Perhaps the best place to start is with the name #Forestschool – said “(hashtag) Forest school, upper case F, lower case s.” The hashtag affectionate nod to modernity, though truth be told I am not certain which learner initiated it originally. I remember early on asking “Do we really need the hashtag?” and being met with a resounding “YESSS!”, and that kind of cemented it for me. I have always wanted them to be engaged and have agency, and this seemed like such a simple first step to show them my sincerity. Shortly thereafter, it became important for any audience to know that Forest would be capitalized to honour it as an important place, and that school would be lowercase to show its relative inferiority. The forest is unlike traditional notions of ‘school’ after all.
In keeping with the CNCA’s principles of a forest school, we started visiting the forest adjacent to our school each Thursday beginning in mid-September, our “regular sessions in the same outdoor space”. Occasionally, we are able to visit the Forest on other days as well, but all of our #Forestschool adventures, even our Thursday adventures, are contingent on parent support. We needed one parent volunteer each time to maintain protocol for supervision of a ‘walking field trip’. Luckily for us, we have a very involved parent community who is exceedingly generous with their time and we have been able to maintain our Thursday #Forestschool for the entirety of the school year.
Our Forest is located in the Pinnacle Creek Ravine (part of the Chineside watershed) that runs between Mariner Way and Baker Drive in Coquitlam B.C. It is temporal rainforest with both deciduous (mostly maple) and evergreen trees (mostly cedar, hemlock, and douglas fir), and has a lush underbrush made up of primarily ferns, huckleberry, salmonberry, and invasive English ivy. The Forest is home to birds, bats, small mammals like chipmunks and squirrels, as well as larger animals like coyotes, black bears, deer, and the occasional cougar. There is a network of delicate pedestrian paths that meander the length of the ravine. These are all paths of convenience created by foot traffic through the space over the years and none of them are maintained by the city, which helps them keep their natural aesthetic and rugged charm.
That charm is not limited to the paths, though. The part of the Forest that we’ve come to gather in each week is a dual sloped ravine with open spaces (‘the gathering space’), lush underbrush (‘the lowlands), fallen trees (‘bridge to the swamp’), marshes (‘the tire swamp’), high hilled peaks (‘the lookout’), and hundred-year-old trees that create a generous canopy through which sunlight dapples the gravel speckled dirt below. There are natural hiding spaces, forts (constantly under construction), places to balance, invitations to climb, and the paths that beg for learners to run stretched legged with reckless abandon. There is an open invitation, a warm welcoming invitation, to come explore and be with the forest.
We adhere to a loose routine, but emerging curiosity and learner needs always trump anything that I have prepared. We always start at the gate, the physical boundary that separates the school from the wilderness. To the inexperienced observer, it is a gate between two 12 foot chain link fences, but to us it is akin to the wardrobe in Narnia. We review safety protocols, whistle signals, first aid, and what to do if we see wildlife, and we ask what our parent volunteers would like to be called (current favourites are ‘hey you’ and ‘Dr. Chill’). We are reminded of boundaries; however, this has become a formality more for the parent volunteers than for the kids who know the Forest limits more intimately than the school grounds they have explored for years.
Then, we open the gate, learners crowding with excitement and longing to return to this place where their inner ‘wildness’ is set free. We wander down the path towards the gathering space, learners pointing gleefully and hollering about the changes since we visited last. We are only 10 meters into the Forest and they are already greeting old friends; the ferns, the trees, the ‘naggy bird’, and the chattering chipmunks. Being mindful not to slip on the slope causing another domino-like reaction, we follow the path, now hidden in a tunnel of salmonberry brambles, and it eventually opens to expose the gathering space. Everyone excitedly finds a seat for the day though truth be told, the only sitting they are likely to do here is during snack/lunch.
Once we are settled, backpacks down, sit-spots placed lovingly, field packs and safety vests on, we take time to sit together and marvel at the Forest’s splendor. What changes can we see? What piques our curiosity? What invitations call to us? Recently, we have taken time to lay down, close our eyes, and listen for the welcomes of our Forest kin who are busy calling to one another, maybe even about our arrival. We take time to appreciate the bright canopy of maple leaves that will partially shelter us from sun or torrential downpour depending on the day, and speak private words of gratitude in our hearts and minds. And then…they are set free and disband like a herd of startled mule deer. I find myself smiling like a love struck teenager, sipping coffee, and feeling immense gratitude for the day that is about to unfold. “So? What happens now?” the rookie parent volunteer queries. “We wait,” I reply with a conspiratorial sense of anticipatory delight.
And we do wait. Sometimes it is 5 minutes, other times it is 45. It depends on what captures the learners’ curiosity, or what the day’s weather is, or how well they slept the night before. It depends on the Forest’s ever changing landscape and the unchanging truth that children are unpredictable. I have learned to come prepared, but without expectation. I bring a few provocations, stories, and activities that connect to last week’s curiosities or recent classroom curiosities, but other than requesting a story at snack time, the learners have more pressing requests for their attention and time.
There are two types of time we experience in the Forest. There is chronological time, the hours and minutes, and then there is time that is not tied to a ticking clock for measure. This type is Kairos, qualitative time or liminal time. This is the time between time, the time between what was and what will be. Kairos exists between the ticking seconds, between the rise and fall of a breath, between the beats of a heart. Kairos is the moments when chronological time stands still, or becomes entirely inconsequential, and we experience something profoundly wonder-full. “Many potentialities reside at the confluence point of the known [present time] and the unknown [future time] … these are the liminal moments [Kairos] that enter our life with great regularity but that often go unnoticed” (Henderson, 2018, p.25). I have often thought that the gift of liminal time and space is the Forest’s most generous endowment, and one that has enriched #Forestschool, our sense of wonder, and our wildness in unmeasurable ways.