Take It Outside
Young students pause to admire native blooms. PHOTO courtesy Plant Community
When you think of a classroom, you probably conjure up a room with four walls, inside a school building, with neat rows of students sitting in chairs behind desks. But a growing movement led by outdoor education proponents asks: why can’t a classroom be a dark cave, a sun-warmed stone patio, a vegetable garden, or even a meadow of wildflowers in bloom? These outdoor settings are not simply places for potential recreation and relaxation, but also innovative sites for education.
Outdoor learning settings offer direct engagement with nature and a tactile, sensory experience. Studies show that spending time outdoors helps kids focus more when they return indoors and helps reduce stress and anxiety. Furthermore, learning outdoors can help bring greater understanding of our place in the world and impact on it, along with opportunities to protect and sustain the environment.
“The connections you make in nature are universal to all learners,” says Dr. Demekia Biscoe, director of education at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.
Wonder, discovery, growth, resilience, connection, adaptability, focus, advocacy: these are some of the themes that quickly emerge when you talk with advocates for outdoor education, before even getting into the direct learning opportunities related to subjects like earth science, ecology, biology and hydrology.
Creating opportunities to learn outdoors and improving access to such opportunities is central to the work of the Wildflower Center and other groups in Austin that are passionate about taking learning outside.
Bringing Parks to Public Schools
Outdoor education can mean bringing students into nature. It also can mean bringing nature to students. This is the mission of an Austin-based nonprofit group called Plant Community.
Hands-on learning elevates the experience. PHOTO courtesy PEAS
Founded by a team with a combined background in ecological landscape design, early child development, and nonprofit program administration, along with support from Native Son Gardens, a sustainable native landscape company, Plant Community wants to integrate more of the natural world into school and social environments.
“Children study Texas wildflowers and would usually need to plan a field trip to go see them. We want to make it to where they can learn about them in their school’s front yard,” says Charlotte Harrigan, Plant Community’s director of development.
This organization is on a mission to put a park at every single public school in Austin, championing the belief that every child of any age (and adults, too!) can benefit from being immersed in nature and the opportunity to explore, learn and play in an inspiring and calming outdoor setting.
“Just think of the High Line in New York City or, closer to home, Pease Park and the new Waterloo Park,” Harrigan said. “These all feature densely planted native landscapes that are beautiful, engaging places to play and learn. We aim to bring those successful green spaces into the school environments where children and families naturally spend more of their time every day.”
In the last couple of years, Plant Community has installed parks at Davis Elementary and Gullett Elementary schools, and they have more in the works. Drawing on their native landscaping expertise, the team includes prairies, woodlands, rain gardens, farms, orchards, butterfly gardens, and nature play areas (rather than playgrounds) in their site plans. They incorporate multiple outdoor classrooms with minimal distractions — such as cars, noise and air pollution — in their school parks.
They also take into account seasonality. For example, they might include one area with shade for use during the warmer months, and another in a sunnier meadow for the cooler days in winter.
Plant Community is working to fully fund projects for Title 1 schools with donated funds. And for all other public schools, the group will help guide community fundraising efforts to cover the costs of materials and labor.
Plant Community’s seasonal scavenger hunts engage students and the community through the discovery of seedlings, blooms, insects and other natural attractions in the space, with colorful reference photos to help identify things like American beautyberry flowers, cicada exoskeletons, and little bluestem seedlings.
“Learning outdoors provides schoolchildren who may not have access to safe, vibrant outdoor spaces at home the opportunity to breathe fresh air, get energy out, regulate emotions by engaging with living things in open spaces, rest and recharge, and interact with nature,” Harrigan says.
More outdoor learning space means more opportunities to learn, grow and fall in love with nature, leading to greater understanding of and caring for our environment.
Putting Nature in the Lesson Plan
Creating the spaces for outdoor education is one step; integrating the outdoors into an existing curriculum is another. Such is the mission of Partners for Education, Agriculture, and Sustainability (PEAS), a nonprofit organization committed to cultivating joyful connections with the natural world through outdoor learning and edible education.
PEAS outdoor and edible education specialists partner directly with classroom teachers in elementary schools in the Austin area to lead outdoor lessons. The organization worked with 34 schools and 4,500 students during the 2023-24 school year. PEAS educators see the same classes and students over the course of the year, teaching them 12 to 14 lessons. The incorporation of this work during the school day creates an opportunity for a deeply engaging academic experience, spanning a three-year curriculum.
Students gather to witness nature’s magic. PHOTO courtesy PEAS
Because PEAS creates and brings the lessons and materials, the classroom teacher is not obligated to take on additional work.
Lauren Zappone Maples, the founder and executive director of PEAS, noted that the organization piloted an after-school program early on, but she quickly realized that most of the kids had left by that time of day. By partnering with schools to incorporate their lessons into the school day, the PEAS program is more accessible and reaches more students.
“Just by being outside, our students are benefiting. That’s before we even layer in anything academic,” Maples said, noting that time outdoors is “grounding and calming” for students. “But the academic piece is so rich, because it’s naturally hands-on, once you go outside: you can dig, you can touch, you can observe things closely — and slowly, which we aren’t doing very well these days.”
Learning these lessons outdoors with different materials and sensory stimulation helps students engage with the subject matter in new and different ways. Lessons can take place in a vegetable garden, a pollinator garden, a wildlife habitat, or any other outdoor spot on the school campus. PEAS educators are experts at knowing their campuses and adapting based on what the outdoor conditions might bring on days, where to find dry spots on wet ones. No two lessons are ever the same outdoor experiences? “So they feel passionate about some aspect [of what they’re learning], whether it’s insects or plants or soil or eating the food that they’ve grown. [Once] they feel like they have experience with that, they can make informed decisions now and later in life,” Maples says.
In addition to their in-school programs, PEAS offers opportunities for families to volunteer and learn together outdoors at the PEAS Community Farm at Cunningham Elementary in South Austin, professional development for teachers, consultations for administrators and PTAs, a guidebook for educators to learn about place-based outdoor learning, and digital lessons that teachers can use as a springboard for engaging students.
Cavernous Learning Opportunities
The Wildflower Center sits on top of a system of caves that flow into the Edwards Aquifer. The true extent of this cave system is still unknown, as only a handful of these caves have been discovered and explored. One of the caves, located just below ground level in the Center’s Savanna Meadow and thus more easily approachable and accessible, has been dubbed “Wildflower Cave” and serves as a hub for cave-related educational programming.
A cave as a backdrop for learning offers deep paths to follow and study. Caves give a glimpse into prehistoric times through a contemplation of their formation over millions of years. They also serve as useful sites for understanding more modern history, including the way in which humans have used such spaces for refuge, burial grounds and even trash dumps.
Young cavers explore a cave at the Wildflower Center. PHOTO Jessica Gordon
Since 2018, more than 5,000 people have visited Wildflower Cave through the City of Austin Watershed Protection Department’s educational programs. These programs provide lessons on aquifers, groundwater, recharge zones, habitats, how to take action to protect our water resources, and more. A cave as a classroom and setting for learning can mark an unforgettable moment for many students, pairing knowledge with sensory experience and the feeling of discovery. The City of Austin’s Earth Camp, a water quality field science program for fifth graders attending Title 1 schools, brings more than 1,000 students each year to explore and learn in the cave. Some students have never been on a hike before, so donning helmets and knee pads and venturing into a cave can feel like a radically new adventure.
Jessica Gordon, conservation program supervisor for Youth Education with the Watershed Protection Department, loves how outdoor environmental education fosters a sense of discovery and challenge for these students.
Being in a new environment gives kids the opportunity to learn new things about their natural surroundings, but also about themselves and their fellow classmates. “It’s amazing to watch the transformation that some students experience,” Gordon said. “They can naturally have a fear of going into a cave, a fear of dark spaces or tight places, or spiders or snakes or scorpions, or even getting dirty. But then they transform, and they work together to support each other in overcoming their fears.”
While the main message of many cave-focused classes centers on the importance of protecting water resources, other parts of the lessons are flexible, depending on what discoveries students might make, like finding the tooth of a coyote or black bear in the cave, observing a cave cricket, or noticing monarch butterflies while gathering in the outdoor classroom before heading into the cave. “We draw attention to [the students’] own discoveries and try to support whatever they’re excited about,” Gordon said. A virtual cave tour is also available for students who aren’t able to go inside the cave.
The Wildflower Center’s New Outdoor Classroom
With so many classes and groups exploring Wildflower Cave, the area where students gather before entering the cave was being impacted with vegetation loss and increased erosion. This problem led to a joint project between the Wildflower Center and the City of Austin to build a new outdoor classroom that could be used as a staging area for educational cave tours, and which opened for use in the summer of 2024.
Students gather at the Wildflower Center’s new outdoor classroom. PHOTO Jessica Gordon
“It’s an interesting collaboration that grew organically out of the impact the increased foot traffic was having on the cave and the need for an educational gathering spot,” said Matt O’Toole, director of lands and operations at the Wildflower Center. To carry out this project, O’Toole worked closely with a team from the City of Austin, including Jessica Gordon and landscape architect Drew Sloat, as well as environmental designer, installer and caver Rich Zarria.
An extreme amount of care was taken every step of the way in this project. “Since we’re building this stonework project in the environmentally sensitive Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone, we picked a location on the landscape that minimizes impact to the cave and the surrounding sinkholes,” Gordon said. “We wanted it to blend into the natural landscape.”
Zarria selected and puzzled together the seven large flat boulder rocks that form the patio floor, and he carefully arranged the semicircular formation of seat boulders, which were sourced from the reserves of materials the Wildflower Center collected when Austin’s MoPac Expressway was built decades ago. The handpicked boulders not only make good seats for one or more students and their cave gear, they also showcase natural features that are regularly incorporated into the lessons. For example, holes that have been dissolved in the limestone show easy pathways for water to enter the aquifer. “Not only will students be looking at the cave and learning about it, but hey can learn about the karst in the limestone while they’re on the patio,” Zarria said. “It’s not just a space for them to learn, but they’re literally sitting on a thing to learn about.”
Wildflower Center staff experts curated a seed mix of wildflowers and grasses for the meadow surrounding the site and planted six hand-collected oak trees in a ring around the classroom, which will provide shade in the future as they grow.
Groups learning about the cave will appreciate the new Wildflower Cave Outdoor Classroom as part of their experience as they gather and prepare for their cave adventure, and the outdoor classroom space can be seen and appreciated by any Wildflower Center visitor.
The Wildflower Center’s cave initiative is one component of an overall approach to create engaging outdoor learning opportunities for a range of students. With an extensive background in middle school science education and school administration, Biscoe knows how to engage students of all ages and strives to create educational experiences that spark what she calls “the little kid wonder, but also the big kid wonder” of learning something new. “Engaging everyone to wonder, and to ask questions,” she says. “People can — and should — wonder together.”
As the Center’s Director of Education, Biscoe encourages students to think about their impact on nature as well as how nature impacts them. “There are lots of teachable moments here about being kind to nature. I say ‘nature aware’ a lot when I talk to school groups, to be aware that you’re in a habitat. You’re in someone’s home,” she says. “Treat someone’s home the way that you would want visitors to treat your home.”
Biscoe is eager to find ways to engage more people and to incorporate technology into outdoor exploration and learning. She and her team recently partnered with Families in Nature to create a place-based virtual outdoor learning program called Ecologist School. It’s in line with the tenets of outdoor education: versatile, accessible, flexible and respectful of the environment (no paper printing impact). Think of it as a self-guided field trip for families, teachers and students as they explore the Wildflower Center. Participants can choose challenges in various branches of science from astronomy to herpetology, learn new facts, and earn badges.
Teaching outdoors requires confidence, trust and flexibility. Conditions can be unpredictable, and things don’t always go according to plan. “When they do, it’s beautiful, when they don’t, it’s still a teachable moment,” says Biscoe.
The rewards are great, and the stakes are high: in the face of future challenges related to climate change, giving children more time outdoors and showing them how to care for the environment feels like one of the most important things we can devote energy to.
By expanding the idea of what a classroom can be — whether it’s a prairie, a cave, a creek, a limestone arch, a butterfly garden — we open ourselves up to wonder, to discovery, to falling in love with nature … and to being moved to protect our environment. Biscoe hopes Wildflower Center visitors “look around and feel this place is magical, because it is wild. It is nature driven. It isn’t just beautiful, it’s also inspiring, and thought provoking, in all the right ways.”