Playground Canopies

Transcription

Jo Clark (On the Hill Director and Facilitator):

One of the reasons I feel really passionate about this work is that, I was brought up on a farm not many miles away. And incidentally a farm where my parents struggled to make a living off 60 acres of land. And nowadays could certainly not make a living off 40 acres of land that we have here. I’m absolutely determined to use this land for social, educational and therapeutic purposes.

But what has inspired me over the years working with land-based education, and I was a teacher doing that work for 10 years, I’ve been involved in an organisation developing land-based initiatives for children, young people and adults for 10 years.

What I really, really want to question is just how we are growing our next generation. Are we growing our next generation into conformist, compliance people who will serve the present economic system? Or are we empowering our next generation to feel that they can be part of the change, the change that clearly is needed in our society?

What we have found and what we really are developing is ways that we can build resilience, build self-confidence, build a sense in the young people that they can be part of building their future. And encouraging them to make sense of their world. And involving them in the gardens and the natural world, management of the woodlands and hedgerows, and engagement with the food that they eat. They are making more sense because actually nature does make sense.

What happens in our natural world is much less abstract than what happens in our human created world. We’re helping them to make sense, but we’re also involving them.

In our programs, whether we’re doing our outreach in schools, helping schools develop their school gardens, or building pizza ovens, or any other outdoor learning facilities. Whether we’re doing that in schools or whether we’re building a new barn, or a new set of compost toilets, or a new pizza oven, or working in the garden here or managing the woodland and hedgerows, looking after the animals.

We’re actually giving children a sense that they can be part of the building of that future. We’re actually strengthening what I called, something that I feel that we’re all born with is, imagine it as the in-service muscle.

Imagine a muscle that we’re all born with because we want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. We want to be part of community. We want to be making a contribution to community, but our culture is not really helping this muscle develop. And consequently, the muscle becomes rather atrophied and it’s not strengthened.

And what I’m talking about is offering children and young people the opportunity to build and strengthen this in-service muscle. So as they grow through childhood, and through their teens and into adulthood, that they actually feel that they can rather than having to jump through hundreds of hoops that they’ve had to jump through in order to make a contribution, they’ve been empowered by being allowed to make a contribution. So by the time they get to adulthood, they feel that they’re actually can build their future.

Here we are with students from Exeter University studying their PGCE. And the question that we’ve put to them, and I think the question that they’re asking is, how can they be of best service to the growing and the educating of the next generation?

How can they bring themselves more fully?

How can they explore every single aspect of learning and whatever constraint to put upon them, whatever limitation that they have to work within?

How can they bring themselves fully so that they can actually offer an education that is not only focused on information intellectually-based learning, that is more focused around growing the whole human being?