Nature Education with Young Children

Integrating Inquiry and Practice

Daniel R. Meier, Stephanie Sisk-Hilton, Daniel R. Meier, Stephanie Sisk-Hilton

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429647437
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Éducation
• Categoría: Éducation de la petite enfance

Now in a fully updated second edition, Nature Education and Young Children remains a thoughtful, sophisticated teacher resource that blends theory and practice on nature education, children's inquiry-based learning, and reflective teaching.

Reorganized to enhance its intuitive flow, this edition features a Foreword by David Sobel and three wholly new chapters examining nature and literacy in kindergarten, outdoor play and children's agency in a forest school, and the power of nature inquiry for dual language learners. Revised to reflect the latest research and guidelines, this book offers a seamless integration of science concepts into the daily intellectual and social investigations that occur in early childhood.

With a fresh framing of nature exploration in the context of our current educational landscape, this text is a comprehensive guide for educators and students looking to introduce and deepen connections between nature education and teacher inquiry and reflection.

Part I

Science, Nature, and Inquiry:
Theoretical and Practical Foundations

1

SCIENCE, NATURE, AND INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

Stephanie Sisk-Hilton

OVER THE PAST DECADE, THERE HAS been a flurry of writing around the need for children to “return” to unstructured time in nature. While some of this advocacy reveals a nostalgia for a past that never really existed, it also serves as a counternarrative to current efforts to standardize and formalize early childhood learning experiences. In this chapter, I will explore a number of questions regarding the place of nature education in early childhood learning. What do children gain from engaging in nature? What is lost when these opportunities are constrained? In the race to “prepare” children for their academic futures, why slow down and spend time attending to the large, messy, uncontrolled out of doors? To understand what happens when children have relatively unstructured time in nature we must attend to the complex relationship between environment and human interaction. Consider the scene below:

Twelve children, ages 18 months to five years, pile out of a van. They walk right past a brightly colored play structure. What has caught their attention enough to make the built playground unappealing? A few of the older children begin to point past the structure, and the younger ones follow their lead. It is geese, pecking at the ground and wandering through the patch of grass next to the structure. The children giggle as some begin to walk like geese, and Diana, their teacher, points out their long, graceful necks. “So they can reach down and get their food,” says four-year-old Stephen (names of children have been changed). Two children bend their heads down, as though looking for the food. No one chases the animals. The group continues on, picking up the pace as they sense that water is near. They begin running as the small stretch of beach comes into view. The beach looks out over both a sailboat marina and the remnants of an industrial shipyard. This is urban nature. Sand, bay, crabs, birds, and also pavement, cranes, and oil storage tanks in the distance. And yet the children are as focused on the natural world as if they were 100 miles away from the nearest road.

There is an ebb and flow of energy from group interactions to individual explorations and back to the group. One child finds tiny crabs in the water, and soon a small crowd gathers. Joshua, age five, grabs a large shovel and uses it to gently scoop the water, trying to catch a crab. Soon five children are testing different methods, including two-year-old Stella, who cups her hands together, scooping water and saying “crab,” but staying well out of reach of the actual animals.

Teacher Diana spots a dead stingray that has washed ashore, and the energy shifts to a teacher-mediated discussion of dead creatures. The children ask where it lived when it was alive, and if it can still sting. The teacher wonders with them. But Jacob, age four, has persisted with the crab hunt, and he arrives at the stingray group announcing, “I got a crab!” He repeats this twice, and suddenly the group energy shifts back to the crabs, first gathered around Jacob’s bucket, admiring, and then back to the water as each child grabs a pail and imitates his technique. As children begin to collect the crabs successfully, many of them break from the group and focus only on the tiny living creatures in their buckets.

Juliet, my own four year old, seems to notice me for the first time since arriving, and she shows me the crab in her bucket and explains, “Mama, I’m testing to see if it’s alive or dead. I tried putting a stick down there and it didn’t pinch, so I’m thinking dead.” Her friend Ariana comes over with her own crab in a bucket, and they begin to play a version of house with the crabs. “We need to take care of them so they won’t be dead,” says Ariana. “They need a blanket.” She begins to cover her crab with sand. “No no, they’re for real living, Ariana,” Juliet responds, looking worried. “They need healthy food,” says Ariana, and an argument is averted as they begin looking together for something to feed the crab “babies.”

Figure 1.1 Children experiment with tools and methods for catching crabs.

Photo by Helen Kim

Eighteen-month-old Aiden has settled himself in the sand, at first totally focused on scooping and feeling the texture. After a few minutes, he refocuses on observing the older children from his safe perch. He watches them wade in and out of the water for a few minutes, and then holds up a hand for a teacher to take. He toddles his way toward the edge of the water, grasping Teacher Helen’s hand. As he begins splashing with his open palm, laughing at the sound and sensation, Helen talks with him quietly.

Four-year-old Lana notices that two-year-old Stella is up to her knees in the water. She reaches out a hand and brings her closer to shore, saying, “not too deep, Stella.”

After about 45 minutes, the teacher notices that some of the littler ones are losing energy. Out come grapes and animal crackers, and slowly the group bunches up into a cluster of seated bodies, looking out over the water as they snack. A few of the children are too involved in their work to stop for a snack. Joshua is building an enormous castle and moat system with Teacher Ian. Jacob is alternating between sand castle construction and sea creature collection. And Stella is so enamored with the water that she only stays long enough for one grape before returning to splash at the edge of the bay.

Post snack, children disperse to find their next projects. Suddenly, there is a cry of excitement from the sand castle crew. They have created a path for water to travel from the top of one of the castle turrets down to the bay. Watching the water meander its way down the long path is transfixing even for the adults. Then there is a rush for buckets, and toddlers and preschoolers have found something they can all do, fill a bucket with water, wait their turn, and pour the water down the path, watching in wonder as it makes its way down.

Figure 1.2 A lost bucket provides an opportunity for risk taking and learning about motion in water.

Photo by Helen Kim

In all the excitement, a bucket is lost in the water. Ian, dressed in jeans, gamely wades out to rescue it, and soon he is up to his waist in water. He laughs, and soon he has a group of the four oldest children, “The pre-k kids” wading behind him like ducks, soaked and screaming and delighting in the fact that they are swimming in their clothes. In a couple of minutes they are back, and the ducklings disperse.

Stella, too little to follow the pre-k kids, desperately wants to go deeper into the water. She figures out that she can squat down and create the feeling of being deeper. She squats and begins walking through the water, splashing and smiling ear to ear. Then she falls and begins to cry. Teacher Helen holds out a hand and she comes to shore. The crying stops immediately, and she stands at the shore for a moment, holding Helen’s hand and recentering.

I OBSERVED THIS SCENE MANY YEARS AGO NOW, when I tagged along on a field trip with my daughter’s preschool, and it has remained one of my favorite examples of the power of the natural environment, combined with skilled adult facilitation, in young children’s learning. We live in a small city within a large, urban area. Willow Street Schoolhouse was a home-based daycare facility located in a small house adjacent to a public transit station. The elevated train tracks and commuter parking lot were more noticeable than anything one might call “nature.” And yet the toddlers and preschoolers who attended this preschool were deeply connected with the natural world, as was clear in the peaceful, fully engaged 3 hours the children spent at the urban beach.

Diana Bickham, the school’s founder, spent years finding ways to connect children’s lives to the natural world in this urban setting. In part, she accomplished this by being wholly unafraid of field trips. Nearly every week, all 12 children traveled two blocks by foot, tricycle, and six-child stroller to a local farmers market, where they talked with farmers, danced to local music, and tried foods that some of them, including my own, would be unlikely to try at home. Also on an almost weekly basis, they piled into a van to explore local parks, beaches, and other natural settings. But even on days when they did not leave Willow Street, daily activities were infused with exploration of the natural world. All manner of plants, edible and ornamental, surrounded the yard, many of them planted, tended, and harvested by the children. The area under the train tracks had “forests” of ivy and bamboo to explore, and trees just the right size for preschoolers to develop their climbing skills. Inside Diana’s house were animals of all sorts, some permanent residents and some visitors. Each year the children watched silkworms hatch from eggs, fed the caterpillars mulberry leaves from a tree in the backyard, and watched the miraculous spinning of the silk cocoons and emergence of the completely domesticated, flightless moths. Parents often arrived at pick up time to find their child giving a lizard a shoulder ride, assisting in walking one of Diana’s dogs, or feeding dandelions to the rabbit. There was an overwhelming sense in this small house that things were cared for: children, animals, plants, and the larger world.

What learning happens in a place like this? What does this focus on exploration of the natural world accomplish in terms of children’s learning and development? My answers are grounded in my work as a researcher in science education and child development. And yet in the framework I lay out below I also try to understand what it is like to be a child in a learning environment in which these ideas are brought to life. And so I will interpret my discussion of what we, as a field, know about how children learn and develop scientific ideas with examples from the world of Willow Street Schoolhouse.

A CAVEAT: THE DANGERS OF A FALL/RECOVERY NARRATIVE

In considering what the role of nature education in early childhood might be, it is important to also consider ways in which our understanding of “nature” can both support and constrain our goals. Educators and researchers who consider issues of whose story is being told in our assumptions about goals and structures of education have pointed out that much of the discourse around nature education is premised on an imagined “golden age” of connection with nature that does not reflect the experiences of most people. Advocates for more and better nature-based education accurately cite evidence that most humans are alienated from nature and that increased time and experience in nature can be emotionally and physically beneficial (Louv, 2008; Sampson, 2015). However, these ideas are often intermingled with the invented notion that there was a time in the not-distant past in which humans, and in particular American children, interacted with nature in a non-problematic way. Dickinson (2013) identifies a “fall recovery narrative” in the work of prominent nature education advocates, harkening to a time in their childhood, before increased technology and millennial cultural norms, in which (some) children were free to roam and were assumed to be deeply connected with the natural world.

Kahn uses the term “environmental generational amnesia” to describe the phenomenon of people seeing as “normal” whatever they have experienced, whether pristine, old growth forest or rivers that, while beautiful, are too polluted to drink or fish in. This concept can help explain how adults develop idealized notions that childhood in previous generations was more innocent and better connected to the natural world. In fact, the history of environmental degradation in the Americas stretches back at least as far as the arrival of the first European colonizers, who sought to “tame” the unfamiliar environment and people that they encountered. Kahn’s critique points out that each generation’s tendency to treat their own childhood as “normal” and desirable ignores or downplays the environmental injustices that were present in that earlier time.

Just as troubling is the norming of the white, middle class, male, heterosexual, able-bodied experience of freedom in the earlier decades of the twentieth century, at a time when laws and cultural norms dictated where people of color, as well as women and girls, were/are allowed to be and were/are allowed to behave. The published memories of a wild, unstructured childhood belong mostly to those who grew up with the privilege of not having to worry about basic safety or economic security. Framing nature education discourse around this one-sided nostalgia can result in approaches that ignore truths about who has access to natural spaces, how decisions are made about preservation, and how to make meaning of human/nature activities such as farming, hunting, and fishing (Flessas & Zimmerman, 2017). These may sound like heavy topics in thinking about very young children’s nature experiences. And yet, children begin building their sense of belonging and place from birth, and so for those who design and enable young children’s experiences, considering how their perspectives may include or exclude the children in their care is critical.

There are alternate narratives that broaden recorded experiences of our interactions with nature, including Camille T. Dungy’s anthology Black nature: Four centuries of African American nature poetry (Dungy, 2009), and such stories help reconceptualize human/nature connections. As we consider how we might best support young children to experience and grow in the natural world, it is imperative that as adults we move away from nostalgia, towa...