Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Louv, Richard [best free novels txt] 📗

education with direct experience, especially of nature. The definitions and nomenclature of this movement are tricky. In recent decades, the approach has gone by many names: community-oriented schooling, bioregional education, experiential education, and, most recently, place-based or environment-based education. By any name, environment-based education can surely be one of the antidotes to nature-deficit disorder. The basic idea is to use the surrounding community, including nature, as the preferred classroom.

Real World Learning

For more effective education reform, teachers should free kids from the classroom. That’s the message from Gerald Lieberman, director of the State Education and Environmental Roundtable, a national effort to study environment-based education.

“Since the ecosystems surrounding schools and their communities vary as dramatically as the nation’s landscape, the term ‘environment’ may mean different things at every school; it may be a river, a city park, or a garden carved out of an asphalt playground,” according to the Roundtable’s report, “Closing the Achievement Gap.” The report was issued in 2002, but has been largely ignored by the education establishment. The Roundtable worked with 150 schools in sixteen states for ten years, identifying model environment-based programs and examining how the students fared on standardized tests. The findings are stunning: environment-based education produces student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math; improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages; and develops skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making.

• In Florida, Taylor County High School teachers and students use the nearby Econfina River to team-teach math, science, language arts, biology, chemistry, and the economics of the county.

• In San Bernardino, California, students at Kimbark Elementary School study botany and investigate microscopic organisms and aquatic insects in an on-campus pond and vegetable garden, and in a nearby greenhouse and a native plant arboretum.

• In Glenwood Springs, Colorado, high school students planned and supervised the creation of an urban pocket park, and city planners asked them to help develop a pedestrian mall and park along the Colorado River.

• At Huntingdon Area Middle School in Pennsylvania, students collect data at a stream near the school. Teacher Mike Simpson uses that data to teach fractions, percentages, and statistics, as well as to interpret charts and graphs. “I don’t have to worry about coming up with themes for application problems anymore. The students make their own,” says Simpson.

David Sobel, who describes place-based education as a focus on “learning directly within the local community of a student,” did an independent review of such studies, including one by the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation, which reported findings similar to Lieberman’s. When it comes to reading skills, “the Holy Grail of education reform,” says Sobel, place-based or environment-based education should be considered “one of the knights in shining armor.” Students in these programs typically outperform their peers in traditional classrooms.

For example, at Hotchkiss Elementary School in Dallas, passing rates of fourth-graders in an environment-based program surpassed by 13 percent those of students in an earlier, traditional class. The Texas Education Agency’s Division of Student Assessment called Hotchkiss’s gains “extremely significant” when compared to the statewide average gain of 1 percent during the same period. Achievements in math are similar. In Portland, Environmental Middle School teachers employ a curriculum using local rivers, mountains, and forests; among other activities, they plant native species and study the Willamette River. At that school, 96 percent of students meet or exceed state standards for math problem-solving—compared to only 65 percent of eighth-graders at comparable middle schools. Environment-based education can amplify more typical school reform efforts. In North Carolina, raising standards produced a 15 percent increase in the proportion of fourth-graders scoring at the “proficient” level in statewide math scores. But fourth-graders at an environment-based school in Asheville, North Carolina, did even better—with a 31 percent increase in the number of students performing at the proficient level.

As an added bonus, the students in these programs demonstrate better attendance and behavior than students in traditional classrooms. Little Falls High School in Little Falls, Minnesota, reported that students in the environment-based program had 54 percent fewer suspensions than other ninth-graders. At Hotchkiss Elementary, teachers had once made 560 disciplinary referrals to the principal’s office in a single year. Two years later, as the environment-based program kicked into gear, the number dropped to 50.

More recently, in 2005, the American Institutes for Research released a report on its study of 255 at-risk sixth-grade students from four elementary schools who attended three outdoor education programs over a period of several months. The study compared the impact on students who experienced the outdoor education program versus those in a control group who had not had the outdoor learning experience. Major findings, submitted to the California Department of Education, included: a 27 percent increase in measured mastery of science concepts; enhanced cooperation and conflict resolution skills; gains in self-esteem, problem-solving, motivation to learn, and classroom behavior. Elementary school teachers and outdoor school staff “repeatedly emphasized how outdoor science school provides a ‘fresh start’ for students,” according to the report.

Sobel tells a charming story of a physics teacher at one school who was teaching mechanical principles “by involving students in the reconstruction of a neighborhood trail where they had to use pulleys, levers, and fulcrums to accomplish the task.” On what the school calls Senior Skip Day, when seniors are free to skip any classes they want, one of the students told the physics teacher, “I want you to know, Mr. Church, that I skipped all the rest of my classes today, but I just couldn’t miss this class. I’m too committed to what we’re doing to skip this.” With such indications that this kind of school reform works, why aren’t more school districts considering it? Why have so many districts cut outdoor experiential learning as well as classroom environmental education, or, when making funding decisions, pitted one against the other—when both are so clearly needed? These questions are unlikely to appear on any standardized test.

For decades, Montessori and Waldorf schools have, in different ways, advocated experiential learning. In