The goal of this project is to make it easier for schools and educators to take students outside during the school day.
Spending time in nature brings many benefits to students’ academic success, social development and mental well-being, and can support positive environmental attitudes now and into the future. Increasing the time students spend in nature during the school day can be a simple and straightforward way to support many different goals educators have for their students.
However, even when educators want to have students spend time outside, making it happen can be challenging. There are many barriers that can limit educators’ opportunities to take students out into nature. These can be within and beyond the classroom, individual or structural, and simple or seemingly impossible to overcome. Additionally, the set of barriers that any individual school, class, or educator experiences can (and does!) change by day, by season, or by hour. Thinking about what the challenges might be, knowing that these challenges are common experiences for other educators, and learning about strategies that others have used to successfully overcome different barriers, can all help make it possible to get students outside.
We created a Toolkit to help educators find strategies to overcome barriers to taking students outside. This Toolkit provides an overview of the benefits students can experience from spending time in nature, outlines barriers that educators may encounter when trying to take students outside, and describes strategies that could help. Rather than reading straight through, we hope you will start at the point that interests you, and find ideas or strategies that could work with your students.
The Toolkit is continuously being updated based on feedback from educators. The current PDF is available here. Please feel free to use it.
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Open in new tab If you have any questions or suggestions, please reach out to akp59@cornell.edu.