Kids gone wild cont.
The forest school concept and getting the kids-in-nature thing right
Bruce Grierson Featured in our August 2009 issue.
Tricia Edgar has been intrigued by the forest school idea for years. Edgar works at the Lynn Canyon Ecology Centre, a resource so fabulous it actually influenced our decision to move where we did. (The centre’s children’s programs are amazingly inventive. One afternoon I tagged along with a kids’ group and learned to identify all the edible berries in the region. Sneaky tip: you can recognize salal because if you turn the leaf upside-down you can make a fake beard and moustache out of it.) Edgar and her staff teach the ecology program to countless kids in the North Vancouver school system, and they give workshops to adults on how to teach outdoor education.
Edgar is among a small group in the Vancouver area that has been trying to rustle up interest in the forest school concept. Personally, the idea strikes me as pretty radical, but Edgar believes the basic premises are sound, and she’s working toward weaving them into the school programs.
There’s very little actual “teaching” in Waldkindergarten—kids figure stuff out on their own, with minimal structured oversight. That’s Edgar’s approach, too. For younger kids, the centre has an outing called the Five Senses. “You go out into the forest and you don’t try to put labels on things,” says Edgar. “You just pay attention.” Let’s say the kids are coming up to a creek. They can hear the distant burble. As they get closer their focus closes on the water they can now see, on the log across it, on the bug on the log. The toggling back and forth between short thoughts and long thoughts is exactly what scientists say the brain was evolved to do.
“We have kids who are very urban, so even walking on the forest floor is unusual for them,” Edgar says. “We go to the creek and they’re afraid of touching the water. So you give them the experience in graduated steps.” Edgar says those inner-city kids put the forest experience in the only context they know: video games. “It was cool,” they will later report. “It was just like the Jurassic Park video.”
My pal Drew has long been a model to me of how you do this kids-in-nature thing right—and why you do it.
Drew’s own family vacations, growing up, were classic mainstream fare: one week each summer his family would do a little car camping, of the sort where upon arrival dad deployed the lawn chair and the newspaper and radio and “basically reproduced our living room” in the campground. “I wouldn’t say my own strategy now is a reaction against that,” he told me recently, “but I do remember thinking, even as a kid: There’s gotta be another way.” Drew’s other way looks like this: you take your kids into the wild places you yourself would like to explore. With one or both of his kids in diapers, he and his wife, Daphne, roared off-piste, on multi-day adventures in the Australian outback or the Gulf Islands. They canoed the Bowron Lakes circuit: adults in back, kids lily-dipping up front. They cycled the old Kettle Valley Railway trail one summer when forest fires were ravaging the B.C. Interior. (While they were on the trail the winds shifted and the fire closed in, and the air smelled like smoke, and they ended up with flames almost licking at their heels, burning down those historic trestles just days after Drew’s family crossed them.) This summer they’re planning another canoe trip on a chain of B.C. lakes in a remote provincial park that happens to be home to one of the densest concentrations of grizzlies in the world.
Without knowing it, Drew and Daphne crafted a perfect Petri-dish culture for growing bright, good stewards of the land. People become environmentalists, all the studies show, not by sitting inside watching Al Gore videos but by having a powerful experience while actually out there in nature. Drew and Daphne intuited precisely the two components that researchers at Cornell and the University of Colorado recently revealed are key to developing lifelong environmental consciousness: early and “vivid” exposure to the wild, and a mentor figure to help them understand it all. The outings don’t have to be extreme, just memorable. The mentor doesn’t have to be an expert, just enthusiastic.
It worked. Their girls, Zoe and Téa, are totally green kids. They’re the kind who push for the school to adopt a watershed or improve the recycling program. They’re horrified by SUVs. Drew recently sold the family car and joined a car-share. For some near-teens, the prospect of no wheels in the driveway would qualify as a hardship worthy of UN intervention. But far from objecting, Zoe and Téa “were all over it.”
I asked Drew what other benefits he’s seen.
“Well, I can think of at least two,” he said. “The trips are definitely part of our shared experience as a family, and we’re determined to keep doing them as long as the kids will hang in there with us. Every trip had its low and high moments, and for sure it all brought us closer together.
“The other thing is that the girls are less fearful in nature than a lot of other kids are. Zoe is downright fearless in terms of not being squeamish about picking up a worm or a bug. I think that’s a good skill that can translate—whether it’s to public speaking or whatever else.”
There’s a further benefit. Drew didn’t mention it, but Tricia Edgar had.
“What are you going to do, where are you going to go, in your mind, when you’re stressed out in later life?” she asked, rhetorically. “If you make positive associations with nature early, then you can draw from that well, wherever you are. You can summon that scene and calm yourself down. And because you spent so much time there you can vividly evoke it, right down to the scent of the trees and the sound of the wind.”
It’s not a bad thing to have at your disposal. No matter how old you are.
Originally published in explore magazine. Copyright © 2010 by explore. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any article, photograph, or artwork, for other than personal use, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the publisher is strictly forbidden.
