Natasha Burgess: Member Feature

Natasha Burgess is a Kindergarten teacher at Marysville Elementary School, and is passionate about learning outdoors with her students. She finds that the local environment provides so many opportunities for meaningful, engaging experiences with her students. Since beginning to take her students outside on a regular basis, Natasha has noticed improvements in student engagement, confidence, self-regulation, and conflict management. She enjoys working with her colleagues to support their efforts in taking students outside. She has successfully planned school-wide events for the past three Take Me Outside Days at Marysville, and has worked with Marysville’s Aboriginal Support Worker, Anna Keiver, to plan school-wide Earth Day activities and Green Games competitions the last two years. She and Sandra Beckett, a Kindergarten teacher in Golden, have also worked on a project titled, “Greening the Curriculum”, a document that links curriculum expectations to outdoor activities.

Natasha has been a CBEEN member since 2013, and has benefitted from many of the professional development opportunities CBEEN has provided. She was part of the first EE Leadership Clinic in 2014, and attended the 2014 Symposium for Sustainability. She also attended the CBEEN sponsored workshop, Making Authentic Inquiry Work, in October, and felt very excited about the shift towards allowing student questions and interests to guide planning. She enjoys networking with others who share a passion for getting children outside, and has found these events very inspiring and empowering.

For the past two years, she has been working on her Masters of Education, and focused her research efforts on the value of involving children in selecting inspiring outdoor spaces for learning. Researching this topic intensely has helped increase her confidence and passion for outdoor learning, and she continues to seek out every opportunity to expand her understanding of this topic.

We are pleased to have Natasha as a presenter in our Weekly Winter Webinar Series. She will be presenting ‘Inspiring Spaces: Exploring outdoor learning spaces with young children’ on Thursday, February 11th at 4:30pm Mountain Time. Stay tuned for more information and to register at www.cbeen.org/webinars.