Rustling leaves, Dancing wind. The gravel pebbled path stretches into the distance, ending at a turn by the crown shaped rambutan tree. Do we continue the rough but clear path? what awaits us by the crowns of the woods…?
As 2022 began, we entered the space with less confined Safe Management Measures, that is the protocols we live with for the COVID-19 season of Singapore. From 5pax to 8pax to a full opening. We endured the early part of 2022 with multiple clusters of folks being C+, as the nation grappled with the natural increase from the re-openings.
Thankful for the blessings and wellness of our community, everyone rode through the C+ storm safely. As we exited the storm, we heaved a sigh of relief. Unbeknownst to us, a greater storm of challenge awaited us.
This year, we also welcome our youngest Forest School Coach on record, 15 years old, Coach Gerald. He was a coach of the Sunbear Saturday weekly class in 2022. Gerald started with FSS as a child in 2017. He then grew through a Teenage/Youth coach journey with us before being promoted to a full fledged coach at FSS. His experience as a kid, youth and coach at FSS gave us a really rich insight into how we should evolve and develop as a Forest School community. He is now also the Assistant Operation Manager of the Team.
In March, we had our very first FSS led session where a Member of Parliament (Rachel) came along with us for the morning. It was very encouraging, as it shows that we are on a path towards affecting the mindset of the greater public…
In the following month, we had the honor of welcoming two talented instructors from Outward Bound Singapore to spend 6 weeks worth of attachment with us. Through their experience, they showed us the importance of our work and the amazing personnel management that exists in FSS. The whole attachment journey ended with a BBQ session at Kampung Garden with Professor See.
Good initial times, as all stories evolve, needs its challenges. And ours was just beginning…
In April-May we were dealt with dishonorable bullying behaviors from a SPECIFIC group of people in the Agency. The drama was worthy of being on Netflix. It was unimaginable to see such unscrupulous action from real human beings. The episode sparked the challenges that unfolded over the next few months.
From the altercation and bullying episodes, we were faced with further internal issues in our sessions, ranging from physical incidences to coordination problems. The appearance of so many issues within a short period, made us seek the counsel of our village and forest elders. They guided us and pointed us to a clearer sky. But the Work needs to be done by ourselves. From there on in, we began a 6-month journey of transformation and evolution for the second half of the year.
As a community, we realise that we need to recalibrate all our adults (coaches and parents) to the new normal. After the reopening, we (FSS) realised that almost 80% of our coaches and parents came in during the Covid season. That meant that they have no experience of the pre-Covid version of FSS. So a retraining and re-experiencing journey needed to be taken for us as a team and community. We stopped all our recruitment of new coaches, and dove deep into an intense internal capacity building process. Coaches were put through 20+ hours of field training and multiple absorption channels. There were also refreshers and simple relationship building activities. The whole journey of internal capacity building processes, for our team of over 30 part time coaches, stretched over a 6-month period.
As the months went by, we were met with a range of realisations. These realisations led us to the magical treasure within the journey. For us to reach the treasure, our team and community had to go through the whole array of emotions that were bestowed upon us as creatures of earth. We went into the rabbit hole of “economical anxiety”, passed the mountains of “desire for control” and sailed the sea of “navigating our purpose”.
Evidently, there is the realisation that the growth of the Forest School movement is now entering the mainstream. Many preschools, international-schools, community groups and individuals are forming their own little versions of Forest School. This is a success for us as a collective community of Forest Schools, as it means that we now have more people out there who are presenting their own stories through their Forest School journeys, and more children can benefit from the space and experience of connecting with Nature and the Outdoors.
Now this is great from the outside, but this phenomenon would also mean we would be facing mainstream mindset challenges that we had never experienced before, as we were working with the niche group of families and people who came in during our sapling days. The growth of the FS movement also means we may be moving towards the usual business market saturation situation. Honestly, this did get us pretty worried, like when the participation for camps and workshops started to decline in the Sep-Nov period.
We began to behave irrationally by marketing aggressively (just go to our IG to see that mad amount of marketing posters during the SEP-OCT period) without clarity of who we are. We are after all humans living in KPI driven Singapore. Inflation was creeping up during that period, and the worries of financial sustainability and keeping up with everyone was heavy.
During that period of rabbit hole-ing, we started to doubt the purpose of our work. And we were even contemplating how to introduce more control mechanisms to the community, the team and the program. We were looking to fit in with the mainstream mindset…
Nature won’t take you for a ride if you don’t need it…
On a windy night in November, we were back on the drawing board, looking to explore and find out what we needed to do to change our ways and gain that sustainability. As we explored various communication channels like Tiktok & Telegram, we realised that we were wrong in the past few months. It is not the external public that we need to focus on. It is our own community. Our greatest strength lies in the collective intelligence and commitment of our ecosystem. It is not about our presence on social media. It is about nurturing our relationships.
And what exactly does sustainability mean to us at Forest School Singapore? Is it making sure we get a big market share, earn plenty of money, and ride only with the rich and expatriate community? These issues definitely crossed our minds. But that is not our mission, and has never been. As shared from our 2017 in review:
“Forest School will continue regardless of the existence of Forest School Singapore, because our dream is:
For forest school to become a way of learning and living.
For forest school to represent a symbol of sincerity and awakening
For forest school to represent an avenue of authenticity and integrity
For forest school to be the voice for Nature, children and their families.
For forest school to be living in our life.”
With these realisations, we turned our attention inwards once more. And we developed ways to build richer community connections with our current weekly session parents, camp parents and adult learners of FSS. And we let these connections build the sustainability that our ecosystem requires. Instead of doing outreach, we choose to deepen our work as individuals and as a community.
The deepening of our work led us to many realms of learning and reflection. We got to connect with a greater range of knowledge and people who are well versed with the local indigenous heritage of the Malaysia Archipelago. We learnt deeply about the challenges of the Orang Lauts, Orang Asli and Kampung Folks. In the process, we explored the relationship between the Forest School journey on the land and the indigenous ways. The oneness with Mother Nature and the Universe.
Another area we dove deep into was our existing work in Special Needs. In FSS, we are known to welcome every child, parent and coach regardless of their challenges. But that also opens our field to a wider range of issues that can seem overwhelming if we try to do it all alone. But that’s where an ecosystem and a collective effort in partnership with Mother Nature herself allows us to deepen our practice of holding space for these individuals while also drawing clear boundaries of our limitations. We learnt how to activate the wider extended communities of practitioners and support from our rich network of lovely folks.
The deepening of work very conveniently encompasses our work on the Wellness of our community in terms of being Trauma Informed, learning how to weave harmoniously amongst life challenges such as taking rest and “Asking for help” when in need. Many of the Wellness work happens in the day to day of the Forest School Journey. Sometimes, we would even forget that we are doing it, because of how seemingly insignificant they may seem to the buzz, blings and flashes of life.
Forest School Singapore is situated in the forest basin of Singapore. Naturally, our involvement with Environmental issues such as invasive species awareness, climate crisis issues and the battle between connection and protection, are at the forefront of our activist work that we have been deepening over the years. We get to observe, reflect and realise the ways of Nature and the ecosystem, which would really help us as city dwelling folks to understand how to address these seemingly apocalyptic aspects of our situation with the Climate Crisis. As one of the Forest elders once said, “Focus on the Children, Nature will take care of the rest”
While going through all the human realisations and deepening work, we were handed an assignment by Mother Nature herself, The Great Migration.
After 4 years of being at Dairy Farm Nature Park, the time arrived for us to Let the Land Rest and move to another space to continue our work. The decision was made after paying close attention to the clues and wisdom of the land and her creatures. And interestingly, we realised that this whole episode is very much aligned with how the wise indigenous and local people live in this region, moving nomadically across the greater space, to allow for the resting of space from our presence. The rest also gives us the opportunity to evolve our practice and way of doing Forest School. So in good faith and trust, we made the Migration in accordance with Nature’s advice.
All the internal work for us naturally drew the attention and curiosity of the wider sphere of the world locally and overseas. It created the natural outreach avenues that we patiently engage in.
Locally, we were able to share the Forest School ways with many groups of people. They range from schools, to teacher’s professional developments, to community centers, to citizen work group, to conferences/events on preschool education, outdoor learning, environment issues and much more.
Internationally, we further cemented our relationship with our regional Forest School Practitioners from Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. We connected online with friends from US, Canada, UK, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Bhutan, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The cross sharing and opportunities to learn from one another really excited our team and community. Imagine getting to learn personal insights on how the Forest School continues in Snowy land. Woooo. We foresee many exchange opportunities in the coming years.
It was a wonderfully eventful year for us amidst all the challenges and realisations. On Hindsight, this journey is how we grow and evolve to become what we hope to represent in this world – vulnerable, authentic and reflective. We would like to thank everyone who played a part in our journey this year: coaches, children, parents, elders, folks-in-the-park and all our fellow community fellowship. Without all of your commitment and involvement, we wouldn’t have been able to continue the work of Forest School. We are truly grateful for the year of 2022, and we thank everyone for Embracing the Journey of Forest School.
See you in 2023.
Written by: Darren
Editted by: Shimin
Library 