The ever-changing nature of the outdoors makes it a perfect learning environment, educators say.
More than 30 teachers from 10 states gathered last week at Lime Hollow Nature Center in Cortlandville to get their Nature-based Teacher Certification, learning about working with children outdoors, safety, activities and making connections to plants and animals, said Monica Wiedel-Lubinski, executive director of the Association for Nature-Based Education.
“It’s helping kids feel connected to their place,” she said. “They’re part of nature, they’re not separate from it. It’s for all of us to share. This approach to learning is different from the traditional approach – it means that kids have opportunities to make choices about their play, and their ideals are valued.”
Anne Berardi, who teaches at a farm and nature-based school in Georgetown, Massachusetts, said the certification legitimizes nature-based learning.
“It’s not always taken seriously,” Berardi said. “People will say ‘Oh, they have to go to a real school.’ It is a real school, they just learn in a different way.”
Most of the educators teach early childhood education in nature-based schools, which have children outside at least half of the day, Wiedel-Lubinski said. Attendees weaved baskets, learned needle-felting, made friction fires and foraged and sauteed mushrooms.
Lime Hollow Executive Director Ilya Shmulenson was excited to have Lime Hollow Nature Center’s staff take part, because the center runs summer camps, classes and has a Forest Preschool Program.
“It’s a different type of education,” Shmulenson said. “The U.S. does not have a standard for teachers who teach outdoors, and it’s not integrated into traditional education training programs, so a lot of the things we experience as people who teach kids outside, practitioners around the country all have the same questions, and we’ve all approached the solutions a little bit differently based on where we are.”
An example: the weather. An educator from Florida has different ways of dealing with bad weather than someone in New York or Colorado, Shmulenson said.
“There’s just beauty in connecting with fellow educators who believe that children learn best in nature, through nature, for nature,” said Fernanda Wolfson, who does nature-based teaching in Delray Beach, Florida.
While getting students in traditional schools at a young age will teach them things like the alphabet and numbers a bit sooner, other skills aren’t developed as well, Wolfson said.
“What is not easy to replace is divergent thinking, creativity, personal responsibility, self-help, and social-emotional learning,” she said. “All of those skills needed for the jobs of the future, we are establishing them now, outside.”
Kids who attend nature-based preschools have better peer play interactions and learned behaviors, which can help with school readiness, reports a 2020 study in the International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education.
The outdoors are constantly changing, so bringing them outdoors helps wake them up, said Benjamin Rubin, a visual arts teacher at Rochester International Academy. It creates inquiry, exploration and curiosity.
“Building a relationship with the natural environment helps kids feel connected,” Rubin said. “Specifically with the students I work with, it’s a new home, and I feel like it takes time for a lot of them to settle into a place where they are comfortable and safe enough to learn.”
One thing he learned last week was the idea of inviting students to an unregimented learning experience, such as an activity station.
“Students are invited to participate, but there’s not one way to do it, or a clear authority telling them step one and step two,” he said. “It’s setting up the ingredients to help them learn and explore.”
“The outdoors is the teacher,” Shmulenson said. “We don’t have to create lesson plans when we’re outside; the outdoors provides the lesson for us. And for millennia, that is how people learned, and I think we’ve forgotten that in some ways. The outdoors is exciting, the outdoors is unique, and it is always different, and there are lessons to be learned from that.”
