Wandering, Wondering, Tracks, Traces, and “the” Scientific Method
Transformative Ecological Activities for Kids and Their Grownups
Becoming naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit.1 –Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Introduction
Gary Gray, a dear friend, and an avid birder, tracker, photographer, and author, calls our walks wanders. We prefer wandering as a description of what we do, rather than hiking, because hikers seem pretty focused on getting somewhere, and our focus during our wanders is on being somewhere. When I’m out in the forest with kids, our travels are also better described as wanders, not hikes. We often have destinations in mind, but those destinations don’t distract us from seeing, smelling, feeling, listening, and sometimes tasting where we are. This sensing includes observing other ecosystem contributors like animals, plants, fungi, boulders, and creeks. In addition to noting current activity in the forest, we look for traces of past activity, including animal tracks, poop, homes, evidence of past meals, and other traces of animal activity and interactions. By observing other ecosystem contributors, we come to know them--first by learning their names and physical features, then their habits and relationships. We find and understand our place within the natural world by observing, asking questions, and looking for answers. Robin Wall Kimmerer calls this becoming naturalized to a place. In this post, we discuss some activities to do in the forest with kids that tie together what might, at first glance, appear to be a word salad of a title. We also discuss how these activities relate to” the” scientific method and our Earth-centered approach to nurturing transformative ecological educational environments and communities.
Activities
These activities are meant to whet you and your children’s appetite for attending not just to what’s happening among our kin in the forest, but also to signs of what has happened in the past.
Poop
When I’m out in the forest with kids, I ask them to shout out when they find something interesting. It’s not unusual during one of our “classes” to hear a distant shout of “poop!” and to see the rest of us scurrying to check out the poop that motivated the shout. In a newly formed group, I’m usually the first one to shout, “poop!” Kids seem to like this ritual and it quickly becomes part of group culture. Of course, you can substitute in any accepted kid word for feces, such as “scat.” Once we’ve found poop, we note the poop's color, shape, and texture, and then dissect it using a stick we find nearby looking for signs of what the animal ate. Presence of only animal remains like fur and bones indicates a carnivore. While the presence of only plant matter, like seeds, suggests a herbivore, if you find both animal and plant matter present you know you’ve found an omnivore.
Finding poop is also a great opportunity to ask questions about what’s happening to the poop and what will happen to it over time? Poop turning into dirt is an opportunity to talk about material cycling and decomposition (see Synthesis and Breakdown for ideas for helping kids make sense of this critical ecological concept).
Finding seeds in poop provides an opportunity to talk about seed dispersal and the amazing mutually beneficial relationship between fruiting plants and the animals that eat their fruits. I start this discussion by asking the kids what benefits the animal gets from eating the fruit. I follow up by asking if the plant gets any benefit from having its fruit eaten. If no one knows about this benefit, I ask thought-provoking questions like, how does the animal eating fruit impact where the seeds end up? And, do you think the poop harms or benefits the seed?
Homes
While hearing someone shout, “home!”, isn’t as fun as hearing them shout, “poop!”, it’s still a joyful call. The kids and I love to look for animal homes including borrows, nests, dens, galls, cocoons, and other structures built by animals. Insect galls may be my favorite home to find. Galls are external growths on plants that can be caused by viruses, bacteria, fungi, mites, other plants, and insects. Insect galls result from gall wasps laying eggs on a plant, most often a tree or a shrub. These galls are formed of plant tissue under the control of the egg and developing larva, which stimulates the plant to grow the gall. The gall serves as both home and food for the developing insect. Once fully developed, the insect eats its way out of the gall and emerges. While gall wasps are considered parasites, in most cases they do little if any damage to their host plant as the plant tissue continues to do its thing for the plant including photosynthesis.
Game Trails
While wandering the forest, game trails are often relatively easy to spot. Spotting game trails uses the same sub-skills as spotting and staying on human trails at a smaller scale and with more subtle hints. These sub-kills include looking closely at the forest floor for cleared paths through the undergrowth and tracks and depression in the soil where it has been compacted. The similarity between staying on human paths and finding game trails is why I’ve backed off my “stay between the engine and caboose” (i.e., adult leader and rearguard) routine. I still remind the kids in front to look out for hazards like snakes and poison oak or ivy. From my new perspective, the skills gained by being in front including learning how to stay on trail when we want to and keeping our eyes open for hazards and wonders outweigh the risks.
Animal Tracks
I am not an expert tracker. I do enjoy trying to figure out patterns of behavior from animal and human tracks. The first tracking activity I share with kids is identifying and following human tracks including shoe prints and the tracks of bikes and ATVs. I use these experiences as an opportunity to ask the kids about where we tend to see tracks (in mud, dried mud, moist sand, and snow) and why we see tracks there. I also ask questions about these and other obvious tracks to guide their observations. How big are the tracks? What is their shape? Do you see evidence of hooves or nails (feline nails rarely show in prints as they keep their nails retracted except when needed, whereas canine claws are always out)? When looking at animal tracks, human or otherwise, I also ask myself and the kids about what they can learn from the placement of prints relative to each other. When tracking two-legged beings, the relative placement of prints tells us about the length of the organism’s stride, which can be used to estimate the approximate size and maybe age of the walker. With four legged beings, we can also learn about their style of walking.
The three main styles are diagonal walking, pace walking, and galloping. I often suggest that kids try out the difference between pace and diagonal walking. In both cases, I start, and suggest they start, in a crawling position.
For diagonal walking, we start out with one arm and the opposite knee forward with the front knee right behind the back hand. We then bring our back knee up behind the hand on the same side while simultaneously bringing the back hand forward. Then repeat the same pattern on the other side and continue. Ask kids what animals they look like when they walk in this way.
For pace walking, we start with one arm and the knee on the same side forward. Then we move both the back knee and the back hand forward at the same time. Then repeat the same pattern on the other side and continue. Again, ask them what animals they think would walk in this way.
Pace walking results in a lumbering gait much like that of raccoons and bears because, you guessed it, raccoons and bears are pace walkers. Bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes, foxes, and domestic dogs are all diagonal walkers. Rabbits and rodents are gallopers. This style of walking is hard for humans to manage!
Scents
One of the many things my recently deceased dog, Marx, taught me was the importance of sniffing when out in the forest. While my ability to detect and recognize scents will never compare with his, I am dedicated, in his honor, to improving my ability through practice. I try to do a lot of sniffing while I’m out with the kids. Both, sniffing trees and other plants, and simply sniffing the air. Personally, despite poop having been a personal favorite for Marx, I stop short of poop sniffing, although I probably could at least learn something about the age of the poop by doing so.
Other Traces
While tracks get the most airtime as what to look out for in the forest, land-based peoples pay attention to everything they encounter in the forest. This is a great habit to develop. When I’m out in the forest, with or without kids, I try and note the location of standing dead trees, logs turning into dirt, chunks of sap on trees, scraped up bark, holes in trees, animal remains including feathers, bones, antlers, places where water has cut into the soil, evidence of grazing or hunting, and as much else of what I see, hear, feel, or smell as possible. Looking with curiosity will easily lead you to more and more questions and musings as you look!
Science
A brief search of the Web reveals considerable commonality among definitions of the scientific method. A typical definition is that it is a process that includes seven steps: (1) ask a question, (2) conduct background research, (3) construct a hypothesis, (4) test the hypothesis by doing an experiment, (5) analyze your data, (6) form conclusions, and (7) communicate your results. This is a very factory-like view of science! I favor a much broader view of science. Scientific methods go far beyond controlled experiments and include qualitative methods like field studies, action research (i.e., research to solve a practical problem), and participant observation that involve no experiments. What holds all of these methods together is that they are systematic approaches to observing and making sense of observed phenomena. While various white men are credited with formalizing “the” scientific method, land-based peoples have been systematically observing natural phenomena, including the activities and relationships between multitudes of ecosystem contributors and traces of those activities and relationships and the impacts of their actions on the natural world for at least 10,000 years and their power of observation in ecosystems is unrivaled by any modern field biologist as is their ability to identify organisms and make sense of their interrelationships. There's nothing like the quality of one's attention when one's life depends on that quality.
Education
I often use transformative ecological education to describe the educational environments and communities I favor. My friend and colleague, Katharine Burke, uses the acronym TREE for our shared approach2. Rather than transferring information into the minds of our students, our goal is to nurture environments and communities that provide children with opportunities to participate in experiences that transform their worldview. Most of the social institutions of industrial society are factory-like, including most of our schools. Those institutions extend from and contribute to a worldview Charles Eisenstein calls the story of separation3. This story revolves around the idea that everything is separate from everything else. Two central forms of separation in this story are that humans are separate from each other and that humanity is separate from nature. All of our ancestors and modern land-based peoples have a different worldview. One built around the idea that we’re all in it together. This is beautifully expressed in the opening verse of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address.
The People
Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as people.
Now our minds are one.
Another friend and colleague, Mike Hoag, uses the phrase transformative adventures to refer to the projects central to his approach to teaching permaculture4. We use the word transformative in similar ways to refer to experiences designed to change the perspective of participants. Mike also uses the phrase because his work includes using permaculture to transmogrify landscapes. This kind of work also figures into the transformative adventures Nic and I talk about in this blog.
Lately, I’ve been trying out the phrase, Earth-Centered Education, on its own or with transformative ecological education: Earth-Centered Transformative Ecological Education. For me, the phrase transformative ecological education elucidates our goal: providing children with experiences that will help them develop an ecological worldview, while the phrase Earth-centered clarifies our educational methods and content.
I got the idea for using Earth-Centered Education from another friend, Suzanne Axelson who, in a thought-provoking blog post, The World at the Centre, proposed using the phrase world-centered education to shift the focus of education from the child-centered versus curriculum-centered dichotomy to a world-centered approach. This pleases me as I don’t feel like what we do is child-centered, teacher-centered, or even some percentage of one and some percentage of the other. Instead, our approach synthesizes child-centered and teacher-centered methods, resulting in an emergent, negotiated, relationship-based, Earth-centered program. Another thing I like about this phrase is that the phrases teacher-centered and child-centered both put humans front and center. The myth of human exceptionalism is one of the main ideas I work to debunk.
For me, the phrase Earth-Centered also clarifies our content focus: putting the Earth front and center and helping children love ecosystems and live ecologically. More specifically, we design our activities to help children:
Be aware of our interdependence with our fellow travelers and Earth, our shared home.
Understand the indigenous and modern scientific views of how ecological, technological, and social systems function as systems.
Know the contributors and relationships within our local eco-, social, and technological systems.
Act ecologically by forming caring mutually beneficial relationships with ourselves, other human and non-human ecosystem contributors, and the Earth as a whole, including minimizing harm and contributing to and obtaining value from our human communities and ecosystem at home and in the wilderness.
The activities we suggest here fulfill our vision of Earth-centered transformative ecological education. They are designed to give children opportunities to experience ecosystems in ways that counter the story of separation and help kids develop deep relationships with our kin in the forest. These activities are also fun for kids. Rather than forcing kids to do them, we can offer them as possibilities that often become natural ways for kids to relate to the forest without additional support. Finally, these activities center the Earth as a system as the primary focus of attention in a way that supports ecophilia and being ecological.
Wrap Up
Hopefully, this post has helped you understand what wandering, wondering, tracks, traces, and scientific methods have to do with each other. While doing science has been described as a rigorous process requiring strict adherence to a specific method that includes the design and execution of experiments, the practice of doing science involves wandering, wondering, and observing events and traces of those events inside and outside of labs. Land-based people depend on their ability to do field-based science to survive. By engaging in activities like those described in this post, we can help the kids in our care simultaneously develop the kinds of deep relationships with their ecosystem that characterize those of indigenous peoples and learn the observational and sense-making skills that underlie doing science.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013
Katharine Burke, Earthwards Transformative Ecological Education, 2024.
Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, 2013
Michael Hoag, The Beginner's Landscape Transformation Manual, 2023