Education
Place-based education
The conventional schooling system is overwhelmingly indoors, disconnected from the land, and based in abstract knowledge, all of which produce indifference to the environment and to traditional cultures. But we can reclaim our curiosity, wonder, and sense of responsibility towards the natural world through shifting our focus towards the unique features of our local areas. Place-based education teaches standard subjects using local environments and communities as the vehicles for learning and discovery. Go beyond using the outdoors as a "classroom" and find your place in the living world with the following Actions.
Place-based education Actions
Choose nature-based education.
Choose nature-based education.
Nature-based education addresses one of the greatest shortcomings of the conventional education system, namely its neglect of and alienation from the natural world that sustains all life, and in which we are deeply enmeshed. Whether through forest schools, wild schools, or like approaches, nature-based education gets children out of the four walls of buildings, away from technology, and back to their roots where learning is integrated into bodily engagement with the land community.
Take action
- Set up a forest school using the comprehensive guide How to Set Up a Forest School from the Forest School Association (UK).
- Check out the extensive resource hub from the Children and Nature Network, which includes free toolkits, reports, infographics and advocacy tools for promoting nature-based education.
- Connect with the movement of Free Forest Schools (US) to find a group or start a group centered on nature-based play and moderated by volunteers. Currently, there are 214 groups in 46 US states and 7 countries.
- Join Inside-Outside (US), a network of nature-based educators; start by finding a local chapter.
- Learn about wild schooling, an approach to homeschooling centered on the natural world, from The Wild Schooler's resource page What is Wild Schooling? and their nature-based kindergarten curriculum, which includes lessons on bushcraft, homesteading, and sustainability.
- For those starting a new nature-based program or "naturalizing" an exsisting classroom, make use of Redleaf Press' books Nature Preschools and Forest Kindergartens: The Handbook for Outdoor Learning by David Sobel, and Nature-Based Learning for Young Children: Anytime, Anywhere, on Any Budget, by Julie Powers and Sheila Williams Ridge.
- Create bountiful gardens in existing schools with the Greening Schoolyards Advocacy Toolkit from the Children and Nature Network.
- Enroll in the Nature-Based Early Childhood Education Certificate Program at Antioch University, focused on training teachers, administrators, and founders of nature preschools and forest kindergartens.
- Find an outdoor school near you with the Outdoor School Directory by Run Wild My Child.
Get inspired
- The articles How forest schools boost children’s immune systems and Why Finland's 'Forest Schools' Are Great for Kids illustrate the benefits of nature-based education for children.
- Marudam Farm School in Tamil Nadu, India, connects children to place and their own sustenance through engaged and embodied eco-learning. Learn more on the Marudam Farm School website, and through their profile on the Vikalp Sangam website: Marudam Farm School: becoming while it is being.
- The Community Farm School in Massachusetts, US is a farm and nature-based preschool and kindergarten, where among other activities, the children eat and help produce the food on the Clark Farm, which also provides organic vegetables, berries, and meat for a CSA community, farm stand, and local farm to table restaurant.
- Shared Earth Learning is a co-operative of forest school practitioners in Frome, Somerset, UK, whose aim is to nurture a love of nature and build community through forest school and outdoor activities for children, teenagers and adults alike.
- The Chestnut Tree Ecological School in Catalonia (Spain), places nature, ecological pedagogy, emotional intelligence, cooperation and community at the heart of its learning programs.
Teach children about permaculture.
Teach children about permaculture.
Education in the values and practices of permaculture, based in cooperative and creative co-existence with the rest of the living world and with other humans, can provide a profoundly grounding ecological ethic for the rest of a child's life.
Take action
- Connect with Children in Permaculture (Europe) and Permaculture Children (Scotland/Wales) promoting permaculture education to “children, parents, educators and other people who work with children to integrate permaculture into education and their lives”. They do this through a variety of tools, including a catalogue of resources, activity ideas, courses and trainings, and more.
- Invite teenagers age 11-17 to join and start their own hub within Permayouth, a global network of teens taking action in their own communities and in community with others around the world.
- Read and implement the ideas from Lucy Legan's book, Planet Schooling: How to Create a Permaculture Living Classroom in Your Backyard, which combines "practical permaculture principles with hands-on activities that make learning about sustainability accessible and engaging for all ages."
Get inspired
- The article Permaculture and Children’s Education: Cultivating a Sustainable Future, by the World Permaculture Association, shows how permaculture principles can be “integrated into the learning process to cultivate a generation of informed, environmentally conscious individuals."
- Maia Raymond, co-founder of Permayouth, shares the inspiring story of Lulu Vierkötter, and her work bringing permaculture to young people and the community in Zanzibar.
Teach in the local language.
Teach in the local language.
Speaking in local languages is essential for stewarding traditional ecological knowledge, foodways, cultural identities, and more. Unfortunately, linguistic diversity is disappearing rapidly, largely due to the conventional education system that reinforces national dominant languages while marginalizing and in some cases forbidding local indigenous languages. With the resources below, understand more about the languages native to your area, how to teach them, and how to keep them thriving for generations to come.
Take action
- Understand the threat to the world's remaining linguistic diversity, and why preserving languages is so critical in the article Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages, summarizing the eponymous book by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine.
- In Canada, browse the resource list Indigenous languages – Learning and teaching resources, published by the Canadian government, which includes a list of university programs in language and Indigenous culture.
- In Australia, look through the Resources page of First Languages Australia, which includes documentaries and tools for educators, town councils, and the general public. The Contact your local language group page features a map of local language resource centers.
- Find free lesson plans in the Teaching Resource Centre by the National Centre for Collaboration in Indigenous Education in Canada. The lesson plans cover Indigenous languages; land-based skills and knowledge; and standard K-12 subjects with an Indigenous perspective.
- For members of Indigenous communities in North America, contribute to enlivening local languages through FirstVoices, a collaborative platform where Indigenous communities manage, curate and share their languages.
Get inspired
- The Adivasi Academy in Gujarat, India, was established in 1996 for the conservation and study of India's vast diversity of Adivasi (indigenous) languages and culture. The Academy includes a learning center for young children where, according to The Language of Diversity by Ashish Kothari, "the teachers are supposed to learn any mother tongue that a child comes with, teaching and learning happens in multiple languages, and there are no grades with various age groups studying together."
- Ekvn-Yefolecv in Alabama, US is an Indigenous ecovillage that not only teaches and operates solely in the Maskoke language, but has also physically built their village structure and customs according to the Traditional Ecological Knowledge held in their language.
- Speakers of the language El Molo in Kenya, one of the most endangered languages in the world, are using participatory video to revive their language, creating a visual dictionary linking their lexicon with activities such as fishing and home building. Read more and watch some of their videos in the article Speaking our Identity by Terralingua.
- The article Native Language Schools Are Taking Back Education shares the story of two early education language revitalization movements in the US: ‘Aha Pūnana Leo in Hawai'i and Mukayuhsak Weekuw, a Wôpanâak language school in Massachusetts.
- Bodhi Ramteke tells the story of how an indigenous Gondi-language school came about in the village of Mohagaon, Maharashtra, India, in Why a community-run Gondi-language school in Gadchiroli is a revolutionary step.
- Teaching and learning indigenous languages: Inspiring practices from the UNESCO Associated Schools Network offers more than a dozen additional ideas and stories from around the world.
Strengthen local ecology-based knowledge systems.
Strengthen local ecology-based knowledge systems.
Caring for our local ecosystems rests on deep knowledge of the rhythms of the seasons, indicators of health or degradation, the state of the water and the other species that call it home. Learn more about your home environment, form community around ecological literacy, and address the planetary crisis with the actions below.
Take action
- Gain a baseline understanding of what you know about your local ecology, and how to deepen your understanding, with the Bioregional Awareness Quiz published by Watershed Commons.
- Visit a local cultural heritage center or history museum to learn about traditional tools and lifeways in your region, keeping in mind that history is usually written by the privileged.
- Talk to your grandparents or other elders in your community about traditional ecological knowledge both where you live, and where they are from (if different).
- Learn how to steward your local environment from locals. Native plant nursery owners, herbalists, environmental educators, and agricultural education centers are good starting points.
- Record the stories and local ecological knowledge held by these elders and community leaders, with their enthusiastic consent. The Oral History Toolkit from the Claremont Colleges offers a good primer on conducting interviews.
- Document knowledge and folklore in other creative ways: for example, articles, visual journaling, filmmaking, songwriting, developing localized teaching modules, and more.
- Explore biocultural diversity mapping, measurement, documentation, policy, and education with the Biocultural Diversity Toolkit and Biocultural Diversity Education Initiative by Terralingua.
- In North America, learn traditional skills by connecting with the Folkschool Alliance network of learning centers.
- Teach children to engage with local ecosystems by downloading a free copy of Shelburne Farm's Cultivating Joy & Wonder: Educating for Sustainability in Early Childhood Through Nature, Food, and Community, which includes over 75 facilitated sustainability learning experiences.
Get inspired
- Two friends in Indonesia took off on the adventure of a lifetime traveling their homeland by motorbike and recording 55 videos of traditional local practices. Watch their Ekspedisi Indonesia Biru series (in Indonesian) on YouTube.
- The Honey Bee Network in India organizes walks among villages documenting grassroots innovations, folklore, and medicinal plant use. Over more than three decades, the network has documented more than 100,000 ideas, shared in quarterly newsletters in eight languages, on the Honey Bee website, and on the United Nations Grassroots Innovation Database.
- The Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Canada offers accredited post-secondary courses in Indigenous land-based studies and self-determination, in addition to videos, articles, toolkits, and public speaker series on those themes.
- The people of Lauru in the Solomon Islands, with support from TerraCircle in Australia, published the book The Forest Foods of Lauru to document their traditional food gathering and cooking practices for their children.
- The Chesapeake Bay Foundation runs the Smith Island Environmental Education Center in Maryland, USA, offering multi-day excursions to connect children across the state with the ecology and traditional maritime culture of the Chesapeake Bay.
- Cultural Survival shares articles about nine initiatives by traditional cultures to strengthen and share their traditional ecological knowledge, from radio shows to schools, festivals to music classes, in the magazine issue Indigenous Education: Safeguarding our Knowledge.
Voices from the field
- In the webinar Education as if the Earth Mattered, hosted by Earth Charter International, author David Orr and professor Sam Cromwell discuss the future of education and its potential as a driver for a more just and sustainable world.
- In the documentary film Project Wild Thing, the film's director chronicles his humorous and heartfelt struggle to lead his computer-crazed children back to nature.
- In the video collection Forest School Videos by Muddy Faces, watch footage and reflections from forest schools across North America and Europe.
- The documentaries Iskay Yachay: Two Kinds of Knowledge and Loving Teacher, by PRATEC (Proyecto Andino de Tecnologias Campesinas), show how indigenous worldviews and knowledge systems are undermined by modern education systems, and document efforts by sensitive teachers to respect and integrate local knowledge and practices into schools in rural Peru.
- In the documentary film School's Out: Lessons from a Forest Kindergarten, filmmakers spend a year following a group of children in Switzerland who learn outdoors no matter what the weather, and share interviews with parents, teachers, and alumni of their forest school.
Policy
- The Natural Start Alliance's (US) Outdoor Nature-Based Education Policy page includes advocacy resources, policy guidance, model regulations and more.
Resources
- The book Earth In Mind: On Education, Environment and the Human Prospect, by David Orr, is a classic work in the philosophy of environmental education, with profound insights on the ecological blindness of the mainstream educational system and the vital need to return education to Earth. Orr's 1992 Schumacher Lecture, Environmental Literacy: Education as if the Earth Mattered, offers a distillation of his thinking.
- The book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv, helped spark a global conversation and movement around the urgent need to free children from the confines of the classroom and re-engage with the natural world. The latest edition offers 100 actions to create change in your community.
- The book Place- and Community-Based Education in Schools, by Gregory A. Smith and David Sobel, elaborates on an approach to education that starts with local environments, closing the gap on children's contact with the natural world and with their communities.
- In his 1967 manifesto Education for Self-Reliance, Tanzanian anti-colonial activist and first president Julius Nyerere made both a scathing critique of the colonial schooling system as a tool for the subjugation of Africa and indoctrination in Western capitalist values, as well as a clarion call for an education system rooted in local knowledge and basic needs-based practical skills. He emphasized food production, where "every school should also be a farm."