Students and educators have been profoundly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and one of the ways some schools have coped with the unprecedented times is turning to outdoor classrooms.
Adam Bienenstock’s social enterprise Bienenstock Natural Playgrounds and its sister company OutClass Outdoor Classrooms built one of their outdoor classrooms for Purcell Preschool in Kimberley.
“The demand right now for teachers to be able to teach in a safer environment is pretty high,” Bienenstock told the Bulletin. “So I always laugh when I hear the new policy of a school board is to open the window so you get fresh air and I think, ‘you could just go outside!'”
Using reclaimed wood, Bienenstock’s systems were designed so that anyone can install it. There are desks made from two stumps bolted together that have a climbing handle attached to them so kids can hang their bags and have their own student station. These way between 350 to over 1000 pounds, the heavier being the teacher’s station.
The company sends a set of lifting tongs that can be attached to any machine with lifting capacity to move the units into place. They’re engineered to have a low centre of gravity so they can’t be pushed over and are designed to be both a sitting and a standing desk.
Usually, as in the case with Purcell, the classrooms are put in with volunteer labour. Other than moving the desks into place, the only other thing they need to be able to do is dig two post holes to install the blackboard, made from western red cedar and steel.
There are more complicated versions, for example ones that incorporate a mix of boulders, logs and landforms, but Purcell wanted to go with a quick and easy installation.
“These things sort of run in the $10,000 range to get a whole classroom setup with a couple of volunteers in a day,” Bienenstock explained. “So it’s not an expensive undertaking and that was very important to us to create something that people could just drop in right away that met all the mandates of the public school boards, so they’re fully indemnified, it’s an insured piece, it’s got your manufactured labeling, it’s sealed so it lasts.”
Bienenstock has been in this business well before COVID-19 changed the world. Back in the 1980s he started a landscaping company with a focus specifically on connecting kids to nature.
“We’ve been teaching and training around outdoor learning environments for decades, but now people are starting to think about it as a COVID relief or a piece of COVID infrastructure, but I’ll take it,” he said. “I think it’s nuts that it takes this to realize that, but I’ll take it.”
The underpinnings of this endeavour he explains are twofold, the first being Dr. Fraser Mustard, who was a trailblazing developmental specialist for young children. The second is Bienenstock’s father Dr. John Bienenstock, one of the fathers of mucosol immunology.
“So [Mustard] has the Order of Canada in that side and my father had the order of Canada for how biodiverse environments affect your immune system and specifically the gut-brain connection,” Bienenstock said. “So I started designing spaces and building spaces that hit the fundamental developmental markers for kids and also helped you with your immune system.”
He said those factors launched his career, and today his social enterprise has four divisions encompassing social entrepreneurship and advocacy, where he spends most of his time, training and education, manufacturing, and installation.
When COVID-19 hit, Bienenstock said the idea of building playspaces for kids had to be put on hold for a while, and the idea of pivoting to focus more on outdoor learning environments became a reality. Having “inside information” from his father regarding the immunological side of the pandemic helped the company transition early on.
“A year ago Christmas my dad and I sat down and talked about this, that it was the big pandemic and what are we going to do,” he said. “He at 85 is still involved, understanding at that point, that it was him that was going to be the most deeply affected, but those conversations we were in a fortunate position to be well ahead of the curve there.”
With information from studies showing you are 20 to 1000 times less likely to transmit COVID-19 outdoors, Bienenstock began building classrooms for kids that were easy to drop into place, stable, relatively inexpensive at less than half the price of an indoor classroom and made from surfaces that chief medical officers of health have said are the quickest to shed the virus.
“Wood’s 24 hours, plastic and steel is four or five days of live virus, so you go outside and it cuts it in half again,” Bienenstock said. “So that means that overnight these outdoor classes go to zero. And you get to reset without chemicals and without all of that stuff and you get the beneficial side of not transmitting.”
Bienenstock said his enterprise is on a mission to install 1000 outdoor classrooms across Canada and the United States, and Purcell was one of the early adopters.
Early on Bienenstock was featured in the Sunday New York Times, Huffington Post, CTV and Global National, so people researching into outdoor options for learning were quick to stumble upon his company.
He said he’s got very positive feedback from the school. The classroom is designed to be reconfigured into a play structure if the school no longer wants or needs it as a classroom post-COVID. What they’ve discovered is that once school’s have the outdoor classroom, it’s booked out immediately and often schools call saying they need a second one installed.
“The interesting thing on this is, let’s face it, if you’re a young child you’ve been asked to make a tonne of sacrifices on behalf of adults this year and this was something that was just purely for the kids,” Bienenstock said.
“They learn there all day, they climb on it, they play on it, there’s a series of games that have emerged for them. It’s genuinely sort of their place to hang out, so this is purely something for those kids. It was driven largely by the parents at Purcell and it’s worked out exactly the way they’d hoped, they use it all the time.”
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