The Eden Sustainability Program at Landmark Christian School in Fairburn, Georgia, encompasses the school’s outdoor education values. This intentional placed-based, experiential, and outdoor adventure education programming is meant to teach students the traits of effective leadership.
It spans curricular integration across all grades at Landmark Christian School using six purposefully designed outdoor spaces.
Students engage in collaborative teamwork exercises, experiential adventure-oriented leadership training, environmental place-based learning, planting cultivated gardens, and purposing school-wide sustainability initiatives within those spaces.
Ultimately, Eden is the implemented plan for growing students who are equipped for any challenge with the knowledge that when the storms of life come their way, students will be able to rise above as concerned and educated Christian citizens who are ready to make an impact in the world for Jesus Christ.
“Teaching young people sustainability requires an outdoor setting where nature is the teacher,” said Ann Marie Brezina, director of the Eden Sustainability Program. “Going green in our schools requires abandoning technology and allowing young people to enter the world of imagination that nature provides.”
- Stewardship
Landmark Christian School offers a K4-12 integration of outdoor education to engage students who would be stewards of the Earth, believing this is a God-ordained responsibility to care for the gift of this world and enjoy the benefits of Creation.
As a part of the emphasis on stewardship, the Eden program integrates within the school-day curriculum to bring students to outdoor campus garden locations, where they learn how to grow food sustainably.
They also explore how the world that God created should operate in a sustainable-integrated ecosystem as they discover how plants and trees exist to nurture all other life on earth.
Furthermore, initiatives for practicing sustainability are encouraged through on-campus awareness projects to reduce, reuse, and recycle materials that are used daily through classroom involvement, community projects, clubs, and more.
- Outdoor Discovery
The outdoor classroom allows students hands-on opportunities to apply the concepts they learn in a traditional indoor classroom setting. Whether students are building a birdhouse for blue jays or learning concepts about environmental science by measuring the PH balance of the soil, Eden offers opportunities to get students learning and moving outdoors.
Outdoor learning calms anxieties, boosts resilience, engages problem-solving, reduces the symptoms of ADHD, offers the opportunity for experiential learning, involves more senses in the learning process, and cements learning.
- Adventure Leadership
Adventure is about experiencing some sort of risk that ensures students are pushed from comfort zones to cognitively inherit new leadership character traits they instill towards future pursuits to help build healthy communities. This risk is always used in positive learning situations and spurred by the desire that we equip our students to be leaders.
Eden has dedicated time for students and families to embark on adventures together throughout the school year, learning about teamwork, perseverance, trust, and other core Christian values. Intention is spent on place-based education as they encounter nature hands-on through adventure.
- Relationship
Our nation’s children are struggling with mental illness and screen addiction. One of the great antidotes is to get students outdoors and off screens, talking with one another in meaningful ways.
The Eden program encourages students to make memories, experience their learning with all their senses, and be transformed in the process. Relational, experiential learning in the Eden Sustainability Program does just that…and is a reflection of the life the Lord intended for us—one lived in community, enjoying the good gifts of His creation.
