Treading lightly on the earth

NICOLE ROACHE, MARKETING MANAGER

Stalwart of the Year 4 Enviro program at the Middle School, Will Johnston has, for 26 years, inspired curiosity in our learners across Middle and Junior School teaching a variety of roles including Mathematics, Humanities, and the Year 6 Multimedia program.

A quiet but principled leader, Will Johnston is best known for his role in leading the Enviro program, and has held several positions of responsibility in his time at the College. He has been the E-Learning Leader and Maths Coordinator in Upper Primary and the Year 4,5 6 Year level coordinator, and was a dedicated coach of APS cricket. He now closely supports the student representative council’s Enviro group, encouraging these students to promote sustainability and to act. But it was in 2007 that he found his ‘place’ at the College, in the Year 4 Enviro program, and it is his great contribution to the students’ learning and the garden itself that will be his legacy.

Will truly loves what happens in Enviro because of both the meaning of the work and the associated academic rigour across the gamut of subjects.

“What we do in the Enviro program is embedded in meaning. The kids engage in meaningful activities. The food that they grow and cook, then share with each other and with their parents, the My Place project, and the biographies of people who are doing great work in the community, it’s real work, with a purpose.

“For the biographies, the students write a very polite email to a real person, they get a response, and then they have to do justice to that person’s work by writing a biography which is then published in a book.

“It has to be spot on, it has to be truthful, which today, is a learning in itself. It is a rigorous, difficult, meaningful and purposeful piece of writing, and the messages are really strong because we end up with a book that demonstrates that there are a whole lot of people in the community who are doing excellent environmental work, and that counterbalances potentially bad news coming from the media.”

Will speaks about the garden as an incredible learning resource and is thankful that the College had the foresight to set aside this space.

“Recently, on a podcast, I heard a professor of astronomy saying that we know more about what is happening on planets in our solar system and beyond than we do about the complexities of the first two inches of our soil.

“So, gardens are incredibly complex places and places of growth. We learn about natural systems; we learn about life cycles. We learn about what living things need, we learn about the habitat requirements of every animal that’s in our garden, from ants and slaters to lizards and birds.

“It provides a wealth of opportunities for teachers to explore practically anything. Inspiration arises from creating beautiful places with our heart and soul and thinking about how we could improve areas and working to do that. Schools giving license to students to improve and work on the land is really rare and it should be something that happens more often.”

With so many of us living with small or no gardens and connected to screens or ear pods there is a risk of distraction and disconnection to nature, but the children in the Enviro program, have a very different experience.

“We see a massive change in the children over the year. We run around on concrete paths, there are lots of screens, and we live and work in hermetically sealed boxes.

“What changes in Year 4 is that we are constantly pointing out what’s out the window and in the garden, or at the river, which provides a constant interest and engagement to try and understand what’s happening before our eyes.

“Now we have young people coming to tell what they’ve seen in our garden, and in their lives outside of school, on weekends or in their home gardens.

“As they engage with and learn to interpret the world of other living things, they develop a strong sense that these things have just as much of a right to be here as we do, but they are voiceless, so we can be advocates for them.

“I also hope that the children understand that there is always something that we can do, and you don’t need to be a fancy scientist in order to make a contribution to the health of our planet. It’s something important to learn to understand what is happening around us, but also to know there is something we can all do.”

As Will considers his favourite moments and memories, he is distracted by a mudlark, currajong and magpie all going at each other in the garden. As they disappear, it is a small bird, maybe a wren, that captures his attention. It is fitting, in that it is this very curiosity that he loves to see in the children.

“It gives me joy to see the kids experience the same joy that I have when they go outside and see things, and watch and listen. When children send me photos of nests in their garden or point out the eagles from the escarpment out the window.

“Towards the end of the year when we visit Healesville Sanctuary, the children show their depth and breadth of knowledge and their connection to living things. If you took them at the start of the year, they would just walk around, but they tell us all sorts of stories about what they’ve seen, they notice everything.”

With sons Jack (OGC 2015) and George (OGC 2017) in Melbourne, he and his wife, Amanda, have an empty nest and the time to take stock of what is next for them. Will has decided that 50 years in school is a lot of his life, and a change is in order.

“I’m going to study a part-time course in nature-based leadership at the CERES School of Nature and Climate in Melbourne. It is basically the field I’ve been working in for the past 16 years – people’s growth, connecting to nature and education but I will be surrounded by my people.

“I also have a project called the Faculty of Outside Learning –schools division that Richard Hanley (Kitchen Garden Teacher) and I will be squirrelling away at and seeing where it takes us. Its essence will be encouraging schools to take students outside more and to utilise more school land for learning.”

No doubt his future endeavours will inspire future generations of educators and learners to tread lightly on the earth and wonder at what they see around them.