If you're driving south down Hillsboro Pike toward Green Hills, you'll see a sign in front of Trinity Presbyterian Church reading “Nashville’s outdoor classroom enrolling now.” The sign belongs to the Linden Waldorf private school, which shares a 12-acre campus with the church.
If you know what to look for, you can catch a quick glimpse of the outdoor classrooms. From the road, they don’t look like much — big wooden structures that could be storage sheds or playground pavilions. But seeing them up close provides a new perspective.
Each of the eight outdoor classrooms hosts a slew of tiny desks and chairs made from flat boards and tree trunks. Portable chalkboards stand in the front, and wooden walls are lines with signs and decorations. The lack of enclosed spaces makes it easy to see surrounding trees and foliage. Nearby fire pits sit waiting to be used again.
Photo: Tricia Drake
These open-air classrooms did not exist a year ago — they were built in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents and faculty at Linden Waldorf knew it wouldn’t be safe to hold classes indoors, but they wanted to keep learning in person, even if that meant braving the weather.
“We had class out here all day every day, pretty much the whole year,” head of school Tricia Drake tells the Scene. “We took off a couple of weeks and a handful of days here and there when it was just too cold to hold a pencil. But other than that, we were here.”
While most of Nashville’s students were tuning into class virtually from their homes, those enrolled at Linden Waldorf were learning outdoors (except for orchestra classes). Every day they stacked classroom materials into all-terrain wagons and carted them outside. In the winter, they also had to stock campfires, do exercises, run around and stay bundled up to keep warm.
And it seems to have worked. According to Drake, not a single COVID-19 case arose at Linden Waldorf during the last school year.
Learning outside also creates unique educational opportunities. Because Linden Waldorf is a private school with its own curriculum, teachers have more autonomy and flexibility to change things up and promote experiential learning. “If that means stopping class because a beautiful hawk flies down — we have hawks that live here — [so they can stop] class to talk about hawks, they’re encouraged to do that,” says Drake.
Photo: Tricia Drake
In-person classes will resume throughout the county in the coming school year, but Drake expects that Linden Waldorf students will still continue to spend lots of time learning outdoors.
There are other schools with outdoor classrooms inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic peppered across the country. Drake isn't aware of any others in the Southeast.
“I had the time, I had the resources, I had a very supportive board," says Drake. "We obviously have 12 acres of space, so I was set up in an ideal situation to be able to build these classrooms."
“Not every school has all of those things aligned for them, so I've been working with other schools and other states that will just call me up and say, ‘I can't do that but what would you suggest?’ And it's been great.”
