A Workshop with Sean of a “Public School Without Walls”
On September 21, 2026, ECOPLUS held a workshop at Hakkaisanroku Ski Resort in Minamiuonuma City, Niigata Prefecture, with Sean Blenkinsop, who founded a “public school without walls” in Canada, as the guest facilitator.
While traveling in Japan, Sean visited Minamiuonuma to take part in ECOPLUS’s “ABC in Rice Paddy: Rice Harvesting” program on September 19–20 and stayed in the area afterward. A total of 16 people joined the workshop, including local families with elementary school children and high school and university students from the Kanto region.
Sean had also held a symposium in Minamiuonuma during his visit to Japan in 2024. Some participants had attended that event as well, making this a chance to reconnect with Sean after two years.
The workshop aimed to open our senses and build a connection with the place. Over about two hours, participants took part in three activities.
The first involved collecting objects in the seven colors of the rainbow and working together to create one. Participants searched for leaves, flowers, and other things in their assigned color, then arranged them into a rainbow. They spread out, calling to each other as they gathered materials.
A beautiful rainbow was created from stones, flowers, moss, leaves, branches, and more. They also discussed how what can be found may change with the seasons, and even asked, “How many colors are there in a rainbow in Canada?” The activity naturally led to a wide range of conversations.
The second activity focused on building a connection with the place. Sean asked participants to “walk around freely, find something that calls you—something that draws you in—and stay with it for a while to become friends with it.”
Participants then formed groups of three or four and introduced their new “friends,” explaining what had attracted them to them. They found a wide variety of friends, including a leaf caught in a spider’s web, the sound of the flowing river, the land itself, a single stalk of Japanese pampas grass, and soft moss. Participants commented, “I was surprised by how differently people saw things,” “Talking about something I liked helped me connect with the person I was talking to,” and “Introducing my tree friend felt like I was introducing myself.”
In the final activity, participants stayed in the same groups and created and presented one-minute stories featuring their “friends.” The aim was to build on the themes of sensation, beauty, and connection to place while incorporating both perception and feelings.
Participants of different ages worked together to create imaginative stories, including one about a weak dragonfly transforming into a lively grasshopper to save a leaf caught in a spider’s web, and another about an acorn collecting seven scents on a journey to become a grown tree. The children’s free and creative ideas were especially impressive.
One local participant shared, “I usually come here for specific activities like skiing or mountain biking, but this workshop gave me a different perspective and made me realize how much this place has to offer.”
Sean’s workshop showed how looking at a place from a different perspective can lead to new discoveries and learning, highlighting the learning that can come from the place itself.
Sean Blenkinsop
Sean Blenkinsop is a professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada. He studied philosophy of education at Harvard University, where he earned his PhD.
In 2008, he founded The Maple Ridge Environmental School, which has no school building. Instead, students from kindergarten through Grade 7 learn outdoors and in places such as local libraries. He has since continued developing educational approaches at other schools that extend through Grade 12, bringing learning beyond the walls of the classroom. His work seeks to create a new culture of learning that fosters connections with nature, encourages students to understand the places they live in, recognizes local people as co-teachers, and makes the outdoors an important setting for learning.