Mount Rainier, Washington, USA
During my practicum, I took students out to the Camosun Bog on multiple occasions. One time, I had them pick any plant and write a few things about their plant. I took pictures of them with their plant, and we made posters about these plants. Most were local: salmonberries, huckleberries, snowberries, alders, California blackberries etc. Many were invasive: Herb Robert, buttercups, etc. There was so much to learn about the land from looking at the abundance of plant life that surrounded us. I consistently see many of these plants around UBC. I ate some red huckleberries on campus and felt really lucky that we have these native plants to enjoy at UBC. Our next steps can be to plan activities and create resources that we can use to incorporate BC’s native plants into our classrooms through nature exploration. We can share our learning by sharing lesson ideas and resources with the class during our final presentation. We can continue to share ideas going forward to keep growing as teachers. We can update our inquiry question to be “How can we use scaffolding and resources to create lesson where students learn the stories of the land?” This can take all the theory that we know and make it more practical withing our future classrooms.
Living in nature and experiencing it is the best way to learn how to connect to land; it is much harder to do so from inside the classroom (unless maybe we were planting local berry seeds in little pots to grow inside the classroom). For example, last weekend I tried to summit Mt. Rainier in Washington. Before going, I tried to research online what that experience would be like: do people often experience altitude sickness over 3000 meters in elevation? How big are the crevasses? How freezing are people who camp out at the base camp at 3000 meters before attempting to summit? We later heard that high winds were in the forecast which could prevent us from summitting. Would those winds turn people around? Those questions were much better answered through experience. We decided to keep going up the mountain until we personally felt it was unsafe (and also with a group of very experienced people), and this learning experience helped us become better mountaineers. For example, the idea of high winds originally scared us, but the wind ended up feeling genuinely fine to us. However, we saw gigantic crevasses and felt the temperatures rise, and we decided to head down at 3500 meters before melting could open up crevasses further and possibly impact our safety. By stopping before risks appeared by looking at our surroundings, we were teaching ourselves how to spot risks and how to mitigate them on our own rather than solely relying on others (even though listening to others is also important).
My point is not to take kids up glaciers, but that learning about your environment through direct experience of it is invaluable. We can do this in our local forests and beaches, and other safe natural spaces. I think that free play within nature is one good way to do this, but at other times, activities and scaffolding would contribute to deep, impactful learning. For example, I couldn’t explore glaciers without gear, an experienced rope team, and knowledge about mountains and crevasse rescue systems. Likewise, students can’t explore medicinal values of plants without knowing what the various plants around them are, or having a way to find out. This is where resources and lesson planning can come in to help teach students about many aspects of nature. We need to find ways to use scaffolding and resources to make lesson plans that be a tool in helping students learn from the land.
Today, we are in the process of discussing why scaffolding and resources can be important when taking students out to learn on the land, and what those resources are. Resources can include plant identification apps, cups and soil to grow seedlings out or seeds found in local berries, magnifying glasses, notepads, journals with fun prompts, etc. We are going to think about possible lesson plan ideas that we can share as well, so that we can all grow our inventory of outdoor teaching ideas.