Community Building In a Forest Village

A Forest Village is something that happens often in Wild Art. After a certain amount of exploring, kids usually between about seven and twelve years old get industrious. Some begin converting whatever materials they find around themselves into decor, clothing, 'food', weapons, or other commodities, and selling them in pop-up shops. Some spend minutes or hours building all manner of lodgings, theatres, town-halls, shops, and other useful structures. Some offer classes, sharing skills they've brought with them or just discovered, while others offer tours of the local mushrooms or 'fancy places'. When necessity dictates, they build bridges and ramps, doors, 'fire pits', and ladders, and often go into business procuring the supplies for these projects and selling them to each other for various combinations of stone, stick, and leaf currencies. Safes, stashes and banks happen. Even robbers happen. And often we end up having police, mayors, town criers and all sorts of other interesting positions. Today I was instructed to be the person who tells everybody else "when it's night time - and do it at least twice!!" But I forgot the second time, because by then I was a detective, wearing a mustache of a moss we call 'old man's beard'. I was on the trail of some robbers, but when their exploits made the rest of the villagers too angry, I called a town meeting and became a spectator as the group of young villagers sorted out what was actually a genuine conflict quite ably. The robbers became spies.

A Forest Village is a wonderful place to work out real-world problems, and to make real-world discoveries. With a lack of imposed structure, kids' imaginations are the source for everything. It's amazing to me what deep issues a group of primary kids can discover, confront, and solve with the innate compassion, dignity, and reason that has not yet been trained out of them. The forest is a dynamic yet safe vessel for these explorations, and eventually the skills developed here will become a strong foundation for those who will inherit our communities.

There Are No Theoretical Children

Photo by my son, as published on his photography blog.

Recently I attended a wonderful training session with Arthur Brock and Eric "Bear" Ludwig, founders of New York's Agile Learning Centers. During this session, Arthur explained that "there is no such thing as theoretical children".

You know those 'theoretical children' parents and teachers sometimes ask about in terms of  'what if a child is afraid to ...'? Those kids don't exist. Either they are in fact real children, in which case they're not theoretical, and need to be discussed in terms of their actual individual situations, their relationships and history and needs... or they're irrelevant, because they don't exist. As a teacher, parent, director of a program, etc. you can't worry for (or even worse, design a program for) children who don't exist, because their individual nature and needs are totally unknown quantities, and you can't prepare for something undefined.

I thought this was a wonderful direction of thought.

We in the education world design programs with theoretical children in mind. We consider the children we know and have known who might benefit from our plans, and we expect to modify them as we get to know the real children who participate. As parents we also consider theoretical children. We read articles, gather parenting advice, follow programs and regimens we hope will help us parent well. We adjust when we see things going awry, and we seek new advice.

But it's easy to lose sight of the needs of our real children. You know how if you've grown up being warned that dogs bite, you may not recognize a gentle dog when you see one? Well maybe when I believed that all children need a hug when they get home, I didn't recognize that my son really needs some space first. For example.

And about my son. Let's say there's this theoretical child. He's made friends with some people in the grade above him, and really wants to participate with those kids in the activity they're doing. But we assume, as educators or parents with all the theoretical children in mind, that the group as a whole will likely be served best if we put him in the group with kids his own age. This is because, first of all, he needs to learn the things they're learning before progressing onto the subject matter the older kids are learning, and secondly, he'll make friends there anyway. Right? Except he's not a theoretical child. He's my son. We've tried that experiment, based on the values ascribed to the theoretical child, and it bombed.

Yesterday we tried again. My son is now attending a new program, with all new kids. And guess what? He's made friends with some kids who are older than he is! And guess what? Once again he wanted to join them in their science and social studies program, instead of the one for the kids his own age. But here's the big news: they let him do it! 

Cut to yesterday afternoon: I was waiting to pick up my daughter when I saw my beaming son, confidence shooting out his head like steam from a steam engine, come striding down an East Vancouver street alone for the first time ever in his life. He was smiling with that kind of vague powerful smile that says 'I am happy to be me in the world, today'. He discovered me waiting there in the car, hopped in energetically, and proceeded to tell me about his day. He said he spent all morning talking about science with a bunch of people who also wanted to talk about science. He spent all of a delightfully long lunch time chatting and playing drawing games with his new friends. He spent all afternoon doing a native studies program that he says was "really interesting". He doesn't even know what grades those kids are in. He's just with them, being himself. And that was what he needed to find his confidence again.

This week my real child was given a voice. He had his own real needs acknowledged and met. His needs trumped the needs of theoretical children, and everybody won. After all, there are no theoretical children.

Kids, Unsupervised

Once upon a time, when both of my kids were under ten years old, they went exploring around our local municipal hall while their father attended a meeting there. They explored all the way over to one of the local shops, where the shopkeeper asked them where their parents were. They told her their Pappa was in the chapel (not accurate - they knew where he was, but had used the wrong name for the building), and she asked them to wait while she called the police. She only meant to protect them - I know that. But they were terrified! They recounted a harrowing tale of running away from her, being chased by her and trying desperately to hide as they made their way back to the municipal hall. Once there, the police arrived and spoke to their father about (as my son tells it) "not letting his children run wild". The point was, they were never in danger. Terrified - yes. But only because of being "helped" by someone who genuinely was worried about them.

What good is it doing us to harbour such deep fears for our children? And more importantly, what harm is it doing them?

I work with many kids who come laden with fears about the woods. It can take a few brief wilderness adventures to develop the skills and knowledge they need to overcome those fears. Gross motor skills like clambering over logs, climbing up and down trees and bluffs safely, and hiking long distances help them to feel confident about the terrain. Cognitive skills like assessing the safety of their environment and activities can take a little more time, but allow them to feel confident in their own well-being. Observational skills like noticing changes in the weather, hearing wind or animals, noticing the stability of limbs or rocks they climb on... these things give them confidence too. And they need this confidence not just to feel safe, but to be safe. If you don't hear the bear coming, are afraid to navigate the terrain around you, have no understanding of common bear-encounter protocol, is it any wonder that you might be afraid of the bear? And if you are afraid of the bear, the bear will be afraid of you... and we know how well that scenario goes.

The city is different, but also similar. Recently I took three pre-teens to a movie in town. I thought: surely they've been here often enough that they are gaining some confidence and can do it alone. One bus, one corner to walk around, six blocks and into the theatre. Same route back home again. But I went with them anyway. I noticed that they kept an eye on me. They didn't watch where the bus was taking them, nor when they should get off - they just followed me. All the way into the theatre. So on the way home I asked them to lead the way back to the bus: six blocks, cross the road, get back on a bus. They were bewildered! It took them about five minutes to figure out which direction to go back (eventually with the help of a city map that I pointed them towards). They became confused multiple times on the way back to the bus, had difficulty figuring out where to take the bus, and it took us over half an hour to walk those six blocks. I don't want to deride them. It was their first time, and I thought they all dealt with the situation I handed them quite gracefully. But this experience taught me that my kids need more independence.

No problem! I thought. They're unschooling in the city now! While my kids used to be the ones confident in the wilderness, now they're going to get confident in the city! And off we went. I am still accompanying them to various locations for this first week, to help them gain the confidence they need to navigate without me. After all, they are attending in various locations near some questionable drug and prostitution hotspots. Not that I have a problem with my kids being there - it's just part of our city that they need to learn to be safe in. They need skills like staying in populated areas, walking together, assessing strangers who might approach them to determine risk level, and how to maintain a strong sense of morale and dignity in a place where so many have been robbed of it.

So yesterday I received an email in red letters from my fourteen-year-old son that pleaded, "pick up time is 2:45!!!!!!!! Not 3!!!! Otherwise i'll be abandined on the street with no place to go." It was a mixture of humourous hyperbole and some genuine concern.

I'm not terribly worried about my son standing alone on a city sidewalk - but he is. And that is the problem. At the root of all our fears is the unlikely idea that they may be abducted or harmed by another person (or in the woods, an animal). Think about this for a moment. A person trying to recruit or abduct a child for nefarious purposes is going to look for a vulnerable child. I don't want my child to be that vulnerable child. That doesn't mean I need to hover over him and shadow him everywhere he goes until he's too dependent on me to look after himself. That means I need to let go of him and let him become independent.

And in the much more likely event that my children will be harmed by their own error, either of physical skill (as in falling off a cliff or crashing their bike) or of judgement (as in drugs, traffic accidents, or food poisoning) I would like them to have the opportunity to develop the skills they need. I saw many ambulances in town yesterday. Most were for presumed drug-related tragedies. One was for a traffic accident, and another I believe was domestic. These are the things I need to protect my children from. And for this they need to go out in the world without me and develop some wisdom.

Being unsupervised may unsettle kids, but it also gives them the opportunity and the need to develop some skills and look after themselves. And further, that unsettled feeling might kick-start their own determination to take stock of their situation and responsibility for their own safety.

I will always be here waiting with my arms open wide when they need my love or advice - or even just a non-judgmental ride home from an unfamiliar street or a bad trip. My dear friend said that having children is like having your heart walking around in the world separate from you. So as parents we can't just hold on and stifle those hearts until they wither; we have to be willing to pick up the pieces again and again and again.

How to Foster Respect for Nature While Encouraging Kids to Play

Two six-year-olds are playing in a creek, and barks at the other, alarmed: "What are you doing?!"

The other barely looks up from her task, yanking and hauling at a fern frond. "I'm just getting this fern to put in my dam."

"Stop hurting nature!"

"I'm not hurting nature! It's just a fern! I need it for my dam!"

The first is distraught, and looks at me plaintively. "She's hurting nature! Tell her to stop!"

And I didn't.

It's a common issue among nature-based educators, parents and even among kids playing outside: How to foster respect for our surroundings while still having fun with the materials and resources at hand. Engagement is essential to developing a strong bond and learning from whatever we're using, and we need freedom to play in order to fully engage. So how do we look after the space, the other parts of our ecosystem, and the resources we have? The following is a list of some of my own practices; hopefully they're useful as a jumping-off point for others.

Stop using the word 'nature' - or define it. The way we currently use this word separates us from the rest of what is truly our own ecosystem, setting up an artificial boundary between 'people' and 'nature', which, far from creating a respect for 'nature', allows us to easily disengage from it when it suits us. Imagine taking out twenty weeds to put in a garden bed. Now imagine taking out a tree for the same. Now a rat's nest. Now your kitchen sink. Now your mother. All of those imaginary sacrifices are not equal - why? Because of their perceived value. When 'nature' is not part of us - part of our family - then we can ignore its value. But somewhere deep inside most of us do understand that we are a part of nature. At its root, the word 'nature' just means everything in the universe we know; the ecosystem we came from. Without it there are no silicon computer chips, no electricity, no asphalt roads, no buildings, no food; no people at all. 'Nature' is us. So being invested in its welfare requires dispensing of the artificial separation encouraged by the current connotation of the word 'nature'. My preference is to make the point by referring to our surroundings as 'our ecosystem', and sometimes talking or asking about our specific roles in our ecosystem. This provides a lot of opportunity for discussion about how the ecosystem works, what we observe, etc., but I think it would be equally effective to discuss the meaning of nature, and to talk about the nature of people, and the way we interact with the other parts of nature.

Father and son playing at the lake.

Play! An understanding of the way things work helps us to feel true respect for them. And understanding comes from explorative learning! So play. Not just the kids you work with, but you. Get deeply personally engaged. Other kids and adults will see and follow suit. And play innocently. Don't be afraid to talk about the things you see that you don't understand. Look them up together, observe them together, and theorize about them together. If the kids aren't interested, let them do other things and observe and theorize by yourself. Even if you don't share your discoveries, the people you are with will feel your engagement and be inspired. They may not discover or explore the same things you do, and that doesn't matter at all. What they explore matters to them, and that is the best possible scenario. When something matters to them, they will care.

Notice the damage you do. I tend to gently point out damage being done on the spot, or cumulative damage from many days of exploring the same area. "Oh look we've kind of removed most of the moss from this log," or "I can see where we've been walking every week; it's beginning to look like a deer trail." "Did you notice all the beetles running for safety when we pulled apart that rotten log? Look at the mycelium we've exposed. I wonder how we've changed their lives in pulling it apart." The idea is not to be critical, but to make observations and help others to make observations. People always make change - everywhere we go. Just our existence changes the world. For the same reason I feel that being involved in food production is far better than buying food on a Styrofoam tray, I feel that being involved in the many ways we impact our ecosystem is far better than pretending it doesn't happen. Yes, sometimes I stop people from ripping all the moss off a tree, or from destroying a whole log full of insects. But for the most part I just point out what's happening. We truly are a part of our ecosystem and we, like trees, bacteria, deer and mosquitoes, cannot live without also destroying. That's more than OK - that's life. So we have to do it consciously.

Don't be heavy-handed. You don't want to provoke fear. Far from being a healthy component of respect, fear leads to a lack of respect. The more people are afraid of their impact (or afraid of a teacher or parent's reaction to their impact), the more they will separate themselves from the rest of their ecosystem, and the less they will engage with it and care for it. As mentioned earlier, I try to encourage thoughtful conversation, but not to criticize. Who am I to criticize, anyway? I eat food, I use products; I walk on this earth. I have an impact, too. It's important to leave each other feeling thoughtful and empowered. The more we live in our own strength, the more we learn to use it with care.

Relax. This list is short for a reason. There's nothing more important than being comfortable in your environment, than playing without intention; than exploring with abandon. Too many rules gets in the way of all that. So just go out and play. Forget about this list, and forget about all the worries you may have had. If you damage something, so be it. Let that be a lesson for next time, and a place to leave a bit of your heart behind in the wilderness and help it heal. It will heal, and so will you. Because we're all a part of the same thing anyway.

Square Foot Observing

On Building In the Wilderness

I have seen various articles, recently, including this rather balanced and good one, asking the public to stop building stacks of rocks. I struggle with this issue all the time. Not always specifically with rock balancing (as we call it here), but with engagement with the wilderness. It's what I do, and I'm passionate about it. There are SO many long-lasting benefits to playing in the wilderness, both for adults and children... and for the wilderness. 

Most people now live in urban areas, are very disconnected from the wilderness, and also harbour a fear of it simply because they don't know it, and/or have been warned about it by their parents. So I take them out to gorgeous wilderness areas and let them play with it. Yes, they move rocks and build dams; they pick up sticks and play with them; build bridges and forts and storefronts where they craft beautiful 'wares' out of clay they scraped from the creeks, mud they scooped from the ground, grasses and leaves they plucked, and moss they pulled from the trees. And as they do this I help them to understand the importance of those things. I show them how the moss holds the water on the rocks to feed the trees; how it forms the bed for the many plants and animals that grow in the trees. I show them the body of the mushroom that lay hidden in the rotten log they crushed, and the importance of that mycelium to the welfare of the whole forest. I show them the many insects and gastropods, etc. that live on the bottom of the rocks in the creeks and the many animals and plants that thrive in and around the mud they are messing with. And they go home filthy, leaving the landscape changed, and also they are changed, themselves. They know the landscape. They aren't afraid to engage with it, and they have a deep appreciation of the many varied and integral parts of it.

When most of us look at a map of a proposed development or construction, we see a map. We can usually relate to it for how it fits or doesn't fit into our community plan or activities. But we don't often think about how many species of insects live on the bottom of the rocks in the creek that flows through the top left quadrant of that map. We don't usually know how our bums feel after sitting in the wet moss on the rotten log at the base of the biggest tree in the bottom left quadrant. We don't think about how much that area or the whole of our community will be impacted by the loss of that area. We don't have a deep sense of caring for the wilderness of that area, so we don't take that into consideration. And then it isn't just altered - it's gone.

This is happening everywhere. So many of us feel unperturbed when we hear that they're building pipelines out in the unpopulated areas of our wilderness, because that wilderness is not our home. The people giving directives to make changes to the wilderness are not often personally acquainted with that wilderness. Our homes are refuges from the wilderness, in towns and cities that are, themselves, refuges from the wilderness. But those concepts separate us from it, and we lose sight of our own welfare. Humans are wilderness. We have to learn to engage with it every single day because it is part of our global body - so that even the tiny changes we make matter to us. The changes will be part of us too, and if we engage with our wilderness wholly and personally, we can be thoughtful about how we engage.

So do I feel it's OK for us all to go littering the shores with piles of rocks, pulling the moss off the trees and artfully carving up the trunks of trees? No. And this is a challenge for me. But I feel that being challenged by the ways we engage with our wilderness is very important. I feel it's essential that we go out and play. And while we play we must question (or help those with us to question) every move we make and its impact on the body of the ecosystem we are a part of. 

I sometimes balance rocks. I find it personally rewarding, and also a wonderful activity to help others to engage with a bit of landscape they may have previously walked over, unseeing. As I pick up the rocks I check for animals, algae and eggs living on and under them, and when I'm finished I carefully put them back again. I do this in order to leave things closer to the way I found them, but I also do it because balanced rocks can fall on small animals. I am not sure I'm doing the right thing, but I think the conversation around how we engage with our ecosystem is definitely the right thing.

How and Why to Use Technology in a Forest School

One of the draws of forest schools is the fact that many are 'unplugged'. At a time when our culture is becoming exponentially more digitally connected, we're noticing some pitfalls of being too connected. We are seeking ways to ground our thoughts and experiences, often literally by going out on the land and leaving technological devices behind. I think this is great, but I also think technology has a place in forest schools.

At Wild Art you'll definitely notice fewer electronic devices, which isn't even so much of an expressed rule as a matter of practicality when we're traipsing around over logs, through creeks and swamps, and up and down trees. We're too busy using our senses to bother with devices that require hands and mental focus. But there are exceptions.

It's important to me that wilderness is not just an escape from the rest of our lives, but that it is integral to our lives. That means that we have to let wilderness into our homes and technology from our homes into the wilderness. This way our thoughts and learning have no boundaries.

At Wild Art, a whole-world view and self-direction are paramount. Of all the things I hope people will learn at Wild Art, I hope most that they leave with a sense that their own engagement with the world matters. And technology is a part of our world. Banning it would be futile, and worse still, would force it into dark corners, where there is little support. So just as I welcome any conversation topic during the time we share together, I welcome technology.

Watches, visual aids, cell-phones and cameras are by far the most common devices among the kids I work with. Watches allow the kids to keep track of their own time, and sometimes help them understand the world around them (movement of the earth; weather, and even reflection and light as they play with the sun bouncing off their wrists). Visual aids are usually brought by me. I have a nice pair of binoculars, and flashlights are sometimes helpful, but the best of them is a pocket-sized 60x microscope that I carry around for looking at anything and everything that suits our fancy. Cell phones aren't that common. Many kids have them, but leave them behind for fear of damaging or losing them in the woods. I don't have one myself, and although occasionally someone pulls one out to check the time, take a photo or arrange a ride home, I rarely see them. I think that reception is pretty poor when we're in the forest out here, anyway. And cameras.

I love cameras. I document Wild Art days myself at least once a month, and sometimes the kids get involved with cameras, too. Getting new perspectives on the things we look at is always a great way to engage, and using cameras can be an excellent way to find and explore new vantage points. Camera-use also often means thinking about communication: Not only does it matter what we are communicating with our photos, but how does the photo-set up influence the viewer, and how does our own perspective influence the photo? All of these questions (and many others) come up and scatter widely into other areas of life. Even just the social interactions that arise from sharing our vantage points, our technological ideas and understanding, and our creativity are valuable. And this is all when the technology is on the side. What about when it's at the core of the group's inquiry?

Recently one of the Wild Art groups made a movie. It was a natural path to take, since their engagement had been mostly social, comedic, and with a lot of talk about video games they had been playing at home. So I embraced it and suggested movie-making. They spent the next four weeks developing and filming their funny idea, and this is the result:

 

(Thanks to these wonderful teens for allowing me to share their movie!)

They also presented their movie in the woods, using a projector, a king-size sheet, about a hundred and fifty feet of extension cords, and some ropes, sticks and rocks to set it all up. It seemed to me like a fabulous combination of technology and wilderness.

But what about the wilderness? Doesn't all this technology take away from our engagement with it? Maybe. But it also deepens our engagement. When we work and live in the wilderness, we can't help but be deeply familiar with it. Just like you know the feeling of your favourite pillow under your head, you know the different feelings of sitting on various types of moss and bark if you've spent enough time doing so. You know what species of tree branches will work best to hold up your bed-sheet movie screen, and what age of fern-fronds will be strong enough to tie a knot with. You know which twigs you can break off for convenience, and which are still alive and better left alone. You not only become familiar with the species of plants, insects and other animals that you cross paths with in the wild, but you become aware of their habits, their habitat, and the way these things matter and intersect with your own life. You will be an integral, engaged, and conscientious part of the world. And after all, isn't that what we use technology for?

Barefoot Education

So our barefoot day started like this. It's always easier to climb a tree barefoot... the contact of our skin against the bark gives us traction, and while our feet are out of sight we can feel our way around the trunk and branches to find the best and safest footholds.

Once they were down from the tree, they left their boots behind and happened upon a patch of mud. The fragrance of the mud as it squished slightly grainy between their toes was powerful - compared by the kids to poop and compost.

And the feeling of the grass, all dry and sunny but with a soft spongy wetness as the kids' weight pushed water up from beneath to rinse the bottom of their muddy feet.

We thought we'd go check out the flooded forest we'd explored last January, and the kids took a little detour to access it via the creek. (You know... because the other route was too dry!) Getting to the creek required the kids picking their way between prickly salmonberry and holly on the ground, watching carefully for dog and deer poop, and maneuvering between hard branches, sharp reeds and soft muddy holes.

The previously-flooded forest is now mostly dry, but green all over with the soft cool leaves and pungent blossoms of skunk cabbage (AKA swamp lantern, though we don't bother with that term). There was a near injury here, as one of the kids stepped hard on the point of a buried stick in the mud. Luckily it was a bloodless injury, and the play continued.

Platforms, shelves, shops, mats, and all manner of other things were built, mostly composed of sticks, skunk cabbage, and mud.

Various interesting footprints (both human and animal) were discovered, as well as frogs, fresh water shrimp, caddisfly larvae, water beetles, a centipede, and many varied textures and fluidities of mud.

Did I say mud? Wet mud and dry mud.

Truffle-like mud.

And even some beaver-made chips, with a dry wavy texture and a crumply kind of feeling when you happen to walk across them in your bare feet.

 

There was everything a person could need for exploration and discovery. This is a place this group has visited at least a couple of times this year (and the meadow and creek before it, many, MANY times...), but it changes every day; the sights, the sounds, the lives of plants and animals, and the feeling of it all between our toes.

 Going barefoot is something I find very important. Maybe not in the coldest months, but absolutely when the weather is (barely) warm enough, and we're on a mission of exploration. Has it ever occurred to you how many things we miss as we walk over them with the thick soles of our shoes, unaware? How many insects and plants do we crush? How many different types of mud to we pass over without a second thought? We are missing out!

I often remind the kids to think of all the types of life that are under their feet at any moment, but I see my words drift by them like breeze. The feeling of the world under their feet - mucking and squishing and poking and scraping - doesn't drift by. It's a sensation they can't ignore. Exploring the world in bare feet makes it necessary to be engaged with the rich diversity we're walking on. Even in the city, bare feet make us aware of the various types of man-made surfaces we traverse, and the many activities that may have happened there (is it really clean enough to wear bare feet?). Our bare feet literally get us down and dirty with the world. And that, to me, is the best place to be for learning about the world.

Dr. Kacie Flegal explains that "Feet are one of the most sensory-rich parts of the human body. The soles of the feet are extremely sensitive to touch, and there are large concentrations of proprioceptors in the joints and muscles of the feet. In fact, the feet alone have as many proprioceptors as the entire spinal column! ... It is never too late to encourage the proprioceptive and vestibular systems in our own bodies as we continue to grow new neural connections, even as we age. Often, it is the proprioceptive and vestibular systems that become inhibited as adults. We lose balance and focus in our bodies and our lives and, as a result, may lose profound connections to our environment, ourselves, and other people."

So take off your shoes and run outside! Maybe climb a tree - maybe jump in a creek or a gloriously muddy spot. Maybe walk all tickly through the long meadow grass. The world is so richly beautiful, and just waiting for us to know it!

Unschooling to School: Cooperation vs. Competition

*Please note that this article is crossposted from Rickshaw Unschooling, and refers to blog posts on Rickshaw Unschooling blog. 

You might have noticed a distinct lack of reporting on this "Unschooling to School" adventure we're on. Both of the kids are still enrolled with school programs, and both still choosing to be there. But I'm not happy. I decided it was time to be honest about it on this blog. I don't want to defame the programs they're enrolled in, both of which are run by passionate and caring teachers, so I am extremely cautious in how I word this:

The schools aren't the problem; our cultural parenting is the problem. Schools just teach in the way we expect them to.  

Our culture celebrates competition, dominance and heroism, while as parents we feel successful when our children learn to fit into tightly defined molds and in grading and schooling them we compel them not to deviate. 

This dichotomy sets all of them up for either extravagant rebellion, spectacular success, heads-down drudgery, or catastrophic failure. Sounds extreme, but that's just because most of us have graduated from this system and are still aiming for the drudgery. In both my kids' cases, the programs they're attending are trying very hard to work around the provincial requirements in order to provide an experience for the kids that is more wholistic and more engaging than what the provincial learning outcomes indicate. Even the Province is attempting to make a change, and will be implementing new, more wholistic learning outcomes this coming year. But as parents we still want to see that our kids are measuring up. We want them to compete (and win!). We want them to get in there with all the other parents' competing little geniuses - and WIN, goddammit! We want the schools to make them win. And that situation means that a school is a place where people win and lose. Grades, tests, contests, and teachers' expectations are all venues for our little dears to step up and prove themselves as better than all the rest... or to fail at life. That is an expression my kid has learned at school this year.

My son got a paper back from his teacher, who happens to be well-known for his amazing views on and implementation of education. And my son couldn't understand why he should change a sentence that had nothing wrong with it grammatically, and that expressed what he wanted it to express. The teacher had criticized him for not making suggested changes, and I said to him, "You have a choice. You can either make the change without questioning it, or ask him why, or not make the change and explain your reasons in the margin." He looked at me with a look of bewilderment and stress. He was scared to speak up for his beliefs. In that moment I saw that his experience of school has robbed him of his confidence. To me that is tragic.

My son now questions all of his own ideas. He writes them off as not-good-enough, or impossible. He used to see questions as opportunities to talk about things he cared about, but now often feels terrified when people ask him questions - as if they are already judging his response. So, increasingly, he chooses not to speak at all. The kid who was uber popular when he first joined the school now feels alone in the same group of peers. I've told him that that feeling comes from his own lack of confidence, but that lack of confidence is nurtured by the competition that determines his every move.

My daughter has a far more relaxed classroom. But I see the effects on her, too. She used to excitedly write down every song, story and poem that entered her mind, sharing them either in her self-published magazine or sending them to Cricket. Recently she has begun doubting herself - looking for skills that will fit better into her classroom expectations rather than those she is passionate about.

So here we are at the end of spring break, and I smell the fresh wind of change, again. My daughter has decided to become a pop star and has spent this bounty of spare time tearing her fingers up from practicing guitar for multiple hours every day. My son has found a renewed interest in sciences, and spent the entire latter half of spring break researching physics and dabbling in electronics, chemistry and programming. He also has taken the half-assed science fair project he made for his school science fair to a much higher standard for the bigger science fair he's taking it to next week. He did this not because he was asked to, but because he has found a reason to care about it. Now, to be honest - he might not be going to that science fair if his teacher hadn't chosen him to go - it was something of a competition he won to be among the school's entries in this fair, and the school is paying for it. I don't pretend for a moment that this competitive situation isn't benefiting him in this case.

It's the overall picture that bothers me. What if, instead of feeling afraid that their contributions might be worthless, or feeling glorified that they beat out some other kids to be seen, our kids could just share? The experience of sharing their work with no strings or expectations attached would give them real world feedback from people with genuine interest in their ideas. They could learn from those experiences about what went well for them and what didn't; what felt satisfying and what they might want to pursue further. I am imagining open non-competitive expos - maybe on different topics. I imagine spaces full of enthusiasm and innovation, where everyone goes away feeling valued. You don't feel valued from winning a contest as much as you do from sharing with people who are genuinely interested in hearing and sharing with you. In such situations there will be people who discover that their talents or passions are different than they expected, but this will happen through their own judgements rather than because of the judgements of others.

She had a problem: she wants to listen to her music while walking, but not be shut off from the world by wearing earphones. So they got together to solve the problem, and using some salvaged speakers and other parts, he is trying to create a little wearable speaker for her mp3 player, while she provides tea, snacks, input and musical entertainment. Most awesome cooperative spring break project.

I know some people will tell me (because I've heard it so often before) that this notion of non-competition is useless - that our kids need to learn to win because that's what the real world is like. They need to learn to fight for their goals or they'll never achieve them. The real world is cold and cruel, and only the fittest survive. Yeah, well... what if we changed that? What if we made our real world a place where everyone had value? I believe in that. I have seen it happen in many smaller organizations that happened to (by chance or design) have a lack of competition and judgement. I want that world for my children, and I want that world for me.

I'll finish with some remarks from evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris. Watch the video at the bottom for more details and visuals.

"We have a marvelous example, in our own bodies, of a highly-evolved, decentralized, cooperative economy, which communes as well as communicating. It uses direct transmission of information and it is completely transparent. The biggest discovery I ever made in evolution was to discover what I call the maturation cycle that permeates all of evolution - that any species has to go through a juvenile or youthful phase, in which is has to acquire as much territory and resources as it can, and multiply as fast as it can, and elbow others out of the way, and establish itself in its place on the planet. And eventually, it gets too energy expensive to elbow the others out. The competition becomes very very expensive. And there comes a point at which there seems to be a maturation process in which the species discovers the advantages of cooperation - that cooperation is much less energy consumptive, so that you have lots more energy to use in being creative in friendly ways with others. When they finally reach the mature phase, having solved both global hunger and global pollution, they start building cooperatives with a division of labour, and every different kind of bacterium gives some of its DNA into a central library we call the nucleus, which then binds them to living forever in that cell. And so these cooperatives are actually new on the planet and have to go through their own maturation. And it takes another billion years, after two billion years to reach the stage of those cooperatives, another billion years they're going through their youthful phase - same kind of behaviour - until they reach maturation and form multi-celled creatures. Those, to me, are the two biggest steps that ever happened in evolution: the formation of the nucleated cell and the formation of the multi-celled creatures from them. We, of course, are multi-celled creatures. We are now, as humans, going through our own juvenile phase, into maturation." ... "We're now at the second time when this empire-building phase has become too energy expensive. We've reached planetary limits in using up resources and all kinds of things as we well know. We've created a perfect storm of crises and we've got to grow up. It's as simple as that. It's time for humans to reach the mature cooperative phase. We need not the hero's journey myth that brought us to where we are now - the adventure story - but a story of cooperation."

Musicians with No Training

Tali spent years begrudgingly taking lessons for violin and cello. He loved his teachers - he loved his time with them - but he didn't love being taught. Rhiannon learns very analytically, so has taken guitar lessons and joined a children's choir, but she never felt impassioned about either. Then Tali got a concertina, and we decided to just let him play with it. No lessons; no advice. Just play. After all, that is what music is about, right?

So he did play. Everything from sound-effects to classical and Irish music, to his own invented French and Balkan-sounding music that seems to just spawn out of his bellows. And eventually Rhiannon became so infatuated with pop music that she now wants voice and guitar lessons to aid her planned audition for the Voice. As she waits a few months for those lessons, she has begun teaching herself using guitar sheets for the songs written by her favourite singer. I think it helps that I don't like the music very much. There's no pressure on either of them to do anything for me, and both of them fill our house with music most days - purely of their own hearts and ingenuity. And it totally delights me!!

This is one of those beautiful life-learning successes I hope to remember.

Why I Ditched the Classroom for the Wild

In a world where pedal desks, blended learning and active learning classrooms are gaining popularity, I would like us to ditch classrooms entirely. And technology too, for the most part.

I would like us all - learners from birth through adulthood to end-of-life - to spend time exploring the world together instead of sitting in schools or staring at screens to educate ourselves. I'd like us all to spend a few more hours outside every single day and call it our education. And lots of people disagree. "That's just great", they say, "but my kids aren't three anymore, and they're no longer into sitting in the dirt making mud pies". Or they tell me that our kids need to learn skills for this century as opposed to an antiquated and quaint appreciation of "nature". This is where I get excited.

Let me show you how teens and adults can learn from a good mud pie, a romp in the rain and a quaint appreciation of nature. Let me show you how in just two and a half hours of self-directed wilderness exploration a group of kids, teens, or adults can learn as much or more than they might have in a classroom, and yet go home glowing and filthy with the effort and joy of it all. And because it's a whole body-and-mind experience, they're likely to retain more of it, too.

This is Wild Art. This is explorative learning in the wilderness. It's the foundation of a healthy development as individuals and society, and I think it should form the bulk of our children's education.

Am I saying we should all be unplugged all the time? No. Here I am using the Internet to convey my thoughts. I and a couple of the kids were taking photos during our last outings, just so we could share this adventure and so I could put this idea out on the web. I began our day yesterday by reading some information I found about pea and fingernail clams online, as well as an email from a local biologist describing the lives of these creatures the kids had discovered in a forest swamp, earlier this month. Clearly, technology and the internet are vital to our learning. But it starts with wading in the swamp and digging through mud and algae just for fun, and saying "hey guys! Look what we found in the algae!" It starts with feeling great about getting out in the wilderness and having no agenda at all - just an open-minded group of people learning to see their world; learning to appreciate nature.

What we learned during two and a half hours of playing in the mud and water:

Ecosystems, observation, measurement, quantification and consequence. The big picture. It's obvious we're looking at ecosystems by going out in them, but it's so much more than that, too. These two photos show the same spot (different angle due to change of accessibility!) one week apart. See that little pond emptying into the creek from about 3 feet above, in the photo on the left? That's the same little pond in the photo on the right, but the creek had swollen so much with the week's rain that there was only about an eight-inch difference in height by the time the second photo was taken. And while I stood ankle-deep on a little gravel bar to take the first photo, the second was taken from the other side of the creek, since I would have been nearly waist-deep had I gone to the gravel bar. This observation, made in many places and to many different degrees, had various consequences. First, there was the experiential lesson of learning to observe. Then there was noticing the consequences of the creek's change to the ecosystem it flows through, and to us, our activities, and our thought-processes. We continuously evaluated how deep the water was and how much it had changed in depth, speed, temperature, erosive power and ecological consequence. To make such observations and hypotheses during an extended exploration of a large area is to truly deepen them, and to apply them to a bigger picture. Learning to see and to always consider the big picture is, in my opinion, one of the most essential lessons. In the wilderness - especially in a social group exploring the wilderness together - we naturally see the big picture.

Measurement, risk-evaluation, and problem-solving - not to mention collaboration. The creek, having breached its banks in many places, flowed out into the cedar forest, and although it was generally too deep to navigate, various roots and clumps of collected twigs made it possible to traverse the flooded forest with caution, and the kids found many ways to test, problem-solve, and group-work their way through it. It was also a great exercise in observation, since keen and cautious observation was essential to staying out of the many chest-deep areas. A couple of kids demonstrated this quite dramatically by falling in.

Just an extension of the above thoughts - this turned out to be the safest way into the flooded forest: a very quickly-moving rapid between two islands (and between two trees!). The water on either side was about four feet deep.

 

There is always, of course, the option to challenge oneself. This brave young soul challenged herself to cross the creek - about five to six feet deep at this location - on a stable but slightly slippery alder. Observation and imagination collided for me as she paused to look at a great blue heron that was digging through the marsh just fifty feet away, and then some of us noticed this young hippo coming up beside the crossing-log... always good to have a little wooden hippo in the temperate rain forest!! I have often been asked how I mitigate risks like this one. And it was a risk - absolutely. As a mentor, this takes my own evaluation of the situation, as well as an on-the-spot assessment of whether I could solve any problem that might arise. In this particular location, the creek was deep but quiet, as the bulk of the flow was happening beyond some piled logs about eight feet away. So I coached her across the log (mostly encouraging her in her own process), and stood very close, ready to leap in and pull her out, if needed. Thankfully such a rescue wasn't necessary, and this crossing will improve her skills and confidence.

Playing with flow and water depth, but also making constant observations about structure stability, weight and holding capacity of the flooded forest floor, and navigating group dynamics.

We made quite a few questions, observations and extrapolations about beavers as we traversed their habitat and noticed many beaver-chewed trees and sticks. This also led to a couple of discussions about Giardia and other parasites; health-risks of exploring the wilderness, how to mitigate those risks, what the outcome might be, and what potential healthcare is available to help should we contract Giardia (not much). Interestingly, this also led to some brief discussion of local wild foods.

The creek didn't stop after flooding the forest - it also flowed out into the meadow, creating beautiful running streams along the trails. Many observations were made about the springy spongy meadow. We rescued a caterpillar and found a few drowned worms. And mostly the open meadow led to conversations about the weather, and some good opportunities for running.

But why just run? The kids wanted to see themselves slow-motion running along this trail, and thanks to the technology I had with me (an inexpensive little waterproof camera), I was able to accommodate, on the spot. As they watched this video they explored anatomy, physics, and technology. And this spot was also an opportunity to discover how various members of our community react to a change in their routine. One of these groups approached the flooded trail from a spot thigh-deep in the flooded swamp beside the trail, and watched various dog-walkers and joggers either turn around at the sight of the water or walk in a short distance to evaluate depth and then turn around. In one case a jogger took off her socks and shoes and jogged through barefoot!

The flooded meadow seemed to inspire some dramatic play, so we went with it.

Sometimes it's difficult to see any immediate curriculum-related value in these moments. That makes them even more important. See this joy? This is the joy that will mean she remembers this day for a long time, even if she doesn't remember the words "Giardia" or "flood-plain".

This joy is the place where friendships are built and developed; where children, teens and adults learn (often through dramatic play) to navigate our intensely social world. The relationships carried on through these kids' lives will carry some of this day's learning along into later stages of life, as these kids trigger each other's memories of shared experiences.

This is the place where the brain is excited into building connections between the many experiences we've given it during this adventure, the many experiences we brought with us, and the many that are still to come.   (This and the following photo generously contributed by one of the students.)

And this is also the place where we learn to know and accept ourselves as part of the world; to let sink in the great learning we're doing, to appreciate where we find ourselves and where we are going, to make great leaps forward and to sit calmly in the current moment - and to appreciate the nature of everything.