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

recent years, newer proponents of experiential or environment-based education established the Association for Experiential Education to support professional development, theoretical advancement, and evaluation of experiential education worldwide. The association now has approximately thirteen hundred members in over thirty countries. A handful of organizations have made the leap from words to action. Among the oldest and best known is Foxfire, headquartered in Mountain City, Georgia. Its Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning originated in a program intended to teach basic English skills to high school freshmen in rural Georgia. These classroom experiences led to the student-produced Foxfire Magazine and a series of books on Appalachian life and folkways. Now three decades old, Foxfire offers teacher and student programs focusing on culture more than nature—but nature permeates the work, which offers information on everything from snake lore to wild plant foods to bear hunting.

Other active organizations include the venerable National Wildlife Federation and the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, New York. Teachers at schools using the Peterson Institute’s curriculum attend summer training. Upon their return to the classrooms, Peterson-trained teachers lead their students in a study of the square kilometer surrounding their building.

After a decade of publishing such writers as Gary Paul Nabhan and Robert Michael Pyle in Orion magazine, the Orion Society, a Massachusetts-headquartered nonprofit, “decided to help put some of these words into practice,” says environmental writer and frequent Orion contributor Will Nixon. Orion now gives nature education fellowships to teachers, including a summer workshop and grants to pay for field trips, sketchbooks, day packs, “or other items that schools with tight budgets can’t afford.”

Nixon quotes one Orion fellowship recipient, Bonnie Dankert, an English teacher at Santa Cruz High School: “I used to take student groups on trips to the California deserts or the High Sierras. We read literature about these places and studied the flora and fauna. We had some wonderful experiences.” But, she confessed, she had never considered taking shorter excursions to the coastal mountains and Monterey Bay close to the school. She had assumed that her students knew and loved the area; she was wrong. Her students told her that they didn’t feel connected to the place in which they lived; on a field trip to a state forest close to the school, Dankert discovered that 90 percent of the class had never been there. “They knew about it, but they had never been up there, sitting under a redwood tree and imagining what the scene looked like one hundred years ago,” she told Nixon.

Dankert dropped the road trips and began teaching more locally, at Monterey Bay. She emphasized local authors. For example, while reading John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row, Dankert asked a local marine biologist to lead the students on a field trip to the tide pools in Monterey Bay, which Steinbeck had explored. In addition to helping the students learn about natural science, she led discussions about the meaning of “community”—because one of Steinbeck’s characters had described a tide pool as a metaphor for the community of life. And, wrote Nixon, the trip helped the class form its own community. “One kid had never taken off his baseball cap,” Dankert remembered. “His eyes were always in shadow. Afterwards, he took off his cap and started interacting.”

Another Orion fellow, a teacher at the junior high school in Homer, Alaska, helped organize a program that allowed eighth-graders to finish regular classes three weeks early; during that time, students studied a nearby glacier, learning glaciology, marine biology, botany, and cultural history. “This isn’t memorizing information for a test,” the teacher told Nixon. “When you sit in silence in front of a glacier and see the glacial pond, the dirt of the glacial moraine, the succession of plants from the lichens to the climax forest, and you write and sketch what you see, you make a bond with that moment. This experience becomes part of you.”

James and the Giant Turnip

An increasing number of parents and a few good schools are realizing the importance and the magic of providing hands-on, intimate contact between children and nature as a larger part of a child’s education. Some teachers come to interdisciplinary place-based education on their own, with no institutional support besides a sympathetic principal. Most current progress in education, in fact, comes from iconoclastic individuals, including the principals, teachers, parents, and community volunteers who chart their own courses. Committed individuals and service organizations can accomplish a great deal.

One creative elementary school teacher, Jackie Grobarek, describes what she called her “butterfly theory” of teaching, based loosely on meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s theory that very small inputs at the beginning of a system’s evolution are amplified through feedback and have major consequences throughout the system. (One interpreter popularized Lorenz’s theory by calling it the “butterfly effect,” wondering if the flap of a butterfly wing in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas.) Grobarek describes the kind of hands-on experience with a payoff not always immediately visible:

Schools are nonlinear systems, and small inputs can lead to dramatically large consequences. Our students this summer have raised earthworms, plants, and caterpillars and released the emerged butterflies. Because the students’ “babies” needed food, they also learned that the worms would eat garbage, the plants would thrive on worm castings, and that the butterflies required specific plants to eat, and other plants on which to lay their eggs. Many of these things were identified on our school grounds and in our canyon. They realized that our canyon, which had become an unattractive nuisance and trash pit in the neighborhood, was actually a wonderful habitat. It is filled with wild fennel, which is the host as well as food plant for the giant swallowtail butterfly. We are now working as class teams, and this week alone have hauled almost four Dumpsters of trash out of the area. Will this improve their reading and math scores? Maybe, but I feel that this experience will change them in ways that tests may not be able to