OUTDOOR EXPERIENCES
For the days onsite at PCEC, the program unfolds through four concurrent narratives. Delegates select a narrative each day and follow that pathway through the story of UNLEASH, exploring ideas from different perspectives. As sessions vary slightly across narratives each day, please refer to the program below to view the specific topics and presenters.
FRIDAY 15TH MAY
1. Empowering Conservation Action: Perth Zoo’s Habitats for Wildlife Program in Action
Perth Zoo’s Habitats for Wildlife program is transforming how young people connect with nature by empowering students—from Kindergarten to Year 12—to become active contributors to conservation in their own communities. More than an education initiative, Habitats for Wildlife is a movement designed to nurture curiosity, environmental responsibility, and youth leadership across Western Australia.
This interactive field trip session will introduce participants to the program’s vision of creating schools as hubs of environmental action, where students of all abilities are supported to design and deliver meaningful, curriculum aligned conservation projects. Through hands-on, inquiry-based learning, the program builds capacity in young people to restore habitat, monitor local biodiversity, and critically evaluate conservation challenges and solutions.
Following a short overview of the program’s framework and outcomes, attendees will take part in Empowering Conservation Action—a practical demonstration led by participating students. This activity will showcase a simplified habitat survey, highlighting how children collect ecological data, assess habitat quality, and translate their findings into real-world conservation actions.
By sharing knowledge, tools, and student-led practice, this session will demonstrate how Perth Zoo is cultivating confident, informed young advocates for wildlife and building a future where every school community contributes to a healthier, more biodiverse Western Australia.
Presenter: Bec Lim, Emily Collins & students
2. Co Designing Youth for Wildlife: Young Leaders Shaping Conservation Education at Perth Zoo
This session will showcase how the Youth Working Group is redefining youth participation by providing authentic opportunities for members to contribute to program structure, activity design, branding, communication materials, and evaluation processes. By engaging young people as collaborators rather than recipients, the initiative builds leadership capability, strengthens environmental identity, and nurtures the confidence necessary to drive meaningful change for wildlife and the environment.
Participants will hear directly from Youth Working Group members as they share insights into the co design journey, highlighting how they generate ideas, test activities, and bring youth perspectives into organisational decision-making. Through practical examples—from designing pilot phase activities to contributing to program branding and messaging—presenters will demonstrate how youth-led thinking is shaping a dynamic, relevant, and impactful conservation program.
This session highlights a powerful model of youth engagement where young people lead, create, and influence real-world conservation outcomes. By embedding youth agency at every stage, Youth for Wildlife is cultivating a generation of informed, motivated young leaders and positioning Perth Zoo as a place where youth voice drives innovation, connection, and environmental action.
Presenter: Naomi Adamazyk & Youth members
3. Kinaesthetic Learning through Mimicry
In this workshop, we explore kinaesthetic learning; learning through movement and mimicry. When we copy each other, or even animals, we use special brain cells called mirror neurons that help us understand how others feel. This builds empathy, curiosity, and a strong sense of connection.
We will seek out animals at the zoo and test learning through mirror neurons, observing and copying the animals, noticing how they respond, and reflecting on how this makes us feel. We’ll also explore what questions arise and what information we are able to gather.
We'll share our experiences through map making and storytelling, translating the moment into new forms to relive it, understand it, and see it differently.
What if learning could be more connected to the natural world? What if school supported the formation of deep relationships, and invited all our senses into the way we collect and interpret data?
Presenter:Daniel Burton, Educated by Nature
4. Learning in the landscape: Lessons from landscape architecture
How can we design our suburban environments for insects, birds and animals - rather than just for humans? What do we learn when we think about our environment in this way, and how can this change perspectives?
For the More-Than-Human Studio, UWA Master of Landscape Architecture students worked with local governments, community members and First Nations consultants to create more-than-human landscape strategies for suburbs across the Perth metropolitan area. The students each adapted, adjusted and redesigned existing suburban environments for a chosen more-than-human client, with clients ranging from the turtle frog, to the long necked turtle, to the quenda, and more.
The results are a series of optimistic, progressive and intriguing suburban retrofits, designed by students who have developed deep empathy for the more-than-human inhabitants we live beside. Their designs, in turn, are created as learning landscapes - passing this new awareness on to the humans who live in our suburban environments.
This approach challenges the business-as-usual human-centred design approach that is commonly used for the design of our public spaces. It invites research, learning and imagining around the social and ecological systems needed to ensure both human and more-than-human beings can thrive, long-term, in the suburbs of our future.
Presenter: Rosie Halsmith
5. Heartspaces, Hope, and the power of 'Unless'
At the end of his short essay, ‘Beyond Ecophobia’, David Sobel implores us to “allow [children] to love the Earth before we ask them to save it”. With this refrain in mind I will unpack my role as an OSCH mentor at Nature’s Atelier, a nature-based early childhood centre in Vasse, Western Australia, and how I integrate slow pedagogical principles of deep nature connection, ecological awareness and environmental stewardship into my practice as an innovative early childhood educator. More specifically, in this personal presentation I will reflect on the heartstrings that motivate my deeply philosophical, nature-based approach, and the importance of promoting, protecting and preserving large outdoor learning environments as natural habitats for play, exploration, and belonging. In doing so, I will describe my relationship with the exceptional playspaces at Nature’s Atelier, as well as other emotional landmarks from my life that I draw strength from, nurturing landscapes that I have come to call “heartspaces” that give me the courage to work towards a better future. I will conclude by discussing the role of ‘active hope’ in environmental advocacy and early childhood education, and what I call “the power of Unless”; a mantra inspired by the one and only Dr Seuss, who, in ‘the Lorax’, warns that “unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not”.
Presenter: Beau Deurwaarder
6. Exploring The Habits of Learning – Hands On!
Do you think you’re more creative than a primary school student? Do you know much about the five habits of learning? At Subiaco Primary School, we have been learning about the different habits of learning through the ‘Creative Schools’ program, and we love to share what we have learnt! Come along to learn more about the different habits of learning, identify any of your strengths and weaknesses, and participate in some ‘hands-on’ activities that explore these habits more. The sessions will be run by Year 5 and 6 students from Subiaco PS, and they will be your teachers for the session!
Presenter: Subiaco Primary School (Gemma Hayley)
7. Making Space for Unstructured Nature Play
In an era of complexity and constraint, unstructured play offers a radical invitation: to trust children as co-designers of their own learning. Nature Play WA’s programs and advocacy support all children from early learning through primary and secondary schooling across diverse cultures, abilities, and communities, creating inclusive environments where all can flourish. Nature Play WA’s nature based design initiatives challenge traditional boundaries between classroom and playground, proposing that the most transformative learning environments are those that make space for spontaneity, curiosity, and connection to place.
This session explores how educators and designers can create school environments that unleash unstructured play as a driver of cognitive, emotional, and social growth. Framed through the lenses of Engage, Experiment, and Reflect, the discussion considers how outdoor, sensory-rich spaces nurture self-regulation, creativity, and wellbeing; how co-design processes embed cultural and ecological understanding; and how design itself can become pedagogy.
8. Mapping Play, Designing Possibilities: A Collaborative Journey to an Adventure Hub
This session will present a collaborative case study between Methodist Ladies’ College, Four Landscape Studio, and Cath Fitz OT, focused on transforming an underutilised outdoor space into a dynamic Adventure Hub accessible for students of all ages and abilities. Initial play mapping revealed minimal opportunities for play within the existing space. Through play mapping and participatory design workshops with students and educators, the team identified key play needs and aspirations, including opportunities for challenge, exploration, and restorative nature connection.
Participants will engage in an interactive exploration of the design process, specifically applying the Tool for Observing Play Outdoors (Loebach & Cox, 2020) and consultation techniques, and hear from students about their experiences throughout the process and how they experience the Adventure Hub today! The session will uncover how co-design principles and evidence-based play frameworks can inform innovative outdoor spaces that foster wellbeing, connection, self-regulation and resilience. Attendees will leave with practical tools and inspiration for integrating diverse play opportunities into their own learning environments.
Ideally, this session would be presented in an outdoor play space (?at the zoo), if this is not possible, efforts will be made to make the session as interactive as possible.
Presenter: Cath Fitzhardinge & Andrew Thomas