Important note for new readers: I live in Nairobi, Kenya now. Our family moved here from Colorado in August of 2022.
Tl;dr
*I start almost all of my posts with a “too long didn’t read” section for those short on time.
Lesson from Kenya #1: Joy seems to have more dimensions here.
+ an adage: “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
= Prediction: Creative nature-based learning innovations are about to (and are already) sprout(ing) 🌱 in Kenya.
&
A suggestion: Pay attention to what’s happening in Kenya to advance nature-based learning. It is GOOD and going to get better.
Dear People Who Care About Students,
Today’s reflection is about patterns, colors, clashing, vibrancy, and emotional spectra. About necessity and invention and creativity and innovation. And about nature-based learning, of course.
Launching the GNL Fellowship in Kenya
We (Good Natured Learning in collaboration with the amazing Mildred Obuya ❤️ and Matters Childhood) recently launched the Good Natured Learning Fellowship in Kenya with a 5-day, 4-night immersive nature retreat with 14 Kenyan teachers.
The nature retreat marks the beginning of the year-long fellowship – a professional development program focused on building educators’ capacity in “apple-a-day”1 (routine, modest) nature-based learning practices2 to implement outdoor and indoor nature-based learning3 as part of formal4 education. The goal of the fellowship is to ensure Fellows bring nature-based learning to their schools so their students, their colleagues, and the Fellows themselves have routine, equitable access to nature's benefits during the school day.
I have only just begun processing the immeasurable learning from the retreat. Moving forward, I’m expecting both waves and a steady drip of lessons from Kenyan educators as they explore what nature-based learning looks like for each of them localized to their schools, students, community, environment, and themselves.
Dance, Song, Laughter. Joy.
Joy was the thematic emotion most pervasive during our first Kenyan retreat. Unfettered, full body joy. Over the course of the week nearly every moment – even the quiet and serious and somber ones – eventually evolved into dance, song, and laughter. Fellows drew from a vast, shared, and yet unfamiliar-to-me repertoire of song and dance. They sourced movement and vivaciousness from seemingly boundless stores of energy. They manifested a brand of joy that felt a notch up from what I’ve known.
It’s not to say that I have lived a life without joy – far from it. It’s just that their joy felt like it had more dimensions.
Kitengechrome
If you haven’t had the good fortune to visit Kenya, you might not know about Kitenge fabrics. Kenyans routinely wear what I might have previously called “clashing” patterns and colors contained within one garment. They even sport outfits consisting of multiple items with totally different patterns.
This is not a problem, I’ve learned.
I should have fit in well here. Aside from green (my fave color), I have always gravitated toward bright and many colors. This has been true since my 80s childhood spent wearing “Multiples” (does anyone else remember these?) and bedazzled jean jackets with puff painted Converse sneakers. Now, Cotopaxi and Patagonia brands call to me with their flashy neon windbreakers and backpacks and their Skittles color palettes.
And yet, since moving here, I’ve found my wardrobe to be lacking in pizazz, with monochromatic shirts and pants (trousers 😉) dominating the lineup. Even when the monochrome color is bright, I hardly wear patterns and texture!
The patterned, textured, colorful kitenge fabrics of Kenya seem a visible representation of the prismatic joy I felt.
It got me thinking about where joy comes from.
Remember the Pixar movie Inside Out5? In it, “Joy” tried so hard to keep Riley happy. Then “Sadness” touched the joyful yellow memories and the memory balls turned a broody, liquidy mix of blue and yellow rather than a monochromatic yellow.
Although this is tough to understand for Riley as a small (cartoon) child who has lived a life filled with lots of “pure” joy, I think the idea of how emotional complexity makes experiences and memories richer makes sense to adults and adolescents because we’ve experienced more emotions during our revolutions around the sun.
Indeed, lots of people throughout time have said things about how you can only know true joy if you also know true suffering. And it makes sense; if your life were only filled with happiness, it would be hard to really have context to appreciate your good fortune because you would have no point of reference.
But none of our lives – even the most fortunate among us – is only filled with happiness and joy. We’ve all faced some form of hardship or suffering or sadness.
Thinking of our Kenyan Fellows, I wondered, how do their lived experiences impact their emotional spectra? The dimensions of joy?
Aperture
The Kenyan teacher-fellows shared of being mugged at gunpoint on the way to work, of walking through illegal homebrew Chang'aa operations to get to school, of working daily from 7am to 7pm, of classrooms filled with 70-90 students – many far from being on grade level (whatever that means), of schools surrounded by thugs, of the legs of classroom chairs being cut off and sold for scrap metal over the weekend just days after the school was able to purchase them for students to be able to actually sit and learn at tables.
This is just a sampling of what I heard. And what I heard was surely just a sampling from Fellows’ experiences during years to decades as teachers.
Let me be clear: educators everywhere experience hardships. It is not my goal to diminish or elevate any specific suffering in a “we have it harder than you” pissing contest where no one wins. Rather, I reference these stories as I grapple to understand the embodied joy I experienced with the first cohort of Kenyan Fellows.
I wondered if the reason joy felt like it was a “notch up” from what I had previously experienced was because the Fellows had a wider aperture of lived experiences than I do. In their careers as teachers, they’ve faced hardships that I simply have not.
In short – they know a wider range of emotions. So joy has more dimensions. Or is bigger at the very least.
And…what does embodied joy have to do with nature-based learning?
So glad you asked!
Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, as I guess it remains to be seen…
I do have a prediction: I have long adhered to the axiom that “necessity is the mother of invention.” It follows that: when you are teaching seventy-one 15-year-olds in one classroom (😳) in an informal settlement in Nairobi and you commit to bringing nature-based learning into your routine teaching and learning practices, it will require some serious creativity. Which means we’ll be seeing some rad nature-based learning innovations coming out of Kenya — developed by this crew of inspiring Kenyan teachers.
Make sure you follow (subscribe and share) so you can be among the first people to benefit from Kenyan teachers’ innovations and inventions!
❤️,
Becca
Apple-a-day is exactly what it sounds like. Routinized and do-able practices to be integrated into WHAT teaching and learning are and HOW teaching is done.
Nature-based learning practices are instructional and classroom design actions to implement nature-based learning.
They can be employed by any educator, anywhere, at any grade level, in any content area, in any curriculum or school design model.
They can be applied in formal (i.e., in schools, during the school day) and informal (i.e., in everyday life) educational settings.
They are within an individual educator’s locus of control to implement.
Nature-based learning (NBL) is a newish term in academia and has been practiced by tons of educators under tons of different names for ages. My short definition is: “Nature-based learning is learning outdoors or bringing elements of nature indoors for learning.” See the longer academic definition here.
In school, during the school day, with formal educators
(NB: If you haven’t seen this movie, you absolutely must)
This reminds me of a line from a Khalil Gibran poem
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”