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What is the role of nature in learning?

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Life’s Litmus

My eyelids’ inner Palettes brushed against
The colours of your morning dreams
And the aromas of our armpits

On most days, it felt like darkness and then light
But today felt queer
The palettes porous
‍
Eyelids are no obstacles
When soaking amongst the greenest of leaves
Lush inside, Lush outside

I had never been awake to my eyelids’ inner palettes
Until today
Now it feels like my life’s litmus.

Imagined Dialogue

Below, I imagine a dialogue between Maria Montessori (1) as Maria , Gail F. Melson (2) as Gail, J Krishnamurti (3) as JK, Craig Foster (4) as Craig and Yuvan Aves (5) as Yuvan on the importance of our natural living world.

Q: Why should education involve other living beings?

Maria: Children have an anxious concern for living beings, and the satisfaction of this instinct fills them with delight. It is therefore easy to interest them in taking care of plants and especially of animals. Nothing awakens foresight in a small child such as this. When they know that animals need them, that little plants will dry up if they do not water them, they bind together with a new thread of love today’s passing moments with those of the morrow.

Q: What can the anxious concern for living beings lead to?

Gail: There is ample evidence that children view pets as companions, friends, and family members, in short, significant social beings. Both children and adults readily compare their ties to pets with those to other close human relationships. For example, adult pet owners reported that their pets were comparable to their siblings in terms of emotional closeness and support.

Q: What do we learn from our bonds with other living beings such as our pets?

Gail: Considering social cognition, bonds with pets are likely to challenge perspective-taking and, thereby, stimulate empathy. When one engages in play with another species, one must imaginatively put oneself into another’s “paws” not simply shoes, understanding very different behaviors and communication.

Moreover, as even young children view animals, both pets and wild animals, as subjects, not objects, children accord moral standing to animals. In other words, children may view animals as having certain rights, including potentially rights to be free from harm, to have autonomy, and to exercise intention.

Moreover, animals may incur obligations upon humans, especially those who have taken on responsibility for their welfare, as all pet owners do. Such obligations, justified as morally necessary, include meeting the animal’s need to be appropriately fed, housed, exercised, and socialized. Moral obligations extend to giving affection, companionship, and medical care, consistent with the developmental needs of the animal.

Q: Besides our relationship with few animals, why is the natural world important in our lives?

JK: Nature is part of our life. We grew out of the seed, the earth, and we are part of all that, but we are rapidly losing the sense that we are animals like the others. Can you have a feeling for a tree, look at it, see the beauty of it, listen to the sound it makes; be sensitive to the little plant, to the little weed, to the creeper that is growing up the wall, to the light on the leaves and the many shadows?

You must be aware of all this and have that sense of communion with nature around you. You may live in a town, but you do have trees here and there.

The next-door garden may be ill-kept, crowded with weeds, but look at the flower in it, and feel that you are part of all that, part of all living things. If you hurt nature you are hurting yourself.

Q: How can we, as educators, open ourselves and children to the ‘sense of communion with nature’ and ‘feel that we are part of all living things’?

Maria: The senses, being the explorers of the world, open the way to knowledge. What can your child learn from nature? As children observe the way leaves move and sway in the wind, they are developing their vision. As children hear the many layers of sound in nature, their hearing is stimulated.

As children smell the damp earth after the rain or fragrant spring flowers, their sense of smell awakens. The feel of sand to bare feet or a cooling breeze in the heat of summer, the taste of sun-ripened fruit or a sprig of fresh mint, all of these sensations play a significant part in children’s development through the senses.

Craig: Thousands of hours in nature can teach a child to develop gentleness. She (the octopus) made me realise just how precious wild places are. You go into the water and it is just extremely liberating, all your worries and problems and life dramas just dissolve. You slowly start to care about all the animals, even the tiniest little animals.

You realise that everyone is very important. To sense how vulnerable these wild animals' lives are, and actually, then how vulnerable all our lives on this planet are. What she (the octopus) taught me was to feel that you are part of this place, not a visitor. That's a huge difference.

Q: Craig reflects, 'all your worries and life dramas just dissolve when you are in water' and 'you realise how vulnerable all our lives on this planet are'. What does our relationship with nature help us realise about our relationship with ourselves and other human beings?

JK: Since we do not love nature, we do not know how to love human beings. We have lost the sense of tenderness, that sensitivity, that response to things of beauty. It is only in the renewal of that sensitivity that we can have an understanding of what is true relationship. That sensitivity does not come in the mere hanging of a few pictures, or in painting a tree, or putting flowers in your hair; sensitivity comes only when this utilitarian outlook is put aside. It does not mean that you cannot use the earth; but you must use the earth as it is to be used.

The earth is there to be loved, to be cared for, not to be divided as yours and mine. It is foolish to plant a tree and call it ‘mine’. Only when one is free of exclusiveness is there a possibility of having sensitivity, not only to nature but to human beings and to the ceaseless challenges of life.

Q: You speak of our ‘utilitarian outlook’ and that we must ‘put it aside’. How can we begin to do so?

Yuvan: In her essay “Perceiving how we perceive”, educator Seetha Ananthasivan speaks about two different kinds of perception – object perception and process perception. She says, “a major preoccupation in nursery and primary education is on learning the names of objects.” Little is done to allow the child to discover the connected and hidden realities of these isolated objects. For instance, is a child encouraged to think, ask a question of a water bottle – where it came from, how it was made, where it will go after its use? This is process perception. In the materials we use, food we eat, clothes we wear, do we perceive beyond their separate forms?

We could say that the culture of consumerism, even the politics of capitalism thrives on object perception. Violence, deeply hidden and structural, is distanced from the products on their sanitized shelves. They dote on anaesthetized eyes which don’t and won’t see beyond them.

Q: What else is lost because of our utilitarian ways of seeing?

Yuvan: I immediately think of children I have interacted with along Elliot's beach over the years, who belong to the local fishing communities. They have a profound knowledge of the coast and seas. They are innately aware of the longshore currents, tides and can plainly predict weather. I can do none of these, despite walking these shores for over two decades. Or consider the children of the Kattunayakan tribes of the Nilgiris who can understand and track bees and hold vast spatial maps of the forest in their minds.

Though modern schooling marginalizes these communities and seeks to make them ‘literate’, their embodied ecological literacy is astounding and is something no mainstream school has achieved. For the indigenous and Adivasi communities of India, education, and the ideals it imposes, has often been a form of acculturation, by de-basing their knowledge-systems. Younger generations are no longer valuing them and are no longer bearers of their eco-cultural wisdom.

Q: How does the marginalization of communities and their ecological literacies threaten all living beings?

Yuvan: The Ghost Crab which sees the horizon as a full circle with its periscope-like cylindrical eyes. The strange Chiton, an unearthly mollusc, which sees in magnetic field lines and has an astonishing acumen for navigating the seabed. The Sea-Eagle which rides rising thermals and sees in heat. The mangrove trees which live by the tidal rhythm, stand on stilts, and speak with each other through fungal networks under the ground. The Blue button, which looks like a little jellyfish but is a colony of creatures working together like an organism, is a puzzle between singular and plural.

The Magpie Robin which makes new music each morning, who never sings the same song twice. The Octopus which speaks through colour. The Sea snake which paints its world through smell. Each creature has its own distinct perceptual field. Each sees the world so differently. Yet this diverse mosaic of perceptual fields, roles, and abilities, woven together by sand, air, sea and sky - form a webwork of numerous interdependent lives and a thriving and resilient intertidal habitat.

A fundamental aspect to any ecosystem is ‘diversity’. As Colin Baker has put it “In the language of ecology, the strongest ecosystems are those that are the most diverse.” In a single ecosystem we notice that there exists rich perceptual diversity.

Citations

(1). Why connect with nature? in the Age of Montessori

(2). Rethinking Children’s Connections with Other Animals: A Childhood nature Perspective by Gail F. Melson

(3). What is our relationship with nature? From the Krishnamurti foundation trust

(4). My Octopus Teacher, a documentary film

(5). The ecosystem of learning by Yuvan Aves, in vikalp sangam

Thinking Rhizomatically

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