Dear People Who Care About Students (and who know other peeps who care about students),
I suspect most of my readers aren’t huge skeptics about nature-based learning (Do tell if you are! Challenge me to hone my thinking!). Still, even if you’re 100% bought in, you likely know many people who care about students who either:
have never heard or thought about nature-based learning.
actively think nature-based learning isn’t useful.
For your peeps in group 1, your call-to-action is to share this post. I’ll give you a button to do it.
For group 2, your CTA is also to share this post to start creating some lively discussions here. Here’s the button again.
Oh - and if you haven’t yet, here’s my last CTA (I know you’re really only supposed to have one call-to-action, but…)
Today I’ll be focusing on the confluence of stories and science that show we must mainstream nature-based learning in formal education.
Tl;dr
Many educators (including yours truly) who have taught students outdoors have experienced first-hand the power of nature to positively transform learning and learners. We have stories about what learning outdoors has meant to our students. Many of these stories tug on heartstrings.
Somehow our stories have not been enough for mainstream integration of nature-based learning in formal education.
Now we have lots of research to corroborate these stories.
So, we’re coming for you – the unaware and the skeptics– with stories and science to make nature-based learning a regular part of schools everywhere.
Read this footnote1 if you get hung up on words. (@Natalia - this one’s for you!)
My Brain Just Seems to Turn On
A few years ago, a teacher caught me in the hallway at her high school one February afternoon.
Battle ax. Union rep. Zoom shouter. 30-year teaching veteran. Life-long, hard-scrabble resident in a hearty, winter-for-9-months-of-the-year mountain town.
I found her more than a little bit intimidating.
Becca! I don’t know if you know…I joined your workshop about teaching outdoors because I thought what you were doing was a bunch of bullshit.
Thanks?
I asked.
I was not sure where this was headed, but I felt cautiously optimistic. Partially because of her use of the past tense “thought” and “was” and mostly because she had attended one of my very first “Taking Kids Outdoors”2 workshops over a month earlier and I knew she had been teaching her 3rd period “leadership and ethics” elective in the outdoor classroom every Wednesday – winter notwithstanding.
This teacher told me she likes to attend PD (professional development) workshops she thinks are malarkey to poke holes in them. Fortunately for me, she didn’t let on to this in the workshop and prior to starting I didn’t know her beyond small-town “knowing” of everyone.
She continued:
You know the theory of multiple intelligences? I now 100% believe in environmental or naturalistic intelligence.
She put her hand on my shoulder and said something like,
Becca, I’m not kidding. I have a student who never participates in class indoors. NE-VER. Not only does he speak up in the outdoor classroom – he’s a leader!
For context, this teacher was taking her students to an outdoor classroom not 30 feet from the building. In the winter. She was teaching absolutely nothing about nature. And though it had beautiful views, the outdoor classroom was minimalistic: whiteboard, tree stump seats. All she did was move class outside. And she was blown away by this student’s transformation. She noticed improvements in many other students, too.
One day the teacher asked the specific student mentioned above – a 9th grade boy – why he participated so much more in the outdoor classroom.
His answer?
I don’t know. My brain just seems to turn on.
Convergence
This 9th grader represents so many students in classrooms world over sitting in the back of the room, nodding off, disaffected. Lost in a world of lifeless, listless, irrelevant learning. Suffocating in conventional classrooms with poor air quality and oft-ineffective instruction. What would happen to these students if we regularly moved learning to outdoor classrooms? If we regularly created nature-filled-and-inspired indoor spaces?
I have witnessed this living data play out first-, second-, and third-hand on hundreds of occasions. So have thousands – or maybe tens of thousands (more?) – of educators.
Yet still, the zeitgeist from teachers who have instinctively turned to nature as the stuff, context, (and often content, too) of and for learning hasn’t been loud enough to crack through the noise in mainstream learning. To become the broader zeitgeist.
Fortunate for us, we have a high-quality and growing set of resources at our disposal as we make this case. Let me introduce my most dog-eared reference documenting nature’s benefits for learners: Do Experiences with Nature Promote Learning? Converging Evidence of a Cause-and-Effect Relationship. The National Science Foundation funded this 2019 integrative mini review. In it, researchers Cathy Jordan, Ming Kuo, and Michael Barnes added fire to the canon of anecdotes and broke through too-often euphemistic “research” about nature’s power for students. They landed on a rigorous, compelling, and growing body of evidence.
After reviewing hundreds of studies, here’s what these researchers explained:
Converging evidence strongly suggests that experiences of nature boost academic learning, personal development, and environmental stewardship.
They outlined 8 possible pathways by which nature-based learning can yield positive results in academics, personal development, and environmental stewardship. Possible mechanisms include lowered stress and increased enjoyment among students, and a calmer context for learning.
These same researchers who live-eat-and-breathe evidence about nature-based learning concluded:
It is time to take nature seriously as a resource for learning and development. It is time to bring nature and nature-based pedagogy into formal education – to expand existing, isolated efforts into increasingly mainstream practices.
Then, because they’re researchers, they called for more research (yay!). Jordan and another nature-based learning maven, Louise Chawla, wrote a separate paper called A Coordinated Research Agenda for Nature-Based Learning where they outline questions researchers oughtta take on. Over time, this research can help educators refine strategies, duration, locations, and other factors to help educators be even more effective integrating nature-based learning practices in their routine teaching.
🌈Here.For.It.
I’m all for more data and more refined ways to integrate nature into formal learning. While we wait for specifics to emerge, let’s mainstream nature-based learning in formal education because…
We know enough to act
In the four years since their metaanalysis, more studies have corroborated Jordan’s, Barnes’s, and Kuo’s findings. And corroborated the countless experiences and stories of educators who have practiced nature-based learning.
It’s time. It has always been and always will be time.
In a 2019 blog post,
explained,We believe more research is necessary to better define the influence of nature experiences on human development. But as Dr. Howard Frumkin, Dean of the School of Public Health, University of Washington…says,
“We know enough to act.”
💯%
I’ll be more emphatic.
We know enough that we can’t NOT act.
(My condolences to cringing English teachers everywhere). Or this…
It is educational malpractice to know what we know about nature-based learning and not embed it in schools everywhere right now.
We know because of stories and experience. Now we have scientific proof as well.
Neither type of data is better. Formal research does not discount or replace anecdotes and experience – especially since data alone rarely moves people to act. Likewise, stories alone have not yielded widespread adoption of nature-based learning in formal education. Together – stories and science – are a formidable force.
We need both. We have both. Let’s act accordingly.
Take care,
Becca
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.”
Researchers’ longer definition is: Nature-based learning, or learning through exposure to nature and nature-based activities, occurs in natural settings and where elements of nature have been brought into built environments, such as plants, animals, and water. It encompasses the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and behaviors in realms including, but not limited to, academic achievement, personal development, and environmental stewardship. It includes learning about the natural world, but extends to engagement in any subject, skill or interest while in natural surroundings. NBL can occur with varying degrees of guidance or structure, across the age span, alone or with others, and in urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness settings. NBL occurs in informal, non-formal, and formal settings (La Belle, 1982).1 With respect to children’s NBL, it includes informal learning during children’s free play or discovery in nature in their yards, near their homes, in green schoolyards, on the naturalized grounds of child care centers, or in any other natural area. It includes non-formal learning in nature during out-of-school programs, camps or family visits to parks or nature centers. And it includes formal learning when children have contact with nature during structured activities in schools, preschools, and child care centers, or during outdoor field trips.
There are lots of terms that have Venn-diagrammatic or concentrically complementary definitions with NBL. Likewise, NBL can be applied in a wide-ranging set of contexts from wilderness expeditions to indoors.
On my Substack, I focus on both indoor and outdoor NBL. Further, because my focus is mainstream adoption of NBL in formal education, when I speak about outdoor NBL, I concentrate on “nearby nature” within walking/rolling distance of schools.
This training has now evolved to be very focused on building capacity amongst formal educators. It’s called “Teaching Students Outdoors” and lives in Good Natured Learning.