Beyond Egocentrism In Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature, the authors describe


a progression toward empathy that begins as students learn to recognize and express their own needs. “Over time and with your encouragement, they will go beyond asserting their needs into taking responsibility for them and being proactive about them” (Young, Haas, and McGown, 2010, p. 268). This growing sense of responsibility might be observed in simple acts, like noticing a student plan ahead by bringing warm and dry clothing. It might be a student who articulates that they are uncomfortable with a certain aspect of an activity and opens a conversation to plan an alternative. Young, et al. go on to describe how this behavior often expands into a greater awareness of others and tending to their needs as well (2010). I have witnessed this progression in my students as I see them begin to speak up for each other. Students also feel more comfortable affirming the positive attributes that their peers bring to the group, and begin to feel a sense of comradery and pride with group identity. “This same tending sensibility will also show itself as


care for the natural world -and especially one’s own native romping grounds” (Young, et al., 2010, p. 268). In watching how self-care can grow into caring for others, it’s easy to imagine this expanding beyond just people and encompassing the environment as well. Developing a sense of place begins when a person starts to have deeper familiarity with their surroundings, and ultimately begins to feel at home where they are. Feeling a sense belonging is a true testament to the number and quality of the relationships built.


Helping Students to Cultivate Empathy An important way to help a group of students begin to


see from perspectives other than their own is by helping each individual realize the interconnectedness present within a community. One way to encourage this sense of interpersonal connection is by engaging them in team-building challenges. Of course there are millions of activities that achieve this -I’ve seen wonders happen when I challenge group of ten students to transport themselves 25 feet across an expanse of “shark-infested hot lava” using only four foam seat-pads as stepping stones. They become invested in a successful outcome for the group and along the way, they discover the role that each person plays and how they can more carefully and effectively communicate with one another.


These types of play-based collaborations have helped groups of students with intense trust and interpersonal challenges to become significantly more community-minded and thoughtful of each other’s needs. Sometimes, we must recognize that there is more work than can be achieved in our time together with students, but we must not let that stop us from trying. One of my favorite activities to facilitate with students to dive even deeper into empathy is to engage them in storytelling from the perspective of a non-human element of the natural world. Students get to create their own narrative, which could be a short story, poem, or comic about any living or nonliving component found in our place.


One memorable story came from a student who, after having CLEARING Spring 2018


trouble coming up with ideas for his story, eventually wrote a beautiful piece about a plant he had learned about earlier in the day, the Evergreen Huckleberry. One time there was [an] Evergreen Huckleberry. People and animals came every second to take the berry. A bird comes and make a house out of you, but the evergreen huckleberry can’t do nothing. So every time it grows [berries], people or animals take it. The tree was mad...because they were eating its berry. It [wanted] revenge and a 10-year-old kid came and said, ‘Stop, we were not hurting you, we were only [taking] berries because it taste good and we take out the seeds and grow another tree. No big deal.’”


Another student wrote from the perspective of a Salal plant that lives through the challenges of each season and ultimately feels unwanted by the other members of the forest community. She wrote, “A small blueberry tree [looked] at me and said, ‘Salal you


are great just like you are. You don’t need to be bigger and we need you. We need you, like you have very [delicious] and sweet [berries] and animals need you. Look, the [deer] needs you for your [berries].’ Salal said ‘Cool, I’m special.’”


In both of these stories, students are demonstrating their understanding of ecological relationships but also have some compelling themes of personal struggle. Both stories have moments when the main character is feeling underappreciated until another member of the community shows them they are valued. People of all ages struggle with self-confidence or feeling like an outsider. These stories illustrate how students can identify threads of connection across boundaries. This helps them develop new interpretations of environmental relationships andf also interpersonal relationships. Another strength of perspective storytelling is that it helps students to view the natural world through a creative lens, and allows them to do so on their own terms and in their preferred medium. The perspective storytelling activity I shared with my students involved writing, but perspective storytelling can be done with singing, rapping, dancing, acting, or any other interpretation. By giving them flexibility in how they complete the activity, students will be more successful in reaching the goals of connecting with place and practicing empathy.


Showing Students We Care


Environmental and outdoor education inherently provides experiences that are new and often uncomfortable for students.


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CLEARING: 20 Great Activities to Develop Eco-Literacy


 How can learning be fun and interesting? How can we rekindle appreciation of nature?


by Chris Helander


educators are asking how do you reach young people who seem apathetic and unmotivated to learn. In old cultures before schools, books, and grades; people learned by being mentored. Using sto- ries, ceremony, games, and survival skills everyone and everything was a teacher. In the modern model of education learn- ing is force fed, sitting in chairs, listening to an adult spouting out information to be memorized. Modern children learning this way are trained to get their knowl- edge by memorization of someone elseís knowledge. They do not learn how to develop the questioning mind or follow their hearts to learn from their own experiences.


T We have all heard about the stud-


ies done on the modern human brain which show we only use 10% of our brains. Recent studies show an alarm-


here are many people who say our current model for learning is ineffectual. Parents and


For the questioning mind learning never concludes because it is an endless journey with an infinite number of destinations.


ing further decrease to between 5% and 7% thinking power. Could it be due to getting our information almost entirely through visually focused stimulation? These same studies done on people liv- ing in aboriginal cultures demonstrated brain use at 60% and up to 70% in the healers and trackers. Could it be due to using all their senses to get information about their world, which means using all of their brain to learn? These people





have never sat in a classroom, they donít read or write yet they use far more of their brain than the modern educated person. In aboriginal cultures not only the parents and extended family of the community are the mentors but nature itself is understood as a powerful and infinitely wise teacher. By observing nature we learn from the tress, from the animals, and from the birds. In our modern culture we learn almost exclu- sively from books, and lecture, while our young people are more inclined to learn from T.V.


At Coyote’s


Path Wilderness School one of the skills we mentor to others is the art


of survival skills. When I first began to teach, I taught as I had been taught in school. This was the “show and tell” what I knew about survival skills method. One of my mentors, Jon Young of Wilderness Awareness School, in his Art of Mentoring workshop, calls it the “drag and brag” style of teaching. After I had taken his workshop I asked Jon to come to Portland to teach a weekend of nature skills at Oxbow Park. I was at my teaching station telling my students


everything I knew about the Cedar Tree. Jon walked by, stopped and listened for awhile and then asked me “Are you asking them lots of questions?” I answered yes, but after he smiled and walked away I realized I had only asked a few questions of my students. I was deep in teacher “show and tell” mode. Giving answers even before I was asked a question. How much more meaning- ful would the experience have been if I had them find the answers by saying the following:


Everyone come over to this tree and smell the branches.


Now smell the bark. Which one smells stronger?


Has anyone ever smelled this tree before?


Why do people put it in their closets?


Do you think that works in the woods too?


So what could you use this for in the woods?


How could you use it in a shelter? Could you put it on your skin?


Go ahead rub a little bit of it between your fingers?





monthly E-newsletter from CLEARING. Stay in touch with the latest stories, resources, and ideas in environmental education!


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