Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors. 

~Nietzsche

For most of us, the entirety of our education has taken place indoors, in rows, in seats. Uncomfortable seats at that.  Pinned in the seat  by the clock on the wall. An hour in this room. The next hour in that room. For the whole day. Five days a week.  For 13 years.

Then we go to college. And there are more seats. More clocks. For 4 more years. 

The TEA team has a great deal of experience with creating spaces for outdoor learning. TEA has also managed a community garden on their campus for the last 8 years.The garden has an “outdoor school house.”  During this time thousands of students have interacted with the garden--for many students this was the first time they ever had their hands in soil. The garden is also used  as a space for learning. Students and teachers come from all across the disciplines:  Astronomy students set up telescopes in the night; Art students set up easels in the day; Biology students test the soil and the water in the pond; History classes are held on the hay bales of the outdoor school house. 

The research behind the value of getting students outdoors is incontrovertible*.  And anecdotally it is overwhelmingly positive. The TEA team works with you to create these sorts of environments on your own campus. TEA supports you with the institutional navigation of acquiring space; the practical considerations of developing outdoor learning environments and gardens; curriculum development from across the disciplines that is tailored  to the outdoors. TEA also supports you to create partnerships with the wider community--a community brimming with knowledge about gardens, about the Earth. 

We can learn from dogs and cats. How they are always staring out the window, aching to get out of the house. They know that nature gives them something they need.  Nature deficit disorder may not be yet recognized by the DSM-5. But it is real. Time and again students share that this outdoor experience was life-changing for them. 

And it begs a question: how can we expect our students--and ourselves for that matter--to care about the fate of the planet if we have no contact with it? Outdoor learning and interaction with nature even in the relative predictability of a garden is a great creator of empathy for Nature. This empathy is a great driver of the initiatives and projects that will heal our planet. 

Let’s get students off their  screens. 

Let’s get teachers out from behind the podium. 

*Multiple studies have found that schools with greener, more vegetated surroundings perform better academically—even when socioeconomic factors are taken into account (Kuo et al., in review).