Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (29 page)

More recently, in 2005, the American Institutes for Research released a report on its study of 255 at-risk sixth-grade students from four elementary schools who attended three outdoor education programs over a period of several months. The study compared the impact on students who experienced the outdoor education program versus those in a control group who had not had the outdoor learning experience. Major findings, submitted to the California Department of Education, included: a 27 percent increase in measured mastery of science concepts; enhanced cooperation and conflict resolution skills; gains in self-esteem, problem-solving, motivation to learn, and classroom behavior. Elementary school teachers and outdoor school staff “repeatedly emphasized how outdoor science school provides a ‘fresh start’ for students,” according to the report.

Sobel tells a charming story of a physics teacher at one school who was teaching mechanical principles “by involving students in the reconstruction
of a neighborhood trail where they had to use pulleys, levers, and fulcrums to accomplish the task.” On what the school calls Senior Skip Day, when seniors are free to skip any classes they want, one of the students told the physics teacher, “I want you to know, Mr. Church, that I skipped all the rest of my classes today, but I just couldn’t miss this class. I’m too committed to what we’re doing to skip this.” With such indications that this kind of school reform works, why aren’t more school districts considering it? Why have so many districts cut outdoor experiential learning as well as classroom environmental education, or, when making funding decisions, pitted one against the other—when both are so clearly needed? These questions are unlikely to appear on any standardized test.

For decades, Montessori and Waldorf schools have, in different ways, advocated experiential learning. In recent years, newer proponents of experiential or environment-based education established the Association for Experiential Education to support professional development, theoretical advancement, and evaluation of experiential education worldwide. The association now has approximately thirteen hundred members in over thirty countries. A handful of organizations have made the leap from words to action. Among the oldest and best known is Foxfire, headquartered in Mountain City, Georgia. Its Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning originated in a program intended to teach basic English skills to high school freshmen in rural Georgia. These classroom experiences led to the student-produced
Foxfire Magazine
and a series of books on Appalachian life and folkways. Now three decades old, Foxfire offers teacher and student programs focusing on culture more than nature—but nature permeates the work, which offers information on everything from snake lore to wild plant foods to bear hunting.

Other active organizations include the venerable National Wildlife Federation and the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, New York. Teachers at schools using the Peterson Institute’s curriculum attend summer training. Upon their return to the
classrooms, Peterson-trained teachers lead their students in a study of the square kilometer surrounding their building.

After a decade of publishing such writers as Gary Paul Nabhan and Robert Michael Pyle in
Orion
magazine, the Orion Society, a Massachusetts-headquartered nonprofit, “decided to help put some of these words into practice,” says environmental writer and frequent
Orion
contributor Will Nixon. Orion now gives nature education fellowships to teachers, including a summer workshop and grants to pay for field trips, sketchbooks, day packs, “or other items that schools with tight budgets can’t afford.”

Nixon quotes one Orion fellowship recipient, Bonnie Dankert, an English teacher at Santa Cruz High School: “I used to take student groups on trips to the California deserts or the High Sierras. We read literature about these places and studied the flora and fauna. We had some wonderful experiences.” But, she confessed, she had never considered taking shorter excursions to the coastal mountains and Monterey Bay close to the school. She had assumed that her students knew and loved the area; she was wrong. Her students told her that they didn’t feel connected to the place in which they lived; on a field trip to a state forest close to the school, Dankert discovered that 90 percent of the class had never been there. “They knew about it, but they had never been up there, sitting under a redwood tree and imagining what the scene looked like one hundred years ago,” she told Nixon.

Dankert dropped the road trips and began teaching more locally, at Monterey Bay. She emphasized local authors. For example, while reading John Steinbeck’s novel
Cannery Row
, Dankert asked a local marine biologist to lead the students on a field trip to the tide pools in Monterey Bay, which Steinbeck had explored. In addition to helping the students learn about natural science, she led discussions about the meaning of “community”—because one of Steinbeck’s characters had described a tide pool as a metaphor for the community of life. And, wrote Nixon, the trip helped the class form its own community. “One
kid had never taken off his baseball cap,” Dankert remembered. “His eyes were always in shadow. Afterwards, he took off his cap and started interacting.”

Another Orion fellow, a teacher at the junior high school in Homer, Alaska, helped organize a program that allowed eighth-graders to finish regular classes three weeks early; during that time, students studied a nearby glacier, learning glaciology, marine biology, botany, and cultural history. “This isn’t memorizing information for a test,” the teacher told Nixon. “When you sit in silence in front of a glacier and see the glacial pond, the dirt of the glacial moraine, the succession of plants from the lichens to the climax forest, and you write and sketch what you see, you make a bond with that moment. This experience becomes part of you.”

An increasing number of parents and a few good schools are realizing the importance and the magic of providing hands-on, intimate contact between children and nature as a larger part of a child’s education. Some teachers come to interdisciplinary place-based education on their own, with no institutional support besides a sympathetic principal. Most current progress in education, in fact, comes from iconoclastic individuals, including the principals, teachers, parents, and community volunteers who chart their own courses. Committed individuals and service organizations can accomplish a great deal.

One creative elementary school teacher, Jackie Grobarek, describes what she called her “butterfly theory” of teaching, based loosely on meteorologist Edward Lorenz’s theory that very small inputs at the beginning of a system’s evolution are amplified through feedback and have major consequences throughout the system. (One interpreter popularized Lorenz’s theory by calling it the “butterfly effect,” wondering if the flap of a butterfly wing in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas.) Grobarek describes the kind of hands-on experience with a payoff not always immediately visible:

Schools are nonlinear systems, and small inputs can lead to dramatically large consequences. Our students this summer have raised earthworms, plants, and caterpillars and released the emerged butterflies. Because the students’ “babies” needed food, they also learned that the worms would eat garbage, the plants would thrive on worm castings, and that the butterflies required specific plants to eat, and other plants on which to lay their eggs. Many of these things were identified on our school grounds and in our canyon. They realized that our canyon, which had become an unattractive nuisance and trash pit in the neighborhood, was actually a wonderful habitat. It is filled with wild fennel, which is the host as well as food plant for the giant swallowtail butterfly. We are now working as class teams, and this week alone have hauled almost four Dumpsters of trash out of the area. Will this improve their reading and math scores? Maybe, but I feel that this experience will change them in ways that tests may not be able to measure.

Sometimes, the catalyst is a principal with vision. At Torrey Pines Elementary School, near where I live, a committed young principal and his students adopted a nearby canyon. “We get the classes down here touching, tasting, smelling, tracking. It’s hard to get twenty-six kids to be quiet, but we do it,” said Dennis Doyle, the principal. He believes that encouraging more hands-on experience with nature is a better way to introduce children to science than relying just on textbooks. In fact, he explained, during the nineteenth century, nature study, as it was called, dominated elementary school science teaching. Now that nature study has been largely shoved aside by the technological advances of the twentieth century, an increasing number of educators have come to believe that technically oriented, textbook-based science education is failing.

At Torrey Pines Elementary, sixth-grade classes were scoring poorly on the hands-on portion of a science test given nationwide by the National Teachers Association. So Doyle and his staff decided on a radical tactic. They would restore the canyon behind the school to its
natural state to create an outdoor classroom and nature trail. The idea was to help kids experience the kind of intimacy with nature that many of their parents enjoyed, and to improve science education—to make it immediate and personal.

On their forays into the canyon, work teams of kids, teachers, and parents ripped out the plants not native to the area, including pampas grass and Hottentot fig (commonly known as ice plant). Spanish sailors probably brought Hottentot fig to California. It is an edible and hardy plant rich in vitamin C, useful in the prevention of scurvy, explained a docent from nearby Torrey Pines State Park, who had teamed up with the school. Many people believe the Hottentot fig, a ground cover, prevents soil erosion, but, because of weighty water content in finger-like leaves, the plant can pull down a steep embankment. In this canyon, for this fig, the jig was up. The students returned the canyon habitat to native plants, including Torrey pines, yucca, cacti, and chaparral. The schoolchildren grew seedlings in their classes for later replanting.

One weekend, thirty parents worked in the canyon alongside the kids. Half of the parents were from wealthy nearby neighborhoods, the other half from the less affluent neighborhoods from which some of the students were bused. They hacked away at the pampas grass with machetes, all pushing and pulling together. “That kind of experience binds people together more than any formal integration program,” Doyle said.

Doyle tries to keep the kids’ canyon forays as relaxed as possible, and his adult view of nature minimized. As we walked through the canyon behind the school one day, he asked the kids questions, but didn’t give the answers.

“Look at these twigs,” said a boy named Darren. “It looks like one twig is dead, but one is alive.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Doyle.

Darren launched into an elaborate and erroneous theory.

“That’s an interesting theory.”

Darren trailed after Doyle, excitedly checking other twigs. In this special classroom, imagination was more important than technical precision.

I
N
1999, I
MET
a remarkable woman named Joan Stoliar. She lived in Greenwich Village with her husband, appeared to be in her sixties, had battled two types of cancer, and often traveled the streets of New York, with her high heels and fish-shaped earrings, astride her Lambretta motor scooter. A few months before cancer finally claimed her life, I accompanied her on a visit to a classroom at Intermediate School 318 in Brooklyn, where a cluster of seventh-graders attended four hundred trout fingerlings. The students hovered over the aquarium, set up to replicate a piece of trout stream.

For decades, Stoliar was one of the grande dames of the tweedy, traditional New York fly-fishing culture. She was probably the first woman to join the old, distinguished Theodore Gordon Flyfishers club. She talked the club into sponsoring New York State’s trout-in-the-classroom program—with the help of Trout Unlimited, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Hudson River Foundation, and Catskill Watershed Corporation.

Such programs—which began in California—have been springing up around the nation over the past decade. Their goal: to enliven biology and to connect kids to nature. The New York effort matches city kids with country kids, in what Stoliar called “a social experiment in creating sensitivity at both ends of the water tunnel.” Several hundred students in ten inner-city New York schools and eight upstate schools work together to raise the trout and replant streams.

“This program gives city kids an appreciation for nature, but also teaches them about the source of their drinking water. They become watershed children,” she said. In October, each school received several hundred fertilized brown trout eggs from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation; the hatchery director even gave the kids his
home number in case anything went wrong. Students placed the eggs in tanks designed to re-create the habitat of a trout stream.

In Brooklyn’s eight-foot piece of stream, a pump pushed water over rounded rocks and aquatic plants, and routed it through a chiller to keep it at a steady forty-nine degrees. Above the water, in a canopy of screening, insects hatched, rose, and fell. A “trout-cam” sent magnified images of the fish to an adjacent TV. The students cared for the trout and checked water temperature and pH level and other factors that can kill the eggs or fish. Stoliar called what the kids were learning “instant parenting.”

In January of that year, the kids reported their progress on their class Web page: “We saw caddis fly larvae eating a dead trout [and] we found a large fry with a trout tail sticking out of its mouth—it probably ate a smaller fish. Lot of dining action! About 42 fish have died in 1999 but we still have over 400 fish.” As the trout grew, the rural and urban kids traded letters and e-mail about their progress. “We hope they remain friends for years, and maybe even fish in the same streams together someday,” Stoliar said.