Include Me! Outdoor Education for Children of All Abilities: With a Focus on Therapeutic and Special Education Practices, Black, Fall 2025

Course Description

The natural world around us represents a diversity of creatures, plants, and objects, all together showing an interdependence that serves as a model for human interaction. We can use this diversity and relationships to help children of all capabilities thrive and learn. Natural environments invite children’s engagement, interaction, and stimulation, providing learning opportunities and experiences that classroom activities alone can’t provide. While all students can benefit from outdoor learning, it can particularly help many children who experience trauma or who have physical or emotional special needs, but those are often the children left out of outdoor experiences. Children with disabilities or delays need to have as many opportunities for education in nature as others do. This course explores theory, research, and hands-on activities to guide early childhood and special educators in working with children in natural environments to address their individual challenges and bring out their individual abilities, to foster and support their best growth and development.

Outdoor learning provides a rich and stimulating environment that can enhance learning experiences for all children. For students with special needs, it may actually remove barriers to learning and may improve self-regulation and social-emotional development. Time spent in natural settings can offer liberation from their challenges, and provide an environment that helps them think differently as they begin to craft new strategies for managing their disabilities or delays.

Our early childhood profession owes it to children to find a way to bring those benefits to everyone.

 Audience: Preschool through Grade 3 Teachers and Administrators

Instructor

Michelle Black, BA, Early Childhood Education, M.E., Elementary Education, M.A.E., Special Education.

Michelle Black, M.Ed., has over 30 years of experience teaching children from birth through elementary school, including early intervention and special education. She has spent a lifetime promoting outdoor learning in all weather. Michelle was the licensed preschool teacher at Wren’s Nest Forest Preschool in New Haven, VT, and is now an early childhood special educator for the Addison Central School District in Middlebury, VT. Michelle Black

Course Goals & Objectives

Course Goals:

• Learners will deepen their own awareness and appreciation of the natural world and the benefits of outdoor education for all children.
• Learners will increase their understanding of nature-based mindfulness and the therapeutic connection to engagement in natural settings.
• Learners will develop their understanding of nature-rich settings as inclusive environments that enrich quality of life for children with physical and social-emotional challenges.

Course Objectives:

• Demonstrate an understanding of forest and nature-based early childhood education practices, including their application to multiple learning domains, especially regarding young children with differing abilities and challenges.
• Describe the benefits of instructional and social inclusion in a natural environment, where all students can participate in the same activity, but at their own skill level.
• Understand and apply current research and evidence-based forest and nature-centered early childhood practices, to allow increased access to natural environments providing enhanced learning for young children with physical or social-emotional challenges.

Required Texts

Required Texts are not included in the course tuition.

*Used copies available online

Fisher, C. Y. (2019). Mindfulness & nature-based therapeutic techniques for children: Creative activities for emotion regulation, resilience and connectedness. PESI Publishing & Media.

Wilson, R. (2022). Naturally inclusive: Engaging children of all abilities outdoors. Gryphon House.

Additional Required Readings/Videos will be provided by the instructor.

For additional course information

Michelle Black
802-377-2488

For additional registration information

Center for Schools Team

(802) 468-1325

Register Now!