by editor | Sep 27, 2019 | Equity and Inclusion, Outdoor education and Outdoor School, Teaching Science
by Sprinavasa Brown
I often hear White educators ask “What should I do?” expressing an earnest desire to move beyond talking about equity and inclusion to wanting action steps toward meaningful change.
I will offer you my advice as a fellow educator. It is both a command and a powerful tool for individual and organizational change for those willing to shift their mindset to understand it, invest the time to practice it and hold fast to witness its potential.
The work of this moment is all about environmental justice centered in social justice, led by the communities most impacted by the outcomes of our collective action. It’s time to leverage your platform as a White person to make space for the voice of a person of color. It’s time to connect your resources and wealth to leaders from underrepresented communities so they can make decisions that place their community’s needs first.
If you have participated in any diversity trainings, you are likely familiar with the common process of establishing group agreements. Early on, set the foundation for how you engage colleagues, a circumspect reminder that meaningful interpersonal and intrapersonal discourse has protocols in order to be effective. I appreciate these agreements and the principles they represent because they remind us that this work is not easy. If you are doing it right, you will and should be uncomfortable, challenged and ready to work toward a transformational process that ends in visible change.
I want you to recall one such agreement: step up, step back, step aside.
That last part is where I want to focus. It’s a radical call to action: Step aside! There are leaders of color full of potential and solutions who no doubt hold crucial advice and wisdom that organizations are missing. Think about the ways you can step back and step aside to share power. Step back from a decision, step down from a position or simply step aside. If you currently work for or serve on the board of an organization whose primary stakeholders are from communities of color, then this advice is especially for you.
Stepping aside draws to attention arguably the most important and effective way White people can advance racial equity, especially when working in institutions that serve marginalized communities. To leverage your privilege for marginalized communities means removing yourself from your position and making space for Black and Brown leaders to leave the margins and be brought into the fold of power.
You may find yourself with the opportunity to retire or take another job. Before you depart, commit to making strides to position your organization to hire a person of color to fill the vacancy. Be outspoken, agitate and question the status quo. This requires advocating for equitable hiring policies, addressing bias in the interview process and diversifying the pool with applicants with transferable skills. Recruit applicants from a pipeline supported and led by culturally specific organizations with ties to the communities you want to attract, and perhaps invite those community members to serve on interview panels with direct access to hiring managers.
As an organizational leader responsible for decisions related to hiring, partnerships and board recruitment, I have made uncomfortable, hard choices in the name of racial equity, but these choices yield fruitful outcomes for leaders willing to stay the course. I’ve found myself at crossroads where the best course forward wasn’t always clear. This I have come to accept is part of my equity journey. Be encouraged: Effective change can be made through staying engaged in your personal equity journey. Across our region we have much work ahead at the institutional level, and even more courage is required for hard work at the interpersonal level.
In stepping aside you create an opportunity for a member of a marginalized community who may be your colleague, fellow board member or staff member to access power that you have held.
White people alone will not provide all of the solutions to fix institutional systems of oppression and to shift organizational culture from exclusion to inclusion. These solutions must come from those whose voices have not been heard. Your participation is integral to evolving systems and organizations and carrying out change, but your leadership as a White person in the change process is not.
The best investment we can make for marginalized communities is to actively create and hold space for leaders of color at every level from executives to interns. Invest time and energy into continuous self-reflection and selfevaluation. This is not the path for everyone, but I hope you can see that there are a variety of actions that can shift the paradigm of the environmental movement. If you find yourself unsure of what action steps best align with where you or your organization are at on your equity journey, then reach out to organizations led by people of color, consultants, and leaders and hire them for their leadership and expertise. By placing yourself in the passenger seat, with a person of color as the driver, you can identify areas to leverage your privilege to benefit marginalized communities.
Finally, share an act of gratitude. Be cognizant of opportunities to step back and step aside and actively pursue ways to listen, understand and practice empathy with your colleagues, community members, neighbors and friends.
Camp ELSO is an example of the outcomes of this advice. Our achievements are most notable because it is within the context of an organization led 100 percent by people of color from our Board of Directors to our seasonal staff. This in the context of a city and state with a history of racial oppression and in a field that is historically exclusively White.
We began as a community-supported project and are growing into a thriving community-based organization successfully providing a vital service for Black and Brown youths across the Portland metro area. The support we have received has crossed cultures, bridged the racial divide and united partners around our vision. It is built from the financial investments of allies – public agencies, foundations, corporations and individuals. I see this as an act of solidarity with our work and our mission, and more importantly, an act of solidarity and support for our unwavering commitment to racial equity.
Sprinavasa Brown is the co-founder and executive director of Camp ELSO. She also serves on Metro’s Public Engagement Review Committee and the Parks and Nature Equity Advisory Committee.
by editor | Sep 26, 2019 | Climate Change & Energy
Violence, environmental violence, and pro-environmental action
Richard Kool
Royal Roads University
hile there are many tasks on the plate of any educator, there are two that, to me at least, really seem essential and that are often overlooked; these tasks are for the educator to both reveal things that might be hidden to the student while being always open to revelation ones’ self, and to provide the student with tools for seeing hidden things.
A domain that seems to be hidden from environmental educators is that of environmental violence: the term ‘’violence’ never appears in the titles or abstracts of our major conferences, and virtually never appears in our published literature. Yet I would argue that environmental education, from its outset, grew out of a concern for the results of the violence our society inflicts on the natural world, a violence that both diminishes the ability of humans to fully function within society and diminishes the ability of the natural world to regenerate itself and thrive.
Thinking about violence
There are many definitions of violence; for example, the World Health Organization (WHO) states that violence is
the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.
An important part of this definition, though, is the idea of intent; the implication is that if there is no intent, there is no violence. The peace scholar Johan Galtung offers another definition that avoids the necessity of an actor’s intent:
I see violence as any avoidable insult to basic human needs, and, more generally, to sentient life of any kind, defined as that which is capable of suffering pain and can enjoy well-being, lowering the real level of needs satisfaction below what is potentially possible. (Galtung & Fischer, 2013, p. 35, emphasis added)
Both of these definitions offer a set of lenses through which we can understand human violence, which always involve harm to someone or something, and that that harm reduces the ability of an individual to satisfy their needs.
While the world faces many violent settings and contexts, environmental violence in the 21st century puts not only humans, but a great deal of life on earth, at risk. Humans have long had powerful influences on environments, but these influences were primarily local or at the most regional. The historical record is replete with the local destruction of environments which result in societal collapse (Tainter, 1988), and some scholars tells us to not be sanguine about the potential of the future (e.g., Turner, 2012). Violence against the environment in this context is not a natural phenomenon, not something that happens as a natural process. Environmental violence is a direct outcome of human activity, with intent or not, that results in a diminishing of the potential for flourishing of both humans and all the other creatures that inhabit a particular environment.
Forms of violence
For Galtung, the simplest and most obvious form of violence is direct violence, the violence that we do, the intentional violence that we can see and we can directly inflict, violence that can be promulgated through words, knives, handguns, stealth missiles, pesticides and carbon dioxide. Environmental educators can easily imagine direct violence against nature: our textbooks and presentations, to say nothing about the Internet, are full of images of direct violence. In a western Canadian context, the expansion of the Alberta tar sands are an extraordinary form of direct violence causing landscape-level harms, biodiversity-level harms and human harms, both social and health-related (Finkel, 2018). Although our individual acts of direct violence (we would like to believe) may be few and small, it’s hard to get through the day in our contemporary world without some form of direct environmental violence.
But violence is not always done with a knife or gun; “neglect, inaction, gross inequality and unjust structures of society, including from lack of freedom and democracy” (Fischer, 2013, p. 12) can also be forms violence. Beyond direct violence, there is the structure of society, and not simply the words or actions of a particular person, that enact violence on people and planet. This is violence that seemingly just happens, with nobody particularly responsible for it. Galtung calls this structural violence. “There are two reasons for this: it is structural in the sense that no specific actors are indicated, and also in the sense that for the concrete actors that happen to be performing roles in the structure in question no specific motivation is necessary” (Galtung, 1980, p. 183). And not only are no specific actors involved nor does anyone have a particular desire to create environmental harm, any outcome (like a day’s worth of CO2 from driving to and from work) that results from either one’s direct or structural violence is not particularly large; the impacts of all of us that drove to work today cannot individually be detected in the carbon budget of the atmosphere, or be directly related to the reduction of global biodiversity. This is akin to what Kahn (1966) talked about when he spoke of the tyranny of small decisions:
It is an inherent characteristic of a consumer-sovereign, market economy that big changes occur as an accretion of moderate-sized steps, each of them the consequence of ‘small’ purchase decisions- small in their individual size, time perspective, and in relation to their total, combined, ultimate effect. (pp. 44-45)
Structural violence can create many victims without any obvious perpetrators and since the victims are often not seen or even noticed (e.g., people in distant lands, organisms in distant habitats), the violence can seem to be invisible or at least, ignorable. Structural violence is subtle, harder to see than direct violence; we need new lenses that allow us to more-readily see these structural causes that are now obscured by both our worldviews, and by various societal screens and curtains, from our everyday vision. Structural violence can be the necessary outcome of the way a society is structured and these structures, for most citizens, are just the way things are. Structural violence hides in the background, directing our attention away from it and towards examples of direct violence which then grabs our concern and outrage.
We as teachers should be able to examine structural violence with our students as it is the one which leaves us feeling that nothing can be done and that no one is, themselves, actually doing anything particularly damaging. This is the kind of violence that was described by Hannah Arendt (1970, p. 38) when she spoke of the work of a bureaucracy as “an intricate system of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the next, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called rule by Nobody”. The system and institutions whose structures are causing havoc in the world weren’t intended to create havoc, and we can imagine that no one who actually is responsible for those systems wants such havoc to be occurring. Nonetheless, the unintended outcomes of many small yet significant decisions have led to a world structure that is in fact creating significant and long-lasting problems.
Galtung continued his study by revealing a final category, cultural violence:
The study of cultural violence highlights the way in which the act of direct violence and the fact of structural violence are legitimized and thus rendered acceptable in society. One way cultural violence works is to change the moral color of an act to green/right or at least to yellow/acceptable from red/wrong; an example being killing in the name of the country as right, in the name of oneself as wrong. Another way is by making reality opaque, permitting us not to see the act or the fact, or at least not as violent. (Galtung, 1990, p. 292)
While structural violence normalizes violence as being inescapable given the very construction of a particular society, cultural violence offers us the salve of justification, absolving us of responsibility for the violence. Justifying violence through cultural norms, we can avoid any sense of guilt that might result from the violent actions we engage or are complicit in.
How does it all come together? We drive fossil fuel-burning cars (direct violence) because there is no way to get from our suburban homes to work (structural violence) and since everyone does it, it’s really not too bad (cultural violence). Given these realities, we need to mine tar/oil sands, create tailings, build pipelines and ship product. And some citizens get angry when they can’t engage in economic activity that results in environmental violence, and then elect governments that promise that they will help shield our consciousness from the implications of our actions. “Voltaire put it well when he said, ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’” (Bandura, 2007, p. 193).
Environmental violence and environmental education
I have three approaches that educators can take with their students to confront the reality of environmental violence in all its forms: direct, structural and cultural.
We can confront environmental violence with environmental non-violence; in the domains we live, with the tools at our disposal, we can work to reduce our engagement in direct environmentally-violent actions. While we might not be able to completely “do no harm”, we all have the opportunity to do what we can and, both individually and collectively, develop a descent strategy to reduce our direct harms. My 30 km bike ride to and from work is a small act of environmental non-violence.
In our educational institutions, we can work to first identify and then reduce direct environmental violence. For example, since the transportation sector produces 24% of all GHG emissions in Canada (just behind the 26% produced by that oil and gas sector) (Environment and Climate Change Canada, 2017, p. 8), schools can look at ways to encourage low-carbon transportation. Walking, biking, skiing, skating, car-pooling, school bus and public transit are all ways of reducing the direct environmental violence of transportation associated with schooling (http://ontarioactiveschooltravel.ca/active-transportation-strategy-for-canada/) . Providing large parking lots at secondary schools for students and staff gives the wrong message if we are trying to reduce direct environmental violence; we should not be encouraging single-occupancy vehicle transportation.
Buildings and electricity combined account for nearly the same GHG emissions (23%) as transportation, so energy retrofits and building conservation efforts can help to reduce the direct violence in those schools that especially use heating oil or natural gas. For example, Destination Conservation (http://www.dcplanet.ca/index.html) is a long-running program that focuses on schools, helping them make significant reductions in their energy and water usage; DC is an exemplar in reducing the direct violence of school building operations.
When environmental educators deal with environmental issues in our schools and classrooms, we tend to focus on the outcomes of the visible forms of direct violence, and can respond with non-violent alternatives.
But at least as important, in terms of our practice, is finding ways to help reveal the cloak of invisibility that hides the structural environmental violence from our purview. Revelatory tools aren’t necessarily easy to find, and we are likely going to have to make some up ourselves. But there are some means at our disposal that can help us and our students come to a deeper understanding of why things are the way they are.
The roots of environmental violence can’t be looked for in the simple surface features of littering and pollution, but rather in the systems and structures that produce as a necessary outcome of their existence the environmental problems we are confronting. As environmental educators, we all need to gain skill and experience in systems analysis (Meadows, 2002, 2008). But it isn’t enough to simply do analysis of the structures in our institutions that result in environmental violence, we need to also look for ways of changing the structure (Meadows, 1999) of the system.
Changing structures involves politics, and this kind of pro-environmental activity is what I’ve come to call environmental anti-violence; the work we do to alter those structural features of our institutions or society that facilitate, or at least fail to stop, direct environmental violence. Students and teachers can work together to change structures, whether they are school board policies, or the actions of various levels of government. Analytical and political anti-violence work of students and teachers can involve things like working to mandate pro-environmental changes of school operations, making pro-environmental presentations to municipal governments, learning how to run for elected office, organizing boycotts and engaging in protests or civil disobedience. As the noted social psychologist Kurt Lewin said, “you cannot understand a system until you try to change it” (Schein, 1996, p. 6). Try to change a system and it reveals itself, and anti-violence work is about getting clarity as to the nature of the system.
But for many of us, students, teachers and parents alike, because of the structures of our systems, we can only do so much to reduce our direct environmental violence. And it might be difficult for us to engage in political action to change those structures creating violence. However, there is always something that we can do, and those things that we can do to try and reverse or even partially-undo our destructive acts are what I have called environmental contra-violence, actions that work to undo the actions that we are all complicit in and responsible for.
In some ways, this is the easiest and most approachable form of action in the face of environmental violence that any of us can take. Actions like recycling, cleaning up local pollution and litter, picking up refuse washed up on our beaches and shorelines, healing habitat loss, alteration and destruction through replanting and re-naturalizing, are all things that we can do. The field of ecological restoration (van Wieren, 2008) is, I feel, the work of contra-violence as its practitioners endeavour to make amends, doing in whatever small and seemingly insignificant ways they can, to undo even a tiny part of the damage are all complicit in as members of our society.
Contra-violence is the kind of work that we can and should do with our students in our communities, working to reduce our wastes (and even trying to not see them as wastes, but as resources), cleaning beaches (in what is truly a Sisyphsian task as each tide can deliver its own load of garbage!), restoring wetlands, bringing butterfly gardens into cities, creating rain gardens, anything and everything that can be contra/against the environmental violence that surrounds us all. Broadly speaking, the work of ecological restoration is a moral act and for some a spiritual act, a form of repentance, of apology, of stepping gently in and assisting natural processes in healing from our damaging actions.
We cannot put an enormous burden on the children to engage in actions that they may be unable to execute; they cannot be responsible for saving the rainforests, or protecting species in habitats far away. But perhaps most important is that as educators, we help to bring the pieces of the problem together, discerning along with our students the linkages between direct, structural and cultural violence. This process of revealing what is hidden, no matter the contexts we find ourselves in is, as I noted at the outset, one of the most important skills that we can offer. And with that revelation, we can work together and can support students and teachers working from their realities, to reduce violence through non-violent, anti- and contra-violent actions.
Rick Kool is founder of the MA in Environmental Education and Communication at Royal Roads University in British Columbia. He has published on the walking speed of dinosaurs, Northwest coast native whaling, museum exhibit design, ciliated protozoan development and the sex life of marine invertebrates. His current work relates to environmental education and how it confronts hope and despair, the potential role and place of religion in environmental education, and conceptions of change in environmental education and communication. Kool is active within the Victoria Holocaust Remembrance and Education Society and is a past president. He also plays the string bass.
References
Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co.
Bandura, A. (2007). Impeding ecological sustainability through selective moral disengagement. International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, 2(1), 8-35.
Environment and Climate Change Canada. (2017). Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators: Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Retrieved from Gatineau, QC: https://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/default.asp?lang=En&n=FBF8455E-1.
Finkel, M. L. (2018). The impact of oil sands on the environment and health. Current Opinion in Environmental Science & Health, 3, 52-55. doi:10.1016/j.coesh.2018.05.002
Fischer, D. (2013). Johan Galtung, the Father of Peace Studies. In J. Galtung & D. Fischer (Eds.), Johan Galtung: Pioneer of Peace Research (Vol. 5). New York: Springer.
Galtung, J. (1980). A Structural Theory of Imperialism: Ten Years Later. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 9(3).
Galtung, J. (1990). Cultural violence. Journal of Peace Research, 27(3), 291-305. Retrieved from http://www2.kobe-u.ac.jp/~alexroni/IPD%202014%20readings/IPD%202014_2/Cultural%20Violence%20(Galtung).pdf
Galtung, J., & Fischer, D. (Eds.). (2013). Johan Galtung: Pioneer of Peace Research (Vol. 5). New York: Springer.
Kahn, A. E. (1966). The tyranny of small decisions: Market failures, imperfections, and the limits of economics. Kyklos, 19(1), 23–47.
Meadows, D. H. (1999). Leverage points: Places to intervene in a system. Retrieved from Hartland, VT: http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
Meadows, D. H. (2002). Dancing With Systems. Retrieved from http://www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/pubs/Dancing.html
Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in systems: A primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company.
Schein, E. H. (1996). Kurt Lewin’s change theory in the field and in the classroom: Notes toward a model of managed learning. Reflections, 1(1), 59-74. Retrieved from http://forteza.sis.ucm.es/apto/alum0203/scheinlewin.pdf
Tainter, J. A. (1988). The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, G. M. (2012). On the cusp of global collapse? Updated comparison of The Limits to Growth with historical data. GAiA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society, 21(2), 116-124.
van Wieren, G. (2008). Ecological restoration as public spiritual practice. Worldviews: Environment Culture Religion, 12(2/3), 237-254.
by editor | Jun 17, 2019 | Environmental Literacy
Photo by Jim Martin
Why Environmental Educators Shouldn’t
Give Up Hope
by Jacob Rodenburg
I’m trying hard not to get discouraged. Being an environmental educator in today’s world feels like you are asked to stop a rushing river armed only with a teaspoon.
There are so many issues to be worried about—from climate change to habitat destruction, from oceans of plastic to endangered species, from the loss of biodiversity to melting glaciers. And the list goes on. The field itself has become ever more siloed and compartmentalized over time, leaving schools, parents, and outdoor programs with little unified guidance. How do we teach kids—in a hopeful and empowering way—about today’s formidable challenges? And how do we translate this increase in knowledge about environmental issues into action?
Today’s Challenge
Children today are given few opportunities to be outside. In a school system rife with worry about liability, it is simply easier to stay indoors. Insurance rates are cheaper if kids are contained, accounted for, and “safe” inside.
Yet the safety argument needs to be turned on its head: It is unsafe NOT to take children outside, not to provide them with rich immersion time in the living world. Leaving kids indoors cuts them off from the knowledge and understanding of what it means to be a living being that shares a world with other living beings. Children have a right to experience the joy of discovering the richness, complexity, and diversity of life.
Children’s disconnect from their surroundings and their environment does not stem from a lack of desire. As an outdoor educator, I have spent many happy hours with school children tramping through wetlands, lifting up rotten logs, and canoeing through still waters hearing comments like “Wow! This is cool!” To fulfill children’s need to connect, the field must develop a coordinated and developmentally appropriate approach—one that is rooted in what kids are ready to learn at each age.
Building Age-appropriate Environmental Education
Children learn about the natural world in vastly different ways as they grow up. Environmentalists are keen to teach children about global warming, pollution, species depletion, and a whole range of admittedly important issues, but they forget that younger children aren’t cognitively, perhaps even psychically, ready for this.
Young children are, however, always ready to love the natural world. Connecting with nature is about establishing a relationship and building intimacy. What is the story of the land near where a child lives? How did that oak get that large hole in it? Who lives under this decomposing log? If we think about tending to and nurturing relationships, then we’ll remember to take kids to the same places over and over again. We’ll help them find their magic places, their stories of that place and, more importantly, their place within that place. We will teach them the power and possibility of restoring nature in their school yards, their backyards, and in nearby parks.
Kids connect best to places through stories and faces. A teacher once shared a story with me about a mystery bird that had built a nest in a parking lot. After doing a bit of research, the children found out that this bird was called a killdeer. They watched the bird as she did her broken wing trick (to lead predators away from the nest). Over the days, they watched her scoop out her nest and sit upon it. They cordoned off an area with yellow emergency tape to protect her from cars. They watched her raise her young. This was their killdeer, and they would have done anything to protect her. The students became involved in her unfolding story, and the killdeer suddenly had a face. In a way, she revealed herself to them.
Another teaching tip: young children love micro environments. A friend of mine told me about a time when he took his children, 4 and 5 years old, up to an incredible view of a valley. He asked, “Isn’t this beautiful?” and watched in amazement as his kids hunkered down and stared at the ants scurrying at their feet instead.
Finally, young children adore discovery. It is the art of an educator to know what to say and what to refrain from saying. If I had a job description, it would be simply this: to help reveal wonder and cultivate awe. I take my students to a place called Salamander Alley and say, “I wonder what’s under that log?” If they find a salamander, there is a palpable feeling of joy in the discovery. Had I said, “Let’s go find some salamanders. They’re probably under this log,” the effect would have been completely different. When a child finds something, I let them own that discovery. I honor and celebrate it. The power of this kind of learning can never be undervalued.
Neil Everenden writes that we do not end at our finger tips. Instead, we radiate out into the landscape. We are inextricably bound up in the processes of life. With every breath in and out we are part of the natural systems that surround us. Our role today is to guide our children, in ways that resonate with their interests and development, to realize this connection.
Where to Go From Here
We can create nature-rich communities where kids feel a deep and abiding love for the living systems that we all are immersed in. Eventually, children will learn even to go beyond sustaining and to engage in acts of regeneration. That is where true hope resides.
Here’s hoping we can all coordinate our efforts throughout every age and stage of a child’s development. We need to work collaboratively with schools, parents, community groups, faith groups, governments, and non-governmental agencies to help future generations love, learn about, care for, protect, and enhance the environment. Indeed the future of the planet depends upon it.
Jacob Rodenburg is Executive Director of Camp Kawartha and The Camp Kawartha Outdoor Education Centre, located in Ontario, Canada. He is a contributing author in the Worldwatch Institute’s EarthEd: Rethinking Education on a Changing Planet.
by editor | Mar 20, 2019 | Gardening, Farming, Food, & Permaculture
Embracing the Unfamiliar Through Adventurous Eating with an Equity Lens
By Caroline Bargo
Adventure Awaits
As I began exploring the IslandWood campus in August it became abundantly clear that the garden would be one of my favorite places here on the 255-acres available to us to teach. As a graduate student at IslandWood’s Education for Environment and Community program I act as field instructor to groups of students that visit during the School Overnight Program. Although I knew I loved the garden, I fall more deeply in love each week when I am teaching in it and surrounded by delighted children. Sometimes these students are familiar with garden classrooms, and sometimes this is their first exposure to one. Some students come in having tried all sorts of obscure veggies, and some are still skeptical. Regardless of student’s comfort levels walking into the space, it is my goal that each student who visits feels a connection to the soil, decomposers, fruits, veggies and herbs that are growing in the garden.
This year, I have been focused on stewarding my students through exciting and sometimes scary activities. We have climbed a ten-story canopy tower, crossed a suspension bridge and hiked through the forest in the dark of night. I realized after a while, though, that these adventures weren’t replicable in everyday life. One thing that students can do to push their boundaries is to try foods that aren’t familiar to them. Here at IslandWood we have the capacity to grow a unique variety of fruits and veggies, and students are often motivated to try them in the jovial team atmosphere that we foster.
Many Histories & a Delicious Meal
During my first week teaching at the IslandWood School Overnight Program I decided to give my students a feeling of place on Bainbridge Island in both in location and in time. We went through a lesson called “Histories Mysteries,” which places students at IslandWood and poses the question, “What happened here on Bainbridge Island before our field group got here?” We traveled up and down the IslandWood campus, visiting a relief map of the area, the harbor where an old mill boomed during the early 1900’s logging era, and a cemetery where generations of Islanders are interred.
We specifically took interest in the idea of the multiple histories that call the island home; we examined those of the Suquamish tribe who inhabit the land, the multitude of immigrant groups who made their home near the mill, the Japanese-American farmers who lovingly tended the land until their Internment, those who stewarded the land until their return and still today. After our initial day of trekking through history, we came back and watched a video of what the Island’s population looked like and how it has changed over the last hundred years.
The next day we visited the IslandWood garden and participated in a Soil to Snack lesson in which Chef Garreth from the IslandWood kitchen led the group in creating a meal to share. In the spirit of celebrating the history of Bainbridge Island we decided to make veggie sushi, sourced almost entirely from garden vegetables and herbs. Students cooked rice, chopped vegetables, handcrafted wasabi with horseradish grown in the garden, rolled their sushi out on their own and washed the meal down with IslandWood grown herbal tea. As we sat down to our meal, I asked the students to share the significance of the meal. They were eager to share with our chef what it meant to eat sushi on this land. Several students connected the fact that Japanese Americans tended this land until their forcible removal in 1942 and upon their return in 1945.
I aimed to incorporate culturally responsive teaching methods into this activity by having students investigate the people that call Bainbridge Island home, the history of their relationships with the land, and partake in appreciating a recipe from just one of those many cultures. The sharing of stories of our own favorite meals from our communities added yet another layer of responsiveness. I was pleased to learn that many of my students had never eaten sushi, much less made it with their own hands.
From Seed to Cookie
Even a familiar delicacy can be made with adventurous ingredients, making it an entirely new experience. My second week of teaching at IslandWood’s SOP I decided to introduce producers and consumers in a unique way. First, we started sorting quinoa grown in the garden, separating seed from hull. This provided a tactile activity for students to absorb themselves in. During the activity, we discussed the origins of the quinoa plant; it grows high in the Andes mountains, has huge cultural significance for many indigenous people in the area, and is often called the “mother of all grains.” Afterward, we ate a chocolate chip cookie made with the beloved grain.
As students enjoyed their cookies, we brainstormed what ingredients went into making them. Students shared experiences of making cookies with family members, and they certainly came in with plenty to share. I was so impressed as my students rattled off all of the different ways they had made cookies in the past. I aimed to engage in culturally responsive teaching methods by sharing the story of quinoa’s importance to Andean culture and asking students to share stories of their own cookie making. This quarter one of my goals has been to consider students lived experiences when using a tool some would think of as a “common” recipe, like a cookie. Students were able to share variations of recipes that were particular to their families and cultures. We listed ingredients on a whiteboard, and when we felt satisfied that we had all of our them down, we divided ingredients into categories that the students designed. One category was plants and the other animal. We talked about where the ingredients come from, how they grow and how they are eaten by creatures to make a new product. We decided that many of our ingredients like the quinoa, sugar and vanilla came from plants. Eggs, milk and butter came from animals that had to eat plants to get their energy; they couldn’t make any of their own. This nicely scaffolded the idea of producers and consumers, and how energy comes initially from the sun and is translated into usable form for life by plants. Students left with an understanding of the beginnings of the cookies they were eating, and of the food they will encounter in the future.
Students Deserve Healthy Food
Students who visit IslandWood may not have the opportunity to try new foods often. A recent study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that, “23.5 million people lack access to a supermarket within a mile of their home.”(Treuhaft & Karpyn, 2010). A similar study done in multiple states found that low-income census tracts had half as many supermarkets as wealthy tracts, and another found that eight percent of African Americans live in a tract with a supermarket, compared to 31 percent of whites. (Treuhaft & Karpyn, 2010). By design, IslandWood attracts quite a diverse set of students, and while some certainly have access to supermarkets within walking distance of home, many do not. These areas in which no accessible grocery store is available are called “food deserts.” According to Teaching Tolerance, a program of the Southern Poverty Law Center, because access is limited, residents of food deserts may rely more heavily on convenience stores and fast food restaurants. In general, these convenient places to get a quick meal don’t offer the variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, dairy products, whole grains and lean meats that make up a balanced diet. (Teaching Tolerance, n.d.). Students may not be presented with options in their everyday lives, but we can use our resources here at IslandWood to expose them to the idea of choice when it comes to food. When we show them that apples are delicious right off the tree, that flowers can be edible, and that sushi isn’t just something that people eat in movies we give students agency to make those choices when the circumstance arises.
“A 2017 evaluation of FoodCorps conducted by the Tisch Center for Food, Education, and Policy at Teachers College, Columbia University found that in schools that provide frequent, high-quality opportunities for hands-on nutrition learning, students eat up to three times more fruits and vegetables at school lunch — regardless of whether or not that food was grown in the garden.” (Shafer, 2018). Dinner at IslandWood is always vegetarian; meals are packed full of greens, whole grains and plant-based proteins. Not all of the ingredients come from the garden here at IslandWood, but many are sourced from local farms. Again the idea of recency prevails. As researched by the Tisch Center for Food, Education and Policy – when students have an opportunity to see where food is grown and understand the energy transfer through the sun to their bodies they are more likely to try new foods when presented with them. (Shafer, 2018).
Brain Food
The effect of adding a new food to a student’s repertoire may foster neural plasticity, or the ability to create new connections between neurons in the brain. These new connections are useful to all types of learning, not just about food and not just environmental education. In a study conducted by London’s Global University, participants were asked to study and recall both new and old information. Subjects were far more capable of recalling new information than the old, which was a surprise to researchers. The study concludes with a quote from Dr. Düzel, “When we see something new, we see it has a potential for rewarding us in some way. This potential that lies in new things motivates us to explore our environment for rewards… For this reason, only completely new objects activate the midbrain area and increase our levels of dopamine.” (“Novelty aids learning,” 2006). This research begs implementation with new foods. If students are exposed to new foods, their brains are quite literally open to new possibilities; we can not only use these new neural connections to show them that foods can be exciting, but to incorporate other concepts of science.
Taking Adventure Home
Students may not be presented with many opportunities to choose their own foods. In a world where many students eat two to three meals at school each day, the idea of food choice may not be a reality. I would argue that situations such as this are the best time in which to incorporate adventurous eating like we do at IslandWood. Students who have tasted the variety of produce available here at IslandWood leave our campus feeling empowered to try new things, and to advocate for their incorporation into their everyday school meals. Trying these new foods can trigger our learner’s brains to be more receptive to new ideas and use those same adventure muscles as climbing the canopy tower or crossing the suspension bridge.
Caroline is a graduate student at the Education for Environment and Community program at IslandWood in partnership with the University of Washington. All photographs were taken by the author.
References:
Bargo, Caroline. (photograph). (2018). IslandWood. Bainbridge Island, WA.
Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy. (2017). FoodCorps: Creating Healthy School Environments: Evaluation January 2015 to December 2016. New York, New York. Retrieved from https://www.tc.columbia.edu/media/centers/tisch/FoodCorps-Report-FINAL-08-30-17-v5.pdf
London’s Global University. (2006, August 2). Novelty Aids Learning. Retrieved from http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/news-releases-archive/newlearning
Shafer, L. (2018, July 31). Let It Grow. Usable Knowledge. Retrieved from https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/18/07/let-it-grow
Teaching Tolerance: A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Food Desert Statistics. Retrieved from https://www.tolerance.org/sites/default/files/general/desert%20stats.pdf
Treuhaft, S. & Karpyn, A. PolicyLink & The Food Trust. (2010). The Grocery Gap: Who Has Access to Healthy Food and Why It Matters. Retrieved from http://www.policylink.org/sites/default/files/FINALGroceryGap.pdf
