In the 2024-2025 academic year, the Red House initiated an outdoor teaching pilot by transforming their Baker Family Terrace into an outdoor classroom. This pilot explored the reciprocal relationship between learning processes and the learning environment. In this session hosted outdoors on the Baker Family Terrace, participants will experience some of the place-based teaching approaches employed in outdoor classes on the Baker Family Terrace and learn about the techniques, activities, and best practices faculty have implemented to connect the local environment to their pedagogies. After sharing additional examples from place-based and outdoor learning from other Georgetown colleagues, facilitators will also share findings from a Red House report entitled “Context Matters: A Fall 2024 Case Study on Place-Based Teaching.” We hope that participants leave this session engaging the question of “can we have class outside today?” as an opportunity to reframe academic content in context for transformative learning.
