Play as Sanctuary with Dr. Deborah MacNamara (a Teach Outdoors podcast transcript)

What Does Play Actually Look Like Outdoors?

Lauren: So I would love to first ask you, what does play actually look like outdoors versus structured activities or free recess time?

Deborah: Yeah. Well, I think we have to dig into the definition of what is true play, and if we had to distill it to the very essence, true play is just the absence of work.

And when I talk about work, it's work that would lead to outcomes, like a structured activity. Structured activities are often very work-based because they lead to outcomes—there are consequences, there are rules, there's inside or outside those rules.

True play is really not bounded that way. I mean, it is boundaried in terms of you need a space for it—it's not just a free-for-all. There are some boundaries in terms of what's out of bounds and adult input that way. But true play has a sense of freedom—there's no work involved.

And the most important work that kids oftentimes have to do that's invisible is the work of connection. So it should be free of that need to be pursuing your contact and closeness and attachment and "Who's taking care of me? Am I safe?"

So, true play is the state that you enter into that is devoid of work of any kind. Structured activities, by their nature, tend to push it into a work mode. That's very easy to see because there are outcomes that someone else has designed. There's someone else's algorithm, if you want to put it that way—outcomes and expectations and consequences. You get it right or you get it wrong. That's all work-based type of agenda.

But it's interesting when you look at free recess—that has oftentimes been associated with true play, but what I've seen, and I'd ask your audience of educators, you could crowdsource this very easily: What I'm seeing and hearing from educators across Canada and around the world, to some degree, is that recess is one of the most wounding places for children now today.

They seem to—instead of going out to play and being restored and refreshed and ready to learn—they seem to be more upset, more emotionally wounded. Altercations, included, not included. It seems to be a very alarming, Lord of the Flies-type situation, with less adults available for supervision, more of children taking matters into their own hands to decide pecking order, and the wounding is exponential.

So there is no emotional safety in those types of settings when the relational needs are so high and they're trying to sort it out themselves. So I would say that free recess, while I do believe there are pockets where recess and lunch can lead to true play, the lack of emotional and relational safety in those places precludes any rest that's required for true play.

And so then when you get to outdoor play, I mean, you could have those same characteristics there. However, there's something very different about outdoor play, in the sense that we're returning children to a very living environment where they're engaging as a sensory being, a relational being through the senses, back into those spaces. And so it's cultivating a relationship with something that's much bigger than you, that holds you.

You know, I think about my daughter when she worked at one of the local mountains as an outdoor summer guide. And they would play this game with the kids, that if you were lost in the forest and you got separated from the group, that you would just go hug a tree and hold on to that tree until you were found.

And I thought, what a brilliant way—not only to play, to teach the kids about something—it wasn't for real, it wasn't like, "Okay, in the case you get lost," and alarming them. It was like, you know, there's living things around you, go hug a tree, we'll find you. But what a sense of being held in relationship.

And I don't know, you know, are we ever too big for nature? Like, you know, is the tree gonna yell at us that we're too loud, or too noisy, or too messy, or aren't using the right manners, or... are you really in trouble with a tree or a bush or digging a hole? Like, you know, it's just so forgiving, it's so generous, and so I think it invites true play because it creates those natural conditions for rest and exploration, and asks very little of you except to immerse yourself as a sensory being.

And so I think this is where you'd start to see more of that true play, that expression from within the child as they explore, discover, come to know themselves, and slow down enough just to experience the changing nature of the world, the developmental nature of it.

One of my friends is a grade 2 teacher, and she said she just knew she had to take the kids outside. Her kids were bouncing off the wall, she had so many special needs, not a lot of support, not a lot of resources, and things were just really messy inside. So she built a garden, and they did gardening, and then she said, "I just took them for a walk through the forest." And we did that as part of our ritual every day, and you know, I thought, well, they're grumbling, what are we gonna get from it?

And as they started, she said it was just magical over the year. They started to notice the changing of the leaves, the tree and the branch that had fallen, and they started to become part of that natural world and their perception started to take off. And it was beautiful.

Lauren: Oh, I love hearing those stories, because I think it shows how simple it doesn't have to be that complicated. It's as simple as going outside for a walk, but your colleague was making that a part of her daily routine. So that commitment that we as the educators know something's not working, we're trying to figure out, we've got that hunch that we know we need to fix something. And she put it into place and it was working magically for the kids.

Deborah: Oh, yeah, it was life-saving for all of them, her and the children, yeah.

The Four Irreducible Needs

Lauren: Now, when we're talking about those needs, there are these four—you call them four irreducible needs. How do those show up when we are playing outside?

Deborah: So, as a developmentalist—studying the science of human development—really digging into what are the conditions that allow us to grow well. It's not only true of our children, it's true for us, it's true of our teenagers, it's true at any point in our life. These four conditions drive healthy development forward and keep us well—emotionally well, physically well, spiritually, whatever dimension you want to look at.

And one of them is obviously play—these places where we enter into, away from ourselves, but into ourselves, in terms of away from the work mode that we're in and into this sense of discovery, exploration, capacity to feel without the outcomes of the world weighing on us. So that's one of the irreducible needs.

And it really is where children become themselves. Someone asked me on a podcast, "Who is most influential in your life and who you became?" And I said, it wasn't a person. It was a what. It was play. Play is where you always become who you are—your separate fingerprints of your identity, your interests, all the rest of it.

And the other irreducible needs are the need for relationship, the need to feel, and the need for rest, along with play. Those are the four conditions.

So, the need to attach, to feel that you are in cascading care, something is taking care of you, you can rest in that, there's safety there, you don't have to work for love, it's given to you. There's something bigger than you holding onto you. I think that's why so many people are turning to nature today, just to feel held again and to feel safe.

Emotionally, something that can allow for that emotional expression, to have that invitation for expression, to be able to not be in trouble and have repercussions for the expression that needs to come out. Like, you know, it needs to go somewhere, and so in play and out into the world or into our relationships, that emotional expression keeps us well. If emotion gets locked in, we don't do well with that. That's where you get distress in the body and stress-related illnesses.

And this capacity to rest is really—it's not just physical rest that's required, obviously, to sleep so that you can grow and recover, to eat and be able to digest your food, but also rest from having to make your relationships or your attachment needs work. Rest—feeling safe. Like, we always talk about, well, you know, do you feel safe? Are kids feeling safe? Well, you can't make yourself feel safe. You have to be feeling held in relationship, and that could be a god, a Buddha, it could be nature, it could be whatever, where you just feel something is taking care of me, I can rest, and the focus can go on self and can go on growing.

And so those four conditions work together. When created together, they create the optimum conditions for growth and development and recovery if there are hardships and adversity. These conditions would even be more important for recovery and healing as well.

And that's what we work at. Like, we think we have to teach them so many things, but actually, if you provide these conditions, kids flourish, and we're just like, wow.

Lauren: Yeah, and I think even with the students that I'm working with, which are grade 2/3, I can name this stuff explicitly with them. Like, they are old enough and mature enough to understand the power of why we are outside. Not that I think we always have to explicitly name it, but as the educator, when I am doing my weekly write-ups, our learning stories that we send home to our parents, that's an opportunity for me to name: We were outside, we were playing, we were feeling, we were resting. And this is why it's so important at this age.

Deborah: Yeah, you created the optimum conditions for learning, the optimum conditions for growth, optimum conditions for a child to feel they're cared for and to have emotional expression. They feel safe, and when you feel safe, you can learn. If you don't feel safe and you're preoccupied with safety, there's no learning or very little learning that's going to happen.

You know, the human being is remarkable in that capacity. And everything that I see, read, or experience with the educators that I work with—as my friend said, he runs an elementary school back in Ontario where winters are oftentimes outside. He said no child was ever sent in from the outdoors to the principal's office. It contains and holds it all.

And this idea that the most dysregulated kid in the classroom—the fear was, if you put them outside, they're going to fall apart. And actually, the opposite is true. They thrive. And again, it's because we have these conditions of relationship, invitation for feeling, the capacity to play, to come to rest. And you've got these irreducible needs that drive human development forward.

Supporting Dysregulated Students Outdoors

Lauren: Yeah, well, that's quite funny, because one of my next questions was going to ask you about dysregulation when we are outside playing, because I know a lot of teachers do worry about that. One teacher outside with 25 students, roughly. And if you do happen to have a student that becomes dysregulated during outdoor play, what are some strategies that teachers can co-regulate without shutting down that outdoor play experience? Not saying, "Okay, everybody, stop, we're going back inside, let's all get out of the forest," right? What are some other strategies?

Deborah: Yeah, well, if we look again back to those four irreducible needs, we can't—play actually rests on relationship and emotional safety. So if we had to dial it back and say, okay, well, if a child is really struggling outside, they're really not necessarily in a play mode. They're really in that place of unrest emotionally.

And so, what brings emotions to rest? Yes, play can help, but you might have an environment where their play is a challenge and feels unsafe for other children, which is not play for them if that person is disruptive that way.

So, the question then is, okay, well, what else could help with that emotional unrest? And, well, that is to pull the child into relationship with you. A walk and a talk, come in for a check-in, feeding them something, you know, whatever that might look like. But how could you do that if you didn't have a relationship first with your student?

So everything that we do in education doesn't work without relationship. Because you can't lead them, you can't walk beside them, support them if we're strangers to them. And they're not going to follow us, and we can't create those conditions then for every kid.

So, it's about, again, coming back to relationship, making sure that we're able to collect the child, then deal with the problem. If we can solve or bring the emotions to rest and get them back into relationship with us and lead them forward, then we can lead them back into the play.

But it's not play for everybody if someone's coming unglued and the stick has become a gun and kids are like, "I'm scared." That's not play for those kids.

Lauren: Yeah. Yeah, and I think that is exactly what we need to hear as teachers—why that's September, October, when you hear us saying, we haven't really gotten to the meat of our curriculum yet, because we are still working on building relationships from the educator to the students, but also ensuring that the students and students between themselves are meshing. We're making lots of time and space for group building activities indoors and outdoors, so that we can build that trusting relationship.

Deborah: Yeah, they've gotta follow you, and if they don't follow you, there's no discipline strategy that's gonna save you. There's no technique, or worksheet, or nice glossy brochure or program that you're going to give that's going to solve those problems that are really going to be built in those safe, trusting relationships that have to go forward where we are in the lead.

And, you know, as an educator, how we take care of the most vulnerable or needy student in our classroom becomes the culture and the invitation that we set for all students. And so, those are wonderful opportunities to very quickly set the tone and create trust, but they're also a precipice where if you don't, you're like, oh my god, I gotta figure this out.

So, you know, and that's where I think so much of being a teacher is that judgment and turning to other teachers and learning and adapting and being resilient ourselves.

Students Who Struggle with Unstructured Time

Lauren: Yeah, it's such an emergent dance, right? If I move here, what's gonna happen? Well, and now that I'd like to pick your brain a bit more about this whole developmental psychology piece, because we all have those students that struggle with the unstructured time at first, you know, they either complain that they're bored, I get that often, or they are constantly coming up saying, "Well, what should I do next? Am I allowed to do this?"

So, for those students, what is happening developmentally? And then, how can we support those students without directing their play? I don't want to tell them what to do.

Deborah: I know, I used to get this too with my students, and the more ambiguous I would make the assignments—like, you could do an interpretive dance, you could do a PowerPoint, you could do a song, you could give me a paper—"Well, what's gonna be on the test? Like, what do you want?"

And so much of this, I think it's really—when you distill it to the essence—it's really about alarm. It's really about that sense of, "I'm going to get it wrong, or I am wrong, or there's something wrong with me, or there's going to be something wrong in my relationship with this person who has power and authority over me, or whom I care about."

And so I think there is that sense, because, you know, in education, there is a power differential between us and our students. And we're not friends, and we do have to lead, and we do have to create the conditions for safety for everyone. It's, you know, it's not just one child's needs, it's everybody's, and we're responsible for that leadership.

But I think a lot of what drives kids' behaviour is alarm, and so what is the answer? If alarm is about separation, then the answer to separation is connection.

So then the question is, how do I connect with the student to bring them to rest so that they can move into play, move into discovery mode?

I was thinking of that tethering—that if you are connected, then it frees you to be an explorer. But without that connection, you're lost, you're floating in space.

And so, if a child's coming up to you and saying, you know, "Is this right?" or "What do I do?" and "I'm bored," they're not at rest to be able to play, and so what's the cue for us to bring them in closer, not to push them out.

Well, you can figure out, or whatever—bring them in closer. I know that's difficult, I know it's hard, but "Come on, let's come over here, I want to see... I've got to walk over here anyway, you can keep me company." You move them into relationship, and then you use your relationship to move them into play from that place of rest, but they have to be tethered.

And so, that's an alarm response that I would read that as. Where's my structure? Where's my routine? Where's the guidepost where I can be assured that what I'm doing is right, and I'm not out of relationship or expectations?

Lauren: Yeah. Well, and I can remember one particular student—I think there was a lot of uncomfortable feeling with the fact that we were taking a what he seemed as a break from academia time. That he should be reading and writing and doing math, and we were out in the forest. And it was this, "Well, can I bring my book out to read?"

No, we're gonna go play in the forest for, you know, half an hour. And you could see the stress was real. And so, as you were speaking, I can make that connection. He was feeling alarmed, right? He was feeling very uncomfortable that he was doing something wrong, that maybe he'd get in trouble at home, because it definitely wasn't going to get in trouble at school.

Deborah: That's the work mode, and look at how we're ingraining our children in the work mode, that they feel unusual and peculiar when they're not task-focused. Like, I bet if you did a crowdsourcing of all your teachers—how many kids are more alarmed by being in play and being out of the work mode? How many adults tell you, "I no longer know how to play?" Play is an instinct. It's hardwired. It's not a luxury. It's a necessity.

And so, you know, but in a knowledge-based, globalized, competitive market where, you know, education is everything, the knee-jerk reaction—and I used to work in academies with tenured faculty, and I would see it all the time—is the grind for knowledge is somehow going to save you.

Well, we're going to be disabused of that notion pretty quickly when AI floods in and we realize that knowledge isn't the answer. As my students would say to me, "I have to come to your university classes because you don't lecture from the textbook, you don't do anything from the textbook. I have to read everything and know everything before I come to your class, Deb." This was like 20 years ago. "You make me use the information!" Yes!

Yes! This is what education is—it's playing with your knowledge and your ideas. And so the most animating features of the human being is our capacity to care and feel and love each other, or not love each other, and also to play. Like, what do we have left that makes us really uniquely human? Those things.

And so our comfort and our discomfort with play is really problematic, and so what you're doing is so important to restore us back to those instincts. The instinct to play is right beside the centers of breathing in the brain. It is central.

Lauren: Yeah. Well, and I think very much related is the lost skill of creativity. You know, when we're playing a simple game outdoors, you know, "This Is Not a Stick" after the beautiful book, and it's taking quite a few experiences of rereading the book and playing it outside before quite a few of our kids can see it as being something other than a stick. It does take a while, but doesn't mean we don't give up, right? We don't give up.

Deborah: And it's there, and look how you can recover and reclaim it, even if the conditions elsewhere have really closed those doors, but you put children back in these natural environments with a leader who believes in it, it creates the conditions, and you see this recovery. So that's the hope.

Will Kids "Go Wild" Outside?

Lauren: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I also wanted to ask you—I think I'm trying to think of all the different worries that teachers are thinking when we think about true play outdoors. I think that teachers worry that if they do allow for this true, unstructured outdoor play that these students will go wild. They're going to forget about the boundaries, expectations, can't remember what they are. So, you know, what does the research and your clinical experience actually tell us about that fear? Is it valid? Is it totally unfounded?

Deborah: Well, I think we have to lead no matter where we are. We don't stop being the teacher, the leader, the one who creates that sense of safety and boundaries. And so play is a bounded space, and so what does that look like? How do we lead into play? And how do we create that sense of bounded space, whether that's the amount of time we have, or the space that we're exploring, or the things that are available to us in that space to explore. Like, there are still some parameters there. It's not a free-for-all.

It isn't the absence of an adult there to say, "I've got the container." It's a psychological womb, a physical space, and so our expectations for play can still be there.

If you're having trouble, you know, before we go in, "I'm gonna be here, I'm going to circulate." And if you're in a setting where, you know, sticks aren't ideal to become guns, then it's like, you know, "Sticks stay on the ground." And if you see kids have frustration that needs to be expressed—"This is our digging pit, and you know, anywhere here, you take a... dig to Australia if you need to." Like, whatever the message is.

And so we can create spaces and places for it. I think especially with teachers, like, we would die without structure, routine, order. I mean, we live on it, and you're outnumbered, so it's not like you throw it out.

But in my mind, and the experience and the science suggests, we still have to lead in these places, we still have to create the boundedness of it, we still have to be present. But what we're not doing is interfering and turning it into a work mode, into a work project. We hold the container.

And if there's discomfort, we move in to provide connection and then move the child into that space where they can express, explore, whatever that might be. And so we're really calibrating that space emotionally and relationally. That's the best. I mean, you can't do that without us there. You can't get to that without us.

So it just changes the nature of it, you know? We have desks, we have chairs, we have a door, you lock the kids in, somehow you feel safe, but oh my god, I mean, anything can happen.

Lauren: Yeah, it's not that things go perfectly indoors.

Deborah: Yeah, exactly.

Play and Resilience

Lauren: Yeah. And there's also something about resilience building when it comes to play. So can you speak a bit to how that gets developed?

Deborah: Yeah, oh, this, you know, resilience is such an important developmental milestone that we need to be cultivating in our kids. When they can start to walk all the way up, because without it, they're not going to be equipped for life, for adversity.

And play plays a central role in that, because you get to experiment, you get to get things wrong without the consequences of real life. You can get married and divorced as many times as you like. You can have any occupation you want, you can put things together in new and novel ways. You're not going to be in trouble. That's where we first come out safest to sing, to dance, to express ourselves.

You know, if you've ever walked up on a child who's really in it, like singing or giving it whatever—they become very shy and self-conscious when you snuck up on their play. It's like you've discovered me at my most vulnerable point, because everything is being channeled through that expression and given birth to the child, and who they are.

And so we always come out in play, and then we can step out into the world for real, with the real big emotions, the real big consequences. And so resiliency is really that being prepared, and play prepares you, because it's not your first go at it.

You know, the first time you go into it, we rehearse plays. You know, if you think about a play, you rehearse it before you do the real thing. And that's where you build the resiliency. You can handle the calibrations of learning things, and it just builds on each other.

The other thing that's most important to resiliency is that it's all about our emotions. If you can't feel your emotions, you can't be resilient. True resiliency—there's a difference between being hard and hardy, and hardy means you have your emotions.

And emotions like courage come from feeling afraid but wanting to do it. Being tenacious and persevering—you care enough even though you're really frustrated. Those are powerful emotions. To feel sad when you're disappointed, or something didn't work out, or something broke, or didn't come to pass, so there was a loss. How do you bounce back from that? Well, you gotta have some tears or sadness.

So, any of the things that would give birth to this sense of resiliency—"I can handle the world as it is"—you know, there's this wonderful quote, I can't remember who said it, but something like "The simple losses to a child are like the great losses to a king. You can't compare. It's just this resiliency that's been calibrated so that one day the king can be the king and lose great things because they were a child who lost simple things and could handle it all the way along."

So play preserves those emotions, which then is what resiliency is built upon. And again, we're trying to teach it, we're trying to come in and direct it. We use adult psychology to try to bolster kids up, or self-esteem tricks and treats and bribes, and worksheets—you can't... none of that will work. This is a developmental process, and as a developmental process, it comes back to those four requirements: play, rest, attach, and feel.

You get there? What do you want? You're gonna get it. Like, name what you want. Your learning potential, social potential, you know, your potential as a good human being, a caring human being, resiliency, resourceful, being adaptive—you're gonna get it all. You name it, you got the lottery there, with those irreducible needs.

Honouring Play While Meeting Curricular Outcomes

Lauren: Yeah. Oh, I love that. And what about—I think the last sort of question I wanted to ask you about is how do we hold space for this true play, but, you know, we're teachers in a public school system, so still feeling accountable for those curricular outcomes and learning standards. How do we honour both?

Deborah: Because I don't actually think they're separate. I just think they go together.

So, I mean, there's no tension in me for that. There was a point when I would, as a university-level teacher working with youth at risk and high school level, and more so in the university level, I never worried about those—and my courses transferred to universities all over BC—but I never worried that I wasn't going to achieve my learning outcomes.

Even when I used play-based methods in my academic teaching, and as I applied the curriculum and used play-based approaches and was much... tried to move out of a work mode, it was incredible. And I thought, if I can do this here, you know, you can do this anywhere in academia.

So I was unapologetic, and I think that's the thing that happens with us as teachers. I think we get so dumb down and by the weight of everything we have to hold. Like, we lose our judgment, we lose our wisdom, we lose our intuition. We forget that we have this incredible capacity to read and understand people. You wouldn't have done this if you didn't like kids or wanted to work with people somehow.

So we kind of remember we're not technicians, we're human beings, and we have far much more wisdom that we need to use and trust ourselves this way. You're gonna get there.

But all the time I was worried about numbers and outcome and work-paced modes, I didn't get there. And I had one very wonderful educator at the Vancouver School Board who said to me, "Let me worry about the numbers, you take care of the kids." And I took care of the kids and we actually were one of the top programs in Canada for outcomes. Like, we're in the 90s, like 98% outcomes, because all we did—we didn't focus on work, we focused on relationship, play, we had fun, we liked the kids and we got all of our outcomes because that freed us up.

That energy for relationship, to feel, to whatever, to care, your desire, and that pushed everything forward. So I think, you know, it just feels like the weight on our shoulders. I can go there as a teacher, but I know that that's burying me, and that will not bring out the best of me in terms of my relationship with my kiddos, my adult students.

So no, I just don't allow that to be the place from which I enter into that relationship with my students.

Lauren: Yeah. Yeah, and I feel lucky that from early on in my career that I had mentors like Janis Novikowski of the world, that for a curricular area like math that can be intimidating for a lot of us, let's say, that we feel that we can't teach it through play because it's not rigorous enough.

Well, no. Like, if you have ever been lucky enough to either be at one of her workshops or to watch her actually teach math, it is so play-based. And she gives that time and space to play with ideas and have conversations with kids, because she's built that relationship with the students. She can uncover that math in a very low-risk type of atmosphere, which is why those students do so well, because they trust her, and they get to be imaginative, and yeah, it's just beautiful.

Deborah: It's beautiful, and you know, those master teachers who can take a subject like that and move it into those modes unapologetically and know and trust and have faith in that. The neuroscience and the developmental science would say, well, if you are in a play mode, you're in a rest mode, and if you're in a rest mode, the brain has more of its resources available to put to a task.

If you're in a narrow work mode or high anxiety mode, which has plagued math forever, then the brain is shutting down, and you have less plasticity to actually learn something. So if you push it into a rest mode, which is either play or relationship, then you're going to get a brain that would be like—you get this integration in all the centers of the brain.

So there's no better robust method. People say, "Oh, well, that doesn't look like you're doing much." If we could do the little brain scans, they'd be like, wow, that is more sophisticated. And there's lots of research to suggest that, right?

So, I think that's the part, is that we just don't see. It seems so invisible, but the science of play is very robust. There's no debate in the literature. There's no debate in the research, or the neuroscience, or the developmental science here.

It's just a lack of faith because we don't see it, and somehow that worksheet seems to produce the outcome, and we have no patience, we have no wisdom to just wait. But you do the longitudinal research, you watch kids' satisfaction at school, you watch those grades, you know, from not just a grade 1 marker, take a grade 3 marker and see who still likes school, who's still reading, who still asks questions.

And **those kids who had play-based mode education are far surpassing those kids, but we take the benchmarks in grade one, and we say, "Oh, well, they're doing better." Yeah, because you took a narrow lens on it.** You haven't... you have to take a developmental perspective.

So, I love that there's these master teachers and these people who believe in play who are just, like, they just bring it to life, you know? Because who could make math fun? I sure couldn't, but I'm glad there are people out there that could.

Closing Thoughts

Lauren: I hear ya. Well, and I'm very lucky, as I said, that I got to learn from her, because then I get to pass that along as well. Thank you so much. Is there anything else that you feel like I've forgotten to ask you in relation to outdoor learning and your work with play?

Deborah: No, I don't, I think you've covered so much that's been, I think, so valuable for people, and just, you know, it just brings me back to the incredible value of a teacher in a child's life who provides those conditions.

Like, you know, as I wear my counselor hat, and I'm working with families and also with adults, and just the difference that another adult outside a family home... you don't know the difference you're making at the time.

But I can tell you, you keep something alive in that child that believes in people and being and feels cared for. And you keep the spark alive in a child, even though times are tough in their life, and they're scared, or their parents are. There's no other adults in children's network today than teachers. There just isn't.

So, thank you, and thank you to you and to all of your educators for the incredible, important, sacred work this is.

Lauren: Oh, thank you. I appreciate all of our listeners who are doing such amazing work, because yeah, it's a tough job, but it is a very... I feel very grateful and honoured that I get to have that role in other kids' lives. It's pretty exciting.

Deborah: I think it's so fun! It can be fun. Kids are fun!

Lauren: It is. I come home smiling every day. Pretty lucky. Now, if listeners would like to get in touch with you, what's the best way they can do that?

Deborah: Website, usually pretty good—macnamara.ca, or any of the Instagram, or Facebook, or social media stuff, but yeah.

Lauren: Perfect! Well, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your generosity today. You know, as we wrap up, I think that what I'm really taking away is this reminder that play isn't this extra that we just fit in when there's time. It is, as you said, a developmental need. And for many children, it is this sanctuary.

And so I hope that this conversation is giving everybody that permission to slow down, to trust children, as you said, and to create that space for real, restorative play in our outdoor learning. So, thank you so much again.

Deborah: Thank you so much for having me, it's been a delight.

Lauren: Wonderful. And thank you, listeners, again, for the important work that you do every day with the kids to help them feel safe and seen and heard. And if you've enjoyed this episode, please share it with a colleague, and don't forget to check out the new Teach Outdoors website for resources and online courses that are going to be perfect for your next upcoming professional development day.

And until next time, get outside, keep playing, and as always, I'll end with the song "From the Trees" by Brandon Grant. Bye, everybody!