Outdoor Learning: Education’s Next Revolution?

February 17th, 2014

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Kenny got the idea for Cedarsong while trying to find a preschool for her own son that provided the kind of outdoor exploration opportunity that she had grown up with in Canada. At first, she wasn’t sure how the public would react. “We’re such an indoor culture,” she said.

Six families joined Cedarsong in its first year. The next year, enrollment doubled. Currently, the school operates at maximum enrollment, serving 48 families, two-thirds of whom commute from off-island. This kind of educational experience is part of a growing outdoor movement in the United States, one that includes names like Montessori, Waldorf and Reggio Emelia.

Increasingly, there are programs aimed at older students as well. Through the Edible Schoolyard, children at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, Calif., engage in hands-on environmental learning in a community garden, and apply this knowledge to their traditional academic subject areas. (For example, chemistry is taught in the kitchen when students bake whole-wheat soda bread.) The program has inspired affiliate programs in New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Greensboro, N.C.

The Mountain School gives high-achieving high school juniors the opportunity to work on a farm in Vermont for a semester; and at the Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound

Similarly, Deep Springs College exemplifies successful integration of hands-on outdoor work and rigorous academics. Nestled deep in the Deep Springs Valley of California, the college is a two-year program that sends many of its graduates on to Ivy League universities and counts a federal judge, a congressman, and several novelists and CEOs among its graduates. The school is so locationally remote that Internet is received by satellite, and cell phones are utterly useless. Its program centers on three pillars: academics; the labor program in the garden, ranch or farm; and self-governance. “Deep Springers,” as the students are called, rise before sun-up, take classes between breakfast and lunch, and spend the afternoons doing assigned chores.

Jared Daar, who went on from Deep Springs to graduate from Harvard in 2012, explains that in addition to a traditional education “grounded in the great books,” he worked in the labor program as a dairy farmer and an irrigator, helping to grow the ranch’s alfalfa crop. Although Daar has no plans to pursue a career in ranching (he currently works at a law firm), there were relevant takeaways from this work — most notably, “the ability to ask questions judiciously” and “working collaboratively.” Deep Springs, he explained, “invites you to be self sufficient in a totally different way.”

“In the labor program,” he went on, “things break and you’re put in situations where no amount of talking is going to fix them.” For example, “your dairy cow could get mastitis and you have to figure out how to administer the right treatment.” Asked which was more rigorous, Harvard or Deep Springs, he answered without hesitation: “Deep Springs.”

Author and environmentalist Richard Louv is one of the major advocates of outdoor education. In his books, he argues that children and adults in the United States suffer from “nature deficit disorder,” and cites a study conducted by the American Institutes for Research of at-risk students, which found a 27 percent improvement in science-related test scores after they spent a week in outdoor education programs.

Other research presents similar conclusions. A study by the State Education and Environmental Roundtable found that students participating in nature-based learning programs did better than their peers 72 percent of the time in measures of academic achievement, and that their attendance was 77 percent better than the control group. Cornell University environmental psychologist Nancy Wells likewise found that being close to nature can boost children’s attention.

In Louv’s 2011 book “The Nature Principle,” he argues that outdoor learning works because it “demands better use of the senses.” He cites an 18-month study of 800 military personnel, which determined that the best bomb-spotters were people who lived in rural environments and regularly engaged all their senses. The children who “were raised on Game Boys,” by contrast, “lacked the ability to detect nuances” in their environment, and were focused on the “screen rather than the whole surrounding.” Louv argues that natural environments promote “involuntary attention” or “fascination,” which enables us to be more alert.

This makes sense. Natural environments were the first classrooms of homo sapiens, the places where human beings learned to forage, hunt and survive. By contrast, traditional schools — with their often closed windows and shades, blank walls, sterile lighting and humming air conditioners — seem to promote sense deprivation.

Increasingly, studies are uncovering the behavioral benefits of time spent outdoors. Research out of the University of Illinois found that outdoor play can relieve the symptoms of attention deficit disorder. Louv cites Hotchkiss Elementary as another example. Before implementation of its environment-based program, teachers made 560 disciplinary referrals to the principal’s office in a single year. After the program was implemented, that number dropped to 50, and Louv quotes Gerald Lieberman, director of State Education and Environmental Roundtable, saying that “both the principal and teachers attribute these decreases in behavioral problems to students’ increased engagement in learning.”

Angela Duckworth, a leading education specialist based at the University of Pennsylvania, arguesthat “grit,” or the ability to work diligently toward a long-term goal, is the greatest indicator of future success, both academically and professionally. To understand the nature of grit, I shadowed an 11th grader at a private high school in Washington, D.C., whose students are unquestionably gritty. They sit still in class all day, respond thoughtfully to the teacher’s prompts, play two to three sports per year, and are engaged in extracurriculars. At lunch, a group of five students told me that on average, they do about three hours of homework per night. They are also busily preparing for the SATs. One girl had traveled to an “SAT bootcamp” in Boulder, Colo., and plans to work with a private tutor during the year.

There is a line of argument that runs like this: Results can only be achieved through extreme discipline; and, as a result, perhaps a certain level of boredom is to be expected in education. However, an essential facet of grit is the ability to self-regulate, to manage emotions and delay gratification. And, as psychology researchers from Notre Dame point out, “The right brain, which governs much of our self-regulation, creativity and empathy[…] grows through full-body experience.”

While the classroom may be making these students “grittier” — preparing them for their probable futures as office-bound desk jockeys — it is simply not good for them physically. A 2010 study by the American Cancer Society indicates that men who sit for more than six hours a day have a 20 percent higher mortality rate than men who only sat for three hours per day. In women who sit for six hours, that number goes up to 40 percent. By my measure, on the October day when I visited that private high school in D.C., the students sat for just under seven hours. Three hours of homework would jump that figure to ten.

If we can extrapolate from the 11th grader whom I had shadowed, those hours are riddled with boredom. Even though said teenager is “a good student,” she explained that her parents are “the ones keeping me on track” – constantly monitoring her performance on tests, quizzes and papers.

“They definitely nag me,” she said.

But what of students whose parents don’t (or aren’t in a position to) keep track of every quiz, or lack the funds to send their children to SAT bootcamp? In schools that cater to “at-risk” youth, engagement is considered the front line in this education battle. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education reports that over 40 percent of D.C public school students drop out. Nationally, the dropout rate for black students is currently being measured at 38 percent. That figure is 32 percent for Latino students.

As students progress through the educational system, engagement problems worsen. Gallup recently released a survey of 500,000 public school students that reports steep decreases in engagement from 61 percent in middle school to 41 percent in high school.

Heeding these warnings, some schools that cater to this “at-risk” demographic are implementing hands-on nature-based education in the hopes of boosting engagement. Richard Louv highlights an effort in New York to enliven the study of biology by linking 10 inner-city schools with eight upstate schools that work on a joint project to raise trout and replant streams. They raise the fish from eggs, monitor their well-being with a “trout-cam” and cultivate their habitats. In the spring, all the schools meet in the Catskills to release the survivors into the wild. Like the “Deep Springers,” these students are motivated by a community mission that has real-world implications.

One of the main drivers of engagement is this feeling of relevancy, the sense that what you are learning has a relationship to the real world. When I asked the student I shadowed at the private school what her favorite subjects were, she answered that they were environmental science and Spanish, for exactly this reason. “I can apply it to my life outside,” she said.

Carol Carpenter, communications director for NYC Outward Bound, explained to me that her program seeks to make the curriculum taught in schools relevant to the students’ world. Since many of these kids live near the Gowanus Canal, students learn about the canal’s water quality in science class; about the sociological effects in the humanities classes; and about the canal’s design in art class. “We believe in field work,” said Carpenter, “in getting out of the classroom and getting your hands dirty.”

The most glaring unknown from all of this is whether this model is scalable. We built schools with a particular model in mind — a brick one to be exact. Is it impractical to try something so radically different? Carpenter argued that this is very scalable. “[Outward Bound] is a part of a national network of around 165 schools,” she said.

“This is already happening.”

Source Article from http://www.popularresistance.org/outdoor-learning-educations-next-revolution/