March is an amazing month to spend time outside with children in New England . As the old saying goes, March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. We will still have plenty of snow storms and cold-cold weather, but March 20 is the Spring Equinox, the “first day of Spring,” when both night and day last about 12 hours. Please look up last year’s Children in Nature March 2018 for specific things to do with children, and check out this nifty Explore Spring With Your Senses Spring Scavenger Hunt Because of the remarkable regularities, recurring cycles, rhythms and events in the natural world, we can come to count on them year to year. We will be looking for the first signs of spring and are eager to participate in the great awakening. “Outside,” the quickening of animal and plant life will be happening all around us, and “inside”their bodies the children are bursting forth with natural energy, growth and development. We as adults, caretakers, teachers, human beings, need to keep our wits about us and our energies high if we are to have any hope of keeping up with nature’s fecundity inside and outside!
In this entry of Children in Nature, March 2019 I want to look at the “past, present, and future”as cultural categories that we need to address as environmental educators committed to place based teaching and learning. Time and place are the basic dimensions within which teaching and learning occur. In terms of place we might mention the six directions ( east, west, north, south, earth and sky); the woods; the playground; the classroom; the home; the street; and the screen. In terms of time we might mention, the cycles of the earth, moon, sun and stars; the past, present and future; the human life-span; the calendar; the schedule; and the clock
A symbolic medicine wheel. While the medicine wheel is understood in different ways by different communities and has been appropriated in many different ways, it traditionally integrates the four directions, the four seasons, the four elements and the four ages of being human (http://anishinaabemodaa.com/lessons?lesson_id=51)
There is probably nothing more important for teachers and caretakers of children to bring to their task than Presence. By presence I mean the willingness and ability to put aside what’s bothering us, what we are worried or anxious about, unresolved issues from the past and anxieties and desires about the future, and just be present with the children we are taking care of and educating, so that we can encounter the world with open eyes and an open heart. Presence is the key to everything else I do as an educator. It is what allows me to be a good kid watcher and listener so I can support their various encounters and engagements with the world. It is what allows me to not get bogged down in my adult abstractions and schemas and instead experience the world through my senses and my body with the children. Presence is what keeps me from “checking my phone,” literally and figuratively, and instead be totally available and receptive to the children’s needs and interests. Presence is what allows me to escape the tyrannical bubble of my ego and encounter what is actually going on in the world with curiosity, wonder and care. And as a teacher, presence is being calm enough and perceptive enough to take in the whole situation, the whole landscape within which I, my colleagues and the children are operating, both so that everyone is safe, and that I am open to all the possibilities of teaching and learning that are present in that moment. March is an ideal month to shake off the winter blues of seasonal affective disorder and the sleepiness of our various forms of hibernation and wake up our senses, get the sap flowing and participate and be present in the quickening of the coming Spring.
By “past” I mean a couple of things: the ancient verities of the earth, its denizens and our ancestors; the wisdom of elders and teachers who have been around longer than the rest of us and have special powers of understanding and bodies of knowledge; and the historical past as it conditions and informs the present.
We have to start with a deep respect for the earth, the animals, plants, the water, the air, the sun and the sky. For the earth is what gives us life. One traditional way of doing this is to offer our gratitude for mother earth and father sky ( the moon and the sun are often seen as grand-parents) And we need to show respect for our mothers, fathers, teachers and all our ancestors who made our lives possible and showed us the world ( this does not imply blind obeisance but gratitude). Use the coming of Spring, to honor the earth, to shed the husk clothes of Fall and the sleepy blankets of Winter, for the dazzling, effusive raiments of the earth coming back to life
Further as teachers it is incumbent upon us to learn from the great teachers everything we can. And we shouldn’t limit ourselves to teachers of the specific age or group we work with, or a specific discipline or field, but rather reach out to the teachers who teach us about the transformative project of being and becoming human. Teachers, elders, our parents are in many ways the bridges between the past and future. Take it as part of your practice of teaching and nurturing the children under your care to honor your teachers and continually expand on the circle of teachers that you draw upon in your work. Use the coming of Spring to reinvigorate your connections to your teachers and discover new sources of wisdom and inspiration.
Finally we must face history with fearless eyes and courageous, compassionate hearts. If we do not address the violence, greed, confusion and ignorance of the past we will be doomed to repeat the worst features of the past and miss out on the best possibilities for the future. March is a good time to reassess how traditions, habits, ways of thinking and practices of the past are having a negative, destructive impact on the present. So as an environmental, place based educator who works in New Haven, Connecticut I need to inform myself about the history of Indigenous people who have lived here the longest, how these lands were colonized by European settlers, changing practices food and energy production, waste management, transportation, housing, industrialization, consumer capitalism, kinship networks, childcare, traditional, progressive and experimental educational practices, forms of entertainment, mode of communication, local histories of the common greens, rivers, watersheds, forest, parks, towns, cities, stores, garbage dumps, prisons, hospitals, the Connecticut River, Long Island Sound, issues of race, class and gender, and all the geo-political-cultural features that inform our sense of “where we live.” March is a good time to face history and begin a Spring cleaning. You can start by reviewing your daily schedule and always be ready to revise it to better suit the needs of your students. But in a more comprehensive way we need to regularly revisit the embedded biases in the curriculum materials we use, re-examine how we interact with our students, and explore how educational practices can either contribute to continuing formations of inequality and oppression, or serve to reconstruct and transform society around more equitable, just and joyful lines.
“Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.” Maria Montessori
Here are some good websites to help us as educators “face history”: 1) Based on Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, this website flips the script of traditional history text books: “a people’s history flips the script. When we look at history from the standpoint of the workers and not just the owners, the soldiers and not just the generals, the invaded and not just the invaders, we can begin to see society more fully, more accurately. The more clearly we see the past, the more clearly we’ll see the present — and be equipped to improve it.” ; 2) Facing History in its mission statement says it works to “engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry”;3) Insofar as this website focuses on children’s literature it has been especially useful to me in making decisions on curriculum materials and suggesting new and important directions to go. 4) Rethinking Schools is a beacon for progressive and transformative educational praxis
https://www.zinnedproject.org/
https://www.facinghistory.org/
https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/
The third temporal category I want to look at is the future. The future is grounded in one’s sense of what is possible and what will most likely happen. Adults are responsible for providing for the needs of the children, showing them the world, preparing them for the world as it is and not robbing from children the ability to renew and remake the world for future generations. One of the mistakes that teachers make is viewing education as simply a preparation for the world as it is ( see Dewey, Democracy and Education). What teachers ought to do is respect the child’s “immaturity,”( their ability to grow and learn) and their unconditioned natality (their unique, unconditioned self) as an opportunity to allow and encourage the child to bring their uniqueness, their little light into the world–to let the fresh flower of the child bloom. We can support children in cultivating the “100 languages of childhood” https://reggioemilia2015.weebly.com/the-100-languages.html and indulge in the kind of utopian, futuristic, pragmatic thinking that is appropriate for people who work with and take care of children.
We spent some of last week scrambling up snowy, icy hills and then sliding down them. A bunch of the kids realized it was a lot easier getting around with walking sticks, so we spent some time finding the perfect size stick for each kid, and then we brought the sticks back to the school to paint and decorate. One child suggested that I use one of the larger sticks for myself to which I replied, “well I already have one.” “A real one?” he asked. I said, ” what do you mean, ‘a real one’?” to which he replied without thinking, “one you buy at the store.” Unraveling this little exchange might make a start on critiquing the reification and commodification of nature and the subsequent alienation from the natural world that is one of the dominant features of the “modern” world.
This exchange presents the paradoxes of working with young children. Children are conditioned by the dominant ( or hegemonic) cultural ideologies, trends and practices from the day that they are born. While we try to shield and protect children from the harsher realities of the world, and they are in many ways developmentally incapable of understanding the ways of the adult world, children very quickly adopt, adapt to, (and mess with), the psycho-social-cultural orders of the socio-linguistic-material communities in which they live. As teachers we need to be aware of the role we play in socializing children into society and how we show them “the whole world” from our limited perspectives. We need to be present with the child in their(our) day-to-day, moment-to moment encounters with the world, learn from our ancestors and face the past, and be open to the future and the possibilities for positive change.
Besides spending as much time outside as possible with the children and investigating the “reasons for the seasons,” I spend a lot of time exploring how cultures celebrate spring and the spring equinox in different ways. The Chinese celebrate the Chinese New Year, Persians and modern day Iranians celebrate No Ruiz, Russians celebrate Maslenitsa or Pancake Week, Jewish people celebrate Passover, the European pagans celebrated a festival for the goddess of springtime, named Eostre, and Christians celebrate Easter. Hindus celebrate Holi, The Festival of Colors. Mayan architects and astronomers designed a pyramid called El Castillo that is constructed in such a way that on the spring equinox as the sun hits the pyramid, a 100 foot long snake appears to slither down the pyramid. The Chippewa Indians moved from winter to spring homes to make syrup out of the rising sap in the sugar maple trees and celebrate the ending of winter and the coming of Spring, a tradition that continues to this day. https://ziibiwing.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/american-indian-maple-syrup-harvesting-tradition/
Four important themes emerge from this cross-cultural comparison of various ways of celebrating spring and the vernal equinox. One, that it is a time of new beginnings, fresh starts, birth and its ancillary forms of attention and care, and individual and collective forms of rebirth. Two, that gardeners, farmers, hunters and family providers (and teachers and their students), know that it is now time to start planting seeds and planning their gardens, foraging for different foods, and hunting for different animals (start planning your gardens, plan farm visits, go fishing, find new plants to forage, and new adventures to go on). Three, take time to appreciate the growing, glowing light, the flashes of feathers and flowers, the sounds of water, the smells of rich earth and wet wood, the sharp, sweet taste of baby greens, the spirit and energy of young children, and a newly revealed tactile, sensual world as the snow melts and the earth warms up. Finally, I would argue that Spring should be a time of radical openness to the new, a time to put aside our preconceptions of what is going on and experience directly through all our senses the wonder, enthusiasm, energy, vitality and beauty of Spring as the earth comes back to life.
Preschools have long been the leaders in fashioning curriculum around the seasons and it is a relatively easy, if demanding step, to embrace a more comprehensive, place based, outdoor, phenological approach to building curriculum around the regular, re-occurring events, rhythms, cycles and seasons of the natural world. It is in some ways much more complicated to create a truly inclusive, cultural calendar that recognizes important dates in a community’s history and the story of humankind. Certainly one of my hopes is that, as we keep our eyes on the North Star of freedom and human dignity, we can find ways to live in harmony with the natural world. In this way the so-called Anthropocene Era, instead of signaling the beginning of the end, might be the start of a new beginning.
