This week in class we participated in an EDCamp style conference. This style of conference fosters and encourages the participation of all attendees. An EDCamp conference style allows the attendees to present topics they would like to learn more about. Attendees then select a few of the topics to discuss and share information about. As a class we came up with three different EDCamp topics that we could choose from. In my EDCamp group, our topic was “How can we incorporate outdoor learning into all classroom subjects?”.
It was very beneficial for me to hear perspectives from a variety of teacher candidates with different teachable subjects. As a physical and health teacher candidate, most of our content can be taught outdoors, making this topic very achievable. Therefore, hearing from math, English, science, etc., teacher candidates was interesting in how they might go about incorporating outdoor education into their lessons. Some of the ideas that were developed in our session were as simple as just taking the class to a location outside and delivering the lesson outside. Other ideas involved incorporating aspects of nature into the lesson, for example, creating a poem about nature.
First Peoples Principles of Learning
In BC, it is required that teachers incorporate Indigenous ways of learning into their lessons. Our EDCamp topic is important as it supports the learning of the land, which is one of the first peoples principles of learning. This EDCamp experience has helped me professionally develop, as I will use the ideas my colleagues and I came up with by incorporating outdoor education into any subject I teach. I would also like to try this EDCamp-style conference in the future for a professional development workshop. I believe that people can learn a lot from each other and their experiences, and an EDCamp style conference allows for that.