Welcome to Outdoor Education Collective
Hello and welcome to our project, funded in part by National Geographic Society’s Emergency COVID19 Relief Fund for Educators.
Paul Huddy-Zubkowski, Kelly Koller, and Becky Schnekser, welcome you to our project, whose mission is to encourage, inspire, and support educators globally, to teach outdoors! Whether teaching fully in-person, fully remote, or in a hybrid model, we have resources to support you in this endeavor. Today is just the kickoff of our website with resources. Each month, we will add resources, highlight educators, communities, and programs who utilize the outdoors for teaching spaces and topics around the world. We want to show you the possibilities there are regardless of the age of learners you serve, geographic location, and teaching environments.
We invite you to explore the resources, ask questions, offer your own insight, and become a part of our Outdoor Education Collective Family. Be sure to fill out this form to stay up to date with our resrouces and/or to share your own!
This resources is meant to be interactive, to evolve along with our community and to support and inspire us all to be outdoors with our learning communities.
Don’t be a stranger, we want you on our expedition team, we want to grow together.
Meet the Team
Becky Schnekser, ancestral land of the Chesapeake, Lumbee, and Nanesmond
Becky is a K-5 science educator in Virginia. With 15 years (and counting!) of experience as an educator, she brings knowledge from PK-5, all subjects to the table along with remote, hybrid, and in person models of outdoor education. If she had it her way, she would teach outdoors with no man made, synthetic shelters at all. Hello, treehouses! Knowing this is not everyone’s dream or reality, she works to make outdoor education accessible for students and educators globally. She is passionate about studying and finding solutions to equity issues especially associated with access to outdoor learning opportunities.
Paula Huddy-Zubkowski
Experiential learning is at the heart of everything Paula Huddy-Zubkowski, FRGS, GTF 2018, and Canada C3 participant, endeavors to accomplish. With guidance from Indigenous community members, she brings Indigenous ways of knowing into understanding how to lead outdoor explorations. Currently she is the Instructional Media and EdTech consultant, K-12 in her District in Canada, developing lessons, videos, STEAM programming, and makerspaces for her district. Vicki Phillips stated at the National Geographic Education Summit, “We must stop seeing tech and nature as sparring partners, and start concentrating on helping them dance.” This website will do just that!
Kelly Koller, ancestral land of the Menominee
Kelly Koller is a 2018 GTF, 18–22 National Geographic Explorer, National Geographic Certified Educator and an elementary educator in the Howard-Suamico School District in Wisconsin. Kelly loves how the outdoors provides hands-on, immersive authentic learning experiences, but it’s the smiles on students’ faces that keeps her continuously creating and looking for more ideas.
As a 2018 Grosvenor Teacher Fellow, Koller journeyed to the High Arctic of Canada and Greenland learning about natural and human communities, viewing the impacts of climate change, and delving into how an Explorer Mindset could benefit the learning process. These experiences inspired Kelly to develop of www.explorermindset.org and #OutdoorSEL, both of which aim to empower learners.
