Rooted - CPD Exploring and Connecting to Our Natural Environment

This is a Face-to-Face Summer Course for Teachers Approved for EPV by DES

You will enjoy a varied, experiential course that explores our connections with nature.  Participants will expand their own relationship with nature and practice techniques to help their students reconnect with the natural environment.

The course is focused on Education for Sustainable Development and Well-being with application to the curricula of Science, Geography and History.

• Enhance eco-literacy to recognise and express links between curriculum strands and real world.

• Deepen teachers’ awareness of the scale, complexity and dynamic of diverse interrelated natural systems of which we are all a part.  Reconnect with nature to awaken senses.  Plan for a greater level of outdoor education on a weekly basis.

• Lower stress and nurture calm engagement among your pupils.  Individual learning is enhanced through mindful tools to help teachers observe their own internal responses. This can become an individual practice that affects the school environment. Children can learn and benefit from mindfulness, which promotes self-awareness and wellness in children and is helpful in countering disruptive influences of social media from outside school.

• Discuss challenges like social media and dealing with bureaucracy.

• Explore ways of creating further high-quality learning opportunities with students through SESE curricular links wellness awareness.

• At the end of this course you will have the confidence, skills and resources to nurture natural talents that focus on the skills in the SESE curriculum and engages a multi-modal approach to learning about the environment.

Testimonials

We really enjoy the CPD courses and so do our participants.  This is what they have said in the past:

A wonderful week’s course – I thoroughly enjoyed! Would highly recommend.

Thank you to Tom and Pam for a wonderful CPD course.

Excellent course. All teachers should do it compulsory at the end of each year. I have thoroughly enjoyed the course. I began a shell of myself, ended back to myself. Thank you.  

Great atmosphere, really enjoyed the week with Tom and Pam. Will be back!

Very good course with enjoyable, engaging content.

Thank you for a beautiful week

Really enjoyed the week. It was relaxing, informative and great fun! Tom and Pam are passionate about what they do and this makes all the difference. Keep up the wonderful work.

Date and Time

Monday 1 July - Friday 5 July, 9.00 am to 1.30 pm

Venue

The course will be held at a smallholding and Special Area of Conservation with Ancient Woodland near the River Slaney.

Ballin Temple, Ardattin, Carlow, R93D7X8  Website and Map

Course guides

The course is delivered by Astraea, a leading systems change community.

Pam Butler is director of a hospitality business and a personal development organisation.  She is long time practitioner of yoga, with a focus on the Shadow school, and has been teaching for over 20 years.  See LinkedIn

Tom Butler has been teaching since a teenager when he started teaching windsurfing.  He has taught investment skills to professionals and lectured at UCD.  He has written two books, works on an organic smallholding and has been developing system adaptation methods for over two decades.  See LinkedIn

Teachers who attend the full 20-hour summer course will qualify for 3 Extra Personal Vacation days.

PLEASE NOTE SUMMER COURSE FEES ARE NON-REFUNDABLE