Make Peace With Winter 2027

OUR KEYNOTE: We are very excited to welcome our keynote speaker: Joe Walewski

As an environmental educator, naturalist, and author of regional field guides including Lichens of the North Woods and Mosses & Liverworts of the North Woods, Joe Walewski has spent nearly four decades guiding learners into deeper relationships with the natural world. Drawing on his framework of the Four Naturalist Practices - Presence, Observation, Inquiry, and Reciprocity - Joe’s keynote bridges COEO’s core pillars of environment, curriculum, character, and wellbeing. Together, we will explore how shifting outdoor education from simply delivering facts to engaging in a living conversation with place grounds us in a real, lasting vision for change. Join us to examine how practicing quiet presence, making space for wild lives, and noticing the connections between all beings enlivens academic learning and allows the landscape to become an active co-teacher - building an ecocentric future through mutual care for our non-human neighbors.

CALL FOR PRESENTERS

We are opening our conference to two types of workshop proposals, both of which will be intermingled during the various workshop blocks and available for anyone to sign-up and attend.

Types of Proposals:

1) Practical workshops: the first are those practitioner workshops, grown from hard-earned insights from years in the field, on the front lines of transforming education toward an eco-centric world.

2) Research and/or theory: the second are more novel to COEO, aimed explicitly at bringing theoretical insight to the table and merging it with pedagogy and practice.

Read more below

GENERAL INVITATION and WELCOME:

Your 2027 COEO Make Peace with Winter Organizing Committee is hard at work on another amazing weekend packed full of professional connection and development, experiential learning, and winter fun! Make Peace with Winter is a retreat-style conference for educators interested in learning how to share (and embrace!) the outdoors with their students in the coolest of seasons.

Join us as we learn, share, and laugh with kindred spirits from across the province and beyond. We’ll enjoy delicious food throughout the weekend and engage in opportunities to connect. Embracing the experiences of the weekend will support you in feeling rejuvenated and leaving with new ideas and resources to enhance your professional practice. The final ingredient for a perfect winter weekend is you! Our host site, Camp Kawartha, is ready to welcome everyone.

Take time this winter to share connections and support one other. We encourage you to spread the word about MPWW and invite folks who you see working to build community in the outdoors who may not yet be a part of COEO. Bring a friend!

CONTEXT:

What role is education called upon to play in this time of accelerating ecological catastrophe driven, in no small part, by a deep disconnection of kinship between humans and the rest of the natural world? It is, we propose, to find ways to enact the profound re-creation of our society; to establish a different set of values and ways of living toward them. Each one of us, as educators (of which we all are, in myriad capacities), is thus called upon to rebel – to refuse the systems and practices which have brought us to the brink and to seek different (sometimes new, sometimes old) ways instead. An act of radical hope, the question is not what is possible, but rather what is worth doing, even if we fail? It is a fundamentally educational act: the planting of a tree on the last day of the world.

From the whole group consolidation activities at the closing of the 2026 MPWW conference - Transforming Education for Eco-Centric Change – emerged this year's bold, provocative, and far-reaching theme – Eco-Centric Education: Place, Relationship, & Responsibility. Let's break it down:

• Eco-Centric: moving toward a renewed kinship with the natural world wherein the flourishing of all living and natural beings and, crucially, the relationships between them, is the driver of human action.

• Education: strip away the blackboards and chalk, the desks and assignments, the canoes and paddles. What is left? Kneel close, peer behind the bushes, and you will discover the most wonderful of things. A process and a practice, a theory and an action. A foundationally hopeful attempt to discover good ways of being human in this world, and a desire to share in those ways with others.

To break it down further we quote from Jabob Rodenburg’s “Outdoor Education: Is it Just a Venue?” (January, 2026). This challenge to outdoor educators emerged from the deep questions and provocations explored at MPWW 2026.

Jacob’s challenge to outdoor educators:

“Outdoor education should not be about escape. Instead, it should be about returning. Returning to place. Returning to relationship. Returning to responsibility.”

We need to ask ourselves:

Are our programs cultivating belonging, or simply delivering experiences?

Are we helping learners see themselves as part of the living world, or merely visitors to it?

Are we inviting people to give back, not just to take?

• Place:‍ The call to place doesn’t mean we abandon climbing, biking, hiking, camping, canoeing, and exploring. In fact, these activities are needed now more than ever. They build skill, confidence, joy, and a felt sense of being alive. However, alongside them, let’s slow down enough to be attentive to where we are.  What are the names, storied lives and long term histories of the multiple beings - trees, plants, insects, human and more-than-human-others - who call this place home?

• Relationship: We are connected not only to the living and non-living beings around us, but also to our ancestors and to those yet to be born. When we step outdoors, we find ourselves held within a rich and interdependent community of life. Soil, water, air, plants, animals, fungi, weather, and time shape and sustain us. Effective outdoor education can help people build meaningful relationships with these life systems that nourish us, fostering care and connection.

• Responsibility: Outdoor education matters not because it happens outside, but because it helps people remember who they are in this web of relationships. At its best, outdoor education restores a sense of belonging to the living world and awakens a quiet but enduring responsibility to care for it.

“This is the deeper invitation of our work. Not simply to take people outdoors, but to help them come home. To place. To relationship. To a way of living that gives more than it takes within this beautiful and irreplaceable web of life.” - Jacob Rodenburg

WORKSHOP PROPOSALS: Information and Guidance

More than a conference theme, Eco-Centric Education: Place, Relationship, & Responsibility is a long-term philosophical and action oriented project – a process and an aim – toward which we hope this year’s Make Peace with Winter can make a substantial contribution. To this end, we are opening our conference to two types of workshop proposals, both of which will be intermingled during the various workshop blocks and available for anyone to sign-up and attend.

Types of Proposals:

1) Practical workshops: the first are those practitioner workshops, grown from hard-earned insights from years in the field, on the front lines of transforming education toward an eco-centric world.

• Place-based pedagogies

• Land-based pedagogies

• Winter foraging

• Winter naturalist activities

• Traditional games and activities 

• Winter story-telling

• Winter tracking

• Winter adaptations & behaviours of various species

• Wild Pedagogies educational approaches

• Story-ing place

• Plant medicines

• Natural materials workshops

• Animacy of the land

2) Research and/or theory (papers and/or workshops): the second are more novel to COEO, aimed explicitly at bringing theoretical insight to the table and merging it with pedagogy and practice. We invite any students (at the undergraduate, masters, or PhD level), professors, practitioners, Indigenous knowledge keepers, and anyone else with ideas to share to submit papers and/or workshops which fit under the general theme of the conference. These could be essays written for classes, previously published ideas re-worked to fit the conference theme, or new papers written explicitly for this conference. If selected, these papers will be published in a special issue of COEO’s academic journal Pathways: The Ontario Journal of Outdoor Education, as well as having the author present a workshop at the conference.

Unlike most academic conferences and paper submissions, COEO is a unique opportunity for academics to present their ideas to an explicitly practitioner audience of people who work in the diverse field of education day-in and day-out. For this reason, while the papers themselves should be academic in nature, the workshop about the paper should focus on the dissemination of knowledge and putting theory into practice. Workshop proposals should outline how the paper and its ideas will be presented in this way. Get creative, as COEO is a community-based organization and the conference theme values being radical. Usual formal rules of academic presentation do not apply here. We also invite the submission of papers for which the author wants to contribute to the Pathways special issue but either cannot attend the conference or does not want to present.

We especially urge students to submit papers, as this is a wonderful opportunity to gain experience in academic publishing, presenting, and, uniquely, disseminating knowledge outside the academic world. All with the aim of making real, profound cultural changes on what is certainly the overriding issue of not only our time, but any time in our species’ history.

ASPIRE:

Soar high, dive deep, go bold, and be radical. Our conferences are nothing without their presenters, and we cannot wait to see what you submit in response to the urgent need for Eco-Centric Education focused on Place, Relationship, and Responsibility. You have much to offer.

The deadline for submission is December 10, 2026. We will do our best to contact all applicants by December 15, 2026.

We look forward to seeing you in joyous, cozy, conspiring communion at Camp Kawartha from January 29rd – 31st for COEO’s annual Make Peace with Winter 2027.

In hope and wonder,

Devin Mutić, Rayanna Santiago, Lee McArthur, and Lilla Scott, conference Co-Chairs

Submit proposals through the COEO MPWW website form. Click here.