A Day in the Life of an Earth-Centered Transformative Ecological Educator

Explorations in Ecology for Children and Their Adults" Transformative Activities for All of Us

Note: This blog is becoming a book titled Coming Back to Nature: Transformative Ecological Activities for Children and Their Adults. Here is the preface. The first field trip is Taking Education Outside

Introduction

This post is different from our previous posts. In those posts, we describe activities to be offered to children by adults in outdoor settings. We talk a lot about the idea that our activities are not a packaged curriculum to be followed by adults and imposed on children. Instead, our approach synthesizes child-centered and teacher-centered methods, resulting in an emergent, negotiated, relationship-based, Earth-centered program. In this post, rather than describing how to do this, we share and elaborate on one of my recent daily activity plans and journal reflections as an example of Earth-centered education.

​​The Role of an Activity Plan in Earth-centered Education

In a pure form of children-centered education, planning has no place. Adults provide a space for children to engage in whatever activities they choose, and free play is encouraged and supported. As we have said many times elsewhere in this blog, we believe in providing children with opportunities to choose their activities and engage in free play. We also support children in forming deep mutual relationships with other humans and ecosystems. For us, this includes learning basic skills like gathering, growing, and preparing food, building shelters, making tools, and building fires. It also includes developing a kinship worldview based on traditional and scientific ecological knowledge. Being skilled at forming mutually beneficial relationships with others and the Earth requires the ability to identify one's own needs and to make shared decisions that support all group members in meeting their needs in a way that respects the needs of non-human ecosystem contributors. So, I plan activities that provide opportunities for children to learn basic Earth skills and develop a kinship worldview while also supporting them in learning how to meet their own needs in a way that also respects the needs of non-human ecosystem contributors by providing them with lots of opportunities to choose their activities and engage in free play. What does that look like in practice? 

The first part of each of my activity plans includes a summary of the Earth-centric ideas I like to have in mind as we do whatever we do on a given day.

Big Ideas for the Course 

We are all in this together as members of a global ecosystem. Like all living and nonliving (i.e., abiotic) features of ecosystems, humans are ecosystem contributors. We all give and receive matter, energy, and information from each other and thus directly or indirectly interrelate and are interdependent.

We are all remarkably similar to each other. All living beings are formed from similar materials, use energy to do similar life actions, and maintain homeostasis until we don’t. Cycles (life cycles, seasonal cycles, material cycling, feedback loops), synthesis and decomposition, and complex dances of interdependence are critical in maintaining homeostasis.

We are all remarkably different from each other. Living systems, at all levels, from cells to ecosystems, are formed from entities that have varying structures and functions. The functioning of living systems emerges from the coming together of those diverse entities.

It’s all about relationships! Both living and nonliving things exist in relationship to each other. Things have both spatial relationships with other things (e.g., under, over, next to, connected) and material exchange (e.g., chemical) relationships with each other (e.g., getting carbon dioxide from and giving carbohydrates to). Many chemical and physical relationships depend on spatial proximity (i.e., closeness). Systems are formed from things in relationship to each other that act together. Patterns that connect are common repeating relationships.

Relationships in ecosystems tend to minimize harm and regenerate the system. Many material exchange relationships in ecosystems are mutually beneficial. Those that aren’t including competitive, consumptive, predatory, and parasitic relationships tend to minimize harm. Destroying ones habitat is an evolutionary dead-end.

We industrial humans must relearn how to benefit rather than harm each other and our environment. Living as if relationships don’t matter and that continuous growth is possible on a fine planet has led to massive ecosystem destruction. We must change how we relate to our planet or we will suffer the same evolutionary consequence of any organism that destroys the ecosystem that supports it: extinction.

I like to have these ideas with me to remind me to look for situations in the forest that demonstrate these ideas. Lately, I’ve started highlighting ideas I think we’re likely to bump into, given my observations of what’s happening outside, what the kids have been asking about, and the activities I plan to offer to the kids.

The other major component of my activity plans is possible activities to suggest to the kids.

Activity Offerings

• Tell and enact hawk story 

• Why so many animals now and why are they acting differently?

•  Pick a being

• How are we similar to the being you chose

• How are we different from the being you chose

• Building by the creek

  • Where did this water come from, keep pushing it back “uphill”

  •  Runoff

  • Infiltration

  • Watershed

  • Discuss the water cycle

  • Discuss climate

  • Discuss seasons (climate as laying down the beat for the forest’s dance of interdependence)

After a get-together, I gray out the activities we didn’t get to for future planning purposes.

Activity Unfolding

As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” While this is always true, it’s especially true with my activity plans. They are my best guess as to what might happen based on my observations of what’s happening outside and what the kids have been interested in doing. In this section, I describe how activity unfolds during one of my two-hour sessions.

As Kids Arrive

I love kids and I let them know that the moment they arrive. Because I am genuinely excited to see them, this is an easy task for me. I greet kids with a spontaneous and enthusiastic greeting like, Joshua, I’m so happy to see you! How are you doing today? Some of our most engaging discussions happen between the arrival of the first child and when we start our circle check-in. Nicolette notes these on a whiteboard for the whole group to see and continues to add to this board throughout the day, often connecting the ideas together!

Circle and Check-In

I truly believe that check-in is one of the most important kinship-culture-building things we do. Our check-ins are of course voluntary and include four components: How we’re feeling at that moment, something we’re grateful for, requests of the group including anything we want to do that day, and requests of the universe. After check-in, I summarize the activity requests I heard and share my suggested activities. Then, as a group, we come up with our initial plan for the day. For more information on my check-in process, see our post, Opening Circle and Check-In.

Out and About

While we are out and about, I check in with the kids one-on-one and as a group to see how they are feeling and to modify our plan based on our collective needs. Often, I take pictures and notes and work on my own projects. On the day we’re talking about here, I worked on making a spoon, which captured several of the kids' attention, and carving will likely be a suggested activity in later weeks. Nicolette and I both often ID the flora and fauna, smell plants, and look up Indigenous uses for plants we find. This has encouraged kids to do the same with their parents! I ask individual kids and sometimes the whole group questions about what's happening at a particular time and place and why. The kids often want to tell me stories of their lives, and I love hearing those stories. I spend a lot of time answering kids' questions, often by talking with them about how they could find an answer themselves. I also help kids accomplish tasks like carrying a heavy log when they ask for my help. And sometimes we just talk, human to human. Kids often find the space to talk when there is someone quiet and ready to listen who shares with them.

Journal Reflections

After each two-hour meet-up, I reflect on our time together in a journal entry. The following entry captures some of the kinds of conversations that I mentioned above.

Journal

Another sad and beautiful day, the day after Ann and I had our dog put to sleep. As with my Tuesday class, I sent an email to the parents of children in this class telling them that we just had our dear furry friend euthanized. I wanted them to be able to make an informed decision based on the reality that their kids might see me cry during check-in and that we would be discussing death. One child stayed home after his parents discussed my email with him. He has dealt with a lot of death lately and decided he wasn’t up to being in conversations about death in class. I understand and honor his and his family's decision. I love the open conversations I have with kids and families, owing in part to the deep relationships we develop over time. My youngest participant arrived with a handwritten note expressing his condolences.

Several of us were early for class and had a great discussion about drawing and identifying insects and spiders before class started. We had a bit of a fractured start as some folks were a little late, and we, as a group, are good at adjusting on the fly. Some of the younger kids did get a bit antsy during this time, and I modeled and talked about how it’s possible to make requests of kids, like please listen when others are talking, just as they listened to you; everyone’s voices are important and deserve to be heard, without getting stern or upset. (If you find yourself feeling tense in your jaw, shoulders, fists, knees, etc. you can try shaking that part of your body out, encouraging students to do the same. Frustration is a valid emotion that needs a release!) Setting a tone of mutual respect is foundational to the community that we foster.

Circle was sweet and included several of us discussing various losses of loved ones. One of the olders’ requests of the group was that we each respect and listen to each other. He has been in many sessions with me and in circle once asked everyone to respect and listen to me. I suggested a tuning of that, to be everyone listening to each other. He has carried that since then. We also talked of death as one of the defining features of all living beings.

We played the new combined hide-along-the-trail and deer-and-coyote game with our new and youngest child hanging out with two more experienced and older kids who wanted to be a team and were fine mentoring our youngest. I loved how the whole group strategized together before we played the game. Our first attempt didn’t go as intended, and it was wonderful seeing the kids scampering around through the forest as they were playing.

While they were building, several older kids suggested a trade of resources for labor with a group of mostly younger kids. The younger kids gave them a flat, no. I gently suggested they might want to be kinder with their “no”- they might change their minds later.

Towards the end of the day, different groups started claiming land around their shelters. I repeatedly and gently interjected that owning land was unfamiliar to First Nations folks and was possibly at the root of many of the problems occurring around the world at this time. You can note that animals do not follow borders and territory may be fought over and then marked within the same species, but different species live amongst each other and share their everyday resources. Birds and butterflies may be able to fly safely over human-made borders but ecosystems and animals like wolves and jaguars can no longer live in their natural habitats due to the same borders. Being curious about what ‘I own this land’ means to them can lead to amazing discussions: What gives them the right to claim this land?; Why can’t someone else just claim it, too?; Who owns the land we’re on right now?; What gave them the right to claim this land? On this day, I mostly served as a construction consultant and as a model and facilitator of kind speech.

I decided to share this particular day and journal entry here because I think it illustrates many things, including how activity unfolds in our get-togethers, and how relationship-based education feels in my groups.

Wrap-Up

We hope this description of how I plan and what actually happens gives you more of a feel for our version of Earth-centered transformative ecological education. We also hope that it clarifies how we hope you use our other posts not as a curriculum to be followed but as a source of ideas for activities that support children learning the basic skills and big ideas we discussed above. For such a description of our main activity of the day described above, see our post, Fairy Houses, Natural Building, and Ecological Design.