As an early childhood educator one of the questions that has been provoking my thinking for a few years is, how do we represent and teach young children about ecology? This question was brought on by my increasing relationship with nature. Through my circle of friends influence I have overcome many of my fears around exploring the forests in North Vancouver. I became aware of the difference in how I felt and thought when I was hiking and exploring in the forest. There is a presence there unlike anything else and I feel a sense of balance when I’m there. This change in my life has caused we to wonder why my experiences of exploring nature has been so limited when I have grown up in a city with an incredible amount of nature literally all around me? Why have I grown up to feel so afraid of the forest when I have seen more bears on the street outside my house then in the forest? Why was my education about ecology so limited in school?
The teacher part of my identity has been provoked to think about education and how I have seen and taken part in representing and teaching children about our natural world. It isn’t a secret that our natural environment all over the world is in danger due to harmful human choices made everyday. This is the social justice issue that I will discussing in my continued blogs. I am interested in engaging further about the impact that is caused by the lack of engaging seriously in ecology education and environmental issues with children. What is the neoliberalism’s role in influencing the lack of ecology education in schools? How do we co-exist with our natural world as a society? How do we value our forests, animals, etc. and how does this impact the level of engagement with exploring and learning about ecology in schools? One of the main people I will be thinking about this issue with is Richard Louv. In Richard’s book: Last Child In The Woods Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, he speaks directly to the social justice issue of the lack of engagement that human’s today have with the natural environment. Richard Louv states, “healing the broken bond between our young and nature-is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also because our mental , physical, and spiritual health depends upon it. The health of the earth is at stake as well. How young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes-our daily lives” (2005, p.3)
In the last few years there has been a great emphasis on bringing the natural environment into our classrooms. It creates an aesthetic appeal in our classrooms that opens a space for children to engage and explore with natural materials. I also value what the natural materials represent in our classrooms but I have began to question more in-depth what this representation of natural materials means to education? If we bring the natural environment into our classrooms is that enough to learn about nature and grow a deep and engaged relationship with it? Does this do justice for what the forest can teach us? In bringing the natural materials into the classroom it seems that we engage even less with the outdoors.
References:
Louv, Richard. (2005). Last Child In The Woods Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin Books.
Ashley’s Response
ReplyDeleteHi Ashley,
Your passion about your topic speaks loudly. To look deeper into your question about whether nature belongs in the classroom, I considered this poem from an ecological perspective:
When one
tugs at a
single thing
in nature: he
finds it
attached to
the rest of
the world
John Muir (personal communication, Sylvia Kind, 2008)
As David Jardine contends, “Ecology… presents us with this image of our lives and the life of the Earth as involving a vast, vibrant, generative, ambiguous, multivocal, interweaving network of living interconnections. We are living in this web of interrelations and these interrelations are always already at work before the task of writing about those relations has begun.” (1992 p.6) To think with Jardine is to appreciate that these interconnections are unavoidable.
Is it possible to divide our outside world and our inside world ethically? To answer this question reminds me of an educational Aboriginal experience I had at the ‘Big House’ in Squamish. Children in Grade 4, as part of their Aboriginal Studies, are given the opportunity for a lived experience within the ideas/culture of First Nations beliefs/customs at the ‘Big House’. Within this lived experience the children are exposed to three central values that are important to First Nations people; respect for elders, sharing of work and living in harmony with nature. Part of the sharing of work was the collaboration of cooking a salmon for everyone to feast on. After dinner, in a gesture of the value of giving back to nature, the children returned the remains of the salmon bones to the river. For me, this act of giving back allowed for a emergence of a new understanding of our interconnectedness to nature.
Your approach to the concept of ecology in the classroom is one of “wide-awakeness” (Greene, as cited by Pautz p.31) “perhaps the most important aspect of full awareness is that it is an active process. It requires not only the individual but the insitiution to be alive and attentive” (p.31). She goes on to explain
“To be present to oneself, to be aware of oneself, does not simply mean occasionally stopping and assessing what is going on. It is a process of awareness of one’s whole experience: of sights, sounds, scents, indeed, the sensuality of life. It calls for an awareness of the process of living in which we are all involved, which emphasizes our interconnectedness, and those processes of alienation which occur constantly in a society that consumes everything, including its people.” (Pautz,p.31)
Can we, as educators can bring a “wide-awakeness” to our ecological values in the classroom? Do we privilege the theoretical over the ecological?
Jardine, D. (1992). Speaking With A Boneless Tongue. [on-line version].
Pautz. A.E. (1998). Views across the Expanse: Maxine Greene’s Landsscapes of Learning. In W. Pinar (Ed.)The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene ‘I am…not yet’. Falmer Press.
Ilyambabazi’s response to Ashley’s blog:
ReplyDeleteAshley, you rise an important and complex question. I call it complex because contradictions seem to be a way of life in our world - a good example being your story on the dichotomy in education. Looking at our world in general and the ills that we humans sometimes inflict upon each other or our environments, one wonders whether indeed much thought is put into questioning our actions and the impact that they may cause, as you indicated. In my opinion our dilemmas today hail from our treating the world as our own personal property which we can do anything and everything to, without any repercussions. In relation to our bringing nature to our classrooms, what gives us the right to move things from their natural environments? Why can’t we interact with them in their own environments? To be fair to us though, all we are doing is just maintaining the status quo; however, where we fall short as educators is according to Foucault failing to “deconstruct, problematize and critically analyze the underlying structures and power relations that these ideas represent” (as cited by Margaret MacDonald, 2007: P. 7).
Reference
MacDonald, M. (2007). Developmental Theory & Post-Modern Thinking in Early Childhood Education. Canadian Children Child Study. Vol. 32 No. 2