From school playgrounds to parks to hockey in the streets, there are plenty of ways for kids to get outside, but the pull of technology often keeps them indoors.

Earth Day 2017 will be held Saturday, April 22, and the focus in Canada this year is EarthPLAY, a program designed to bring outdoor, unstructured play back into children’s lives.

Earth Day Canada says around 70 per cent of all Canadian children spend less than an hour a day outside, and their EarthPLAY initiative is both a fundraiser to build more outdoor adventure playgrounds, and an awareness campaign to get more young people outside.

Debra Harwood, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, is leading a research team examining the experiences of children and educators in an outdoor learning and teaching environment.

Launched last year, the Forest School, run through the Rosalind Blauer Centre for Child Care, is a program for junior kindergarten-aged children that immerses them in nature. They learn the basics of phonics, math, science and art while taking trips through the forests around Brock, and by learning in an outdoor classroom on campus.

Harwood says it’s “fundamentally important” for kids to be spending time in nature.

“In Niagara we have an ideal context for kids to be outside. It’s absolutely beautiful here and we have an abundance of nature,” she says. “The outdoors provokes their interest. It sets the foundations for formalized learning later in life.”

Harwood says the Forest School program is one small step to counter-balance the pressure society puts on children that leads to them spending so much time inside.

“I think we’ve organized children’s lives a bit too much and that’s kind of the idea of making the outdoors a bit more available,” she says. “If we look at children at this young age, they’re in formal learning settings for six or eight hours a day and that’s a long time to be closed off from nature.”

Ryan Plummer, a professor at Brock and Director of the University’s Environmental Sustainability Research Centre (ESRC), says “going outside and cultivating a personal connection with the environment is an enriching opportunity, and offers a chance to enhance environmental consciousness.”

 “We need to be mindful of our relationship with the environment every day; and Earth Day serves as a powerful and widespread reminder of this crucial connection,” he says.

Based at Brock University, the ESRC pursues innovative and transdisciplinary research concerning the environment, sustainability and social-ecological resilience.