Outdoor Learning Leadership Conference

RAAW Learning

Incorporating Outdoor Literacy Events for Adolescents into Secondary ELA Courses

Friday, October 17, 2025 - 3:15 - 4:30 pm - Raven

Adolescent literacy and outdoor experiences form an intersection of pedagogy that has largely been ignored in both practice and research.  Outdoor settings, however, offer possibilities to blend experiential, sensory learning with literacy development for teens just as they do for preschoolers. This workshop will demonstrate approaches for outdoor learning suitable for high school learners of all ability levels and provide examples and explanations of how outdoor literacy practices promote authentic writing and cross-curricular exploration. Participants will receive findings from research conducted within high-poverty schools of diverse ethnicities, including examples of writing from learners who had failed previous ELA classes and were not writing at all in class. Join this academic researcher as she introduces an outdoor literacy pedagogy fashioned from over two decades of experience teaching secondary ELA in the rural southeastern United States, along with the positive results it has yielded.