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14 Teaching Outdoors
- Indiana University Press
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14 Teaching Outdoors Vicky J. Meretsky Public and Environmental Affairs Most of the environment is outdoors. It isn’t surprising, then, that many of our best opportunities for teaching about environmental issues are out there, too. Outdoor learning is more than just an excuse to escape the tyranny of four walls and little desks. The outdoors is both an obvious classroom for environmentally related topics and a uniquely rewarding one. As earlier chapters in this volume by Sanders, Auer, Clay, and Vogelsang and Baack all attest, lessons learned outdoors can be powerful, vivid, and long-lasting. Landscapes show us our species’ own impacts onlandsandwatersandallowustocomparetheoutcomesofdi√erentactionsand practices. While teaching us about the land, outdoor learning also teaches us about ourselves, and about the impacts of the ethical choices we make in our lives. Virtues of the Outdoor Classroom The outdoors is an obvious classroom, but I will not immediately dismiss the obvious. Outside, everyone becomes an explorer: everyone has a chance to see a Teaching Outdoors ⭈ 159 new bird, hear a chorus of would-be-mating frogs, feel the soft spongy moistness of a well-rotted log. As a teacher of ecology and conservation biology, I work hard to help students understand how interconnected the di√erent parts and processes of the world are. In the classroom, students can find this confusing, as they wrench their minds away from the current brainful of information to reach back to what they learned last week, or to reach forward to what we’ll discuss next week. In the field, or the forest, or the swamp, the connections are immediate, even intrusive. You cannot look at a tree without seeing the birds that feed and nest in it, without seeing the other trees crowding in around it, without seeing the grapevines that use the tree for support even as they conspire to steal its sunlight. What was di≈cult to visualize in the classroom is constantly on display outdoors, and students are often able to find the connections for themselves. In my experience, many of us who teach outdoors seek out the serene and seemingly unspoiled places to be our ‘‘classrooms.’’ For many of us, these are the sources of our own renewal, and our desire to share them is a generous, if not entirely selfless, gesture. How better to defend what we love than to ensure it is loved by many, many people, until it is too important to too many to despoil? And what better way to convert the unconvinced than to show them that forests and meadows and mountains are beautiful and moving and mysterious? By sharing such sights with our students in their own towns and counties and states, we give them an opportunity to be proud not only of our national treasures, but also of their own, nearby treasures. As Scott Sanders explains movingly in his chapter, we get a wonderful return on our investment of time and passion by showing students these special places. Working Landscapes Indeed, these days, parks are the only part of the outdoors that many people deliberately experience. But most of the world is not a park. Increasingly, we humans are urban creatures. Fewer and fewer of us grow up exploring out of doors, much less working there. The resulting disconnect from the ‘‘natural world’’ can be an important component of environmental problems, and taking people outdoors is an obvious part of the solution, once the electronic distractions have been left behind. But if our goal in promoting environmental literacy is to nurture environmentally informed citizens, then we must take students beyond the delight and discovery and awe of our parks and preserves to the more complex learning opportunities of working landscapes. Working landscapes—farms, mines, urban and suburban and industrial areas, landfills, commercial ports, dams—are the places to go to see human impacts in action. Too often, the necessary processes of human existence—raising food, constructing roads and buildings, mining metals, producing goods, processing [44.197.113.64] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:27 GMT) 160 ⭈ vicky j. meretsky wastes—are unexamined in the context of environmental education. Or if examined , they may be condemned as entirely negative activities that a more enlightened species would avoid entirely. But we must eat. We must have shelter. And no species is without impacts on others. Our task is not to create students who loathe themselves and their needs. Rather, we seek to create students who can distinguish between needs and wants...