Outdoor Learning Conference 2026

Students of all ages are drawn by nature to story-telling and connection to community. Let’s bring these together as an inquiry stance and explore how students can interpret environmental data to build stories of place; stories that can be used to trace environmental histories, clarify climate change, find community boundaries and paths to belonging, and reveal resilience (or precarity) across human and more-than-human systems around them. We will survey and try some low-tech tools for “place-responsive storywork” including a human timeline of climate history, community inventories, narrative fossicking, living ethnographies, and others. This work has cross-curricular iterations for primary, intermediate, and secondary students, and is an interesting option for inquiring about the UN Sustainable Development Goals at a local level, or simply as a way to connect students to community and place.