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Our Educational Philosophy and Learning Community
- The power of a dynamic cultural model

As important as what you learn at the Residential Program is the way in which you learn it. A primary educational principle at Wilderness Awareness School is that hands-on, field-based experience leads to the deepest learning.

Knowing something by reading about it or hearing someone else share their expertise is a surface level of knowledge. Our intent is to cultivate a deeper, authentic knowledge only accessible through direct personal experience, deepened by shared reflection and a constant sense that there is always something yet to be discovered.

In light of this philosophy, we balance the presentation of information in lecture with important activities, exercises, challenges, and important daily routine that allow students to gain the authentic knowledge that comes from living your own adventures and pursuing your own genuine questions and mysteries.

Some survival schools emphasize the “struggle” of humans vs. nature and focus on “toughening up” students. The Residential Program is perhaps unique as a survival school or wilderness survival course. It blends hard skills necessary to journey into nature without modern gear together with naturalist awareness and spiritual inquiry to cultivate profound relationship to the world that is sustaining us.

Residential Program students are nestled within a large learning community that encompasses Wilderness Awareness School. This larger community consists of fellow students, both youth and adults, participating in our other intensive programs; a range of staff, both instructors and administrators, who visit and support this wilderness course in various capacities; a council of elders available to provide guidance; apprentices, volunteers, and a large circle of program graduates; as well as independent community groups.

This large community of people, all fully engaged in the grand exploration of how we can create a regenerative, earth-based, human-scaled culture, is essential to the success of our program. The support and encouragement students share with this community super-charges each person's learning journey, and the connections and friendships students develop while living within this remarkable community last a lifetime.

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