BEYOND THE GATES The evolution of outdoor education at Shawnigan

BEYOND THE Gates STORY BY CHRISTINA CHANT PHOTOGRAPHY BY ARDEN GILL

WITH ITS PRISTINE 270-ACRE LAKEFRONT CAMPUS, SURROUNDED BY THE FORESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND RIVERS OF VANCOUVER ISLAND, SHAWNIGAN ENJOYS AN ENVIABLE NATURAL POSITION – ONE ARGUABLY UNMATCHED BY ANY OTHER SCHOOL IN CANADA.

With the School’s long-standing commitment to providing a holistic, experiential education, it’s hard to imagine a better place for students to explore the great outdoors, push their limits, and flourish in the face of challenge. “I first started working in outdoor education because of my love of adventure and natural spaces, but I quickly learned that the outdoors can be a very powerful teaching tool,” shares Eric MacDonald, who joined the Shawnigan community as the School’s Outdoors Coordinator in 2018. “Our goal is to create a comprehensive outdoors education program that uses the beautiful BC wilderness as a tool to develop confidence, empathy, teamwork, self-discipline, decision-making, and problem-solving skills, along with a strong sense of initiative.” The multi-faceted benefits of time spent in the great outdoors is a lesson Eric learned first-hand. An early passion for the outdoors industry, sparked by summer work as a teen on multi-day canoeing, hiking, and climbing camps in the Rocky Mountains, flourished into a career after he moved to Australia. There, he completed a diploma in outdoor recreation, specializing in adventure-based learning, and began working full-time as an outdoor educator. After 10 years spent developing and coordinating domestic outdoor programs for schools, he transitioned into a different role, where he facilitated international expeditions to developing countries for high school students, merging his passions for outdoor education and travel. He also enjoyed the unique experience of working as an independent contractor for Geelong Grammar School’s world-famous Timbertop program, guiding Geelong’s Grade 9 students through some of the outdoor adventures that form their full-year wilderness experience. The very act of creating the Outdoors Coordinator role and bringing a dedicated outdoors professional on board to coordinate programming marked a liminal point at Shawnigan, where outdoors education began the process of evolving from a series of stand-alone excursions and co-curricular offerings to a strategically administered, interdisciplinary educational program. In Eric’s experienced hands, each student’s outdoors journey is steadily developing a more intentional shape, with experiences planned and structured as a progressive sequence, where each new challenge builds on previously learned skills and incorporates specific educational outcomes that marry curricular learning goals with 21st century soft skills. Developing a clearly articulated plan for a gradeby-grade Shawnigan journey and the ways in which outdoor education and wilderness experiences can be woven into each student’s unique trajectory is also part of the remit of Nigel Mayes ’89 (Ripley’s), Shawnigan’s Assistant Head, Co-curricular Programs. A Vancouver Islander by birth, he grew up locally in an active family that was always outdoors. “That’s what I’m used to,” he explains. “I rock climbed, my mom rode horses, and we hiked and skied all over Western Canada as a family.” A Shawnigan alumnus, Nigel now sees it as part of his mandate as an educator and member of the Senior Leadership Team to continue to help develop comprehensive outdoor education programming for all Shawnigan students. “At Shawnigan, we have a great reputation for offering a wellrounded, holistic education, but we also have this unparalleled natural environment at our fingertips with multiple world-class outdoors destinations, from the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve to the Juan de Fuca Marine Trail, within an hour’s drive of the campus,” he explains. “I think if kids have been here for two or three or five years and haven’t really explored much beyond the gates, we’ve missed an enormous opportunity.”

Shawnigan already offers some bold, differentiating outdoors programming – aspects that provide an exciting foundation for further standout initiatives. From the co-curricular Search and Rescue (SAR) program through to the formative multi-day Grade 8 and 9 excursions and international service-based trips that fall under the EDGE and OuterEDGE umbrella, the building blocks of an integrated, progressive, and intentionally structured outdoors education program are well-established. Today’s SAR program is the brainchild of the late Peter Yates. An active outdoorsman and passionate educator, Peter brought his leadership training and time spent as an Outward Bound instructor in BC and New Zealand to bear on his work at Shawnigan. Peter’s career at the School encompassed teaching English, coaching rowing, and building programs in youth leadership and outdoor education. His legacy includes a profound and lasting positive effect on the lives of the many young people he taught, coached, and mentored. The uniquely challenging aspect of SAR, where students learn advanced outdoors rope access and swiftwater rescue techniques, is exactly why Shawnigan’s Co-Heads of School so often take part in the program: not only does the program teach transferable leadership skills, it also teaches students how to be resilient, how to handle criticism, and how to push themselves beyond their comfort zone.

In addition, SAR students emerge from the program with tangible technical skills, including first aid certification with CPR Level C, swiftwater rescue certification, a basic avalanche awareness certificate, and rope skills. The qualifications they gain change their summer job possibilities and can even open up new career opportunities for some. Students leave the program with skills that equip them to volunteer for local SAR groups or take on any summer job, such as youth work or summer camps, that requires a first aid qualification – exactly the kind of formative experiences that set Eric on his future career trajectory. If SAR grounds students in the local Cowichan Valley area, with the Koksilah and Cowichan Rivers functioning as their outdoor classrooms, the EDGE (Engagement, Development, Gratitude, and Experience) program lends a global perspective and humanitarian angle to the experiential and outdoor education portfolio at Shawnigan. What initially began as a stand-alone humanitarian trip to Thailand to provide aid in the wake of the 2004 Asian tsunami has evolved into a series of multi-week outdoor adventures encompassing service, internationalism, and environmental awareness in countries as diverse as Costa Rica, China, Zimbabwe, and Ecuador. Each trip pushes students out of their comfort zone, tests their limits, and puts service and stewardship front and centre. The EDGE program connects students with parts of the world that they may have never seen before, helping them develop a sense of gratitude and perspective through deep, meaningful engagement and connections with teammates and host communities. In contrast to the rigorous selection process that senior students go through to participate in an EDGE trip, mandatory Grade 8 and 9 OuterEDGE trips bookend both of those initial years at Shawnigan. These local multi-day camping expeditions are pivotal aspects of the Shawnigan journey, bringing the younger grade communities together off-campus in a fun and challenging way. The rich and meaningful content and curricula incorporated in these current outdoor adventure offerings, combined with Eric’s professional guidance and experience, may also give rise to a future cornerstone of outdoors education at Shawnigan. Currently in a nascent stage of development, the vision is to expand current OuterEDGE programming in an intentional and progressive way, in line with the mission and goals outlined in Project Future. Junior students would engage in a more extensive and purposefully planned series of multi-day outdoors and curricular expeditions spread across both their Grade 8 and 9 years at Shawnigan, culminating both years in a resilience-building multi-week outdoors expedition. With a viability study now complete and approval granted by the Board of Governors, a visionary pilot project, provisionally titled Beyond the Gates, is slated for the 2021–22 academic year. Of critical importance to all the stakeholders involved in the evolution of outdoors education at Shawnigan is the impact that this kind of programming, when developed thoughtfully and with clear intention, can have on students’ understanding of themselves and of their bond with others. Through wilderness and adventure challenges, students learn and use valuable technical outdoors skills, but they also, crucially, become comfortable exploring the world, pushing their own limits, and trusting their skills and abilities. They learn to manage stressful situations, communicate effectively within a group, and support other people. They learn how to build community. It is perhaps this foundational concept – the ability to connect, to care for themselves, and to extend that care and service to others – that is the most powerful lesson of all. By learning to survive and thrive in the great outdoors, students are correspondingly gaining the transferable skills and confidence they will need to guide themselves and their own future communities through an ever-evolving – and, at times, unpredictable – global landscape.