Patterns that Connect
Field Trips for All of Us: Transformational Activities for Children and Their Adults
Note: For now, this blog is a serialization of a book titled Field Trips for All of Us: Transformative Adventures for Children and Their Adults. Here is the preface. The first field trip is Taking Education Outside.
Introduction
As ecological educators, we are very motivated to help children and adults learn that the natural world is characterized by relationships. My observations, first as a learner and then as a supervisor of student and in-service teachers in public schools, was that children are expected to learn from unrelated tidbits that were very hard to remember because they were unrelated to each other or to the learner.
One way to highlight the interrelatedness of the natural world is to point out patterns that connect (Bateson, 1979; Volk, 1995; Bloom, 2004). Patterns like grains, spheres, webs, symmetry, fibers, tubes, bundles, sheets, layers, branches, cycles, edges, and spirals. What makes these patterns, patterns that connect is that we find them everywhere. We suggest you stop reading here and think of examples of tubes from your everyday experience. Straws, pipes, tunnels, grasses and rushes, stems, blood vessels, and pant legs are all tubes, and cups, glasses, and test tubes are just tubes with bottoms.
Activity
I usually introduce the concept of patterns that connect by asking the group, “What do you think of when you hear the word ‘pattern’?” or “Can anyone think of an example of a pattern?” If no one comes up with any, I’ll suggest a common one like tubes, and ask the group for examples of tubes. Then I’ll ask if anyone can come up with another example of a common pattern in addition to tubes. If no one comes up with anything, I’ll name another one, usually branching or fibers. These patterns and others are described in the following section. If you’d like, you can read about the three patterns that connect we’ve already mentioned now or read the whole section. Please don’t worry about you or your children memorizing these patterns. Remembering will be a natural outcome of your experience and understanding!
Once we have about three patterns that connect in mind, I suggest we go for a walk and see how many of those patterns we can find. On pattern walks, my role is to keep reminding the kids to look for patterns, to support their sharing of their findings, and to review their findings at the end of our time together.
Alternatively, sometimes I suggest we play a game like Tree Tag except for this time the kids have to run to an example of the pattern I call out instead of a type of tree.
In addition, to pattern walks and pattern tag, I also like to bring talk about patterns into other activities we’re engaged in like designing and making fairy houses, nature crafts, forts, fires, rafts, bush-craft furniture, cordage, raised beds, herb spirals, and water catchments.
Younger kids and those of us who are young at heart often also enjoy making geometric patterns like circles, lines, and spirals with small rocks.
If you’re working with older children or any children who enjoy thinking about how things work, consider engaging them in making sense of the following questions for each pattern you look for:
What does this pattern do well? (e.g., tubes are great at transporting stuff)? and
What about this pattern enables it to do what it does? (e.g., their cylindrical shape minimizes surface area and makes them structurally strong)
As you look through the patterns that connect described in the next section, think about which of them might come up during the above activities. Better yet, look for these patterns everywhere. They’re there to be found wherever you look.
Some Nature Science
Here’s a list of some more of my favorite patterns and brief descriptions of each. We recommend reading the list and introducing your children to them a few at a time. Older children can read about each pattern with you or you can introduce the patterns with questions. For example, “Is a grain a common pattern?”, “What are some examples of grains?”
Tubes: A tube is any elongated cylinder or hollow fiber. Straws, pipes, grasses and rushes, blood vessels, and pant legs are all tubes, and cups and glasses are just tubes with bottoms. Tubes can also be considered rolled-up sheets (see below).
Fibers: A fiber is any long thin piece of matter. Thread, string, muscle and nerve cells, fungal mycelia, the strands in celery, the nasty strings that form in some avocados, and the strands of spider webs are all examples of fibers. Many fibers are bundles of smaller fibers (see below).
Branches: Branches occur when any object splits (diverges) or joins with another object (converges). Branches can be found, in paths, creeks, conversations (too abstract for young kids), and, oh yay, trees.
Grains: A grain is any small irregular chunk of matter. Grains of sand (including those that break off of granite), grains of salt, and grains of rice are all common examples of grains.
Bundles: Bundles are just fibers and/or tubes wrapped together. I explore bundles with kids by cutting up rope and showing that rope is a bundle of bundles of fibers. Nerves, muscles, and plant stems (e.g., celery and hemp) are also bundles of fibers.
Sheets: Sheets are simply uniformly thin objects. Bedsheets, sheets of mica, leaves, sedges (i.e., plants that look like grasses but are more sheet-like), skin, and clothing are all examples of sheets. Clothes are sheets made of nets (see below) made of bundles of bundles of fibers.
Layers: Layers are stacks of sheets. They are to sheets, what bundles are to fibers and tubes. We can see layers in rocks, in sheet mulching, in sandwiches and cakes, in settled soil shakes (and any other suspension that has been left to settle), and in soil.
Spirals: Spirals can spiral in one dimension like a snail or in two dimensions like springs and DNA. We can see spirals in the fiddleheads of young ferns, the growth pattern of some pines, herb spirals (more on these later) tornadoes, and in whirlpools in our sink drains and toilets and whirling water in a stream, river, or creek.
Webs or Nets: Webs, like many other patterns, can be physical or abstract. Physical webs involve the crisscrossing of fibers as we see in spider webs or butterfly or fish nets. A food web is an example of an abstract web. Webs are one of my favorite patterns because realizing that we and all other living creatures are members of a global web of relationships and interdependencies is essential to our survival as a species.
Cycles: Cycles are another favorite pattern of mine. I believe that an understanding of its role in how our planet works is also essential to our survival. The movement of the moon around the Earth and the Earth around the sun are cycles. As are seasons, life cycles (e.g., seed, seedling, vegetative growth, flowering, repeat), the water cycle, the carbon cycle, etc. I get kids of all ages to recite the seasons as a way of getting cycles. I ask them what season this is and then what comes after until we’ve gone around a couple of times.
Edges: Borders, edges, boundaries, membranes, fences, and walls are all similar in that they partially separate areas. Partially, because all have pores or leaks where material flows across the border. The edges between Earth and air, bodies of water and Earth, water and air are additional examples of edges as are those between each of us and our environments and between forest and meadow.
It is not a coincidence that we find these patterns everywhere. Each of them is common because they are efficient ways for matter and energy to be organized. For example, tubes are great at material transport and their cylindrical shape minimizes surface area and makes them structurally strong, branching patterns are excellent at collecting and distributing matter and energy (e.g., converging creeks and diverging blood vessels), and sheets maximize surface area for fast fluid and energy transfer (e.g., broad leaves as solar collectors and evaporation surfaces).
Educational Tip
I think that asking questions that engage kids in making sense of the world is one of the most critical skills for a natural educator to develop. Initial questions work best when they appear to the kids as open-ended. For example, What do you think of when you hear the word pattern?” is more likely to get a response than, “Can anyone define the word pattern?” With closed right-answer questions, teachers typically evaluate kids’ answers immediately after hearing them or supply the correct answer if no one answers. There is an art to following up when no one answers an open-ended question. One way I often follow up is by asking for examples: Can anyone think of any examples of a pattern? Folks of all ages often find it easier to give examples as it gets them out of the mindset of defining the word correctly. Another thing I do is to reassure the kids that I’m not looking for any fancy words in their answers, just what they’re thinking.
I see engaging kids in making sense of the world as another synthesis of factory and forest patterns. The factory pattern is top-down control. Machines are constructed and or programmed and operators are told to perform specific tasks. In factory-like schools, children are told what they need to know and what they need to do via lecture. In forests, beings tend to communicate without symbolic language. And, everybody broadcasts and everybody listens. In ecological learning environments, we synthesize these patterns and replace lectures and commands with open-ended questions based on curiosity for others and our shared environment and with sense-making conversations about topics of mutual interest.
Wrap-Up
Learning about patterns that connect is a great way to see and begin to feel the interrelatedness of the natural world. These common natural patterns also play an important role in Permaculture. Pattern walks, pattern tag, pattern treasure hunts, and talking about patterns while engaged in other activities are engaging ways to learn about patterns that connect.