Cycle 2 Reflection: Nature and Curriculum

Is there a “natural curriculum”?

The “nature vs nurture” philosophical debate that has seemingly been around since the beginning of human consciousness is something that has never really appealed to me frankly because I think the idea of putting those two things at odds with each other is absurd. The roles that our nature and our nurturing play in our lives varies from action to action, and the idea of a “natural curriculum” for anything from how to eat to how to read is an oversimplification of life and learning. That being said, while reading these different materials throughout the course of this cycle, it did become clear to me that there are some aspects of human nature that modern humans seem to be moving too far away from, at our own detriment, and we need to focus on getting back to this kind of learning whether the curriculum itself is “natural” or not.

In Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, he made a number of interesting points that brought me to a bit more of an acceptance of the idea of a “natural curriculum.” In the excerpt, Louv states “I do sometimes romanticize my own childhood and… too readily discount my children’s experiences.” Reading this, I was quickly reminded of a multitude of interactions I’ve had with both people older and people younger than I. Some of my good friends are a couple of organic farmers in Northern Maine who are in their late 60s, and talking to them and comparing our childhoods, there is a huge chasm between their experiences by themselves in nature and my own, and even bigger one between the students I teach and them. My older friend has fond memories of working on farms with French Canadian family members, working in fields for hours on his own without any parental interaction. Meanwhile, one of my biggest memories of freedom in nature either came from kayaking down my aunt and uncle’s busy river, biking through my parent’s subdivision in suburban Detroit, or taking a stroll through the woods right next to the elementary school. So when I talk to students in Boston who have never even stepped foot in an ocean less than three miles away from them, my initial thought is as Louv says, “society is teaching people to avoid direct experiences with nature.” Unfortunately, Calarco’s article on “Free Range Parenting” from The Atlantic highlights the glaring issue which is the fact that a lot of the students who seem to lack those experiences with nature, are excluded from a society that views their natural experiences as parental neglect.

What is the relationship between humans and the Earth?

The relationship between humans and Earth is a philosophical question that isn’t quite my cup of tea because to me there’s not a single aspect of our existence that isn’t connected to the Earth. In Jardine’s “To Dwell with a Boundless Heart” a Thich Nhat Hahn quote is used that almost perfectly encapsulates how I feel about that relationship, “Cause and effect are no longer perceived as linear, but as a net.” Too often I feel like relationships of all kinds are oversimplified, and perhaps none is more simplified than the relationship between the Earth and the people who live on it. You could be the most indoor and modern technology based person in existence, but the fact will remain that everything you have, regardless of how “unnatural” of a form those things may take, was created from the Earth by humans. Kissling and Bell’s “Teaching Social Studies Amid Ecological Crisis” perhaps said it best when they said “We are of the Earth, a massive, dense web of material in a constant state of fluctuation and change.” Similar to Thich Nhat Hahn’s net, the web of Kissling and Bell does a beautiful job of showing the way that the relationship between humans and the earth is both endlessly multifaceted and completely intertwined.

Can curriculum reflect the interrelatedness of all things?

Having focused on how to employ cross curricular and trans curricular education into my classroom since my student teaching, I have a pretty firm belief that curriculum can reflect the interrelatedness of all things. One of my favorite lessons that helped me show this was when I collaborated with a science teacher to combine their unit on weather and natural disasters with my unit about the 19th century United States. We talked about the New Madrid earthquakes which were so powerful that they caused the Mississippi River to reverse stream and also broke down a house that showed evidence of a murder. I think this was a great lesson for a number of reasons, one being that it is pretty inherently interesting stuff. The other being that everyday millions of people in this country go about their lives without putting much if any thought into how the earth on which we live could upend everything about our lives in a moment.

And therein lies why I think curriculum can reflect this interrelatedness: because everything truly is interrelated. Kissling and Bell use a quote from Wendell Berry that says “the environmental crisis is no such thing...it’s a crisis of our lives as individuals, family members, community members, and citizens.” I think that this is an important idea to be aware of when we are constructing our curriculum and finding ways to show the interrelatedness of all things and our human connections to the earth. Jill Lepore’s “Baby Food” article is one that I probably never would have read on my own, but along with being a very interesting read on a topic I haven’t given too much thought, it also made a number of points that go beyond the idea of how humans feed their babies. There’s a quote in the article that says “All this is so new that people are making up the rules as they go along,” and I feel like this quote can connect to just about every aspect of our world. We’re constantly learning about new things in nature and our relation to those new things, and we need to look no further than the way the facts on Covid-19, something from nature that wasn’t in our consciousness a year ago, has completely upended our society in ways we could never have imagined. The question of whether curriculum can reflect the interrelatedness of all things is a moot one to me because in a lot of ways, it already does. The real question is, are we doing this in a conscious way that lets students learn about the importance of this interrelatedness and what their place in this net or web that is humanity on Earth is.