Learning Ourdoors

 

Earlier I posted a blog titled "Kids and Nature," inspired by a book by Richard Louv, which you can read at https://blogger.com/blog/post/edit/previous/623125745868183589/9029692448848 .  The title of the book is "Last Child in the Woods, Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder."  The book was published in 2005, and it stresses the importance of allowing children to interact with nature.  Louv  was talking about nature in the raw--not the carefully manicured, supervised, sanitized versions of nature more of today's children have access to, if they experience nature any way at all except through windows or on television.  I continue to recommend the book.

In this blog, however, I am going to share what has begun to happen in the era of Covid.  With inadequate ventilation in many schools, and challenges of social distancing a classroom of kids, some schools are using the idea of classes out of doors, called "Out Door Learning."  The necessity brought on by Covid fits perfectly with the existing movement, already happening in some schools, to get students out of doors into a natural environment.

For those of us who grew up a generation or two ago, the idea of needing a "movement" to get children out of doors may seem silly.  After all, many of us needed no movement to get outside to play and explore.  The little girl in the photograph at the start of this blog is me.  My father did not ordinarily raise hogs, so one year when he did, they were a novelty to me, and I loved them.  Mother could hardly keep me away, as is obvious, since I was dressed up to go somewhere when this photograph was taken.

Weather was no reason to stay indoors either, as the above photograph of my cousins makes clear.  All seasons were just adjustments in the temperature, as far as we were concerned, and seasonal clothing to accommodate the temperature was all we needed to head outside.

I may have been getting old enough to rake the leaves when this picture was taken, but I wasn't too old to jump into the middle of the pile I had just raked with our dogs.   And, as the leaves make clear, there were trees at our farm for building tree houses, although that was more an activity my brother enjoyed.

Animals were a part of farm life,  with dogs eager to wander in the fields, chickens to learn where eggs come from, calving to learn about birth, the squirt of milk against a bucket a familiar sound, and if you were lucky, a horse to ride.  Even kids like my husband, living in small towns, had some of those things.

Today, rural areas cover 97% of the nation's land but contain only 19.3% of the population, based on 2016 information.  Adults in rural areas had a median age of 51, making them older than the adults in urban areas with a median age of 45.  By age 51, their farm children are likely young adults and probably gone.  According to an article appearing in the New York Times in 1988, "the nation's farm population is its lowest level since before the Civil War.  From 1981 through 1987, the farm population has lost an average of 2.5% annually.  In the previous decade the annual decline was 2.9."

An interesting article in "The Guardian" in England in 2016 describes the same problem of English children being separated from nature.  "More than 1 in 9 children in England have not set foot in a park, forest, beach, or any other natural environment for at least 12 months," the article reported.  Advocates for getting children outside reported that it was the parents that needed convincing.  "In middle class suburbia, it's the parents--how do you tell parents that the time children play freely outside is as important as their French lesson, their ballet lesson and their Mandarin lesson?" 

Some schools in America were already using nature as a classroom prior to Covid, but the need for social distancing and ventilation issues indoors is encouraging more schools to consider outdoor learning, some for the first time, and others in a more expanded way.  Landscape architects across the nation have volunteered to partner with schools in the planning.

One outdoor learning coordinator explained, "My best pitch for getting outside is that it ignites a curiosity in students that we don't necessarily see when they're confined between four walls of their home or in a classroom."  Another teacher reported, "I would say that being outdoors, my experience is students are naturally alive and awake and curious...Covid has really opened that remembrance that we need to be thinking about the Earth in our academics, too."