Nature Study in the City by Carroll Smith

The focus of my last blog began with the importance of observation in the Mason educational paradigm.  However, it quickly evolved into the natural, organic way that observation can occur while growing up on a farm.  Eventually, I would like to get back to the topic of the power of observation and why it is so crucial in the Mason paradigm, but first I think it would be helpful to respond to some of the comments that were posted by readers of my previous post.

First, let me say how much I appreciate those comments and how helpful it is to all of us that people are willing to post them.  I think it is particularly helpful when individuals mention concerns or problems they are having that we can all respond to.  It can sometimes feel easier to refrain from commenting out of fear that other people will think that we are not “Mason” enough, but that shuts down the conversation.  I do not have all the answers.  I don’t even know all the questions.  The benefit of a blog goes beyond existential writing about a personal experience; it is a means of building the community and relationships for which we are made.  The dialogue created by comments helps build the community.

After my last post, several readers asked questions about what they could do to help children who have not had the opportunity to grow up on a farm develop an interest in nature.  Or, how can they help children who may seemingly have no interest in nature.  What kinds of experiences can be provided in urban and suburban settings? To answer this, let me begin by describing an activity I did last year with college students who were learning about the arts in elementary education.  One evening, we went outside with paper and a pencil.  The students were asked to sit, listen for sounds, and make a list of sounds they heard.  We were on campus near parking lots, buildings, and people, so at times it was hard to hear sounds of “nature.”  It was surprising to them that the longer they sat, the more sounds of nature they heard.  It was also interesting to hear the sounds of nature combined with the sounds of the nonliving world, such as a car door shutting, a building door closing, or a car passing in the parking lot.  It was surprising to me that the students expressed hearing sounds that they had never paid attention to before.  In the midst of all the sounds one hears in a parking lot, they heard bird sounds, insect sounds, people’s voices, the breeze in the bushes and many other sounds of nature.  The students then had to turn the sounds they heard into a poem.  This is called sound poetry (You can Google that and get more information).

This is a far cry from being so close to nature that you experience it intimately, but it is certainly a place to begin.  In an urban setting, the sounds of nature are probably going to be mixed with the sounds of the handy work of humankind.  Maybe sometimes that handy work is not very pleasant (such as urban sprawl). But the point of this activity is that, in order to develop a love and appreciation of nature, we all must begin somewhere.

There are other ways to begin, such as sitting in a park or at the window of an apartment and listening for sounds. You could also hang bird feeders from apartment windows and/or balconies and learn to identify the birds that come.  Start a container garden in which to grow plants that interest the children.  Learn to identify which ones must grow inside the apartment versus those that can stay outside on the balcony even in winter. You can learn which plants need more sun and where they must be placed in the apartment to get that sun.  Observe the plants with a magnifying glass.  Painting the leaves and stems of the potted plants for nature study can be helpful in learning to pay closer attention to details.

Studying trees in winter is another interesting quest.  You can study their bark, paint that bark, and learn to identify the trees in your neighborhood based on the their bark.  Learning why those particular trees were planted in your neighborhood is another interesting study of nature.  Contact city officials who care for these trees to find out why they were chosen over other types of trees.

This is a maple Andy and I purchased at Biltmore House. We grow it indoors for the fun of it.

Kerri Forney reminded me that Mason suggests studying a spot of nature for a year to observe the changes.  I did this once with a group of children who are now young adults.  It would be interesting to know their memories of that experience. This could easily be done in an urban setting in a park, nature trail or other nature reserve.  If a park isn’t available, have children clock the rising or setting (or both) of the sun for a year, keeping up with the time and the path of the sun.  Use this knowledge to then learn north, south, east and west. Transfer that understanding to learning directionality on a map.  Also use this knowledge to help make decisions about what kinds of plants can be grown in your urban or suburban area.

Of course, caged animals, such as birds, hamsters, and gerbils, can also provide opportunities for observing nature.  Study their habits.  Use feathers that naturally fall from the cage to paint as nature study, paying close attention to the colors and other details.

One key component to this endeavor is that the adult must show interest.  If you are just beginning this endeavor, you as the parent and/or teacher must take the opportunity to grow with your children.  You don’t have to be an expert naturalist; rather, assume the stance of learning with the children about things that you don’t know.  Learning together is exciting, and it provides a powerful model for children, who see that people continue to develop and expand their interests even into adulthood.  Even those adults who have never really had any interest in nature can say to themselves, “I have no interest in this endeavor, but I am going to give it a try.”  Once you begin you may very well find that your interest develops along with the children’s.

Grandparents can provide another whole range of experiences that relate to nature.  They can be yet another example of how we never stop learning. I remember reading in Mason’s books that she believed that we should be learning as long as we have a mind, and since we always have a mind, then we should always be learning.  In addition to visiting the homes (or farms) of the grandparents, technology provides a means for grandparents to share their interest in nature. Grand parents now have the ability to share an exciting new plant with their grandchildren through venues like Skype, FaceTime, and Facebook.  Sending grandchildren pictures of favorite plants encourages children to be involved in nature in whatever way they can.  Maybe grandparents can send the grandchildren the funds to purchase a new plant that they themselves have purchased.  The grandparents teach the children how to care for the plant, talk about the plant, learn what it needs in terms of light, water, fertilizer, etc.  With each household growing the same plant, it can provide many opportunities for conversation between grandparents and grandchildren.  It can also provide an opportunity for purposeful writing.  That is, children can share back and forth in letters (I know, whoever even thinks about letter writing these days!) with grandparents what they are learning about the plants they are growing together.

We frequently are so disconnected from nature that we are not aware of all the many details that are occurring in the growth and development of a plant.  We need to encourage children to pay attention to those details.  How?  Measure a plant once a week to determine how much it has grown.  Put a plant in light and another where it is darker.  Measure them over the course of a month.  See which grows faster.  Discuss why.  Do the same with water.  Water one plant correctly, and then over- and under-water others. What happens?  Why?  Put one colorful plant in a window.  Put the same plant in a place where it doesn’t get as much light.  What happens to the colors in the plant in these two situations?  Why?  Sprout various seeds and after several weeks of growth, take out the plants, clean off the dirt and do drawings of the root systems of each plant.  How are they the same?  How are they different?

The point that I wish to make here is:  Plan nature study where you are, not where you wish to be.

I have only mentioned a very few possibilities in this blog.  The opportunities for nature study even in an urban setting are many.  Here is what I would encourage for parents:

1.  Don’t assume that you need to know every thing about nature.

2.  Don’t assume that you have to have a great interest in nature yourself.

3.  Begin small so that you and the children enjoy the small steps that you take.

4.  Let the children’s natural curiosity and interests and yours help guide you.

5.  Keep it affordable.

6.  Look for opportunities that involve family and friends or an older adult.  (I am making the assumption here that anyone you are willing for your children to be around is safe and sound.)

7.  Join with another family.

8.  Involve other family members, when you can:  grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins.

9.  Keep it simple.  Begin with what you can manage, not only in terms of time, finances, and interests, but emotions as well.

10.  Don’t take the “take away” stance.  That is, if your children have spent their free time playing video games, don’t take that away and declare that the family will now do nature study.  Add nature study, slowly but steadily.  Their and your interests will grow.

11.  Nurture your children and yourself with nature.  We are all persons.

I hope the comments in this blog are helpful and encourage all of us, no matter where we live, to explore in our own situation, whatever or wherever it is, the nature that is available to us.  And, if nature isn’t available, to use pots, contains, bird feeders, seedlings, caged-animals or any other morally right way that we can find to learn about nature.  BUT, keep it simple, fun, and satisfying so that the next time you can go even deeper in your discovery of nature.

© 2013 Carroll Smith

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Wendell Berry and Education On a Human Scale by Dr. Jennifer Spencer

I believe in love at first sight.  And well I should, considering that I met my husband on a blind date twenty-one years ago last week and we have been inseparable ever since!  But today I have a new love–an incident of “love at first read”–in Wendell Berry.  I have heard people talk about Mr. Berry for years, but I had not gotten around to reading any of his work until a few days ago, when I walked out of the library with an armload of books to preview for Willow Tree’s developing high school reading list.  One of the books was Berry’s What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth.  I checked it out thinking that it was, well, a book on economics, in the hope that I had found a living book on that subject.  A living economics book, indeed it is.  But what I did not expect was for the ideas to sweep me off my feet the way they did.

For those who are unfamiliar with Berry’s work, he is a farmer, a poet, an essayist, a novelist, and a culture critic.  His writings are reminiscent of Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Eric Sloane in their small scale, local, pastoral emphasis.  Like them, he is critical of our culture’s obsession with industrialism and consumerism.  And like the Jubilee Manifesto that I mentioned in an earlier blog, his ideas are rooted in  the Christian tradition, and they challenge modern Christians to rethink their positions on economic, social, cultural, and environmental issues.  Consider this small excerpt, from the first essay in the book, entitled, “Money Versus Goods:”

“A properly ordered economy, putting nature first and consumption last, would start with the subsistence or household economy and proceed from that to the economy of markets.  It would be the means by which people provide to themselves and to others the things necessary to support life: goods coming from nature and human work.  It would distinguish between needs and mere wants, and it would grant a firm precedence to needs” (Berry, 2010, p. 4).  He continues on the following page: “It [our current economy] has inverted the economic order that puts nature first.  This economy is based upon consumption, which ultimately serves, not the ordinary consumers, but a tiny class of excessively wealthy people for whose further enrichment the economy is understood (by them) to exist.  For the purpose of their further enrichment, these plutocrats and the great corporations that serve them have controlled the economy by the purchase of political power. The purchased governments do not act in the interest of the governed; they act instead as agents for the corporations.  That the economy is, or was, consumption-based is revealed by the remedies now being proposed for its failure: stimulate, spend, create jobs” (Berry, 2010, p. 5).

All of that sounds like it could have come as a statement from the Occupy Wall Street movement, but Berry’s proposed solutions are not in the least Marxist.  Instead, all he wants is for life to be lived on a human scale and with frugality and good common sense.  He laments that we as a culture have bought into the lie that opportunities, growth, and resources are limitless.  Our drive to produce and consume on such a large scale has left the earth depleted and polluted, families separated as children become “upwardly mobile,” and citizens without the basic knowledge that will ensure their survival if and when the current “anti-economy” collapses.  What is needed is a “homecoming:” A return to persons, to place, to community, to relationships, and to acknowledgement of the natural limits that are part of human creatureliness.  This is brilliant in its simplicity.

So what does this have to do with education?  To answer that, I will quote from another essay, entitled, “Simple Solutions, Package Deals, and a 50-Year Farm Bill.”  After writing about the negative effects that the long-distance food industry has had on citizens, farming, the environment, and communities, Berry says, “About now I begin to hear the distant rumble of two accusations that experience has taught me to anticipate: namely, that I am trying to ‘turn back the clock,’ and that I am a Luddite” (Berry, 2010, p. 58).  As a Charlotte Mason educator, I can identify with that.  After all, she did practice and write a century ago.  That in itself is enough to make her outdated and irrelevant in the minds of some people.  But the effects of corporate schooling have been just as devastating as those of corporate farming.  Schools have bought into the idea that they exist to serve the economy, and that has led to practices that are anything but relational. It has caused the demise of the neighborhood school in favor of huge conglomerate institutions.  Behavior systems have been put in place that ensure conformity and compliance.  A fetish has been made of technology, which has caused schools to spend an obscene amount of money for equipment and software that will be outdated within a few years, even as teachers have been laid off or furloughed.  And an ever-increasing emphasis on standardization and testing has lined the pockets of publishers while sending children to the nurse’s office with anxiety-induced symptoms.  I do not believe that to protest these practices is backwards or anti-progress; it is just good common sense.

A friend in my doctoral cohort wrote her dissertation on motivation.  She interviewed teachers to find out what they thought motivated their students, and then she interviewed the students to see what actually motivated them.  The teachers gave a variety of answers, including grades, technological gizmos, and entertaining, dog-and-pony-show lessons.  But what the students said motivated them most was when they had a teacher who cared about them and built relationships with them–who knew and had a passion for the subject matter and came alongside them to share it.

A child, a caring adult, a good book, an interesting idea, and a nurturing relationship.  Education on a human scale.  It’s brilliant in its simplicity.  No one is going to make a lot of money with this model, but we will all be enriched, nonetheless.

Berry, W. (2010). What matters? Economics for a renewed commonwealth.  Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.

© Dr. Jennifer Spencer 2013

Jennifer is the director and lead teacher at Willow Tree Community School in Boiling Springs, NC.

 

 

 

 

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