Immersive Credit Courses
Imagine if this was your classroom
Drawing lessons from the landscape
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.
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.
This is learning emerging from place: going beyond giving lessons while on the landscape and moving toward drawing learning from the landscape.
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.
Beyond the textbook
Components of an Immersive Credit Course
1
Academic credit course
Earn an entire credit with a month-long Immersive Course trip. Or integrate a one-week Immersive trip into an in-school course, with the Immersive component providing a curriculum-linked enhancement to in-school learning
2
Land-based, outdoor learning
Education of, in, and for the natural world. More than cooking over a fire, learning to paddle, and identifying plants, a land-based pedagogy asks: what did you observe, what is this telling you, and what is this teaching you? Our academic and outdoor learning components are interwoven with each other, deepening learning through finding connections
3
Achievements & certifications
With learning that is immersive, Duke of Ed, Outdoor Council of Canada Field Leader, and Paddle Canada canoeing certifications are all satisfied well beyond minimum standards during the course, recognizing and certifying the achievement of non-academic skills
Sample Immersive Credit Courses
Our Immersive Credit Courses are run in partnership with schools. Tailored to the particular needs and culture of each school, our courses are unique, with each being a one-of-a-kind experience designed around the school's goals.
Schools have the option to have their teaching staff co-lead on any of our programs, enabling the teacher to make connections back to the classroom for students. Equally importantly, this serves as an amazing professional development opportunity for the teacher and the for school: attending teachers will work in partnership with the Headwaters team to run the course, partaking in cutting-edge, research-based educational pedagogy at the forefront of the field, and being able to take those learnings back to their school, integrating them into both their own and the school's regular teaching practice.
Voyage Through Landscapes: The Mighty Missinaibi
CGD3M: Regional Geography, grade 11 (full credit)
30-35 day canoe trip down the Missinaibi River to James Bay
Immersive Conservation Training Canoe Trip
CGR4M: The Environment and Resource Management, grade 12 (culminating assessment linked to in-school course)
8 day Temagami canoe trip
Creating Communities as Active Citizens
CHV20: Civics and Citizenship, grade 10 (curriculum-linked enhancement)
5-6 day winter camping trip in south-central Ontario
The Headwaters Team
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.
With combined decades of experience in outdoor education curriculum development, academic research, and wilderness trip guiding, logistics, and risk management, the Headwaters team brings a unique combination of expertise that sets us apart. Our team has led and overseen wilderness trips in the Northwest Territories; guided Indigenous cultural canoe trips for Québec CEGEPs; worked and conducted academic research at outdoor schools from Ontario to the Yukon; regularly present at conferences, publish papers, and sit on Boards and advisory councils for outdoor educators; hold Master's degrees, teaching certifications, and industry leading wilderness guide qualifications.
Rather than separate the academic researcher, the curriculum designer, the teacher, and the wilderness guide, we bring together these skill sets toward a common cause – developing and delivering extraordinary educational experiences. By putting all of these skills together, in one team, we create a strength of united purpose that is reflected in the quality and uniqueness of our Immersive Credit Courses.
As professionals in outdoor education, we’re aware of the widely varying degrees of exposure, comfort levels, and expected outcomes held by schools, staff, parents, and students alike. Given this dynamic, we strive to have our programs be as customizable as possible, to meet schools where they're at, viewing our relationship with schools less as a third party provider and more as a collaborator in crafting exceptional education opportunities.
"It is easy to understand that all life is physically connected through our chemical composition… However, it is on the [kinship] level that it is much more difficult, and indeed absurd to some, to contemplate that we share a connection to all life, but we do. This has to be felt and experienced – it cannot be rationalized.
~ Dr. Soren Bondrup-Nielsen