Michele Baker is an experienced early years educator, qualified Forest School Leader and Forest Mind instructor. She has worked in Steiner, state and international schools in England, Switzerland and Belgium. For the past 20 years she has created engaging outdoor learning experiences for young children. Michele shares her passion for outdoor learning by offering professional development courses to educators both in the UK and abroad.
As educators our goal is to provide the best education for our students and to support our students to not only become the best versions of themselves but also to be equipped for the world they will live in in the future. The Anxious Generation (Haidt, (2024) highlights the documented increase in mental illness among children. Haidt believes that the increase in mental illness among children is linked to a change in behaviour, from reading books and engaging in hobbies to spending up to five hours a day watching 15 second videos of addictive content.
Nature deficit and nature-smart
Since 2005 Richard Louv, an American author, has been talking about Nature Deficit Disorder, a term used to describe the negative effects of too little time spent in nature. In Last Child in the Woods, Louv (2005) argues that social and technological changes over the last 30 years have led to children spending more time indoors in a virtual reality and less time engaged in free play in the natural world. In The Nature Principle (Louv, 2012), he predicts that “the Future will belong to the Nature-Smart; those individuals, families, businesses and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real”. More than just disconnecting students from technology, as suggested by Haidt, I agree with Louv that we need to reconnect students to nature.
Taking it outdoors
So how can we, as educators, support students to find the balance between technology and a connection to nature? It starts simply by making plans to take learning outdoors every week. The outdoors offers a living, breathing and ever-changing landscape for innovation and creativity. Many ideas stem from nature in one way or another. If we don’t include time in nature for our students, they miss out on opportunities to get to know the world around them. A possible point of departure is the comparison of natural and man-made materials in everyday activities. For example, using natural materials found outdoors for measuring activities enables a meaningful discussion of measurement principles. Explorations such as comparing a metre length of Lego bricks with the same length of leaves supports not only conventional mathematical understanding but also opportunity for reflection on how other cultures have used the natural world to measure distance, mass and time. Investigating how to produce precise measurements with natural resources requires creativity, analysis and evaluation.
And breathe…
An added benefit of taking learning outdoors for both students and teachers is that natural spaces help us relax. Nature invites us to be present, be calm, become fascinated and recover. The good news is you don’t need a forest to feel these benefits. Outdoor learning and wellbeing practices can be done in the school playground, a park, garden or woods. A simple way to begin is to take your students on an outdoor mindfulness walk. Find a time to take your class to a natural environment near the school. Ask students to reflect on how they feel when walking in a natural environment. Slow down and walk slowly, experiencing the sights and sounds of nature around you. Ask students to find a quiet place to sit, by themselves, under a tree or any natural space that attracts them for 5-10 minutes. Ask them to open their senses and look around slowly, turning their focus on the nature around them and letting everything else go. I truly believe that as well as heeding Haidt’s warning about The Anxious Generation, as educators, we need to take it one step further and work on reconnecting students to nature.
I challenge everyone reading this post to commit to two things each week:
1. Find one lesson that can be done outdoors with your students.
2. Find one hour where you can take time to slowly walk or sit in nature for your own wellbeing.
See how much better you feel.
- Haidt, J. (2024) The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. London: Penguin Press.
- Louv, R. (2005) Last Child in the Woods. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.
- Louv, R. (2012) The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.