Natural Chemistry – Outdoors!
Use fluorescence and sunscreen
to teach chemistry to high school students while immersed in the outdoors
By Alexander Engl and Björn Risch T
HERE IS A BROAD CONSENSUS that experiences in nature positively affect physical and mental health and social development. Children who play outside
several times a week are generally happier than those who don’t, especially if those outdoor settings are stimulating ones. Since youth now spend an increasing amount of time in a virtual world, too often they become alienated from nature. And they experience fewer sensory opportunities than those who have regular contact with the natural world. Richard Louv identified this problem as nature-deficit
disorder: “the human costs of alienation from nature: among them diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses.”1 In spite of this however, “nature” as a place of learning is not suffi- ciently integrated into science classes. The concept for teaching chemistry outdoors is intended
to make youth more aware of nature and the processes occur- ring there. The central idea is to shift parts of chemistry les- sons outdoors, ideally into natural settings. Such outdoor lessons help students to better connect with the natural world and hopefully enjoy much more their time spent outside. In order to better understand environmental processes, we encourage students to work in small groups and conduct
outdoor experiments using natural items that they have col- lected. There is another less obvious benefit of conducting experiments outdoors. The impacts of environmental stress- ors, such as UV radiation, are not immediately visible to most people. When outdoor experiments are set up to inves- tigate those impacts, it helps the participants to better appre- ciate those impacts. In contrast to traditional chemistry lessons which many
students find abstract and complex, the objective of our Natural Chemistry approach is to build a bridge between chemistry instruction and every-day, natural phenomena. The starting point of our program is the “Outdoor Mobile”, a former circus caravan that has been converted into an environmental outdoor student laboratory. This caravan is primarily used to store the materials and act as a meeting place for debriefing what has been learned. While it is very helpful for us, you will not need a mobile caravan in order to implement the concepts outlined in this article. The Natural Chemistry units are designed for senior high
school students with the following criteria in mind:2 1. Experiments take place outside of the classroom (“nature is my lab”)
2. Minimal laboratory equipment and chemicals are used and reactions occur from naturally occurring substances
3. Environmental processes are demonstrated on real objects 4. The focus is on basic chemical concepts
GREEN TEACHER 109 Page 39
Alexander Engl and Björn Risch
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