Partnership History and Framework for
Place-Based Service-Learning

A brief history

The Forest Service’s nationwide Children’s Forest concept is in response to the growing disconnect between our country’s youth and the natural world. It’s an especially evident issue here in Georgia. Despite having 875,000 acres of national forest lands in the state within 2 hours of major metropolitan areas, many Georgia youth have little awareness of these places that offer so many health and quality-of-life benefits. Urban and rural youth alike often lack opportunities to participate in life-changing experiences in the outdoors. Georgia’s Youth Forest Connection program – and every other Forest Service Children’s Forest – is working to change that.

Children’s Forests nationwide share a commitment to four national goals:

Connect kids, families, and adults to healthy outdoor activities across all landscapes.
Create new education and career pathways.
Foster an understanding of how our changing environment affects our world, and how we can work together to embrace these changes.
Provide professional development opportunities for educators, with emphasis on conservation and the natural world.

Here in Georgia our Children’s Forest is not a place – instead it is a vision and a concept designed to achieve these four goals by bringing together local youth, building connections between them and everything that our national forests have to offer. By working hand-in-glove with partner organizations who share our mutual interests and concerns, the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forests are improving existing youth engagement programs both on and off national forest lands while creating new initiatives to support the developing Youth Forest Connection program. These various initiatives are increasingly united through one compelling purpose – to ensure our state’s youth are engaged in place-based outdoor experiences on their journey to becoming the next generation of conservationist

Framework

Schools, national parks and community organizations work together to build stewardship through education by:

Co-creating and co-facilitating professional learning opportunities for educators;
Developing healthy communities of learning, inquiry, and practice that nurture sharing of expertise, resources, and support;
Practicing curriculum-based innovations focused on emerging challenges, including exploring, implementing, and continually adapting the Aspirational Principles (See below);
Planning and working together to make a direct impact in our forests and communities

Principles

Grounded in Place

Learning is grounded in the multiple attributes of a particular place including the values of local residents, natural landscape and resources, cultural heritage and resources, social dynamics, and political and economic systems. Learning moves from local to global as children mature.

Real

Students engage with teachers and partners in experiential projects that make the world a better place by addressing authentic, relevant, community stakeholder-identified issues, problems, and opportunities in support of healthy and sustainable communities, including ecological health, social justice, cultural vibrancy, and economic vitality.

Empowering

Teachers and community partners give students meaningful roles in project planning, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation, thereby building agency in their learning to follow their curiosities and passions while developing self-efficacy and life-long skills.

Collaborative

Multi-directional collaboration between students, teachers and community partners sets the direction of the learning experience. Students build relationships, and cultivates cultural competency through deepening appreciation for the diverse talents, potential, and perspectives of others..

Integrated

The co-planned and co-taught curriculum is an exploratory and project-based extension of classroom learning, taking place across multiple disciplines, and instilled through direct experience and reflective practices

Rigorous

Learning experiences are critical and comparative in nature; they are learner-centered, using inquiry to cultivate systems thinking, enduring understanding, and skills in content and practices that are aligned with state and national learning standards.

Equitable

An environment that promotes fairness, justice, and the absence of avoidable, unfair, or remediable differences among groups of people. (NRPA Equity Language Guide)

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Partnership History and Framework for Place-Based Service-Learning