YEARLONG REGISTRATION is open to all families!!
Adult Workshops: Comox Valley
Nature Connection for Parents and Educators
Date: July 8-9, 2023
Location: Green Haven Farm, Merville
Cost: $139 + GST
Time: 10.30am-5pm Saturday and Sunday
Facilitators: Stephanie MacKay and Kester Reid (Bios)
Take an experiential dive into 8 Shields “Coyote” Mentoring as a way to connect with nature, and support deep connection with your kids and students.
We’ll be sharing, and experiencing a set of “core routines” from the 8 Shields model that facilitate connection to land, self and other. These are practices, tools, and skills that make up a culture of place, and of connection.
Our ancestral cultures, and many Indigenous cultures today, continue to value their own forms of these core routines. They include, singing, play, storytelling, council, mind’s eye imagining, questioning, tracking, mapping, present-centred awareness and more. They form the practical structure of a healthy culture and homeland. Many of them you might practice already, even without realizing it, because they are intuitive inclinations to us as humans, and as creatures of a landscape. As such, they make us feel alive.
Because today we have lost many of our particular cultural forms of these routines, as well as our land-based lifestyle, to point them out, and cultivate them can be revelatory and revitalizing,
We will be presenting practical and intuitive ways to integrate these core routines into your parenting and teaching. At Fianna we orient particularly to mythologies as living maps of culture and relationship, so expect a dose of ancestral mystery from the stories and traditions that feed us as a school.
You will come away with a feeling of aliveness, groundedness and curiosity for the mysteries of this land. You’ll be carrying songs, stories, games, practices, and a mischievous excitement to be on the land with your kids, participating in their wonder and their hunger to learn through connection.
Adult Skills Workshops
This year we are offering one-off workshops for adults, in the Comox Valley, to come together and build community around land-based skills. If you are looking to connect more to nature, to hone your bush skills, build your confidence, or gather teaching content as an educator, then these workshops are for you.
We teach within a context of decolonization and grief-tending, approaching these skills as cultural practices that can feed our relationship to land, history and community. We aim for these gatherings to be experiences of depth, connection and discovery for all skill levels. We’ll challenge ourselves to apprentice to the landscape, working from that relationship to build our personal capacities, and our village.
We learn best in the container of supportive community, so expect games, stories, songs and one-on-one mentorship as a part of each session.
11th March 2023: Fibre
Natural fibres were essential to our ancestors for cordage, cloth and basketry. These are things we still depend on daily, and learning to harvest and process fibres for their production is an incredible way to deepen connection with life and the landscape. These fibres bind, contain, and carry all that gives us life. We’ll introduce some local fibres, practice harvesting and processing, and produce some baskets from plants.
Location: Green Haven Farm, Merville
Cost: $60 + GST
Time: 10am-3pm
29th April 2023: Plants
Spring brings forth abundant plant growth: the return of energy from deep in the ground up into the fresh air. Suddenly, sprouts and leaves are pushing up full of water and complex chemicals that can feed and heal our bodies. We will study some local plants for use as foods and medicines, identifying, harvesting, and processing them together to take home vital knowledge of just how richly the land can provide for our needs.
Location: Green Haven Farm
Cost: $60 + GST
Time: 10am-3pm
28th May 2023: Bird Language
With the return of the birds we get to experience so much colour, lightness and song out on the land. But beyond their captivating beauty, the birds are also constantly communicating very accurately what is happening in the woods - from predation, to animal movements, to topography, to available resources; like us, they talk about pretty much everything! We will be studying the five main languages of the birds, learning to notice the character of different bird calls to ascertain what might be happening in the immediate environment. They see much that we don’t, and have much sharper attention, so if we can pay attention to them, we can learn what is beyond our own senses. Expand your awareness, and your mind, with the birds as your guides and teachers.
Location: Green Haven Farm
Cost: $60 + GST
Time: 10am-3pm
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