WILD Educator Award

How do you encourage teachers to offer outdoor play and discovery during a pandemic? Well, it’s not easy. As we learned in the past year, school closures, lockdowns and orders to isolate make it very difficult indeed.

For Leah Japp, general manager of SaskOutdoors, an organization promoting and facilitating outdoor learning and environmental stewardship among Saskatchewan teachers, school administrators, parents and students, it meant doing things differently. As a trained WILD Education facilitator, Japp has been promoting Project WILD and Below Zero for more than five years, working with innumerable K-12 teachers and other educators around the province through in-person workshops and toolkits to help them connect youth to nature and grow their conservation ethic.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, Japp recognized the challenge but refused to let the cancellation of all in-person opportunities stop her. Instead, she embraced the challenges presented by the pandemic by adapting her environmental education work for a remote, online learning environment. Working collaboratively with CWF staff, Japp was the first WILD Education facilitator in the country to develop and pilot an online Project WILD workshop. According to those who worked closely with her, it was her plucky pioneering spirit, creativity and enduring optimism that enabled her to reimagine and then retool CWF’s WILD Education program to meet a sudden need for activities that could be done online, outdoors and in physically distanced classrooms.

Established in 2015, this award honours an exceptional WILD Education facilitator or instructor who has provided innovative and meaningful experiences for youth that focus on wildlife and the building of a conservation ethic.