The Campus Wild: Design for Outdoor Classrooms
Aloni Cahusac
You don’t have to go far to get “Out There, Together!”
This workshop shifts the focus from off-campus expeditions to the regenerative ecosystems right outside our classroom doors. This session will use case studies of UWCSEA East campus’s nine environmental classrooms – creative and vibrant experiential spaces – found within our urban campus boundaries.
We’ll explore how to transform overlooked corners – from courtyards to roundabouts, rooftops to perimeter gardens – into living labs and environmental classrooms where students can connect deeply with nature every day. This is not Urban Gardening 101. This is the pedagogy of campus rewilding.
This session will explore the benefits of building sustainable, small-scale campus initiatives like seven-layer food forests, mud kitchens, composting systems, and chicken coops in order to strengthen place-based connections that foster community. Come and learn about how these little regenerative ecosystems and wild corners have become powerful tools for teaching sustainability, promoting student and staff well-being, all while reinforcing systems that bring our K-12 curriculum to life.
You will leave this session with inspiration and actionable strategies, which you can use to start or expand your own outdoor environmental classrooms on campus. This is campus rewilding – out there together.
About Aloni
A true ocean warrior, marine biologist, and shark lover, Aloni is actually a part-time mermaid. She is a PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor and a passionate international educator who spends her free time on liveaboard ocean expeditions throughout Southeast Asia. Specialising in both Wildlife Biology (BSc), Outdoor & Experiential Education (BEd) during University, Aloni has since built a career inside classrooms, bringing experiential learning and community connections to life – in spaces that don’t typically lend themselves to such – for example, highly developed urban campuses in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bangkok, to name a few.
A proud member of the UWC movement for the past 11 years, Aloni currently spends her time developing, designing, and coordinating environmental sustainability initiatives from K-12 at UWCSEA’s East Campus. She loves spending time with students and teachers in composting bays, rooftop gardens, chicken coops, rewilding spaces, and biodiversity hotspots around campus, building rich bonds between people and the planet, for a more sustainable future.
