Go to promiseofplace.org for a two page pdf of research summary collected by Louise Chawla on the benefits of nature for children.
These include:
Improving concentration and impulse control
Assisting children with handling emotional stress
Inspiring more creative play
Fostering environmental stewardship
Reducing ADD and ADHD
Improving motor skills
I have appreciated Dr. Chawla's work which has been referenced in Richard Louv's book Last Child in the Woods as well as David Sobel and other educators' work.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Protecting Children from Death Anxiety in Environmental Ed
From a posting on the Ernest Becker listserv:
I work in the environmental restoration field, and I have recently been taken with the work of David Sobel of Antioch New Hampshire. I heard him speak at the National Recreation and Parks Association Environmental Summit in Portland in 2008. He wrote a wonderfully thin book called "Beyond Ecophobia" where he argues against teaching "gloom and doom" environmental curriculum to elementary age children. Instead, he argues for "curriculum" that contains an abundance of unstructured play and just enough teaching to satisfy the student's natural curiosity about his/her world. This parallels developmental capacity. The young child's developmental task is to bond with the local environment. Asking him or her to identify with the rainforest or polar ice caps is not an abstraction that he or she is capable of. Abstract and relational thinking develops in adolescence and that is where the gravity of environmental issues can first be effectively introduced, according to Sobel.
He gives an illustrative example from one of his researchers, Steve Moore. Moore interviewed students in four classrooms. He showed them 25 iconic pictures and asked them choose three pictures that seemed most important to them. In two of the classrooms, the children picked pictures like an eagle, earth from space, a deer. In the other two, the children picked the baseball, home, and dog pictures. In the interviews, the children in the first two classrooms the children talked about saving the planet, stopping pollution, protecting eagles. But they didn't seem to enjoy the activity. The children in the second two classrooms talked about home, family, pets and were enthusiastic about the activity.
The researcher returned to interview the teachers. It turned out that the teachers in the first two classrooms had conducted an Earth Day unit recently, while the teachers in the other two classrooms had (apologetically) just taught regular curriculum. When he tallied up the responses from the student interviews, he noticed that actually more children expressed an appreciation for the natural environment from the non-Earth Day classrooms. While the Earth Day students expressed concerns for many things, they expressed little appreciation their world. His overall conclusion was that the Earth Day students' natural interests in their friends, families and play had been squashed by their awareness of global problems. This observation has been supported by research in Germany in the aftermath of Chernobyl. German schools launched a curriculum to raise awareness of nuclear issues, hoping to created empowered global citizens out of school children. However, in follow up studies, researchers found students felt hopeless and disempowered.
Elsewhere, Sobel talks about a movement in Freeport Maine to ban styrofoam containers. Apparently, high school students did a unit on global warming and the following week were out picking up litter on the highway. When they noticed how much of the litter was styrofoam food containers, they petitioned the City Council to ban the CFC containers. The Council did so, and McDonalds quickly stepped in to sue. The City of Freeport eventually won the case with support from the students.
The backstory on this is that the high school leaders of the CFC ban had mostly come from one of the elementary schools. This particular school had a 2/3 acre woods next to the schoolyard. The students played in there at recess everyday. They built forts, houses, roads. They formed clans, bartered for goods. They even had money in the form of asphalt chunks. The more glittering mica in the chunk, or the bigger the chunk, the more valuable. These woods were for all practical purposes off-limits to the adults. Students who complained about something that happened in the woods were told to work it out with the other kids. I am sure that these woods were heavily impacted from an environmental standpoint - the understory trampled, bare dirt everywhere. But it seems that the experience of peer-to-peer play in the natural environment taught caring for a place as well as social order and leadership skills to enough of the participants that they were able to take those abilities and convert them to real-world issues as adolescents.
My musing about this here is about developmental psychology and death-denial. It seems that children's defenses are not fully formed and neither are their cognitive abilities. Therefore they are vulnerable to "real world" information damaging their sense of self and security. I find it ironic and perplexing that perhaps to foster the future generation of environmental leaders we have to protect them from death awareness up to a point. Which makes me wonder if our insistence on teaching "gloom and doom" currriculum comes from adults trying to "client" their death anxiety onto school children. I can hear ourselves collectively saying,"Oh, my god, the world is really a mess. Since I am not together enough to do anything about this myself, I will place my hopes on the next generation and make sure they understand what they are getting into. Maybe they will have a better chance of doing something than I have in my self-paralysis."
It makes me also consider one of the differences between a "heroism" that serves humanity and one that is damaging. It may have to do with how well attached and secure a child is able to become in his or her world at an early age. Then the heroism is guided partly by deep structures in the cortex and limbic systems. I would appreciate hearing what others may have written about this idea.
Paul
I work in the environmental restoration field, and I have recently been taken with the work of David Sobel of Antioch New Hampshire. I heard him speak at the National Recreation and Parks Association Environmental Summit in Portland in 2008. He wrote a wonderfully thin book called "Beyond Ecophobia" where he argues against teaching "gloom and doom" environmental curriculum to elementary age children. Instead, he argues for "curriculum" that contains an abundance of unstructured play and just enough teaching to satisfy the student's natural curiosity about his/her world. This parallels developmental capacity. The young child's developmental task is to bond with the local environment. Asking him or her to identify with the rainforest or polar ice caps is not an abstraction that he or she is capable of. Abstract and relational thinking develops in adolescence and that is where the gravity of environmental issues can first be effectively introduced, according to Sobel.
He gives an illustrative example from one of his researchers, Steve Moore. Moore interviewed students in four classrooms. He showed them 25 iconic pictures and asked them choose three pictures that seemed most important to them. In two of the classrooms, the children picked pictures like an eagle, earth from space, a deer. In the other two, the children picked the baseball, home, and dog pictures. In the interviews, the children in the first two classrooms the children talked about saving the planet, stopping pollution, protecting eagles. But they didn't seem to enjoy the activity. The children in the second two classrooms talked about home, family, pets and were enthusiastic about the activity.
The researcher returned to interview the teachers. It turned out that the teachers in the first two classrooms had conducted an Earth Day unit recently, while the teachers in the other two classrooms had (apologetically) just taught regular curriculum. When he tallied up the responses from the student interviews, he noticed that actually more children expressed an appreciation for the natural environment from the non-Earth Day classrooms. While the Earth Day students expressed concerns for many things, they expressed little appreciation their world. His overall conclusion was that the Earth Day students' natural interests in their friends, families and play had been squashed by their awareness of global problems. This observation has been supported by research in Germany in the aftermath of Chernobyl. German schools launched a curriculum to raise awareness of nuclear issues, hoping to created empowered global citizens out of school children. However, in follow up studies, researchers found students felt hopeless and disempowered.
Elsewhere, Sobel talks about a movement in Freeport Maine to ban styrofoam containers. Apparently, high school students did a unit on global warming and the following week were out picking up litter on the highway. When they noticed how much of the litter was styrofoam food containers, they petitioned the City Council to ban the CFC containers. The Council did so, and McDonalds quickly stepped in to sue. The City of Freeport eventually won the case with support from the students.
The backstory on this is that the high school leaders of the CFC ban had mostly come from one of the elementary schools. This particular school had a 2/3 acre woods next to the schoolyard. The students played in there at recess everyday. They built forts, houses, roads. They formed clans, bartered for goods. They even had money in the form of asphalt chunks. The more glittering mica in the chunk, or the bigger the chunk, the more valuable. These woods were for all practical purposes off-limits to the adults. Students who complained about something that happened in the woods were told to work it out with the other kids. I am sure that these woods were heavily impacted from an environmental standpoint - the understory trampled, bare dirt everywhere. But it seems that the experience of peer-to-peer play in the natural environment taught caring for a place as well as social order and leadership skills to enough of the participants that they were able to take those abilities and convert them to real-world issues as adolescents.
My musing about this here is about developmental psychology and death-denial. It seems that children's defenses are not fully formed and neither are their cognitive abilities. Therefore they are vulnerable to "real world" information damaging their sense of self and security. I find it ironic and perplexing that perhaps to foster the future generation of environmental leaders we have to protect them from death awareness up to a point. Which makes me wonder if our insistence on teaching "gloom and doom" currriculum comes from adults trying to "client" their death anxiety onto school children. I can hear ourselves collectively saying,"Oh, my god, the world is really a mess. Since I am not together enough to do anything about this myself, I will place my hopes on the next generation and make sure they understand what they are getting into. Maybe they will have a better chance of doing something than I have in my self-paralysis."
It makes me also consider one of the differences between a "heroism" that serves humanity and one that is damaging. It may have to do with how well attached and secure a child is able to become in his or her world at an early age. Then the heroism is guided partly by deep structures in the cortex and limbic systems. I would appreciate hearing what others may have written about this idea.
Paul
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Seattle Urban Forestry Meeting - Love of Place
"Am I young enough to believe in Revolution
Am I strong enough to get on my knees and pray
Am I high enough on the chain of evolution
To respect myself, and my brothers and my sisters
And perfect myself in my own peculiar way."Pilgrim's Progress Kris Kristofferson
July 1: A room full of earnest, caring people deeply involved in urban forestry. Tree company owners, municipal arborists from other cities, consultants, engineers, citizen activists, planners from the City, and nobody thinks it's OK the way it is. Tree canopy in Seattle is about 23%. Everyone wants it to be more.
But that's where our agreement ends.
The better part of the 4 hours is spent discussing four goals:
- Better understand the tree resource and improve management tools
- Improve tree maintenance and management
- Better engage the community in stewardship of the urban forest
- Enhance tree preservation and planting through regulations and incentive
What I am reflecting on now is why we are convinced that trees are so great, when it isn't obvious to the general public. We know that people don't like trees for various reasons: they fall down; they block views; they drop leaves; the block sunlight; they cost money to maintain.... And then there's the benefit side. Trees trap air pollution, cool urban microclimate, buffer storm water and reduce erosion on slopes. They improve property values, encourage recreation, speed healing in clinical settings, and reduce neighborhood crime. But the research on these benefits is debatable. Right now, many tree advocacy groups are touting the CO2 sequestering power of urban trees. I have looked at the data provided by the US Forest Service, and I find little evidence that urban trees would make a dent in the drastic reductions that are needed in atmospheric CO2.
I think it is reasonable to conclude that trees provide benefits, and that these probably are greater over the course of the tree's life than the costs. There is no single dramatic benefit that trees provide, so the average person is not likely to get upset about a gradual decline in urban forest canopy.
Us tree advocates are probably stuck in our strident ways partly because we feel despair about the loss of trees, and what that means for the world and it's future. The loss of a magnificent tree in Seattle reminds us that magnificent trees are being cut by the shipload everyday around the world. The thoughtlessness that is manifest in the big picture we project on to the specific instance. Sometimes it is justified. Trees are removed in the city for stupid reasons, but that is not the rule in my experience.
But to save trees on a global scale, we will need more than regulations and incentives. We will need to raise children who love this place as much as we do. This place, the earth, is only perceived after the first "this place" - the home. That's where trees come in. For the benefits assigned to trees, such as property value, recreation, aesthetics and community building, there is a subtext about how we feel about the place we live. Do we feel connected or not? Do we feel a sense of permanence and heritage? Do we find wonder and beauty there?
And the problem with urban forestry is that not everyone finds their sense of place the same way. The business executive that cherishes his view of Elliott Bay is connecting with his sense of place. The retiree who cherishes her vegetable garden is connecting with her sense of place. The father who coaches little league and wants a ballfield is connecting with his sense of place. They are all finding place in their own way. I also see the limitations in these manifestations, just as there are limitations on making the focus of place the trees.
I would like us as, as urban environmentalists, to be more respectful of the way others are trying to realize their visions for the way they'd like to see our city work. I'd like us to focus less on trees and more on the ecosystem, which includes humans. I would like us to see where people are trying to manifest "love of place" in their own way, even if it differs from ours. I think this is the common thread that could make the whole discussion of the urban landscape more expansive and inclusive.
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