Natureversity is a nature-based learning school located in Austin Texas that offers courses in naturalist studies, survival skills, archery, and scouting for all ages. Our outdoor classroom inspires imaginative play, creations from nature, and life-long relationships with the earth, community, family and self.
Our Vision
We envision a world where every person is inspired and excited to be outdoors, creating, playing, exploring and discovering the secrets to all of nature’s mysteries and treasures.
Our Mission
Our mission is to create a regenerative nature-based learning culture that promotes the restoration of eco-literacy among children and adults through the practice of earth-based crafts, skills and traditions.
Why Nature-based Learning?
Nature-Deficit Disorder, as defined by researcher and author Richard Louv, is the result of seperation from nature, that includes symptoms of: lack of curiosity and imagination, reduced use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of mental, physical, and emotional illness. The disorder can be present in individuals, families, communities and cultures.
Nature-based Learning is good medicine for the effects that isolation from nature has had on our culture. It helps re-inspire our passions of curiosity, exploring, discovery and sharing. Through hands-on experiences in nature such as catching turtles, tracking wild animals, harvesting wild foods, and building shelters out of natural materials, students build life-long relationships with all of Earth’s creations.
Our Teaching Approach
At the heart of our approach to mentoring students is the idea of “Passion-based learning.” We use people’s natural passions of play and adventure fused with naturalist studies, survival, archery, and scouting in order to create a secret school of environmental education that is informal, balanced, safe and always fun!
Our school’s main focus is to awaken those passions of learning about nature in our students, and to help them identify and pursue their own unique interests with our wild world. We believe that the most effective learning happens when people are pursuing what they love to do, and so truly desire to learn more about whatever it is they may be inspired about in the moment.
In addition to our mentoring approach is our philosophy of “what you earn, you learn.” In their efforts to achieve goals and challenges, students are individually guided by educators who strive to create new experiences and opportunities for participants to discover their own solutions rather than be shown the answer.
We call this method “Coyote Mentoring”, a teaching method that was utilized by our ancestors hundreds of years ago, created and crafted by the amazing naturalist and outdoor educator Jon Young. This style of mentoring encourages creative thinking and results in a much deeper understanding of our natural world. It also allows students to develop greater problem-solving skills that help them progress in self-sufficient living and learning throughout life.
