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Maya and Nayha Gill are budding teachers and are already planning how they will shape their future classrooms.

The identical twins may be a few years away from leading a classroom, but on a recent trip to Las Nubes, ����app’s EcoCampus in Costa Rica that stresses care of the environment and sustainability, they began to imagine future classrooms. The trip to the campus was life-changing for the third-year educational studies students who will begin the Bachelor of Education teaching certification program upon completion of their undergraduate degree program.

In Costa Rica, the sisters stayed with a family who made a major impact. “Marianella, our homestay mom, the absolute best woman I've ever met in my life. She loved us like family,” says Nayha. They visited local classrooms, hiked the forest, painted Indigenous masks and baked cookies at a women’s co-operative bakery, all activities that stress education as a process of self-understanding, gathering resolve and forging deep respectful connections in the world, aligning with the vision of Las Nubes EcoCampus.  

“It's an experience of a lifetime,” says Maya. “Hands-on activities resonate with you. You retain so much more … (The trip) added to our own personal pedagogies, the way we would be teaching. We will definitely be integrating hands-on activities, field trips, experiential learning. We have seen first-hand that you just remember everything so clearly.”  

The Gill twins – nicknamed Los Gemelos by their homestay family, the Spanish word for twins – were students of Steve Alsop, a professor in York’s Faculty of Education. Alsop taught Education for a Sustainable Future in the summer at the Las Nubes EcoCampus. Unusually, the classes he leads there have a mix of undergraduate and graduate students (master’s and doctorate students) from many disciplines. The classes focus on: ecology and sustainability themes; feeling powers of local ecology and community and practicing reciprocity; respect and gratitude in learning environments set within farms, forests, mountains, schools, women’s co-operatives; and Indigenous communities.

“I have had the privilege of teaching there for the last few years. In summer courses, I go down there, and a group of students come and join me. We work together in a series of activities and thoughts and readings on place and land-based education,” Alsop says. “It's a beautiful, energizing and rewarding experience.”

He explains that at a time of great awareness of climate change, biodiversity breakdown and increasing social inequality, people are seeking ways to respond to and support one another. His Las Nubes courses offer that in a beautiful setting, celebrating ways in which all life is related and the responsibility to understand and support each other in life journeys. The setting and lessons offer “a clear advocacy agenda,” he says.  

“It's quite a moving and humbling experience. At the end of the course, students come to me and say it was a profound and motivating experience. And often they say, it's a special life experience. It's really a moment of transformation.”  

Nana Adu-Poku, a second-year PhD candidate in the class, felt that transformation.  

“Dr. Alsop curated a great environment. We could feel the connections he had with the people in the town, the staff at Las Nubes,” says Adu-Poku. “He put thought into where he was taking us and what he wanted us to take away from it, the text he selected for us to analyze each day. It all connected to what we were doing. I appreciated that he took the time to make it a meaningful experience.”

Adu-Poku also stayed with a family – learning a little Spanish from watching Blue’s Clues with the family’s children – and took part in the field trips and cultural activities, including making chocolate at an organic cocoa farm.  

The day and night hikes remain a particularly vivid memory for him.  

“The hikes were really fun because it's like we got to see the same forest, but it was different from day to night. We saw different wildlife, and the views were different too,” Adu-Poku says. “There was a point in the night hike where we turned off all our phones, turned off all the flashlights, and just stood in the darkness. It was slightly terrifying, but at the same time, it was an experience to remember … Growing up where I grew up (Jane and Finch) that's not really something I was normally exposed to.”  

All three students commented on the local community’s awareness of and care for the environment. The twins recalled walking with some children who picked up litter they saw along the way and put it in a garbage can without being asked to.  

“What was really interesting was how conscious they were of the environment. Environmental studies is mandatory in their lessons so it's very normalized and near and dear to their hearts,” says Nayha.  

Adu-Poku noticed how local perceptions of sustainability differed from a North American view. “In different parts of the world, different things are valued. A lot of that community is engaged with efforts to sustain the environment and the forest.”  

Alsop emphasizes the importance of the students’ full experience in providing a comprehensive understanding of ecological conservation and community revitalization and our need to move beyond familiar doomism and techno-fixes (often central to reduce-reuse-recycle approaches.)  

“I think the students really begin to understand and value those words differently: education; sustainability; future. They suddenly find themselves thinking, appraising and questioning Western modernity and associated assumptions. They find themselves reflecting on their own life, regarding what they know, need to know, what they desire and how they can contribute,” he says. 

“And all of that, for me, are values which open and reframe education, sustainability and the future in potentially more generous and generative ways.”

With files from Julie Carl

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