Dear Readers - Today you’re getting a straight-up op-ed format from me — light on the personal story telling. Don’t worry, I’ll be back with more stories soon-soon.
I’ll do a quick TLDR for those short on time. Thanks for reading!
Throw in a like or comment with your reactions. Also - I’d like to note in reference to the title of this post: I don’t own a farm. I’m using the farm as a metaphor here. Thanks for playing along!
Tl;dr (Too long, didn’t read section for those in a hurry)
Aldo Leopold warned of the dire consequences when we’re not connected to the land - namely that we’re clueless about ecology and interconnectedness.
Right now the two main consequences I see of this human-nature disconnect are: thinking of issues in silos (not grain silos though!) and trusting that technology will solve our problems.
Leopold wanted folks to plant a garden and split some wood to reconnect with nature; I want mainstream adoption of nature-based learning in schools everywhere
Leopold
“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm,
wrote Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife ecology, in his 1949 book Sand County Almanac.
One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.
Leopold's prognosis rings true today with two new spiritual dangers stemming from our disconnect with nature: the first is supposing each issue we face is isolated and the second that all problems are fixed by computers.
Taking education as an example, the current NYTimes shortlist of “Issues Facing U.S. Schools Today” includes: Improving Performance, Climate Change, Artificial Intelligence, and Culture Wars. Two other issues have received recent coverage but didn’t make the grade. The first is the continuing and worsening mental health state of emergency among children and adolescents. This crisis is exacerbated by a shortage of school-based mental health professionals. The second is teachers leaving the profession with fewer new teachers in the pipeline and those that remain expressing their lowest job satisfaction rates in 50 years.
Although doomsday education headlines abound, there is relative silence about how these issues are interconnected.
Climate change poses myriad threats to academic performance. School closures due to excessive heat, buildings leveled by hurricanes, or classrooms rendered unusable from flooding put schools in disarray. Even without these disasters, many of our nation’s school facilities are aging and unhealthy. Disruptions like these are not helpful for learning. We knew this before COVID. Pandemic shutdowns provided a stark and sustained example.
Beyond academics, climate change is a mental health issue, especially for young people who will bear the brunt of its impacts, feel powerless to effect change, and see their government’s responses as inadequate. In a 2021 study of 10,000 young people from 10 countries as different as Nigeria and Finland, 56 percent of respondents said “humanity is doomed” – with higher levels of concern reported in countries most vulnerable to existential threats from climate change. Meanwhile, there is little faith in the adults at the helm; only 21% of American young people thought the government could be trusted to take care of the planet. Cross-walking data about the mental health state of emergency with this study presents a troubling correlation.
Add to the climate chaos and mental health crises a heap of deeply partisan culture wars and it takes little imagination to understand the teacher retention and recruitment crises.
Folding in AI – and education technology more broadly – one area of interconnection with the other issues facing education is resource allocation and outsized faith. As we trip over ourselves to figure out how to safely integrate AI into schools and pursue ineffective technologies to “personalize learning” that amount to little more than having students move through standardized content at different paces1, we have fewer resources to invest in proven solutions. Worse still, when we myopically pursue tech fixes – saying each time that this is the one that will work where others fell short – we fail to recognize what we know about how change happens in education: Small and iterative. Not one-size fits all. Teacher driven. Context matters.
Improving education is a complicated endeavor nested in a complex system There are almost 24,000 public schools in the U.S. Each marches to the beat of its own school board, leadership, student-body, and dozens of other context-specific drums. Within them, almost 3.5 Million individual teachers close their classroom doors and do what they’ve learned through training and their own experiences in school: teach students. Experiencing all of these drums, teachers make real-time decisions about how to adapt to reality.
Technology can support better teaching and learning and even facilitate relationship building. Still, it is not equipped for the context-specific and entirely human anticipation, adaptation, and response required with students. Even sophisticated large language models like ChatGPT, which holds the tantalizing potential to free up teacher bandwidth by taking care of mundane tasks, or apps like Along that Chan Zuckerberg Institute - Meta's philanthropic arm - is developing with Gradient Learning to “help educators make each of their students feel seen and understood” cannot adjust to the situational trauma of a student who fearfully shares a poem about gun violence - and is shot dead the same day or a student who showed up to school hungry because she didn’t have breakfast that morning – or dinner the night before.
Computers can and should play a role in making sure things like school food programs are well administered. Likewise, technology – say apps like Remind – can support teachers in building relationships with their students and families.
Still, I hope we never ask a bot to comfort a sad kid.
Leopold’s solutions for the farm-deficient grocery-furnace problems were simple: plant a garden and split some wood.
In education, one solution is more-or-less the same: ensure educators and students have routine access to nature in school.
A growing body of research shows nature boosts academic achievement, mental and physical wellbeing (for students and educators), and social-emotional learning. Emerging evidence shows it as a promising practice to drive equity. What’s more, outdoor learning facilitated by trusted adults plays a role in developing nature champions and growing student agency on this warming planet they inhabit and are anxious to inherit.
The good news is there are plenty of ways to accelerate nature connections in schools that abide by the evidence for what works to effect change in education. Some involve s’mores, binoculars, and hip waders – 6th grade camping trips, a day at the pond catching frogs and spotting birds, counting macro-invertebrates in the stream. Some are more subtle, low-cost, accessible, and immediate – classrooms filled with birdsong, seeds and leaves bundled into factors of 242, a pause from writing to gaze at a tree’s branches trembling in the breeze, speckled sun on the pages of a good book.
It’s time to plant a garden, chop some wood, and integrate apple-a-day nature connections in school.
Ulcca Joshi Hansen speaks to this on page 143 of her book The Future of Smart linked in the body of this post.
Credit to Good Natured Learning Fellow Renee Atencio for this simple and brilliant math activity with her 4th graders.
I so agree with you, Becca, and wrote about this in my Spirit of Education Substack earlier this year, drawing on the wisdom of another great thinker, Thomas Berry. https://open.substack.com/pub/jenniferbrowdyphd/p/cultivating-awe-at-schoolyes-really?r=77vfa&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web