Romeo Public School teacher Luke van Schaik has been growing engaged students for a few years, and the Avon Maitland District School Board named him as one of four award winners for his green thumb efforts.
van Schaik, Tracey James Britton and Jenna Lange from Stratford Intermediate School, and Rebecca Wilson of Stratford District Secondary School were recently named winners of the AMDSB’s ‘iAM Making an Impact’ recognition program. The award for van Schaik recognizes his work at Romeo PS with the eco club and his commitment to weaving Indigenous education into his teaching.
The eco club is a project he began years ago at the school and has continued to grow. A schoolyard garden is just one teaching tool at his disposal, as he and the growing number of club members find lessons everywhere they look.
“When we met previously, the club had done a yard audit and found three different species in the grass that we could identify - this year I think we’ve named 53,” he said. “Some of those are ones that were already in the yard and others were ones we brought in for the garden. But most of them were insects that have come to visit the garden, or other animals and creatures that have come back because of the species that are in the garden. It’s given us a real outdoor classroom to use.”
The garden project also enabled van Schaik to bring indigenous pedagogies to the school to further engage the students and develop their relationship with nature. As one of the board’s strategic plan pillars, the club has helped engage more students this year than last; it started out slowly but took off.
“This year, we started the school year with five students and one educational assistant volunteering her time, which was great,” he said. “Our largest meeting this year had 49 student members and two EAs. We also had five parent volunteers for our largest meeting, so that was pretty significant. When you consider our school size of just 145 students, having 49 of them show up for an eco club was pretty incredible.”
It wasn’t just the students’ minds van Schaik was trying to reach. One of the projects he took on this year was trying to increase outdoor education and student-teacher-parent engagement with the school. The eco club and garden provided that platform, and van Schaik filled in the rest.
“I led the division’s focus on outdoor education and Indigenous pedagogies, and with parents, we also involved them through things like we had at our community night where we invited them to come learn about our outdoor education activities,” he said. “One of my philosophies towards education is that if you have an engaged student, then learning becomes more meaningful. If you think of when it’s something you want to learn, you’re interested in it and a deeper learning sticks with you and you’ll remember it. So for the students being interested in helping create our eco actions for the year and helping with the club’s announcements for things like weekly challenges, it helps them learn more. By working collaboratively to write the announcements and make posters, it meant the students had to drive the actions and the learning. Hopefully they’re walking away with a much richer understanding and connection, rekindling those connections to nature.”
Looking at things long-term, van Schaik sees the indigenous education element, the eco club and the garden as parts that overlap the board’s strategic plan pillars. And having them connected to nature and making them engaging for students provides plenty of meaningful learning opportunities.
“Being engaged and then helping prepare the students is a place, for me as a teacher, that I can bring in other ways of knowing and recognize indigenous perspectives in a meaningful way,” he said. “To highlight those cultural differences and learning, and to have students recognize that on this land means we can move forward and take steps towards reconciliation but also have them engage in rich and meaningful tasks that leave an impact on them so that they remember and continue to be connected.”
