A Forest School Study Tour in Denmark!

One of the most common questions that I get by far and away is how people can come to Denmark to observe forest schools in action.  Sometimes it is curious parents, but often, the questions come from other educators around the world – I think at this point I’ve gotten notes from the US, from Japan, from Italy, from all around Eastern Europe, from Australia…truly, I know people globally seem to be drawn to the notion of how these schools that are based in the outdoors really run in real life.

I get the questions often enough that soon I’d like to get a Q+A post (Update – post is done!) on the few typical ideas that I send people to, but the shorter version of the story is that often times, it’s not easy. Forest school educators are often busy, and feel strongly that their first priority and full attention must be devoted to the children (rightfully so), so they can be notoriously hard to get a hold of for coordinating visits.  Which I know is always frustrating to those genuinely wanting to know more about what this all looks like and how to bring these concepts home to the countries that so badly could use an injection of fresh air in their early education systems.

Enter our friends from the NaturePlay film (remember the screening party?).  As they’re quite connected from making of the movie, and well versed in the Nordic model, if you’re wanting to see the schools up close and personally (as well as log professional development hours as an educator), they are running four-day study tours in July 2018 in the Roskilde area outside of Copenhagen  . *** Exciting Update! The NOME team is running customized study tours to Denmark and now Sweden as well – reach out to them with interest directly ****  

Full disclosure, I have never been on such a study tour so I can’t vouch for the experience personally (i.e. this is not a review), but I wanted to spread the word on the information since it is such a popular question that people write in to the blog.  It is often so hard to get a response from the schools themselves, that it’s wonderful to have a coordinated opportunity to see the schools in action.

The NaturePlay team is remarkably dedicated to outdoor learning as a form of pedagogy, and have always been warm and welcoming to me, so I have no doubt they will do the same for those on the tour.

Any interest in the program can be directed to NaturePlay directly – and all this talk of summer has reminded me that it’s time to start planning ours!