This Earth Day, Consider Time And Space

Teachers of all stripes have small goals and big goals.  

Teachers strive to get through each day with a measure of success; usually there are a series of smaller tasks they need to move their students through, and that likely adds up to a series of benchmarks for any given day that then propel everyone forward.  We typically call this "progress" or "growth."  By whatever measure, or whatever definitions, progress and growth are hallmarks of teaching, I think-- regardless of whether you are working with the very young, the very experienced or anything in between.  Progress and growth are things that adults wish for ourselves too.  If we don't feel like we are making adequate progress or growth as we move through life, we might feel bummed out, or we might find ourselves in the midst of a midlife crisis...but young kids mostly live in the here and the now.  Progress?  That might not be a concept for kids until we give it to them.  Growth certainly is inherent in a child's actions and expressed desires.  Kids are desperate to grow up into something bigger, to get a little closer to the stratosphere that is being a "big kid," or being a "grown up."  Kids seem to have the ability to hurtle forward, through each day, making huge strides, taking huge leaps.  They sometimes seem to jump whole epochs of development.  Einstein, famously, did not speak for the first three years of life, and then, suddenly, he communicated in paragraphs.  

We adults, teachers especially, think in terms of goals.  While teaching, we lean forward to peek around the corner, to see if the kid in question is going to get where we think she should go.  Land-based learning, emergent curricula and seasonally-informed, experience-based approaches do not escape this forward lean.  A classroom can be de-centralized (most of my lit classes in grad school where), but the teacher is still there, lurking, listening, contributing, and grading!  And the teacher is some kind of authority, usually some adult with aspirations.  There is no getting around this.  At Dodge, we have mixed-age classrooms in order to temper this teacher/authority thing, this adult tendency toward the didactic.  Mixed-age classrooms allow kids to share the responsibility of instruction, of course.  The more experienced kids provide the models for behavior and action, teaching their peers what to do and how to do it.  Teaching comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but it all involves sharing knowledge and I think inherent in this is an understanding that to acquire knowledge is to be capable, to be better at doing the things you want to do.  Capability seems to mean progress.  

Kids care a lot about capability, but if life is fun enough, they care about it because it meets an immediate desire or need.  Later on in life, a kid might do a worksheet well because he desires an "A," but doing a worksheet isn't going to get him any higher in a tree, for instance.  Finding the correct foothold and having the arm strength to leverage your own weight will indeed get you up the tree, though.  If you are capable of meeting those challenges, you can make the desired progress and be higher in the tree than anyone else.  Then you can laugh like a pirate and enjoy life in the crow's nest, until your buddy figures out how to get up there too (she was watching, of course).  Kids have goals and make progress, certainly, but theirs are generally short term, here-and-now kinds of goals that serve to deepen the joy of the moment.  With enough time and enough space, pursuing joy through play together, kids travel far.  And they go farther than we adults do, and probably faster, because they are not always stumbling over their long-range goals.  Teachers, especially those charged with working in a land-based school environment, constantly have to step away from their own on-behalf-of-my-students aspirations and support joy in the moment.  I firmly believe we are in constant danger of taking ourselves too seriously; early childhood teachers (maybe teachers beyond early childhood too), especially come spring, after an entire year with their students, need to think of themselves as life guards, rather than instructors.  After at least a year in the pool, most of the kids already know how to swim, you see.

To ruminate a little more on this topic, whatever it is, I include an excerpt from an e-mail I sent out to our afternoon class last Friday:

...Amanda and I grabbed some ropes and pulleys and headed out with the goal of locating our campsite.

Well, we got to the farm and checked out the babies, then we mosied down the farm road and had to stop to play in the creek/culvert area.  We stayed there a good, long time-- longer than ever perhaps.  We stayed through the Oak Room kids playing in and around the creek with us.  We stayed so long that we then adjourned to another part of the creek and decided to sit down and eat (Amanda had a Mary Poppins bag of tricks with her today, including marshmallows, grahams and coconut).  We snacked and chatted and told funny stories and then the kids posed for even funnier photos, and this is where we started to really see the beauty of this day:

First, we were struck by how the kids functioned as a group.  When the Oak Room kids shared the creek with us, our kids continued to pursue the games they had developed, undisturbed or distracted-- knock-knock jokes through the culvert, sending objects down the swollen creek, wetting and/or cleaning found stuff in the creek.  Every single child was communicating with friends in all the ways we would like them to.  They developed games and ideas with words and gestures and there was virtually no conflict (this is unusual for preschool, of course).
...we realized that everyone in the group knows their peers really well, and we know them pretty well now too.  This familiarity has become collegiality and watching them pose for pictures—-“Make the face you most want to make”—-we saw each of these personalities distinctly, and they were so delighted to reveal who they were!  Each of the kids seemed very comfortable in their own skin at that moment, and happy to be together; this is a big lesson, for adults especially, right?  Accept the differences, and when you can, rejoice in them.  This, for me, seems to be the definition of peace, which can seem so hard to come by on this earth.

...Amanda, in her infinite wisdom, pointed out that today provided us with a big lesson in intervention, as in when to intervene and step in and be "the teacher” and when to hang back, and step out, and be “the life guard.”  What the children benefited the most from today, was interaction with each other and calculated and sparing interaction with us...we saw how capable each kid is (a good thing to see after nearly a year of growth), and also how capable they are of challenging themselves, making connections and getting what they need.  

Today we saw a panorama of “firsts” in terms of physical, social/emotional risk-taking and in terms of cognitive leaps...these were the result of kids playing with each other in a stimulating setting with very minimal hand-holding from us.  They had the TIME to play and keep developing play and interaction and they had the SPACE to do so.  Amanda and I were there to support and offer help only when needed.  Kids need time and space and here, in the spring, after many hours of experiences together, we can easily give it to them. 

Time and space, in a land-based environment, may be the most precious gifts we can offer here at Dodge. 

...At the end of the day, we asked, “Did you do anything you’ve never done before today?”  Kids had something to say about this:  “Today, I made a new friend”  “I chatted with someone for the first time."  Behind these comments are big stories about social risk-taking and the joy of reaching out to and connecting with another person.

A lot of big things happened in one small afternoon.

No doubt, time and space are the luxuries of kids playing at Dodge Nature Center.  I would hazard that everyone who works at Dodge or supports the Nature Center knows that time and space in nature are too often luxuries, and nature experiences are not the fundamental birth rights they should be.  This Earth Day, and for all time, perhaps we adults can model our children and try to afford a few more moments out there, in the present, resisting the urge to peek around the next corner...