Nature Preschool in the Urban Wild: Lessons from the Pacific Northwest.

With Kit Harrington
Founder and Former Director, Fiddleheads Forest School,
University of Washington, Seattle, WA

• Kit will share the story of how socially and culturally responsive outdoor preschool programming came to shape a regional movement for nature-based education. She will cover the challenges of providing a quality early childhood program in a public park setting, focusing on the importance of community and place-based education in outdoor classrooms. 

Kit co-founded of one of the country’s first urban outdoor preschools, the Fiddleheads Forest School at the University of Washington. In 2015, she founded the Washington Nature Preschool Association to support the regional growth of nature-based early childhood education. She also helped to pass and develop the first licensing regulations for outdoor preschools in North America, and was part of the writing team that crafted the field’s first professional practice guidebook.