A few days ago myself and my colleague had a bunch of high school students come to our nature center. If you look back at my post Standards you will see that myself and the other grad fellow were creating curriculum for this school. Trying to meet the schools curriculum and teach them about nature was difficult. Trying to work creatively within the rigid education standards was probably the most challenging thing I've had to do in the education field. Keep in mind, I am not a trained educator. I'm mostly self taught and I've been learning tricks of the trade through experience, particularly with my old job in New Hampshire.
They arrived, and the day felt like a blur. We had planned everything. We were mostly just along for a roller coaster ride. We talked about the scientific method, random sampling and avoiding bias in your data, making observations, how to orient yourself to a map, and the forest itself. At the end we finally waved goodbye to the students and we slumped into chairs. My colleague said it well when she said 'wow I feel like I ran a marathon' I agree.
Today we looked at our goals for this lesson and the overarching goals of the program and determined if we met our goals or if we needed to revisit them. We found that we did meet our goals and our lesson was in line with the program goals. But we felt that something was missing. The big picture was giving the kids a sense of place, to connect them to their plot. We had only spent 20 minutes at their plots this week. The truth was staring us in the face. We had connected the kids, in small ways, to the property, to each other and science, but we had failed to really hit home what we truly wanted. The vision was to have the students have ownership of their own plot.
I've had a series of posts focused on sense of place. I could talk the talk, walk the walk, but could I grow the feeling in others? Building a sense of place in myself wasn't a challenge but an activity, I could develop that by going out and observing. It's easy to use yourself as the guinea pig. While I was at my spot I had been observing a cocoon. I had been watching it grow and change. For a couple of weeks I would look to see if it was still there. I went the other day to see what it looked like now, and when I looked under the leaf it had been dangling from I noticed it wasn't there. I was sad. Where was it? I looked for the remnants of the cocoon and couldn't find it. I wondered if something didn't eat it or if the caterpillar completed its metamorphosis and flew away. I thought to myself the most I could hope for was that it flew away. Then I thought that this is a slight taste of how parents must feel when their kids go to college. I then realized with a bittersweet thought that my experiment with myself about sense of place, was working. I had become connected to a piece of my spot. I leaned back in the deer bed and looked at the sky thinking. I had succeeded, but why did I feel strange about it? My feelings towards the place changed. If someone had told me that a bird ate a cocoon anywhere else on the property I wouldn't have cared. But because it was my cocoon it meant something more. Even when I tried to rationalize life and death of a caterpillar I still felt uneasy. I determined that I felt this was because my experiment had worked. I had 'duped' myself into feeling emotions about the land. I had irrational thoughts about my place because I had grown to love it. I had fallen for my own experiment. I then had motivating thought, that sense of place WORKS. I had gone having zero connection to my nature center in Wisconsin to feeling the loss of one cocoon a few months later.
It had worked. But how do I get it to work in others. A huge part of my connection with this place is that I wanted to be connected. I was open to what it had to give me. How do I teach sense of place without sounding like a hippy with their head in the clouds? The first step is allowing the kids to spend as much time as possible at their places. It's not that I want to trick them into having emotional connections to their space, I want them to decide that they feel connected to their spot. I am going to work on putting as much time in the schedule to allow for the students just to be at their site. Having planned activities that will force them to look around, notice things will be a great way to help foster sense of place.
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