History
In 2010 a small group of faculty began our journey into imagining an outdoor learning space. Gerold Hanck, former third grade science teacher, came to Sylvie’s office with an idea: Pebbles could be re-imagined as an outdoor space where faculty and students can have the opportunity to learn across all ages and disciplines within an ever changing, ever growing outdoor setting. The opportunity is now real. The stones from Pebbles remain, as well as some large sections of a Giant Burr Oak that once stood where the Gordon Parks Arts Hall stands now, anchoring the new classroom in the History of Lab's outdoor spaces.
The Outdoor Classroom Professional Growth Group developed the following to guide our welcoming of the space.
Fundamental Principles for the Outdoor Classroom
The Outdoor Classroom is an aesthetically pleasing space that uses the outdoors as a learning environment, a curricular resource, an inspiration, and a contemplative refuge for use by all the Lab School’s students, faculty, staff, and parents.
Purpose
As the year progresses and the teachers and students explore the many ways that we can utilize the space, we will also be exploring opportunities to involve parents and families, the other key component to the Lab School community.- The Outdoor Classroom is a place of restoration. It is a human-made framework that together we will nurture across time as a space filled as much as possible with nature’s footprint. The space is alive, growing, and developing. People experience natural cycles: fertilization, growth, development, decay, and death, through their interaction with living, native organisms, both flora and fauna.
- We all play a stewardship role in the development, growth, and maintenance of the space. With active participation and a sense of ownership, students will see it as more than a pretty place. We will witness and help make possible some of the various ways that animals and plants slowly fill the space, establish niches, and make it home.
- The space is a beginning of a journey, and not a destination. It is to be one stop on a much longer trip towards the development of an outdoor curriculum that can begin to redefine and make real abstract ideas like "sustainability", "ecology", "environment", "native and non-native", "natural", “adaptation”, “survival of the fittest”, “evolution”, and "beauty."
The purpose of the Outdoor Classroom is to incorporate and enhance outdoor learning experiences for all UCLS curricular areas across divisions. The possibilities for the Outdoor Classroom are varied and numerous. The Outdoor Classroom presents an interdisciplinary ecosystem that demonstrates the connectedness of ideas and theories, across all subject matter, as parts of a dynamic, systemic whole.
As the year progresses, the teachers and students will explore the many ways they can use the space. In the spring we will also be working to create opportunities to involve parents and families, another key component of the LAB community.
