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Last Child in the Woods: Place-Based Education

By Will Willingham 9 Comments

Last Child in the Woods garden
When I walk to the post office, I often cut through the elementary school playground which is not far from my house. Once school is out, a small garden pops up to the west of the jungle gym, a plot that is planted and maintained by kids who spend time in the local out-of-school program for school-age kids that are a little too old for day care and a little too young to stay home alone. I’m not sure the plot is large enough to raise enough vegetables to feed a family of four, let alone the whole group of kids that participate in the summer program. My own garden is on the small side, but it might even be larger than this little plot. Still, it’s something: a thing for them to care for and watch grow, to help them understand how the food on their plates got there, to give them space away from electronics.

I don’t recall having a garden plot to tend in my school, but I do remember planting seeds in cut-off milk cartons and growing something in the classroom that we could take home and transplant in the spring. And I do remember the delight of having persuaded a teacher (even up through college) to move class outside for the hour.

In his book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv highlights the work of school programs that focus on “place-based” education, where schools find ways to use the local ecosystem — whether it’s a nearby “river, city park or a garden carved out of an asphalt playground” to enhance learning in “math, science, language arts, biology, chemistry and economics.”

One could say that it’s nice for kids to get out of the classroom, but researchers like David Sobel would say that it’s more than that. Louv reports  on Sobel’s research, noting that “when it comes to reading skills, ‘the Holy Grail of education reform,’ says Sobel, place-based or environment-based education should be considered ‘one of the knights in shining armor.’ Students in these programs typically outperform their peers in traditional classrooms.”

Education leaders in Finland seem to have caught on to this phenomenon. In a 2003 study, Finland scored better than 31 other countries, including the U.S. Louv summarizes the Finnish approach: “Finnish students don’t enter any school until they are seven years old — practically senior citizens in America. Finland offers no special programs for the gifted student, and spends less per student on education than the United States. While requiring educators to meet national curriculum requirements, Finland gives them wide leeway in how they teach. And Finnish educators believe in the power of — get this — play. In the United States, meanwhile, the trend is toward dropping recess. But at a typical school in the Suutarila district of Helsinki, students ‘pad about in their socks. After every 45-minute lesson, they are let loose outside for 15 minutes so they can burn off steam,’ according to the Times. Finland also encourages environment-based education and has moved a substantial amount of classroom experience into natural settings or the surrounding community.”

Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health explains that “The core of learning is not in the information . . . being pre-digested from the outside, but in the interaction between a child and the environment.”

In one California school where students had been working a garden plot, the teacher said, “For us, the garden has been much more than simply planting vegetables and taking care of them. It’s been a bonding experience. When we go to the garden as a class at the end of the day, there is a feeling of shared joy and peace no matter how hard the day has been.”

I’m not in school any more. And I’ve not been the subject of studies to prove it out. But I am convinced that my own small garden is a place of peace and healing, that taking myself outdoors every day and putting my hands to the leaves and my fingers in the dirt is a way to think better.

***

Last Child in the Woods

Buy Last Child in the Woods

We’ve been reading Last Child in the Woods together this month. Whether you’re reading along with us or just picking up the highlights, share your thoughts on this week’s reading and the question of  relationship with nature in the comments. Have a favorite quote or excerpt? Let us know, and check out the previous posts in this series:

Announcement Post
May 17: Introduction, Parts I & II
May 24: Parts III & IV
May 31: Parts V, VI & VII

Photo by Mike Beales,  Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by LW Lindquist.

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Will Willingham
Will Willingham
Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry
I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.
Will Willingham
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Filed Under: Blog, book club, Last Child in the Woods, nature

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About Will Willingham

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

Comments

  1. Bethany R. says

    May 31, 2017 at 2:11 pm

    Interesting. I did have a teacher (or two?) that would let our little class go outside for lessons on beautiful sunny days (there weren’t a ton of them here in WA state). It was a little more distracting to be in a different envirnoment at first, but then something about the shared enjoyment of our long lost friend the sun made the whole lesson feel more positive and engaging for me.

    Reply
    • Will Willingham says

      June 1, 2017 at 9:14 am

      I used to love those times, if for no other reason than the change in routine. 🙂 And yes, super distracting, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be quite as much so if it were more a regular part of things. Or, if that’s maybe a sort of distraction that is actually helpful in our development, like your experiences being more positive overall. 🙂

      Reply
  2. L.L. Barkat says

    June 3, 2017 at 9:57 am

    “…there is a feeling of shared joy and peace no matter how hard the day has been.”

    Besides the “war” that my kids had in the woods near where we had our home education co-op, I believe peace is the center of most outdoor experiences—or, can be.

    When we see Nature as obstacle, as something to just be gotten through or gotten from, then the peace can escape us.

    I’m guessing that, just like the curiosity phenomenon we discussed in Ian Leslie’s book, our adult viewpoints and expressions about Nature can have an unexpected power in the lives of our children—for good or for ill (either forwarding their relationship to it or fostering fear and distaste or even neglect or disinterest).

    Now I am thinking back fondly to days of doing dishes on the red sled. What fun they had (and so did I, surprisingly) when that sink clogged and I moved the whole dish-doing operation outdoors for a few days. This might not exactly be what Louv had in mind. But I remember the utter peace my kids seemed to be experiencing (and how they enthusiastically volunteered for an activity they *never* volunteered for indoors! 😉 )

    Reply
    • Will Willingham says

      June 3, 2017 at 1:13 pm

      Seems that being outdoors sometimes creates those out-of-the-ordinary experiences that change our perspective on things (even on dishwashing, as long as there is a red sled involved).

      I’m eager to hear from JP next week when he gets back from China. He’s spent the last few days hiking in the Tibetan area and the photo he posted this morning is breathtaking. I suspect he will have much to say about nature, having seen a truly different world than the one to which he is accustomed.

      Reply
  3. Rick Maxson says

    June 4, 2017 at 2:28 pm

    The final chapters of Last Child in the Woods seem to me to be the most important. How do you teach a child to love nature with the intensity that they love a puppy? Is it because the puppy is “alive,” because it responds to them instantly, jumping up, licking their face, all the things that puppies do? Grass is slow. We’ve all heard the saying about watching it grow. And what child has ever seen a flower open in real time. Usually this is in reel (digital these days) time. Who has seen a mushroom emerge from the soil. All these things seem to happen when we are not looking, when we are asleep, How do we make nature lick our faces?

    There are amazing books to read about nature and natural phenomenon. One of the best books I have ever read on the subject of nature is The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley. Although it was first published the year I was born in the 1940s, I didn’t discover it until the 1970s, after I had a couple of decades of actual experience with the wild thanks to an uncle and a priest and then on my own. Eiseley writes of the world as a single entity developing. His delineation of the birth of flowers over the surface of our planet is something I have never forgotten.

    What Louv seems to be telling us is we need both actual experience and the experiences of others left for us in books and other media. The world is too large and magnificent to see it all in one lifetime. Actual excursions into the wild either before or after we read about it can animate nature in a way that reading alone cannot. Moreover, actual experience with nature, however small, enables us to better use our imagination when mere reading might be all we have available. There are exceptions to this, such as the Grand Canyon, giant sequoias and those places that simply defy language to describe them, or imagination to envision them.

    Sure, taking a class outside on a campus or down to the city park is better than nothing and can serve as a break from four walls, but having a child take their hand and turn over a fern leaf to see its reproductive spores; watch a butterfly struggle and emerge through a cocoon; take a finger and gently slide the soil away from the cotyledons of a seed; turn over a starfish to see its feet and mouth; or seeing and hearing a bird sing its distinctive song, or watching a mocking bird do its impersonations all leave permanent imprinting like the kiss from a puppy.

    Reply
    • L.L. Barkat says

      June 5, 2017 at 10:44 am

      It’s my experience that sometimes people simply don’t even see the beauty of Nature, even when it is stunning, right in front of us.

      So there’s the question of what’s going on there.

      How can we stand before a great Sequoia and not even take a second look? Or a breathtaking canyon or mountain-top and be less-than-interested in the view (or ready to strip it down for its natural resources)? It happens.

      My interest is in understanding how this happens versus an interest in Nature that is so deep that even a bit of pollen brushing across one’s fingers is cause for ecstatic observation and joy.

      (It’s been a while since I’ve read Louv. Maybe he spoke to this in particular? It’s something I’d like to think on.)

      Reply
      • Rick Maxson says

        June 6, 2017 at 12:25 am

        I know what you are saying. I’ve seen people stand before the General Sherman tree and say, “Wow, it’s so tall,” and walk on. What does one do before a tree that was growing hundreds of years before we say Columbus or anyone set foot on North America; before Mozart or Beethoven were born?

        And, yes, pollen, so naked in its journey as if to ask us to pay attention. Before i would have my child wish on the seeds of an aging dandelion, i would let them know that their wish may be answered the next spring, that it depends on many dandelions, the wind and rain and the sun that follows.

        Nature is poetic. It depends on us to show its poetry, but it is poetic anyway, even if we do not contribute.

        Read The Immense Journey. If you have already, read it again. For those who give the wild world merely a glance before moving on, I suggest they have not seen the world, its fauna, flora and people (are we not just flora) as an organism in its own right. This is essential and everyone is capable and has the elements at their call to see the world this way. Humans may be the heart or the brain that has developed the eyes and ears and nervous system of the world. Loren Eiseley will have us see that.

        Reply
        • L.L. Barkat says

          June 6, 2017 at 11:50 am

          Still thinking on this.

          What contributes to seeing or not seeing something as an organism in its own right? I don’t mean at the attitude level (pride, humility, and so forth). Because attitude, it seems to me, stems from other, simpler matters.

          Digging down, then, what is it that helps us recognize a “being,” an “organisim”—or the converse: what makes it possible for us to miss that or deny it?

          Reply
  4. Rick Maxson says

    June 4, 2017 at 2:39 pm

    LW, I couldn’t see this book club session end without thanking you for bringing this book to our attention. It is worth reading again and even again.

    The events of the last week with the Paris Accord and the defiant response from local leaders choosing to carry on with acute attention to environmental protection, demonstrate a love of nature that still turns in the soil of humanity like a crocus making its way through the snow in early spring. Reading books like Last Child in the Woods serves to nurture and hopefully grow our inherent connection to nature.

    Reply

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