EarthEd (State of the World)

Rethinking Education on a Changing Planet

The Worldwatch Institute

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781610918435
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Earth education is traditionally confined to specific topics: ecoliteracy, outdoor education, environmental science. But in the coming century, on track to be the warmest in human history, every aspect of human life will be affected by our changing planet. Emerging diseases, food shortages, drought, and waterlogged cities are just some of the unprecedented challenges that today's students will face. How do we prepare 9.5 billion people for life in the Anthropocene, to thrive in this uncharted and more chaotic future?Answers are being developed in universities, preschools, professional schools, and even prisons around the world. In the latest volume of State of the World, a diverse group of education experts share innovative approaches to teaching and learning in a new era. Topics include systems thinking for kids; the importance of play in early education; social emotional learning; comprehensive sexuality education; indigenous knowledge; sustainable business; medical training to treat the whole person; teaching law in the Anthropocene; and more. EarthEd addresses schooling at all levels of development, from preschool to professional. Its lessons can inform teachers, policy makers, school administrators, community leaders, parents, and students alike. And its vision will inspire anyone who wants to prepare students not only for the storms ahead but to become the next generation of sustainability leaders.

PART ONE

Earth Education Fundamentals

CHAPTER 2

Outdoor School for All: Reconnecting Children to Nature

David Sobel

One of the salient problems facing us today is children’s alienation from the natural world. They are too creeped out to touch earthworms, they don’t know where their food comes from, and they are afraid to walk in the forest alone. Or, if they are walking in the forest, they can’t see the forest for their iPhones. We, and our children, are easily seduced by the panoply of digital treats. It is so much easier to be a couch potato than to plant potatoes. The result is that twenty-first-century children spend eight hours a day interacting with digital media, and only thirty minutes a day outside.¹

When interviewed about their computer use about fifteen years ago, children in Putney, Vermont, described how this happened. One girl sheepishly admitted: “Before we had a computer, I used to read a lot and go outside more to be in the neighborhood. Now, it’s so easy to go exploring on the computer, it’s like it’s too much work to go outside.” Another boy agreed: “I’ll be playing a really cool computer game, and I’ll think, ‘Wow, it’s beautiful outside, I should really go outside.’ But I can’t stop myself from playing—it’s kind of like I’m addicted.” A third student summarized: “For me, I learned to love nature before I did computers, and so it doesn’t really affect me. But if I started to use computers when I was really young, it might have kept me from getting into nature.” Today, the computerization of childhood is so complete that not even this level of awareness exists for most children.²

What’s to be done? Numerous overlapping educational initiatives hold promise for reconnecting children and nature. At one extreme, a U.S. public television program on “The Future of Education in the 21st Century” was giddily enthusiastic about students in a constant relationship with computers and other screens—using them in classrooms, for homework, and in their leisure time. At the other extreme, the kindergarten-through-seventh grade Environmental School in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, has no formal school building. Although they use some indoor facilities around the community, they are outdoors, through cold, wet, and snowy Canadian winters, most of the time. There is a right balance between these two approaches.

Essential for a liveable future is education for sustainability. It is a paradigm shift that aspires to educate students to make decisions that balance the preservation of healthy ecosystems, vibrant economies, and equitable social systems in this generation and in all generations to come. Around the world, numerous overlapping movements have this goal in mind: “green schools,” education for sustainable development, environmental education, community-based education, nature and place-based education, the farm-to-school movement, and more.

Unfortunately, some of these approaches tend to get too heady too fast. Before you know it, we are trying to get children to save the rainforest, understand energy flow in ecosystems, reduce the carbon footprint of their schools, and address problems of income inequity in their communities. Too quickly they leave behind the primacy of children caring for animals, digging to China, or playing capture-the-flag at dusk. In other words, the cognitive, problem-solving, technology-based aspirations to save the world have to be balanced with the physical, socioemotional, immersive values of making mud pies. In fact, one may lead to the other, if we implement education practices that honor the insights of developmental and conservation psychology.

In a landmark 2012 chapter on the development of conservation behaviors, environmental psychologists Louise Chawla and Victoria Derr synthesize the research on the relationship between childhood experience and adult environmental behavior. They conclude that, “if societies seek to achieve a sustainable world where people will not only act to protect the biosphere today, but future generations will also value this goal and work for its achievement, then children need to be provided with regular access to nature.” They add, “Research has linked a background of childhood play in nature with every form of care for the environment: informed citizen action, volunteerism, public support for pro-environmental policies, environmental career choices, and private-sphere behaviors like buying green products, conserving energy, and recycling.”³

In other words, opportunities for nature play and learning need to be an integral part of cultivating adult environmental behavior. Children cannot just learn about the environment through virtual simulations; they need to get wet and dirty in order to fall in love with the Earth. Other factors become important later in the developmental trajectory. As Chawla and Derr explain, “In middle childhood and adolescence, young people need opportunities to extend their environmental knowledge and skills in more formal ways. In addition to a tapestry of nature in different spaces of their lives, children need people who can help them appreciate and understand what they find there.”⁴

With these indications in mind, one can consider a developmental continuum of promising practices to connect children to nature in the twenty-first century: from early childhood, to elementary school, to middle and high school. If these practices are nurtured, they could shape a generation of young adults that are grounded in nature, selectively mature in their use of technology, and committed to environmental preservation.

Early Childhood: Immersion in Nature

As public schools in the United States and elsewhere have put greater emphasis on standardized testing, a counterpoint grassroots movement has arisen to “naturalize” early childhood programs. Since the original Earth Day in 1970, nature preschools have been growing steadily in the United States, and forest kindergartens have spread rapidly across Europe from their origins in Scandinavia. Although Denmark has conventional indoor early childhood programs, about 10 percent of the country’s children participate in outdoor schools, and the older participants attend five days a week from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Germany has about one thousand forest kindergartens, and the schools also are popular in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and Taiwan.

Parents of forest kindergartners appreciate this opportunity for immersion in the natural world. It is the antidote to the urbanization and antiseptic lives of many post-modern children. Early childhood programs offer an at-oneness with nature that constitutes the roots of empathy for ferns, hedgehogs, and wild places. Paul Doolan, a father who sent his daughter to a Swiss forest kindergarten (wonderfully documented in the film School’s Out: Lessons from a Forest Kindergarten), articulates the unique quality of the experience:

For two years, my little girl went to kindergarten in the forest. Not a school in the forest, just the forest. No walls, no roof, no heating—only the forest, a few tools, and incredibly dedicated teachers. One day, she came home from a day of particularly vicious downpours, her feet inevitably soaked, her eyelashes caked in mud, her cheeks ruddy with the cold, and her eyes sparkling with fire, and I said to her it must have been tough being outside all morning in such weather. She looked at me in genuine incomprehension, looked out the window: “What weather?” she asked.⁵

Nature-based early childhood programs aspire to that old progressive education chestnut of balancing head, heart, and hands. Although most naturebased programs share common aims—they honor the primacy of children immersed in nature, and they support self-directed play—their different styles reflect the poles of teaching practices that we need to balance. Nature preschools, for example, work from a cognitive readiness mindset, which is reflected in the beautiful facilities, desks, and somewhat greater emphasis on formal literacy and numeracy, while getting kids outside for one-third to one-half of the day. Forest kindergartens, meanwhile, embrace an initiative/resiliency mindset, with an emphasis on minimizing indoor facilities, being out in all weather, and giving children opportunities to solve problems on their own.

A preschool class snowshoes in below-freezing temperatures at Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge, Minnesota.

Advocates of nature-based early childhood are convinced that their approach provides a win-win solution. They contend that their children are cognitively well-prepared for formal schooling and are also healthier and bonded with nature in a way that will incline them toward conservation values and behaviors. They accomplish the same goals as conventional indoor programs, and more. A recent case study documents how the Chippewa Nature Preschool in Midland, Michigan, led parents to advocate for nature kindergarten in the local Bullock Creek public schools. The success of the nature kindergartens has led to the creation of nature first grades. Parents and administrators realize that children are happier, more engaged in school, and have increased vocabularies and science knowledge as a result of this change in teaching practice.⁶

A similar grassroots movement has emerged in the state of Vermont. After watching the School’s Out video in 2012, two innovative teachers in the town of Quechee decided to do a Forest Day, one full day a week in the woods where students solve outdoors math problems, climb ledges and trees, and learn to identify local plants and animals. Today, dozens of Vermont schools have Forest Days programs. The North Branch Nature Center in the capital, Montpelier, supports these efforts and is in the process of providing year-round curriculum materials for similarly inclined teachers. All of this has happened under the radar, without state mandates or targeted funding. It is a backlash to the academification, digitalization, and indoorification of young children’s lives.

Elementary Education: Exploration and Connection to Place

Whereas early childhood programs are about immersion in nature, elementary programs focus more on exploring the physical world, becoming adept in it, and connecting to the nearby natural and cultural worlds. The desire to venture beyond the bounds of one’s yard and neighborhood has always been an inherent part of childhood and is well represented in children’s literature. Christopher Robin explores the Hundred Acre Wood with Winnie the Pooh. Caddie Woodlawn runs wild with her brothers exploring the Wisconsin woods and rivers surrounding their farm. On all continents—from Sioux children in North America to iKung children in Africa—children historically have had freedom to roam. But this freedom has been curtailed as a result of urbanization, parental anxieties, and digitalization: it is now a rarity to hear a mother encouraging her children to explore outside all day and “be home by when the streetlights come on.”

Insightful schools understand the physical and cognitive benefits of these natural childhood instincts and try to recreate these opportunities across the elementary grades. The Adventure Education curriculum at The College School of Webster Groves, near St. Louis, Missouri, is a perfect example of a sound developmental approach. Outdoor adventures begin in kindergarten with the annual Day in the Woods, when the children study pond water, climb hills, and complete a half-mile hike. The first graders’ one-night camping trip in a county park includes a ten-foot rock climb, a creek exploration, and fossil hunting. The second graders begin cave explorations, and third graders embark on a three-day wilderness camping experience. In fourth and fifth grade, the students move back in time as well, participating in a historical reenactment of a pioneers camp at an old prairie homestead.⁷

An integral aspect of this “expanding horizons” approach is the development of traditional wilderness living skills. The camping movement in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century exhorted boys and girls to get out into the open and heed nature’s everlasting voice. Back then, the call to nature was a response to the rapid industrialization and deforestation in the later part of the nineteenth century. The creation of U.S. national parks and national forests marked the beginning of the conservation movement. Today, in the early twenty-first century, we are heeding the same call, yet we are now impelled to conserve not just nature, but also the connectedness between children and nature.

One promising sign is the quiet growth of nature mentoring programs. Whereas environmental education programs have a curricular and cognitive orientation toward teaching about food webs, nutrient recycling, and environmental problems, nature mentoring programs teach shelter construction, wild edibles, bow and arrow fabrication, and even basketweaving. After a Wilderness Youth Project program in Santa Barbara, California, one child enthused, “Three hours isn’t enough for these trips. We should do five hours, we should do all day, we should do twenty-four hours. We should build forts and live out here.” A certain gusto is developed in nature mentoring programs that can carry over into the classroom, reflecting a synthesis of both cognitive goals and the socioemotional/resilience goals of forest kindergartens.

In the United Kingdom, the forest kindergarten movement has morphed into the forest schools movement, extending to the elementary grades. Forest Schools Canada, with the same orientation, was founded in 2013, and interest in place-based education and forest schools is particularly strong in the province of British Columbia. The Davis Bay Elementary School north of Vancouver (motto: “Where the outdoors is in!”) reflects a schoolwide commitment to a nature- and place-based curriculum. Students in the three multi-age classrooms—Hive K/1, Cocoon 1/2/3, and Rookery 3/4/5—spend as much as half of each day outside, engaged in activities such as writing poetr...