Community Consultation Project

The Forest School Canada facilitation team is responsible for professional learning and program delivery. We want to ensure that they are fully supported in their work. We will create a feedback strategy for the facilitation team as well as a recruitment, onboarding, and retention strategy.

The outcomes of this activity will be greater regional representation and diversity among the team, greater capacity to respond to demand, delivery of highest quality training, as well as a team who has a deep sense of connection and commitment to their work.

Over the last few years of course delivery, we have learned that practitioners’ needs are always evolving and that CNAC/Forest School Canada is widely regarded as a national leader in the Forest/Nature School movement.

We will meet directly with our community of practice through focus groups, surveys, and direct one-on-one conversations to gain a better understanding of the local, regional, and national priorities of the sector. We will also zero in on specific training needs, and barriers to participation, practice, and mainstreaming. This will help us ensure our work continues to benefit and represent the Forest/Nature School sector in Canada.

We currently work from and with a set of “Principles of Practice” but it was created internally and adapted from a European model. The sector has grown significantly and much has changed since Forest School Canada began delivering the Practitioners Course. There is a need to revisit these principles and co-define a new set of quality indicators with practitioners who are working on the Land directly with children and families.

We will also engage in meaningful collaboration with our Indigenous partners to ensure anything we publish does not cause harm and may actually be of benefit to Indigenous communities.

By working with the community, we can ensure that this new document fully represents the reality of Forest/Nature School in Canada, and is inclusive of Indigenous worldviews. By offering a public-facing document, we can support current and future practitioners who want to improve or start their own programs. It will also better position CNAC/Forest School Canada to contribute to discussion on policy and systems change.

Using everything we’ve learned from our community of practice over the course of the next three years, we will create a formal model and toolkit that will help us ensure the Practitioners Course is of the highest quality and fully represents and meets the needs of the sector.