Outdoor Classroom Day, celebrated on November 7 in many countries around the world, is a day that celebrates playing and learning outdoors. Statistics describe children as happier, more engaged in learning, and more able to reach their full potential by virtue of being outdoors. Yet we don’t often talk about how children’s relationship to nature impacts their identity. Ecological identity – our connection to place through land, sky and sea and multitude of creatures and configurations of stars and sunsets – shapes who we are.
In her work as a teacher of young children Ann Pelo recognized that children’s ecological identity was as impactful as their cultural and social identities. She speaks of the importance of helping children experience land through their senses, emotions, and conscious thinking.
I believe that this ecological identity, born in a particular place, opens children to a broader connection with the earth; love for a specific place makes possible love for other places. An ecological identity allows us to experience the earth as our home ground, and leaves us determined to live in honorable relationship with our planet. (A Pedagogy for Ecology)
But how do we, in a society that is always on the move from one activity to another, or from one place to another; and in a society that values fast-paced consumerism of materials and ideas, help children and ourselves grow an ecological identity?
In her article A Pedagogy for Ecology Ann Pelo asks “How do we cultivate this love of place in young children’s minds and hearts, moving beyond the tenets of recycling to intimate connection with their home ground?”
One of the principles she suggests is to explore new perspectives – finding ways of looking at the familiar as if seeing it for the first time.
Ann shares a story about how, through children’s observations and wonderings, new perspectives were awakened within her and her co-teacher in the preschool class she taught.
It began with a simple familiar question posed by a four-year-old. “Why do leaves change colour?”
To this child who had witnessed this phenomenon only a very few times in her young life the transformation was mysterious and magical. Instead of rushing to offer a scientific explanation, Ann and her co-teacher took the children on a walk through the neighbourhood to study the trees. The children began to see patterns. They noticed that leaves on the outermost branches had turned colour before leaves on the innermost branches. Then they noticed that the outside edges of individual leaves had turned colour while the more central parts of the leaves were still green.
So, they collected leaves to take back to their school where they could study them more closely. They sketched the leaves and added colour to their sketches with watercolour paints. It was then that some of the children noticed how the lines in these leaves looked like bones in their hands. And, just as the children sketched the leaves they had collected, they were invited to sketch their hands, “knowing that our sketching would help us see ourselves in new ways, as cousins to leaves.”
As they sketched, Ann invited the children’s ideas about why leaves turn colour in the autumn. This led to theories about how the leaves start to feel cold and huddle on the ground to keep each other warm. One child began thinking about the emotions of leaves as they start to die, and what they could do as children to comfort the leaves when they fall to the ground.
An ecological identity takes time to grow. It requires our intention and attention to nurture a relationship of love with the natural world. What would it take for us to seek out and explore new perspectives, and gift the children in our lives with a deepening relationship to place – to their ecological identity?