Drawing lessons from the landscape 

Education is in desperate need of a re-think. The separation of academic learning from the "world out there" is inadequate to address the very real challenges our students and our planet are facing. If we want to deliver the types of educational experiences our students and our planet need, we have to think outside the box. The Ontario Secondary School curriculum is always our starting point, but it cannot be our end goal. To create the world they want to live in, students need to get out into it. They need to discover for themselves how their academic learning – ever-important – is not only connected to the "real world", but is drawn from it. That is the experience of a Headwaters Immersive Credit Course.

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Headwater is different. We start with the premise of re-imagining the classroom: not only taking students outside, but integrating academic lessons into the world around us: taking the place we are in and intentionally building a course that will draw the curriculum components out of the natural and cultural landscape.

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We develop and deliver curriculum-linked, for-credit courses that teach the Ontario Secondary School curriculum and so much more. Beyond the textbook and more than outdoor or experiential learning, our courses are immersive education. This is learning emerging from place: going beyond giving lessons while on the landscape and moving toward drawing learning from the landscape.

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​Beyond the textbook and the classroom walls, and deeper than simply learning outdoors, our courses are a profound integration of academic learning, personal growth, community-mindedness, and the natural world. Merging the form of a wilderness journey with the learning of the classroom, this is education beyond the ordinary: credit courses which do more than teach, they immerse, providing for students a complex, multifaceted, authentic understanding of an interwoven world with no simple answers.

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To achieve this, we take a deliberate, long-term, three-pillar approach to educational programming. Recognizing that institutions are often siloed between research and practice (those who research are rarely also those who practice, and vice versa), we bring them together. Always research-based, and always integrated, we follow a cyclical model of Development, Delivery, and Dissemination in everything that we do, enabling us to be at the forefront of educational philosophy and pedagogy – of both research and practice – advancing the field through an integrated approach.

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​As a boutique organization with an intentionally small team, everything we do is thoughtful, purposeful, and highly personalized to the needs of our partners. Schools get to know us, and we get to know them.

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To read more about our research activities and findings, click here.