Academic Focus in the Classroom Courtesy & Copyright Joseph Kozlowski, PhotographerAcademic Focus in the Outdoors Courtesy & Copyright Joseph Kozlowski, PhotographerA recent educational outdoor experience (I’ll call field experience) with a homeschooled family, prompted me to reflect on the balance between academic focus and student-exploration when teaching outdoors. Yes, some balance of the two is necessary. In the extreme case of too explicit of academic focus, why be outdoors at all and not just at school in desks? Why all the logistics and planning to transport kids to some outdoor location then sit them at a picnic table to complete worksheets about some science-based academic standard, when you could do that all at school? In the other extreme, if you ‘let kids run free’ for the entirety of the field experience, they’ll have fun and make discoveries, but they will likely miss the intentional connections to curriculum that made the trip academically justifiable. So, when you take kids to learn outdoors, what is the right balance between academic focus and student-exploration and how can the instructor support such a balance?
In my experience, the way to think about this balance isn’t so much as a mixing of the two, but more of a time sequence. Here’s what I’ve found works well.
Prior to the field experience, formal academic focus should be the priority. Students should engage in academic activities that set them up to make explicit academic connections when they go to the field.
Then, when in the field, emphasis should be on student-exploration, and priority should be given to fostering children’s wonder, discovery, and inquiry about nature. Importantly, the instructor plays a vital role in in the field in helping refine student-exploration so it leads to academic connections. One major role of the instructor in the field is to arrange an outdoor experience that will likely lead to an encounter with the academic material that was previously focused on. For example, if you had academically focused on animals taking advantage of their habitats to survive, you may want to take children to a specific area that might have downed trees from a gnawing beaver so as to naturally lead kids to make their own nature to academic connections. Another major role of the instructor in the field needs to be expertly observing the kids engaging in the environment and noticing when there is an opportunity to highlight a child’s nature-to-academic connection, or prompt children to make such connections.
Finally, after the field experience, attention should shift back to academic focus in the form of documentation, which will help children formally connect their experiences in the outdoors to the academic topic they are learning about.
So, whether you’re a homeschooled family, related to the public- or private-school sector, or even just a parent considering how to make the most of an outdoor opportunity, consider this balance between formal academic focus and student-centered exploration in the wild Utah outdoors.
This is Dr. Joseph Kozlowski and I am Wild about Outdoor Education in Utah!
Nature journaling is nothing new. Charles Darwin kept thousands of observation field notes. Lewis and Clark documented our American West as well. In Jacqueline Davies’ children’s picture book “The Boy Who Drew Birds,” John James Audubon says, “I will bring …my pencils and paper… I will study my cave birds every day. I will draw them just as they are.” As a school teacher, I ask my students as we explore the magic of Hardware Ranch, Bear River Bird Refuge, and Logan River to write and to draw. We carry composition notebooks, erasers, colored pencils, magnifying glasses, and rulers in sealable plastic bags. We date and title each entry, noting the weather and our location on outlines of Utah, and then get into the details from our five senses. What do we see, hear, smell, feel, and, sometimes even taste, like when we are at Antelope Island with Friends of the Great Salt Lake naturalists learning about pickleweed?
The children don’t always have the luxury of just snapping a picture with an iPad or smartphone on our place-based field learning experiences, and I hope that their engagement with and blossoming attitudes about keeping nature journals stick. In the book “Keeping a Nature Journal,” Clare Walker Leslie quoted Frederick Franck about just this: “I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen.” I know I am not alone in thinking, especially when I am not wearing my teacher hat, that I lack the skills to draw natural subjects in any recognizable way. That cannot be an excuse, though, for not taking the time to quietly contemplate what I’m experiencing, being mindful, as naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton wrote, once “the ripples of my presence settle and let nature resume,” and recording it on paper as a permanent memory. There are some who say that we should be present in the moment outdoors and create a journal entry of the most striking memories upon return, but I would submit that engaging in trying to capture nature in a field journal in the moment only heightens the entire wild experience. I’ll share two examples from my recent adventures.
I am convinced that every time I open my nature journal to that page, I will remember that day with that hairy insect, and I am also convinced that I’ll never know all there was to appreciate about that bee plant I failed to take the time in the moment to capture in my field journal. There are so many resources online about nature journaling techniques, from a formal Grinnell-style field journal to tips for drawing flowers and bugs. There are also opportunities for citizen scientists interested in contributing to Notes from Nature projects sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute and zooniverse.org to digitally transcribe field journals. Explore the possibilities to be wild about nature journaling.
Josh and his students study outdoors Courtesy & Copyright Steph JuthIn February of this year, researchers published an integrative review of the literature on nature’s role as a catalyst for academic growth in children. They had this to say about their findings: “In academic contexts, nature-based instruction outperforms traditional instruction. The evidence here is particularly strong…” (Kuo, Barnes, and Jordan, 2019). For a long time, great thinkers such as renowned educator John Dewey and conservationist Aldo Leopold have recognized and professed the power of situational, hands-on learning—especially in the natural world, and especially among children. This sentiment is something we all share, I think—something bordering on instinct. Now, scientific research has caught up to a truth we all know in our bones.
This is a topic close to my heart; I’m a third grade teacher who got his start leading groups of kids into the backcountry, canoeing and backpacking the lake-littered northern latitudes of the mid-west. Adventure and education always seemed necessarily intertwined to me. “Education is not preparation for life,” said John Dewey; “education is life itself.” And life, I’ve always thought, is out there. The authors of the literature review agree, writing that “experiences with nature…promote children’s academic learning and seem to promote children’s development as persons” (Kuo et al., 2019). One of the key logs for this increase in learning and development is the increase in students’ motivation once they’ve left the walls and classrooms behind. According to the researchers’ report, “learning in and around nature is associated with intrinsic motivation, which, unlike extrinsic motivation, is crucial for student engagement and longevity of interest in learning” (Kuo et al., 2019). Even more “[e]ncouragingly, learning in nature may improve motivation most in those students who are least motivated in traditional classrooms” (Kuo et al., 2019).
I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with students in the field. While out there, I’ve had that instinctual knowledge we all share reaffirmed while sitting next to a dammed-up beaver pond, watching third-graders reverse engineer the beaver dam out of rocks, sticks, silly putty, and freshly-chewed wood chips from a beaver log. I know my circumstances are not the norm, though—not yet, at least. So, how might teachers utilize the natural world when there’s no beaver dam on campus and they can’t get the funding or administrative support to go find one? It may be simpler than one thinks! There is an abundance of evidence that indicates students can reap the same benefits just from being outside while they learn. “In multiple studies,” the researchers point out, “the greener a school’s surroundings, the better its standardized test performance—even after accounting for poverty and other factors—and classrooms with green views yield similar findings” (Kuo et al., 2019). To supplement the views and the greenspaces, though, teachers can consult research-based resources like UC Berkley’s teaching guide, School Yard Ecology, and the National Science Teachers Association’s inspired 10-minute Field Trips.
If the increasingly robust academic research into nature’s role in student learning is any indication, though, I foresee a not-so-distant future replete with an even wider diversity of resources and opportunities for teachers and students to explore the natural world in pursuit of academic rigor. “It is time,” the authors of the integrative review write, “to bring nature and nature-based pedagogy into formal education—to expand existing, isolated efforts into increasingly mainstream practices” (Kuo et al., 2019). It seems incumbent upon us to trust the truth we feel in our bones.
Barrett, Katharine, Willard, Carolyn, SchoolYard Ecology, GEMS (Great Expections in Math & Science), Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley, https://lhsgems.org/GEMSschooleco.html
