Guest post by Braydon Beaulieu. Braydon is a graduate student and teaching assistant in English Literature & Creative Writing.

The door was locked. My eighteen students, huddled outside Chrysler Hall South 53-1, exchanged glances. Some worried they’d driven to campus for 10:00 a.m. for nothing, some excited at the prospect of a cancelled class. I pulled out my cell phone and dialled my supervisor, Dr. Dale Jacobs.

“Dr. Jacobs, my classroom’s locked.”

“Ouch. You’ll have to find a custodian to unlock it, I guess.”

But there were no custodians to be found. Under normal circumstances I would have probably cancelled the class, but today we were covering trends. The foundation for forty percent of my students’ grades. No way I was cancelling.

So, quick thinking: it was warm outside this particular Monday in September, and my own CanLit professor, Dr. Narbonne, had taught a class outside the year before. Inspired and excited for the excuse to get my Aristotle on, I organized my soldiers into ranks, and markched them straight to the grey stone steps outside Leddy West.

My experience teaching outside was far different from being locked in the dungeon that is the basement of Chrysler South. I was initially worried that students would have difficulty focusing. But, to be fair, there’s so much more to see outside on a warm, breezy day. Hell, even I was a bit distracted. While heads darted to and fro more often than when surrounded by brick walls, I got the sense that my students were thinking more clearly than when confined by stone and institutional architecture. I was too.

So, the problem wasn’t really that there were pretty things to look at. No, the problem with teaching outdoors turned out to be that the lesson at hand required us to watch a video about 2010’s trends on YouTube. We needed to watch it to open discussion on the difference between a trend and a fad. Ideally, I would have shown it on the fancy television in my classroom, but we problem-solved. We pulled out all the laptops we could muster and watched the video in groups of twos and threes on the choppy  wireless connection filtering through the walls of the library. The open air was our enemy on the technological front. But once we’d all seen the video we started a wonderful discussion about the distinction between techno-nomadism and Pokémon, between co-dependency and jeggings.

Would I do it again? Absolutely. Obviously the situation was somewhat forced and I had no choice but to teach outside my comfort zone, as well as that of my students. But it presented me with a unique challenge as an instructor. Took me out of my element and dropped me in a setting where my students had not built up a comfort level. Those stone steps were a new environment, and therefore an environment that necessitated caution and punched holes in our regular classroom dynamic.

But here’s the thing: this operation wasn’t successful because of anything I did. My students were the ones who make it work, the ones who adapted to survive in this unfamiliar academic ecosystem. Being the excellent group of students that they were, they made the most of the situation. When all was said and done, it was an incredibly enjoyable and refreshing to teach under the warm September sky, the breeze blowing leaves around my feet. Next time I get locked out, though, I just hope the weather’s as nice as it was that morning.

Photo licensed by Creative Commons: “springtime classes” by Wolfram Burner