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| At Nature's Way Montessori in Knoxville Tennesse, this is their recycling center in each classroom. The top two cans are for paper and plastic. The bottom two cans are for brown paper towels and compost. When you place anything in thee wastebasket, you have to acknowledge where you are sending it. |
I would like to try my hand at
writing a blog for those of you who teach the biome curriculum. My intention in doing so is to share my
ideas with you and to share your ideas, discoveries, and experiences with
others who have brought the biomes into their classrooms. For the past five years, I have been
traveling and giving workshops on the curriculum. I feel your enthusiasm and your need to network with other
educators. By traveling and
networking with others, I find new ideas to incorporate into my vision of a
Montessori cultural curriculum rich in environmental education and integrated
across the boundaries of isolated subject matter.
I feel there is a potential
grassroots movement towards a saner, more sustainable way of living in closer
connection to the natural world and I want to be a part of that and a
facilitator in connecting people who feel the same pull. As educators, we are all in a position
to impress impressionable young minds with a different message than the one our
modern culture is transmitting to us. Our culture would have us believe that we are a
species above the laws of nature and entitled to unlimited use of the earth’s
resources. Children live in such a
state of disconnection with the natural world that they don’t even realize that
it is nature that provides them with everything they need to exist. We think of nature as uncomfortable and
even dangerous. And, yet, for
thousands of years we, as a species, have lived in close connection to the
natural world. The past two
hundred years since the industrial revolution entails a very recent “experiment”
in living behind glass in temperature-controlled environments with all of our
food transported from remote soils to be processed and packaged for us to pick
up at the grocery store. The media
has further removed us from direct experience of any kind and isolated us in
front of screens to live our lives virtually. In his book, Last Child in the Woods Richard Louv
warns us that there are serious repercussions to this “experiment”. When I first started teaching 28
years ago, I didn’t see children with sensory integration issues or such
problems with attention and concentration. Now it is prevalent along with physical problems such as
asthma and obesity. Our children
are calling for help. We don’t
need to dwell on these tragic circumstances any longer than it takes to
recognize the need to reclaim our connection to nature.
Nature heals.
We have only to make the time and the space in our lives and in our
schools to experience it, to allow it to provide us with what we need to live
happy and healthy lives.
As I have traveled around giving
the workshop and sharing environmental education materials to be used in the
classroom, I always encouraged guides to take the exploration outdoors but I
couldn’t tell them how to do that.
I only knew that it was a missing piece to what I had to offer and that
indigenous cultures were the model to observe. About a year ago, I spent a weekend in the woods with a
group of people to be initiated into an art called “Coyote Mentoring”. Evan McGown had written a book with a
man named Jon Young called Coyote Guide to Connecting with Nature. Young is an anthropologist who studied
the process of how native children develop their connection to nature through
mentoring by elders. I instantly
recognized this approach as the missing piece I had been looking for. I enlisted Evan to lead our lower elementary
class into the wild one day each week.
Since then, I have become very involved in getting children outdoors to
have their biological button pushed, their senses integrated, and their minds
and spirits awakened in awe of nature.
This year, we are bringing our primary classes into the forest and out
on the field.
I am discovering, firsthand, how to
integrate these outdoor experiences with the biomes curriculum to make it even
more experiential for children. I
would very much like to share this journey with you and all of the amazing
benefits that I observe. I
also hope that you will send me your stories and experiences so that I can
share them with our biome community.
We have some very important work to do and we need to stay
connected. Remember that nothing
and no one exists in isolation and that we are all connected.
Sincerely,
Sharon Duncan
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