Immersing instead of Escaping

I had a very interesting conversation with a high school student at lunch today. At the semester school that I kinda- sorta work at right now (I also work for a nature center an hour and half away). At the school they are doing something called solos. Solos are basically at time for kids camp alone in the woods. They each have spot and they stay out for 24 hours by themselves. I want you all to keep in mind there are several safety precautions which in place to make sure every students physical and emotional safety needs are met. I personally see this as an excellent opportunity for reflection on their semester. I also see it as an opportunity to really connect with their spot.

This girl who I was sitting with said 'Solos are going to be so boring! I'm going to bring a book about the tropics or something while I'm there.'

She clearly wasn't seeing this as an opportunity to connect with the woods. Instead she was seeing this as an opportunity to sit in a tent for hours and read. She was also choosing a book which was going to escape the world around her. Don't get me wrong, I escaped all the time while I was in Benin. Every time I took a bike ride, or read in my apartment, I escaped the frustrations of third world living. This can be a very helpful for sanity. However, I found myself at some low points in Benin where I was completely escaped from the reality around me.

It is a fine line to walk between escaping and immersion. But I think for one night this girl should immerse herself in the opportunity given. Carpe Diem! Perhaps choosing a book that instead of escaping makes her feel more connected to her place. Books like A Sand County Almanac or Walden (even though Walden is based on a place in Massachusetts it's still a very similar climate.) would only work to deepen the sense of place.

Teaching Sense of Place

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.

Standards

Early on when I first arrived at my assistantship people were talking about a green charter school that we would be working with. 'Oh yea eventually... you're all going to do something with the school' was about the extent of the conversation. Until we were in the car going to a meeting with our new work partners did we fully understand what we were getting ourselves into. Our supervisor was driving and basically said 'What were you all thinking? We should probably have some sort of plan before we walk in there, the big boss man wants us to do some sort of research that's on going, so lets think'

So we walked in and my supervisor, our fearless leader, and the young teachers supervisor (his fearless leader) sat back and said 'well... this is for you all for you all to work out far as we're concerned'. So here we were, three doe- eyed young professionals being told to do something. Having been in the Peace Corps, and working as an outdoor educator I can pretty much pull it together and a brave give a fake-it-'til-you-make-it face until something does happen. However, this time, I was a little stunned. I'm not a teacher, I'm an educator and working with a school to develop curriculum is something I've never done. The fake-it-'til-you-make-it strategy didn't seem appropriate because these were children. What type of program could we do?

The idea was they would come here every month and do some sort of outdoor programming. It would be a full day every time. In order for these kids to come it had to be not only worth while for students but also worth while for the school. If either one of both of those parties didn't feel they were getting enough out of the programming it could be a disaster. If the kids didn't like it, the program wasn't going to work, if the school didn't feel it was worth it to come, they wouldn't. We have to make it not only ongoing, but also engaging and educational.

We came up with an idea, giving each student a 'plot' or place and get it know it by learning about it. There was also a prescribed burn going on and we were looking to study the effects of that. This project was looking at not only seasonal changes but also changes made from the fire. They were going to take their data and compile it together within a project. They were also going to get to choose one thing to study, a question they would like answered. From our study they would take the methods of data collection that we taught them to answer their question.

The teacher loved the idea. So we've taken it and ran. But having to wade through educational standards to make sure that the students are getting the most out of the program is mostly the problem. Standards and criteria are great. They help define expectations of teaching. However, I can also see where they are cripplingly confining. A creative teacher who sees educational value in nontraditional topics is stuck trying to check boxes. I can't imagine having to work through every single curriculum standard. You would get through most in a year, but definitely not all.

My goals this week were to check the curriculum standards and make sure that we're hitting on quite a few in environmental education and science. Not the most exciting thing I've ever done, but enlightening. It is also interesting to see how much work gets put into a class or program when starting from scratch. I want this program to have more weight, and linking it to the curriculum standards will only make it stronger.

Teachers and Environmental Education

I've written about sense of place and advocating for teachers to connect kids more to the outdoors. See my post called Sense of Place. Kids should be outside, they should be learning and connecting to their environment. Start with the backyard, slowly move up to the world. As an adult I feel that I have problems connecting to places that I don't know, empathizing with their problems and feeling like I can talk intelligently about a problem half a world away. I would consider myself an informed environmentalist and if I have problems making these connections than I can only imagine how children feel. 

Who teaches kids about the woods then, who connects kids to nature on their level? Lots of people can! Parents, Boy/ Girl Scout leaders, Youth Group leaders, non formal educators, camp counselors, volunteers, friends, family, and of course, classroom teachers. Classroom teachers have an amazing opportunity for connection. Why? Because our government, and many around the world, has deemed the subjects of math, literature, social science, history, art, music and physical education so important that they will pay for it's citizens to have at least a base line knowledge of these subjects, not only for just one year, but for 13 years if you include kindergarten. Putting environmental education and building environmental connection in a school curriculum only adds weight to the subject matter. Because environmental education is so broad it can be combined with any preexisting course. For example, learning about math by analyzing data collected from trees, learning about the water cycle by collecting rainwater and kayaking down a river, reading about the history of your town and looking at ways the land was used (maybe map some old stone walls!). The opportunities are there. 

Now here comes the hard part. It's a great idea. I can get many people excited and interested in implementing this type of curriculum. They agree that yes this should be done! By someone. Usually when people say 'someone' they could mean one of two things 'someone' meaning YOU or 'someone' meaning NOT ME. There is a disconnect between teachers and environmental education. Keep in mind, I do not mean all teachers, some are great and excited to bring backyards into their classroom. Disconnect number 1) teachers work extremely hard. They are paid very little. They have terrible budgets to work with. 

Let me step on a soap box for a hot minute here: If our military can buy pretty much whatever they want, whenever they want, and millions of dollars can be put into presidential campaigns... Tell me why teachers have to fund-raise for field trips? Tell me why we can feed every prisoner 3 square meals a day but our kids who are in public school have to pay for lunch? Tell me why supplies like new books (I remember only using ONE book in my high school that was less than 5 years old, our history books still had the USSR in the map) graphing calculators and computers are often times deemed 'too expensive'? Ok I'm stepping off the soap box now. 

Going back. The teacher is worked very hard, many days bringing home quizzes to grade, papers to read, progress reports to fill out. They should have enough time to have a life too. Adding something else onto the job of a teacher is not only short sighted but also disrespectful of their time. Disconnect number 2) Some teachers just plain don't like going outside. So because they aren't interested in it, the don't do it. And so instead of a teacher creating a unique lesson plan which was about going outside to learn about chipmunks foraging or migratory Canadian Geese, the students sit inside and learn about penguins. This was my 4th grade class. We learned about penguins. I am from Vermont. I am 10. I have never seen a penguin in my life. I have no idea what South America or Antarctica look like. I only know that penguins are flightless birds that look cute and waddle. We learned about penguins for what seemed like weeks. It was fall and often times at recess we would point out migrating geese and the V shape they make as they were flying south. Curiosity and wonder were running wild. Where did they go? What did they do there? Why didn't they stay in Canada? Why learned about penguins and not geese I still have no idea. I remember clearly our teacher standing at the front of the class after the test and saying how disappointed she was that we all had done poorly on our exam. If I could see her now I would remind her. I was 10. I didn't give two shits about penguins. Our grades reflect your teaching. You failed to inspire excitement and curiosity and you also used an abstract animal. Our development wasn't ready for abstract thought. Good job, you set us up for failure, and then you told us it our fault. 

Another high school science teacher of mine in AP Biology talked about pea plants and genetics. This was a perfect opportunity. Why didn't we have pea plants?! We could have grown and cross pollinated pea plants! But now we learned about it through a book. Thanks. Way to remove real life experiences from your classroom. Some people, just like some teachers, don't like going outside. And so they have the flexibility to choose to learn from a book instead. This is robbing a classroom of direct experience. Even if an activity was there, if it was all set up, easy for the teacher, not any more work perhaps less, that teacher could look outside and say 'well, it's raining, I don't want to do that' and just not. This makes me so mad. I can't choose whether or not I want to learn math in public schools, so teachers shouldn't be able to choose to do an entire course on environmental issues inside. 

Moral of the story: working with teachers and finding solutions to these barriers is going to be the next step in a more integrated approach to bringing kids closer to their place and connecting them in many ways to the environment. 

Sense of Place: The Garden

In keeping with my sense of place theme, I've been working in the garden. The garden is a great place to bring students to start connections. Taking part in the entire process is immensely rewarding. Getting a garden ready for spring, planting seeds, weeding, watering, harvesting and eating the food gives ownership to those who took part in the work. Gardening also teaches those who work on it patience and not to rely on instant gratification. Food tastes better not only when it's fresh but when you know how much work you put into it. Waiting for a tomato to ripen or a pumpkin to grow is fun. It takes time to watch the change, but it happens.

Those who have anxiety about connecting with natural areas might have an easier time connecting to a garden. While the garden isn't wild it teaches people how to care for other living things, and in response the garden grows. It can also teaches people what happens when it isn't cared for. Knowing where food comes from isn't always apparent to people. Summer squash, lettuce and green beans aren't magically grown in the store but instead outside. Just as chicken doesn't come from the Styrofoam it sits in or the factory that packaged it, it came from a real live chicken. More opportunities to connect to where food comes from means people are more thoughtful about the food they buy. For this exact reason, I love farmers markets.

Garden where I grew up in Vermont

The place I work has a garden. It unfortunately wasn't taken care of, and so the first emotional connection I have to the garden is one of sympathy. The beds were overgrown, some didn't even come up they were so choked with weeds. About the only things that were OK were some tomatoes, broccoli, and squash. I saw that there were some dried pea and bean plants, but mostly everything was grass. The year before when there was someone to care for it they had taken 450 pounds of food out the garden. This food when then used in the kitchen and served to the students who were staying at the facility. This year they had only taken out about 4 pounds. Not enough to make a significant impact. The garden itself was in a sad state visually. Grass was everywhere. When we started to work on it, the best idea we had was to use a lawn mower and mow some of the beds.

But there was a glimmer of hope. They didn't plant the whole garden, be it for crop rotation or because they figured it might be too much work. Instead of trying to weed half a garden for no good reason an entire season, they planted oats instead. Many people use oats as crop cover. As a plant they need almost zero maintenance, they cover the ground and don't allow for weeds to come in, and then they die back about the right time. I thought to myself 'What does one do with whole oats?' I found out that once you separate the grain from the chaff they are called oat groats and can be eaten very similarly to oatmeal. It doesn't need to be milled, another thing that surprised me is that you can buy them just like that. I always thought of oats as needing to be milled. Apparently not. My hobby this fall I think will be trying to get oats to a state where they can be eaten. I will have more posts about my experiments with this process. Stay tuned!

A Sense of Place

There is a movement happening within schools, both public and private, to encourage children to connect with their immediate environment. This has come as a result because when a school does environmental curriculum they learn about far away places and their problems. Kids effectively connect more to penguins and tigers than they do animals that might live in their own back yard. They also learn more about destruction of the rain forest or desertification on the outskirts of the Sahara than they do about clean groundwater in their community. This leads to some huge disconnects. First of all, once the curriculum about the rain forest is over the kids are going to be more challenged to continue to connect to a place that is thousands of miles away and completely different from what they're used to. Second of all, once they loose that connection why should they care, how does the extinction of the polar bear affect them?

Now instead imagine northern New England. A place where there are oak, maple, aspen, fir and pine, rolling hills, deer, moose, bobcat, lynx, and coyote. Children from this area can learn about the forest in their back yard. Learning about the trees and making maple syrup will build stronger connections to the environment. Their woods are no more or less important than the rain forest. They can also learn about environmental problems such as honey bee die back, which has been proven to be caused by pesticides. The idea is that these things they can touch, smell, taste, see, and hear. It has been proven time and time again that anyone learns better when they use more senses to learn. Also when the curriculum is over, they will continue to see the forest, or even better visit the forest. Learning about the fall and why the leaves change or spring when the leaves come back out isn't an intangible topic, because in the kids minds IT REALLY HAPPENS!

Children up until almost 8th grade have a hard time with abstract concepts and so starting an environmental unit with 10 year olds 'Ok kids imagine a place thousands of miles away in the middle of the ocean...' you've already lost your class. If a kid has never even seen the ocean, this isn't an effective way to connect kids to that place. It works so much better when you start your lesson with 'Ok kids, we're going outside where you're not going to have to imagine anything because we are studying maple trees you can touch them, see them, measure them, and then we're going to make maple syrup!'

Giving children, or adults, a sense of place is very important. It means that they feel as if they belong and are connected to a place, be it in the forest, one spot, or a trail system. They feel as if they are part of the interactions that take place there. I have been working to feel a sense of place in Wisconsin. Going out and being somewhere, looking closely, sitting, listening, and setting down roots in just one place is important. Those who care and are deeply connected to a place are more likely to hold on to their understanding of that place than those who learn about a place they aren't connected to.