Enrollment: Open. Please use form below to register.

When: March 8-9, 2025 

Where: Brattleboro, VT

Who: Adults (Age 16+). Open to all levels of experience.

2025 Cost: $225 / $260 / $295  Scholarship and reparations funds are available.

To Enroll: 

• Complete the registration form below.
• Make your payment.
  • Make a secure online payment via the PayPal box at the bottom of this page
  • Send a check payable to “Vermont Wilderness School” to: Vermont Wilderness School, P.O. Box 2585, Brattleboro, VT 05303.

• Complete a Medical Form / Waiver by clicking the tab at the bottom of this page.

Read our scholarship and cancellation policies for more information.

Course Description:

What happens when learning is facilitated attuned to the natural cycles of the place where you live and your own natural cycles?  What happens when learning is facilitated in an intergenerational web of relationships?  Grounded in every day embodied life beyond the human built environment?  

Youth and adults who have learned in such a setting often describe this as the “invisible school” and are happily surprised to realize their learning.  Learning and skill development happens but it happens through the experience rather than being lectured.  Everyone involved, “learners” and “educators,” develop as joyful lifelong learners.  They develop confidence through competence in life skills, sense of safety in knowing the rhythms of their place, and space to know themselves as part of a larger living whole.  They also learn how to notice when the local patterns are changing and how to respond to emergent emergencies in each other and the land community.

Join Amy Hyatt for a weekend learning about facilitating “invisible learning” and deep nature connection.  The weekend will weave storytelling, explicit skills and tools for facilitating deep nature connection (in particular Natural Cycles Design & Learning), and some experiential learning embodying what we are exploring.

Expect to be outside both days.  You are responsible for your meals and housing for the weekend. 

Instructor Bio

Amy Hyatt has been involved in nature connection mentoring since 2001, when she began as a participant and apprentice. Amy was one of the first women facilitators and leaders of the Art of Mentoring, an intergenerational weeklong workshop in nature connection mentoring. For over 15 years she has been designing and directing youth and adult programs at the Vermont Wilderness School.

In recent years Amy joined the board of the national Nature Connection Network, playing an active role in current movement dialogues around decolonization and anti-racism. Amy is of mixed European ancestry. She grew up with attention on challenging inequalities in race, class, and gender in our everyday lives as well as spending time outside exploring and helping in the family vegetable garden. At age 19, she began overtly encountering Indigenous people who engaged her with everyday issues of colonization, cultural appropriation, and decolonization…and the living practice of listening to different species and asking permission before harvesting or developing areas.

She has humbly continued to ask the questions and seek to make changes creating more equity for humans and other species, a sense of welcome and safety for people of different backgrounds, and a sense of trust and allyship in working together for the children and multi-species future generations on this Earth.

Questions?

Contact us at office@vermontwildernessschool.org. To receive email notifications about this program (save the dates, opening of registration, etc.), sign up here.