Field-Trips for All of Us: Taking Education Outside
Field Trip Number One
Note: This blog is becoming a book titled Field Trips for All of Us: Transformative Adventures for Children and Their Adults. This is the first field trip of the series. Here is the preface.
You may be interested in taking education outside because you, like me, believe that healing our relationship with the rest of the natural world is critical for our personal, community, and planetary well-being. Or maybe outside is where you find your bliss, and you just want to share your deep connection with nature with others. Whatever your reason, I applaud your decision and offer the following advice.
Don’t try to replicate children’s in-school experience outside!
I say this for two reasons.
You can’t do it! Practices that work inside school walls just don’t work as well outside.
Given all the outside has to offer, it’s not the best way for your children to learn.
Being inside sets us up to think about containing our children. The word “educate” comes from the Latin educere, to lead out. Taking children outside shifts our perspective from containing to guiding out!
Activity
Take your children outside and explore what is happening in your yard, down the street, in parking lots, or on nearby trails. Look for signs of the current season. Download the Seek App for your phone (Seek is an APP for families that identifies species through your phone camera). Go to a park visitor center or your local First Nations Center and buy some of their field guide pamphlets and maybe a topographical map.
Balance following and guiding with an emphasis on following, to begin with. Please pay attention to what your children pay attention to, not what you think they should pay attention to.
When one of your children notices something (e.g., an organism, a track or animal sign, or a landscape feature), ask questions that support their deepening their awareness of what’s around them:
What did you see, hear, smell?
What does/did it look/sound/smell like?
How does/did it move?
How did you feel inside when you sensed what you sensed?
Where do/did you feel this in your body?
Did it remind you of anything?
What happened here?
Who was involved?
What were they doing?
Why were they doing it?
When did it happen?
If it’s Spring or Summer, lots of plants are sprouting and growing- see if you can identify them! Some trees have started to bud. There are butterflies to be identified and birds, insects, and mushrooms. Fall is a wonderful season for looking for the fruit and seeds of all kinds of plants like pine nuts and acorns. Fall is also great for tracking animals. Winter is an excellent time for tracking and looking for signs of life, even as life seems to be taking a long nap.
Remember, while it’s natural to get tense in unknown situations, it’s always more effective to relax. Go to places you are familiar with and feel safe in. Start where your family is comfortable! Right now, the most important thing in the world for kids is for them to have relaxed and curious adults with them.
Educational Advice
I have the utmost respect for public school teachers, with 20-30 kids in a class and standardized tests driving them to focus on teaching to the test. I also know that the current school model is far from ideal. Despite arguments to the contrary, the impact of industry on our schools is obvious. By design and/or as an extension of industrial culture, many schools appear and work a lot like factories. In factories, products are manufactured to meet precise standards. Products move along an assembly line from one station to another. Each station performs one function on each product. Movement between stations is precisely scheduled. If we plug in children for products and teachers for factory machines we get children moving along from one class to another, learning one discrete subject per class, according to a precise schedule, receiving knowledge from teachers, and being assessed based on their performance relative to a predetermined set of standards.
People learn best when our learning is playful, interesting, and meaningful to us. So please, don’t stress about how much the children in your care are learning. Beings in ecosystems vary their pace a lot! The best learning environments incorporate long periods of relaxed activity, resting, and quietly observing intermixed with times of fast-paced activity. This kind of pacing along with some scheduled activity flexibly accommodates what is happening in participants' inner and outer environment. So for today’s adventure, relax and engage in fun activities with your kids where learning will happen naturally.
And do you know where learning automatically happens naturally? Outside in nature. Those of us fortunate enough to live in an area where healthy ecosystems are accessible have an amazing learning resource right outside our front doors. And, for those of us who don’t, nature is everywhere from parks, to rooftop gardens and window planter boxes. Nature, wherever we find it, is a natural environment for learning naturally.