Volo Natural Learning Community & A Pedagogy of Play

Volo Natural Learning Community’s practices create a learning environment that is joyful, meaningful, and socially interactive—all key characteristics of play as defined in the book. Here's how they mesh:

🧩 1. Empowering Learners to Lead Their Own Learning

PoP Principle: Learners should have autonomy, choice, and voice in how they learn.

🪶 At Volo:

• Student-directed projects are a core part of the curriculum. Learners choose inquiry topics (e.g., “Where does the creek go after it leaves our property?” or “How do beavers change the landscape?”) and guide their own explorations.
• Multi-age settings allow students to take leadership roles in their learning community—mentoring, asking questions, and shaping daily activities.
• Volo's educators say "yes to the mess," embracing the emergent, sometimes chaotic nature of real play and discovery in the outdoors.

🔗 This reflects the “License to Hack” tool from PoP: Students are encouraged to adjust and personalize tools, processes, and even learning objectives.

🌿 2. Building a Culture of Collaborative Learning

PoP Principle: Playful learning happens in environments that encourage collaboration and relationship-building.

🪶 At Volo:

• Every day includes group rituals, shared problem-solving, and team projects—such as mapping habitats, building stream models, or preparing community presentations.
• Nature-based activities like games, storytelling, and fieldwork are inherently social, helping children negotiate roles, share ideas, and navigate conflict—a natural training ground for collaboration.
• The Volo community model emphasizes interdependence, echoing PoP’s call for a classroom culture that supports group learning and emotional safety.

🔗 This resonates with PoP’s emphasis on routines that promote thinking together: such as the “Expert Book” strategy where students teach peers.

🔭 3. Promoting Risk-Taking, Experimentation, and Wonder

PoP Principle: Playful learning invites learners to take risks and explore the unknown.

🪶 At Volo:

• Students regularly engage in open-ended experiments in the field: testing hypotheses about animal tracks, building shelters, or designing erosion solutions.
• Activities are often iterative and require flexibility—students test ideas, fail, try again, and learn from the process.
• Volo encourages children to bring their “what ifs” into the classroom: “What if the creek floods?”, “What if we mimic beaver dams?”

🔗 This echoes PoP’s “Design Challenges” and tools for creating a “Culture of Risk-Taking.”

🎭 4. Encouraging Imaginative Thinking

PoP Principle: Playful learning nurtures creativity and imaginative engagement.

🪶 At Volo:

• Students create imaginary ecologies, simulate being animals, design future ecosystems, and tell stories based on field observations.
• Language arts activities often involve place-based storytelling, nature journaling, or “playing” with scientific names and etymology (e.g., making games out of Latin roots).
• Seasonal changes are framed in poetic and mythical ways, drawing children into symbolic and abstract thinking.

🔗 Aligned with PoP tools like “Imaginative Sparks Generator” and “Questions Worth Playing With.”

😄 5. Welcoming All Emotions Through Play

PoP Principle: Play includes a range of emotions, and students need tools to navigate them.

🪶 At Volo:

• Emotional regulation is woven into outdoor experiences—students reflect on frustration, excitement, boredom, and joy.
• Conflict in games or group challenges becomes a learning opportunity, helping students develop social-emotional intelligence.
• Nature itself becomes a co-teacher: learning to face cold, uncertainty, or awe fosters resilience and presence.

🔗 PoP emphasizes tools for “Supporting Learners with Conflict and Frustration”—mirrored in Volo’s daily debriefs and group reflections.

✨ Summary: Alignment Snapshot