt of Standing People Together to discuss forest school exploratoriums. Learn how you can help make forest schools possible within Sullivan County, how to stay up to date with Caroline & Eric’s programming, and how to volunteer as a supporter during forest school sessions.
Caroline Baillie & Eric Feinblatt – Part 2
(Forest School Exploratorium)
Transcript of Interview with Caroline Baillie & Eric Feinblatt
April 27, 2021
Cortney Larson:
What can community members do to help your organization?
Eric Feinblatt:
I think getting in touch with the school board members and getting in touch with the administrators saying, you know, we know about this. We know that other schools, we know that Homestead for instance, has moved all other classes outside. They built big tents. We don’t have to buy tents. We can use the areas around the schools that we have in Sullivan County and create these spaces. Why aren’t we doing it? We have, on the one hand, you have this push because of the, I don’t know, because of the necessity of putting kids online, you’re going to have a real push for these schools to computerize more and more of the learning. And I think that the parents have realized the pitfalls of that. A lot of parents are really frustrated with that. So we have the school administrators going in one direction. And I think the parents intrinsically feel that maybe this is not the best direction to go in, or at least it should be modified by more outdoor activity. So I think that getting in touch with the school board members and getting in touch with us, the school administrators, and of course getting in touch with us because we can help.
Caroline Baillie:
And Sullivan West Elementary, you know, we just mentioned has a Forest School setup. And so they really did lead the way there. And we established the outdoor classroom very simply, with little tree stumps, little parachute for rain cover and very, very simple set up, but it just enables so much, so many learning opportunities and they really embrace that. And I think that they can embrace it even more. And I think other schools can go there and learn what to do. So, yeah, encouraging the teachers to take the kids outside to learn is a simple thing to ask, but often schools don’t think about it. They don’t even know that it’s an option. They think that outdoors is either for playing games in the break time or sports or visiting the garden. But actually there’s a huge amount of stuff that can be done outside. And it’s really a question of just helping the school realize that that’s what they want because a lot of people say, Oh, it’s too cold. You know, we don’t have the very long season, but actually, you know, as we always say, there’s no such thing as bad weather, it’s just bad clothes. We can buy the clothes. The schools can buy the clothes, the outdoor coats and the boots, and to learn the kids that don’t have them. And we have a fire usually, which is well tended and looked after, and you can have your lesson outside and you’ll go sit by the fire and you’ll have a cup of cocoa and warm up and it’s the whole thing becomes exciting and fun and kids want to go to school suddenly. And the parents are saying, what’s going on here? Why do they suddenly want to come to school? What’s going on? And they’ll be dragged you know, come and have a look at this outdoor classroom mom! So, yeah, I think you can just ask.
Eric Feinblatt:
One of the astonishing things. I think when we were running these after-school programs at Sullivan West was the school that the kids would arrive and they were so wound up, by being inside all day long that we usually had to give them out of this hour and a half time that we had them, 20 minutes just to kind of run and go crazy and just let off steam before they could just kind of collect themselves and then sit down. It was so clear that there was something unnatural about it, about learning within these four walls.
Caroline Baillie:
Schools are starting to really pay attention and think about it, um, particularly through the initiatives of the organization. And I find that once people experience that, they can’t go back. Often teachers take a little bit of time to feel safe enough to take kids outside because they feel like they’re gonna lose control with those children. And in fact it does take preparation. Teachers do need to go through some training to understand how to address and how to safety look after the children. And also what to do differently in their teaching. They can’t just take the inside and reproduce it outside. It doesn’t work. Once they learn some new approaches to teaching and how to look after the kids and make sure that they’re providing a safety net, but they’re not constraining them, then they immediately see the joy and the beauty and they enjoy classes and so much better than they have before as well. So the benefits to the teachers and that health stress levels is, is wonderful to say. I’ve seen parents who are really, really happy because their kids are having a healthy time, but motivated to learn. And the kids themselves.
Cortney Larson:
What is the best way to stay up to date with your organization?
Caroline Baillie:
So we will provide the links for you. We have Facebook and Instagram and a website, the website posts, the events that we will host and the various different Forest Schools. We run our schools on our property. Outside COVID times we ran them regularly. And we also support schools at any stage of their journey. So, schools can get in touch with us and we will talk to them and come and visit the school and give advice. And then if they are really interested in engaging us, we can go further and do pilot studies with them. We can co co-teach classes sort of by doing, how it works. And, also teachers can join,. The online training course that I run, which is actually meant for the university of San Diego, which I know is a long way from here, but it’s an online program. We do it through those three mechanisms and we can give you those.
Cortney Larson:
Is there anything else that you guys would like to share?
Caroline Baillie:
If anybody’s interested in volunteering, particularly parents, if you’re interested in this kind of thing, and you want to connect with your school to say, I’d love to do this, also offer yourselves as a volunteer because, you know, if you are the sort of person that is great outdoors, they’re always going to look for a supportive, we’ve got some amazingly skilled people around here. I’m, it puts me to shame the kind of crafts that parents come up with. One way that a child gets a project to do. And we just love to hear from you. We would love to have you run a session in the Forest School. So get in touch. Yeah, yeah.
Cortney Larson:
Again, thank you guys so much for joining us and for all that, you’ve done to get schools involved with outdoor classrooms and learning spaces in Sullivan County. It’s truly wonderful.
Caroline Baillie:
So thank you so much for the opportunity. We’d love to help as much as we can.
Transcript of Interview with Caroline Baillie & Eric Feinblatt
April 20, 2021
Cortney Larson:
Hi, I’m Cortney Larson. Welcome to Sullivan 180 Presents… Take Five! Our guests today are Caroline Baillie and Eric Feinblatt from “Standing People Together”. They run what they call “a Forest Exploratorium” in our local area. Welcome Caroline and Eric. Thanks for being here.
Eric Feinblatt:
Thank you so much.
Cortney Larson:
Please introduce yourself, and tell us a bit about the ‘forest exploratorium’, and the’forest school’ on which it is based.
Caroline Baillie:
We fell in love with this pedagogical approach: getting kids back into nature in what’s called “forest school”. When our child was very young, we were at the time in Australia and we were going back to my home country, England for a few months. And somebody said, you should enroll him in ‘forest school’. And we said, “what’s that?”. Zoom forward, and we are now trained as far as school leaders, and we’ve been running a school in Australia and here for some time. We just fell in love with the idea of kids being outside in nature, and learning how to connect with nature. There are a lot of different features of it that we can talk about that are very special. And we now focus on helping schools learn how to connect kids with nature through the forest school approach.
Eric Feinblatt:
Just additional background, both Caroline and I have been involved in educational development at the university level. Caroline has had different positions, and me at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. And both of us have worked with faculty, helping them develop better pedagogical practices.
Cortney Larson:
What can “forest school” do for physical and mental health?
Caroline Baillie:
So one of the things that really intrigued me, was how kids just changed behavior, attitude, motivation, and just loved being outdoors. I mean, many of us grew up where we were just running around out doors and because of, you know, recent developments, stranger danger, playgrounds have become kind of plastic and hermetically sealed. It seems that kids are just not kind of ‘out in the woods’ as much as they used to be, even in a rural area like this. And so the idea of somehow re-introducing this was fascinating to me, and what I learned from the training and all the people that we met in the UK that were doing this… was that it really helped a whole variety of different health issues: physical and also mental health. So if you had children with learning difficulties, they might be anxious. They might be anxious about math, for example, and being outside distracted them enough to be fascinated by the worm that they just saw ,or the bird and the tree, and they would forget that they were doing math and have fun instead. And all the kids report that they are “just outside having fun and this isn’t learning”, and yet they are actually learning extremely well. So it reduces anxiety and increases motivation. And things like ADHD has also been proven to be reduced. It’s a help to autism and other things as well because the kids are using a different part of their brain. They’re calming down. They’re not quite as stressed as they are in the classroom. They don’t feel as if they have to perform. They’re literally just having fun, and the learning sneaks in on the side of it. So it has some surprising side effects!
Cortney Larson:
Could you highlight ideas for parents and educators to use while learning from home to get more connected to outside?
Caroline Baillie:
Yes, sure! So in the early part of last year, when we first had a lockdown for COVID, I was experimenting with ‘what it was like to be a parent’, (which I am, and the teacher), but experimenting being a parent who was trying to help my child remote school. And so I had this idea to try to see how much of the school curriculum we could do outside. And a lot of the work that I do with teachers is to help them understand how to bring the curriculum outside, how to teach everything, not just plant ecology and biology and the things that make sense, but physics and math and chemistry and poetry. Everything can be taught outside can be enhanced as well. So we were doing this, not from the perspective of being in a classroom, but from the perspective of just one-to-one at home, parent and a child. Essentially there are many different, fun things that you can do to try to motivate your child. So even just going online and searching “forest school” is a good term to use: ‘forest school’ and then ‘learning math’ or ‘forest school’ and ‘learning three digit addition’. You’d be surprised what pops up and you can go outside with sticks and stones and do a ‘place value chart’… and suddenly, what seemed awful, trying to get the kids to move the one over or trying to work out how you turn thousands into hundreds suddenly becomes a really fun thing with sticks and stones outside and the sun shining and adults running around. So, yes, I would just recommend parents share ideas. I’ve joined a lot of Facebook sites for our school ideas. And honestly, people just put onto those Facebook sites, things like, “okay, I want to motivate my child who happens to really love boats… or airplanes, or whatever it is. What can I do outside in the forest?” And then there’ll be a stream of ideas that get posted: “You can build this out of sticks and you can have a boat race and then you can do this”. So, I would totally recommend just using what’s out there, getting ideas, sharing them. And of course, people can contact us for ideas too. We’re always willing to spend ages talking about this stuff!
o learn more, or to get involved…
Connect With Us!