Teaching with nature and place
There are many ways to think about what it means to teach with nature and place, but all manifest a certain tension with the curriculum typically mandated by state authorities. Such “official” curricula are generally structured by grade level and subject area and include lists of facts, concepts and skills (“learning objectives”) that students are supposed to master by a particular age. While a curriculum of this kind can be a useful resource for eco-teachers if handled carefully, teaching that is responsive to the natural world can’t afford to tie itself too tightly to pre-determined objectives. Instead, the conventional approach to curriculum gets flipped on its head.
Classroom teaching often starts with one or more learning objectives and then identifies an activity/experience/worksheet for the students to do that helps cover off that objective. In contrast, the eco-teacher generally begins from the experiences, encounters or activities offered by place and the learners’ interests. This requires greater flexibility, and arguably a deeper knowledge of the curriculum, in order to see the possibilities for accomplishing learning objectives in situations that arise more or less spontaneously. Often this entails subtly shaping the activities, perhaps by asking certain questions while taking into account the learners and their needs.
Obviously, for this approach to teaching and learning to work well, planning is important. Teachers need to know the places where they will take their students and to know what encounters, experiences and activities will be possible at these sites at given times. Teachers need to factor into their planning attributes of the kids in their class, while letting go of the idea that on a given day they will tick off particular learning outcomes. In this way, when some event or learning opportunity occurs—perhaps a dead bird is found on the side of a trail and the teacher and students observe the body and the insects that are consuming it—the teacher has a sense of where the learning might most productively be guided.
In addition, there are a lot of benefits to letting children learn through unmediated experiences. One of the beauties of spending time in natural places is that they do a lot of teaching on their own and at their own pace. This is something often missed in the hustle and bustle of a field trip, but when students are spending time in the same place week after week through the turning seasons, more is being learned than any teacher can fuly comprehend. Thus eco-teachers will also allow kids the openness and flexibility to do their own exploration of place, especially when some of the key ethical and safety principles have been established.
Shaping/changing the culture of the outdoors
The transition from indoor classroom spaces to outdoor learning is not only challenging for teachers; it also requires that the students change their perception of what it means to be outside, and how to relate to the natural world. In our experience, kids suddenly released from the confines of a school building tend to see the outdoors as a space for running around freely and wildly, without discipline or a specific intention. They are much less likely to see the outdoors as a space for contemplation or reflection, or a space where activities might be more structured, or that they might have a range of behaviours, from crazy and free-spirited to quiet and humble. And they also tend to see nature as a source of entertainment and distraction, or a space for pursuing their own interests without considering the interests of the natural world itself.
Part of the issue is a shift in structure from explicit to tacit, from blatant to subtle. When compared to conventional schools and classrooms, the outdoors for the most part lacks overt messages about what is expected or appropriate. Teachers, too, find it difficult to manage this shift. It is usually through experience that they learn how to shape a day, how to dial their goals onto the rhythms of their students and the places themselves, how to set expectations for particular places (that is, identifying some spots as quieter and more contemplative then others, and having kids come to know this and practice it). And students differ in their responses: some embrace quiet contemplation and readily feel a connection with place, while others may be inclined to move constantly and only gradually learn to slow down and pay attention to what is around them.
Along with this shift towards greater attentiveness, kids also may need a surprising amount of guidance around environmental stewardship. For instance, some of the younger kids may find some insect, or worm or small animal, and in their enthusiasm and affection end up squeezing it to death. Or they might decide to put a creature in their backpack to take it home because they want to protect it. Even after discussions about stewardship and care for place, they may still throw their lunch wrappings away or rip leaves off plants without much thought as they walk along a trail. And of course kids love looking at things, turning over rocks, picking up bugs, stripping bark, often out of genuine curiosity. Developing a culture of respect and self-restraint takes time and consistent effort—much like a culture of safety, in fact.
A useful approach we have found is to have students think through what a given place needs in order to flourish. A shallow stream, for example, would offer many temptations—kids love building dams and splashing about in water. So building a relationship with the stream might start with a dialogue about what the stream and all its denizens need to live well, what the students might do that would disrupt that, and what some ground rules for good stewardship might be. Then, when it’s time to leave, the class can inspect the sites they visited that day, look for signs of damage or major disturbance, and assess how well they cared for the place and what they might do better next time. And this practise can be transferred to other settings as well. For instance, if the eco-school uses the municipal library, having students talk about what makes a library flourish before they enter will help them understand why there’s a need to minimize noise and to keep things orderly.
Each eco-school will have to pay attention to questions of stewardship, to try different approaches, and to evaluate how well they work and make course corrections. Obviously, it helps when the teachers and parents model good behaviour. Language matters—being careful about how a place is named and described, and finding ways to foreground the agency and value of beings other than humans. Songs, poems and stories can help reinforce desirable relationships with place.
Learning and teaching in a multi-age community
Most eco-schools seem to gravitate towards multi-age groupings, at least for some of the time. In some ways, it does add another layer of complexity: teachers need to be familiar with a broader curriculum and range of capacities, and the variety of interactions expands as more ages are involved. It’s also important that older kids don’t end up in a baby-sitting role and that they be sufficiently challenged by learning activities, the pace of a hike and so on. When the youngest kids are part of a group, a lot of the time can be taken up with clothing adjustments, snacking, dealing with bathroom breaks and the like. For these reasons, students tend to be grouped in age ranges like K-2, 3-4, 5-7 for many activities. However, the school can still do some days or activities with a broader mix of grades, such as having grade 5 kids read to kindergarten students, and might also use “clan” or “house” groupings that include the full range of ages. And sometimes a particular group of kids, like the ones in their final year at the eco-school, might take part in activities especially designed for them.
However it’s organized, there are significant benefits from mutli-age groupings. Younger kids remind older kids about the value of play, to open up to wonder, to ask questions, and to be more embodied in their learning. Older kids gain valuable skills as they mentor the younger ones, and reinforce their own skills and knowledge by teaching them to others. Kids who are young or old for their age can find friends who are at their level of maturity. And all learners have more freedom to explore and find the level of challenge that works for them.
The teachers, too, can become something of a multi-age community, closer to how people have taught and learned through the general arc of human history. Eco-teachers can ehance their own wellbeing when they embrace co-teaching, both with each other and with parents/caregivers, grandparents, local naturalists, etc. Not only does this add to the safety of the school, but it offers other practical benefits, allowing for flexible responses to such incidents as a child falling into a puddle and needing help changing clothes. Most importantly, it allows the teachers to build off each other’s strengths and accumulated experience. When teachers take a moment to confer, to explore different possibilities, to add to each other’s ideas, in a truly collaborative spirit, the capacity of the whole school is enhanced.
As the various participants in the eco-school come to know and trust one another, a distinctive culture starts to form. The year might begin, for example, with a naming ceremony, where everyone gets their nametag and gets their photo taken, and the returning students do a little welcome for the new students. Music, stories, rituals, symbols—all of the ways humans express meaningful belonging can be part of such events. And the scope of student agency might expand over time, shifting for instance from having projects assigned by the teachers to students choosing their own topics, including themes drawn from popular culture or otherwise unrelated to the specific context of the eco-school. There is a give-and-take involved that represents a kind of collective learning through spending a lot of time together in place.
The challenge of curriculum integration
In previous sections we described some of the tensions between eco-schooling and the mandated public school curriculum. One of the key challenges stems from the divisions between subject areas. Even in mainstream schools this is often seen as problematic, and for a century or more there have been efforts to overcome these divisions through various approaches to curriculum integration. For eco-schools, it’s the way the world presents itself in experience as a single integrated whole that essentially demands a less siloed approach to developing knowledge and understanding.
The mandated curriculum does have its uses: it can serve as a reminder of some especially valuable ways to approach a topic (e.g. through immersive personal experience, through collective observation and reasoning, through the lens of history and culture, through creative storywork, through mathematical modelling). And it also gives something of a sense of progression in understanding through the grades, although it can seem unhelpfully rigid in the context of the multi-age groupings favoured in many eco-schools (see above). In addition, the contrast with lived experience can actually be a productive tension in some ways, pushing teachers and students to make connections that they would otherwise have missed.
In practice, most integrative approaches to eco-teaching seem to rely on the use of overarching themes. These can be relatively specific (e.g. birds, the river) or broad (e.g. communication, the watershed), but in all cases they provide a container for learning over a stretch of several days or weeks. Such themes don’t rule out the possibility, or even likelihood, that other learning opportunities will arise and demand attention over that period, but they provide a focus to return to and a lens for inquiry that help students answer the question, “What are you learning about in school?” And the constraint afforded by a chosen theme is a spur to creativity—to uses of writing, math, games, music and so on that both build on and depart from what the students have experienced before.
Eco-schools that divide their time between outdoor and classroom learning may find that the themes also help provide continuity between the two. That being said, some parts of the curriculum, mathematics above all, can be resistant to full integration. That is, one can apply and explore mathematical ideas and procedures in the context of a theme, but it’s by no means guaranteed that one can cover all of the math curriculum this way. So it’s not uncommon for eco-teachers to include some more conventional kinds of lessons within an integrated curriculum—not just in math but in other subject areas as well. Over time, the capacity for integration will likely increase, as teachers come to understand more and more of the learning opportunities and mediational possibilities of a given place, and a wider range of entry points to the mandated curriculum.
Questions of technology, from low to high
Every eco-school community has to sort through three questions around the use of technology in teaching and learning. First, what do they mean by technology? Second, what particular technologies fit with their vision for the school? And third, how are these technologies to be used—in what circumstances, under what rules and restrictions, and for what purposes?
Such question are, of course, not unique to eco-schools. As an interesting example, many Waldorf schools have takes a strong stance against television viewing by their students at home. Waldorf schools see this medium as hampering the development of a child’s imagination, positioning the child as a passive recipient of content rather than engaged and creative; they also deem much of the programming to be problematic. Of course, it is parents who have the final say over their children’s access to TV, but these schools see it as important to follow through on the implications of their educational philosophy.
These days, many schools and teachers feel pressure to introduce students to electronic technologies at a young age. Eco-schools on the whole tend to be resistant to this trend, for a number of reasons. A simple practical one is that outdoor settings are not like the controlled environment of a classroom. It’s much easier for computers to be ruined by sudden rain, or by being dropped. By way of contrast, there is not much that can go wrong if one relies on paper, a clipboard and a pencil—one can even write in the rain. It’s true that iPads can be used to support a range of activities, such as taking photos of plants and annotating them. But on the other hand, kids will have a very different relationship with a plant if instead of photographing it, they are asked to sketch it. So often “lower” technologies make the most sense.
A more fundamental objection to electronic technologies in general (including television) is that they can make the world of immediate experience less real and interesting to children, and discourage them from the effort involved in finding out things first hand. Say, for instance, the kids encounter two banana slugs doing a mating dance. With electronic media close to hand, a tempting move may be to look up a video or a web page that explains the process, forgetting about the actual slugs at their feet. Of course, we do not want to imply that kids should always be kept away from checking things out online, but direct, unmediated experience is in our view (shared, we think, by eco-teachers in general) one of the most valuable aspects of eco-school learning. Out of such experiences come questions and ideas that increase students’ sense of wonder, agency and possibility, rather than representing the world as already explored and known.
Even quite ancient technologies can raise significant questions for eco-schools. One of the classic ones is whether kids get to use knives. Many outdoor programs have eliminated the use of knives because there were too many injuries. On the other hand, there is clearly value in learning about knife craft—the skilful use of this technology. If children are being being taught how to take care of a knife, how to use it properly, how to mitigate the damage this potentially dangerous tool might cause, an eco-school might decide this learning is worth a small amount of risk. In such a program, children would earn the right to use the knife once they had the appropriate skills and confidence. We are not saying that this is the best choice in all circumstances, however; It would be prudent to check on the most recent outdoor safety literature regarding knives or other potentially dangerous tools the school is thinking of using, as well as conferring with other eco-schools to see how they have handled such questions.
Perhaps the knife example points to a general approach to thinking about technology. What craft traditions are involved? How can students be taught the necessary skiills to use the technology effectively? Do they understand the risks involved, and how to mimimize those risks? These questions are as useful for thinking about iPads and the Internet as they are about knives, hammers and saws.
Aligning assessment with values and purposes
The assessment methods used at an eco-school should reflect the school’s philosophical commitments. Conventional grading practices—rating students competitively on a single linear scale—are a poor fit for experiential and outdoor learning. Assessment is in essence a form of communication between teachers, students and caregivers, and to some extent the broader education system. So the school community needs to work through what they want that communication to cover and how it will do so.
A couple of approaches worth considering are portfolios and learning stories. A portfolio is a body of work the student assembles over the school year, with the teacher’s descriptions of assignments and assessment criteria included. Portfolios can be physical or electronic, depending on the school’s approach to technology (see previous section). At various points in the school year, students showcase their developing portfolio and explain what they have learned. Both caregivers and teachers thereby get a richer perspective on the child’s understanding; they can see both the child’s strengths and the areas where they may need help to improve. It also allows teachers to see where they may need to put more emphasis in their teaching and class activities. Learning stories, an approach developed in New Zealand but with affinities to the “pedagogical documentation” used in Reggio Emilia, involve the teachers writing up and sharing brief descriptions of learning moments for each student, to which the student and their parents/caregivers can add further details or respond in any way they choose. Both of these approaches allow parents to share in their kids’ accomplishments and encourage dialogue over how best to acknowledge and support them. Both are oriented to ongoing growth rather than summative evaluation. And both help learning become a topic for shared enjoyment and celebration.
If an eco-school adopts these richer methods of assessment, it’s important to account for how much time the new methods demand of teachers and when and how they will be able to carry out and document their assessments. For teachers used to conventional assessment methods, the switch to a fundamentally different approach can at first seem daunting. This is something the administrator needs to pay attention to, perhaps scheduling dedicated time for professional development or arranging other forms of support such as mentorship. Appropriate use of technology may make certain things easier, like keeping track of individual students’ development over time.
A different assessment system may also require some adjustment on the part of parents and students. Since most parents will themselves have come through schooling systems that emphasized grades, some may feel a little concerned to hear that their children’s progress will not be measured in a similar way. The kids may want to know why they don’t get “report cards” like their friends who go to conventional schools. Some of the kids who have already spent time in such schools may initially feel like they don’t know how well they are doing in comparison to how they were doing at their old school. Clear communication is essential in order to build understanding and support around the school’s assessment approach. Fortunately, the dialogical nature of the practices outlined above involves parents/caregivers and students in the process directly, so some of this adjustment can be based on (hopefully positive) experience.
If the eco-school is part of the public system, it will likely be subject to the same kinds of standardized tests as other schools, regardless of its internal approach to assessment. In addition, many students are likely to go on to more conventional forms of schooling in the later years of high school, where letter or numerical grades are the norm. The prevalence of such practices may lead eco-schools to spending some time on preparing students for these other forms of assessment. Such decisions are contextual and strategic—but again, we think it is important to communicate them clearly, and to keep them open to ongoing community deliberation. While in general we measure what we value, we also tend to end up valuing what we measure, which is why assessment practices are an important touchstone for the authentic, lived values of an eco-school.