A Coastal Classroom without Walls

Abstract

Woodbridge School (Kinder to Year 10) is located on the banks of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, a major coastal waterway between the Tasmanian mainland and Bruny Island in southern Tasmania, about an hour’s drive from the capital city of Hobart. Like all students at Woodbridge, Sam (a Grade 4 student) participates in a weekly environmental and sustainability education programme that occurs predominantly in the school’s coastal school grounds. Her expression of feelings and ideas about trees, the air and the birds exemplifies some of the ways children interact with and understand the ecologies that make up the local places where they live and go to school. Her perceptions of the more-than-human world, which she refers to as ‘Mother Nature’, and her relations with that world provide the foundations of this chapter, which focuses on the impact of school ground ecologies on children’s sustainability learning.

I love sitting out my window and I have this big tree out my home and always climb on that, and there’s this really, I don’t know what it’s called but I’d love to find out, it’s this bright pink, I’m not sure but it smells like sweet lollies. And I love listening to the kookaburras ‘cause we have kookaburras and I love listening to the birds. I just like breathing fresh air and looking up at the sky with all the nature and walking around the school. It’s Mother Nature and it’s already been there and it’s born there. Nature is everywhere.

(Sam, age 9)