Pedagogy of Permaculture & Earth Skills

Including an Overview of Outdoor Mentoring, Risk Management, Wilderness First Aid & CPR

Current Enrollment: Open/Available for Ages 13 - Adult

The goal of this camp session is to prepare participants as eventual oudoor educators.

For this course, you will receive an expanded version of the Wolf Journey Handbook for Students & Teachers which has been called the "teaching bible" for outdoor programs by some of our more subjective (but successful) adult students. Designed to be used as a model for professional standards in the field of earth skills education, the handbook serves as the Wolf Camp policy manual and the author (and lead course instructor Chris Chisholm) hopes that it will also be used to help students later create safe and successful programs elsewhere, like our first apprentice Kate Hedges did with her Blue Skies program in Scotland, and our 2005 apprentice Chris "Huck" Anderson, EMT, did with his program Lost & Found Adventures based in Pheonix, AZ.

This camp session takes place at the Wolf Camp home office and includes field trips to the various locations we utilze throughout the summer camp season which best facilitate the skills covered and in order to get familiar with those areas in advance of teaching there later in the summer. Activities covered during this camp session include, but are not limited to the following list, and are somewhat dependent on weather, instructor descretion, camper desire, and serendipity:

On Sunday, we'll meet at 12:00 Noon sharp at our summer camp rendezvous point which is Hill Park (Driving Directions) in the town of Snohomish, and you should bring a pot luck dish to share as we enact the regular camp schedule that will take place over the course of each week this summer. Every camp week starts with Sunday lunch and goes through Saturday lunch. After initial introductions, we'll eat between 12:30-1:00 and then give an overview of the week between 1:00-1:30. After cleaning and packing up, we'll review our camp agreements and add any special rules that participants request. We'll return to the Wolf Camp home office to look over resources in the library, and you'll learn about related outdoor adventure and other environmental educational programs, indigenous teachers and anthropologists, herbalists of the Wise Woman tradition, founders of the permaculture movement, as well as those who followed in the footsteps of primitive skills specialists like Larry Dean Olsen and Tom Brown, making the afternoon a great exploration of similar but sometimes competing philosophies, and include an introduction to the kinds of preventable (and sometimes unavoidable) accidents which have occured in the outdoor educational field over the past generations. We will lay a foundation for why it is important to undertake certain risks in the field for their educational benefit, though learning to stand up and say "stop" when it looks like a risk is not going to be managed or mitigated propertly to avoid injury. In the evening, we will overview the ecology of Washington, start a sacred fire, and share stories and song in outdoor education tradition. The general schedule you should expect for the week includes morning wake-up, stretches, washing, and breakfast which vary slightly depending on previous evening activities, but if all was quiet by 10:00 p.m. we would awake at 7:00, do warm-ups from 7:30-8:00, and have breakfast from 8:00-9:00 ... 9:00-12:00 is the morning session. 12:00-1:00 is lunch, and 1:00-2:00 is usually swimming time. 2:00-5:00 is the afternoon session. 5:00-6:00 is dinner, and 6:00-7:00 is usually "secret spot" or personal time. Evening sessions begin at 7:00, and lights out varies according to the activity and the time of sunset.

On Monday, we'll set a goal of learning to give students the nurturing experiences they most need in nature, and the place to start is by making absolutely sure that you are healthy enough to give your students what they need. As So you'll learn to design a "medicine wheel" of health which is an excellent tool to help you create balance of mind, body, emotion and spirit, leading to more harmonious social relationships, both professionally and personally. The medicine wheel will show us how to similarly create balanced lesson plans from as short as one hour in length, to a whole summer of teaching. We will also use as practicum examples some of the more advanced experiences which are key to mentoring students throough outdoor programs, including various rites of passage like solos, sweats, treks and quests. Essays on how to lead these activities are included as class handouts. We'll also look at the ethical issues facing outdoor educators. In the afternoon, we will create some scenarios which you and your fellow students will have to act as a consensus decision-making staff to solve, including how to deal with "dual" or double-relationships, defined as two (or more) people having more than one kind of relationship with one another, aka, office romances, friends as business partners, family members together in a learning environment, etc., and helping young adult camp counselors supervise older teen campers with appropriate boundaries, for example. Before dinner, you will receive an introduction to designing lessons using the medicine wheel overlayed by risk management models. Your evening assignment will be to finish designing your personal medicine wheel and do research in advance of deciding on a lesson you would like to practice-teach to the class later in the week.

On Tuesday, we'll get into detail regarding how to prepare for lessons of outdoor education, using the medicine wheel and risk management models. Before lunch, you will receive an overview on how to best teach to each age level, including when didactic, kinesthetic, experiential, and "coyote" methods of teaching are appropriate. In the afternoon, we'll lay out this knowledge in the field by traveling to locations where kids as summer camp will swim, including a river site and a lake site, so that you can witness how we to set up safe lifeguard management and also learn to rescue swimmers in trouble. Your evening assignment will be to design a lesson plan on any subject in the fields of earth skills or permaculture that relies on the medicine wheel model and adresses the standards required by risk management.

On Wednesday, we will review lessons of risk management and teaching various age groups, plus receive some time-tested tricks-of-the-trade which make your teaching days more successful. You will then share your ideas for teaching a lesson of outdoor education, and receive feedback in addition to reminders on how to teach to each age group. You'll finish the morning by choosing a theme and age group for your instructor to teach, then you'll test him in a dry-run scenario where you learn to realistically act like a certain age of student so that when it comes time for you to practice-teach tomorrow, your fellow students will know what to do. Of course, your instructor might also throw in acting like a student with particular psychological challenges so that you get a sense for those. For instance, if you know that you may be welcoming a child with asperger's syndrom into a program this summer, then Chris or other experienced Wolf Camp staff will act similar to what you might expect to experience in that program. In the afternoon, you'll receive lists of how to prepare for outdoor education programs, and you'll gather together materials to use in your moch lesson, again learning what is necessary for certain age groups. Your evening activity includes refining the lesson plan you are developing in advance of teaching it yourself tomorrow, as well as studying the list of tips for teaching various age groups, memorizing the list of risk management factors to consider when teaching various activities.