The Land Education Dreambook is intended for organizations and groups who are interested in developing land education programs for youth. We have designed this as a guided process to lead you through different aspects and topics that may be helpful in visioning and planning your program. This Dreambook includes an Introduction to Land Education, Working with Young People, Understanding the Role of Facilitator, Designing a Youth Program, and Sample Activities that you may want to use in your program.

The Land Education Dreambook is developed by the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab and is grounded in decolonial, anti-hierarchical, and anti-racist approaches to land education.

Throughout this process, we offer various points of reflection and meditation on aspects of program development. These prompts are intended to be spaces of openness and dialogue rather than prescriptive tasks to complete. They also serve as examples of engagements you may wish to employ with participants in your program. Take your time to get comfortable with the content and the activities and engage in a way that feels most meaningful to you. 

Sometimes these activities use metaphors or physical grounding as a way to think about our relations to one another and land. These activities may not be available to all people in the ways they are described here. In our programs, we should anticipate people with different bodies, different ways of thinking and relating, entering into our spaces and plan for diverse ways of engagement (we will speak to this further in section 2 - Working With Young People). When engaging in the activities described in this book, feel free to participate in ways that feel available to you. 

While the prompts in this Dreambook can be responded to individually, in its fullest version we envision this as a collective process. We suggest that the prompts and activities in this Land Education Dreambook be undertaken and discussed collectively, for example among the staff team developing a program, or with input from advisory boards or community members.

Sections of the Dreambook

(1) Introduction to Land Education

This section helps us to think about our collective and individual relations to land in order to better understand land education programming methods.

(2) Working with Young People

This section helps us to think about the aspects of working with young people that will shape your youth program.

(3) Understanding Your Role as Facilitator

This section helps us to think about our roles and responsibilities as facilitators.

(4) Designing a Youth Program

This section will take you through different aspects of designing your youth program. 

(5) Summary of Activities

This section includes a summary of activities from the previous sections and outlines several additional sample activities you may want to include in your youth program. The activities vary in approaches: there are arts activities, sensory activities, photo activities, geospatial activities, and recording-based work.