Junkyard Playgrounds: A Risky Business

risky business at Dodge

Have you heard of "adventure playgrounds?" There seems to be some chatter out there about a "new" trend in outdoor play spaces. People like risky play advocates, Rusty Keeler and Richard Louv, are tagging stories about edgy junkyard-esque spaces for kids. I take it some of these have been around for quite a while. Berkley's Adventure Playground has been going strong for twenty years, and that playground is based on a World War II era movement spearheaded by none other than a UK landscape designer--Lady Marjory Allen--who wanted to promote a "free and permissive" atmosphere for play and exploration over a concrete pad dotted with exercise equipment. Lady Allen's work certainly informs today's adventure playgrounds like The Land in Wales (you'll want to read the Atlantic's article, The Overprotected Kid. But, historically, what is the norm in Berkeley, let alone Wales, seems to take a while to filter into American culture at large, and I suppose here in "fly over" country we are perceived to be something less than cutting edge-- plus we do not have a collective memory of kids playing in bombed out neighborhoods as they once did in the war years of Lady Allen's UK.

climbing Dodge pasture fence in winter; a no-no in summer

But, finally, Minnesotans (with our strong, local history of agrarian culture and outdoor fun-- we are the land of 10,000 Lakes) are talking about these risky, junky adventure playgrounds too.  From what I hear, folks in NE Minneapolis, perhaps the heart of our local "alt" culture, are excited about embracing the junkyard ethic in risky play and exploration (probably no accident that NE Mpls is also historically the seat of heavy industry in the city, and residents have embraced that ethos and aesthetic in all sorts of ways that enrich our local culture). While pushing the envelope in this way may seem new, the idea of risk-taking that underpins such pining for childhood adventure is not.

preschoolers slack lining, barefoot

Readers of this blog will recognize that Dodge Nature Preschool has a long-standing tradition of helping children embrace appropriate risk as a natural, necessary, to-be-applauded part of child development (just moments ago, one of my students tried to decline my invitation to spread her own chive butter on a cracker:  "My parents don't let me hold a knife." Like it or not, we inhabit a time and place where even a butter knife seems to inspire worry). Here at the Preschool, we certainly have a much higher tolerance for early childhood risk taking than many of our peers in education.  Not only do we instruct children to use knives and saws, we routinely build fires with them, we let them play with sticks, we teach them to climb trees and we encourage them to wrestle, if they want to.

preschool ropes work

Safety is a hot topic for Dodge teachers, and parents, but not because we don't take risks with kids outside. As our Assistant Director, Joey, will point out, we talk about safety and constantly update protocols because we want to support risk-taking as much as we can (check out my former posts on working with kids and ropes and trees), and to teach families about the importance of embracing risk. Like Richard Louv, Rusty Keeler and David Sobel, we believe that risk-taking outside is an important vehicle for developing the "whole child," and for supporting the child's relationship with the world, specifically that natural world.

tree swings at Streefland

One night last week, I visited YMCA Camp Streefland in Lakeville for my daughter's open house. While touring around Camp, I was reminded that the Y has a long tradition of emphasizing physical risk-taking as character development. Streefland is a lovely place, tucked right off a major highway, actually, in the midst of what some might mistakenly assume is a sterile outer ring suburb. The camp occupies ravines and shoreline on the edge of very healthy, shallow lake-- so healthy it supports a rare and protected species of water lily (and all the campers know this and don't pick it). Everywhere you look, throughout the woods, there are opportunities for kids to test their mettle and have fun:  giant swings, ropes courses, canoes, kayaks, zip lines and something called the "black hole."

Streefland "Black Hole":
drain tile, sleds and screams

note Wee Bee lugging sled

These activities capitalize on natural infrastructure with minimal development for challenging fun. The camp activities--swings, zip lines, swamp walks--in fact highlight the natural components of the landscape, rather than obstructing or abusing them with junk. The paths are well worn and a lot of kids move through each summer, but the attitude and tone is one of respect for people and the environment, and it shows in the use of the land. As a leader-in-training last week, my daughter had a chance to take her "Wee Bee" charges out canoeing. Wee Bees are pre-k aged and my daughter and her counsellor filled a canoe with them and headed out to look for "sea monsters," and turtles. Even Dodge teachers shiver at the thought of taking preschoolers canoeing, but apparently, refreshingly, the Y embraces such risk-- and the payoff is huge, the kids running around Camp that night were full of stories and enthusiasm for the place.

lovely lake Kingsley
and a happy camper

a late vernal pond
& almost too much joy

Based soley on a very superficial scan of some of the junky "adventure playgrounds" in use out there, I am tempted to play devil's advocate. While I truly believe in and support risk as a valuable part of social, emotional, physical and cognitive development, I worry that advocating playing in a place that more closely resembles a favella or any developing world ghetto runs the risk of seriously insulting the resourceful residents of such places, and it looks for all the world like citizens of privilege are enjoying the benefits of "slumming it."  I realize that children developing in favelas are likely developing some great coping skills; I would argue, though, that those kids parents would probably say that their children are required to embrace a little too much risk. Privileged, well-educated America often pines for the "sandlot" days of yore-- when a "kid could be a kid," playing pick-up games in the vacant lot, or when people like me were free to range through cow pasture and forest for entire days with no adult supervision.

spring mud is boot-sucking mud;
you might lose one!

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world's residents cannot supervise kids when they want to and cannot choose where their children "play." Sobel and others have pointed out the fact that many kids actually hunt and catch their own food every day. Some kids eat animals they catch, instead of trapping them just for fun and observation. Kids the world over tend crops and siblings, and work out in the elements without REI rainpants or bug spray, let alone vaccinations or access to a hospital, should they fall from a tree and break their arm. Risk is relative, of course. World War II Londoners worried more about bombs falling from the sky than they did about abductors. Now privileged Americans worry too much about germs, and predators. But how much risk is too much? I'm not always sure, but I think here at Dodge Nature Center, and at our Preschool, we've discovered a balance, and that balance is largely dictated by how the natural world arranges itself.

not-so-risky rooster, Midas,
puts his life in preschool hands

Every day we use mostly what we come across in nature for the scaffolding of play and development through risk-taking. Trees make the best jungle gyms. Rocks and sticks are the best tools to manipulate for play and building materials. With very little modification to our biome, to the fauna and flora we encounter in our own backyard, we can provide kids with experiences that helping them grow healthy bodies and minds while preserving some idea of what it means to have a healthy relationship with the earth. I worry about those junkyard play spaces removing kids from what should be, arguably, a kind of ideal for a healthy ecosystem, not to mention an example and respite of beauty. Let's face it, people who work at Nature Centers are biased; we find nature itself, in its less-disturbed forms beautiful, and therapeutic. Dragonflies and sparkly clean, healthy ponds and milkweed and monarchs and Great Blue Herons are beautiful, and they are emblems of nature with a capital "N," because they remind us of the beauty of a functioning ecosystem.

tall grass prairie is lovely
...and itchy

Kids can learn a lot, I'm sure, from playing in a junkyard, and I'm sure that kind of play goes a long way to support "whole child" development too-- but not all the way. What's missing? What is missing is the child's relationship with the natural world, with the ecosystem. Instead of making a junkyard, clean up your municipal park, make it support more plant and animal life, make it more interesting and complex in the right ways. Make it a place where kids can climb living trees. If urban kids need a place to play, clean up the needles and condoms and then consider how that space can be a tiny haven of an ecosystem in the concrete jungle.

blind Fox snake;
kids & reptiles taking risks together

I know it sounds way less edgy, and it lacks that steam punk esprit de corps which I applaud for its whole-hearted urge to push the envelope, but I think children need examples of functional, healthy, natural beauty in their lives if they are to overcome nihilism and powerlessness, if they are to bond with and make good choices about the world we share with plants and animals.

Nature and health are rights, not privileges of course. If we take that stance, then we have a responsibility to develop and use play spaces with an eye to child development and an environmental ethic.  Places like Dodge Nature Preschool should not be enclaves and hang-outs only for REI denizens. Land-based learning should be supported and advocated in each and every community and municipality. As we know full well, kids today have to cope with tomorrow. Why create a dystopian playground to support risk-taking and development when you can court as much danger as you want playing in an actual ecosystem?

the closest thing to a junkyard playground at Dodge:
temporary play with trees, ropes, tires and a few barn boards

I'm all for adventure and risk and independence and autonomy in play, but I'm no nihilist. I think we can have risky fun, and support land-based learning, beauty and sustainability at the same time.

forest shoot out with stick arrows and yarn bows:
striking the balance between Waldorf and junkyard

kids, fire & mushrooms;
how much risk is too much?

Ice out!
Who doesn't want to take a risk come spring?

the first gesture of friendship might just be the biggest leap of faith

Lessons from the Flood, Again, and The Rivers Institute

tadpole study in a vernal, er, flood pond

Washouts, mudslides, sandbags, road closures, no wake warnings, crop loss, property loss, infrastructure damage and lost revenue...many communities in Minnesota are still reeling from a flood season that is stretching right through the summer.  Just this morning, a Prior Lake resident was on MPR citing increased development and subsequently increased acreage of impermeable surfaces in his community as major contributors to the run off that exacerbates flooding.  Climate change aside, it seems there has never been a more relevant time to discuss watershed issues in our state and beyond.

facilitator/teacher Melanie Grue supporting hands-on inquiry

In June, mid-flood, I had the opportunity to discuss watershed issues at Hamline University's 2014 Rivers Institute on the St. Croix. This three day, hands-on, site-specific course offers educators the chance to experience inquiry-based learning first hand, and to consider how to integrate watershed inquiry, and other studies, into their curriculum. The course is put on by Hamline's Center for Global Environmental Education, within the School of Education, and it is free to those teachers who apply and get a spot. The Rivers Institute turns out to be a great excuse to pursue issues of land-based, project-based, integrated education and curriculum. The focus of the Rivers Institute also happens to point out just how relevant, and necessary hands-on, land-based learning is.  Like it or not, the generations of kids we are educating are going to have to figure out how to swim in environmental circumstances and changes that threaten to overwhelm the globe. Kids have to get outside and understand our environment if they are going to grow up to engineer change and apply the science necessary to keep the world healthy and productive. Fortunately, educational institutions like Hamline, organizations like the Jeffers Foundation and educators like Cara Rieckenberg and Sil and Ed Pembleton are working in our communities to help teachers connect kids with our environment and to support integrated, land-based learning curriculum in our schools.

comparing tadpoles

Most of the attendees at the Rivers Institute were primary and secondary public school educators from our metro, and the majority seemed to be science teachers-- makes sense that these folks would self-select into a program with an environmental education focus. While my point of view as an early education generalist, with an environmental and experiential education focus, was certainly complimentary to the group, I was a bit of an oddball in terms of the population of the assembly. Over the course of my time with all these interested and interesting teachers, a theme emerged:  Dodge Nature Preschool, specifically, and nature centers in general, have some big ideas to contribute to the conversation about the future of public education, and to how we will grow the next crop of ambitious and creative scientists, technicians, engineers, artists and mathematicians.

If the hope for primary and secondary education is to finally fulfill the hands-on, project-based (now commonly called "integrated") curricular approach to learning propounded by John Dewey back in the day, then the teachers at Dodge have a mighty gift to offer our interested and concerned colleagues in the public schools. We can provide a great template for what integrated, hands-on, emergent learning looks like in its most basic form.

the shoes come off to find more frogs

During the Institute, we studied macroinvertebrates as part of our Project Wet training.  In order to actually and not theoretically study them, we had to find them.  I waded into the floodplain of the St. Croix right up to my hips. Right away I was rewarded with a water scorpion.  This aquatic insect can breath out of a snorkel-like bum and it has piercing mouth parts (inquiry can be exciting, with an element of danger!).  We study macros with our Dodge preschoolers all the time, laying on our bellies on our pond boardwalk and scooping up life in margarine tubs. We don't use the term "macroinvertebrate" and we don't necessarily classify all the life we find, or survey the population of the pond, but looking at our example of looking at an actual example, it is easy for a biology teacher to imagine how she could structure curriculum around this activity. And it is easy for a physical science instructor to see how designing vessels to sail the pond to learn about neutral buoyancy would be super doable. And a math teacher might like to think about how runoff impacts the volume of the pond. The history teacher could think about how new the pond is, and the history of ponds (or lack of them) in Minnesota agriculture.  The language arts teacher could ask students to write from the point of view of a pond animal, or the farmer who drained the pond-- but wait, that's getting at science and history too.  Whoa, the phy-ed teacher could teach kids how to canoe.  And the history teacher could piggy back with native american history and birch bark canoe construction and then the science teacher would have to chime in with buoyancy and then there's botany and why you harvest birch bark in spring, and a molecular physics layer over the same conversation, and the math teacher could propose calculations about the canoe itself, or how it displaces stuff.  Boy, one canoe on a pond could keep every teacher in the sixth grade busy for a long time.  Even the music and arts teachers could horn in on the act, with aboriginal art history and craft, the songs of the voyageurs-- wait!  The French teacher...

coping skills, resiliency and "grit," via tadpoles

So we do a lot of cool stuff on our Dodge ponds, but the St. Croix river supplied my first ever water scorpion. See, context matters too; learning can be very specific to place, to your place.  I am convinced that we at Dodge, with our place-based learning experience, can help primary and secondary teachers lobby for integration opportunities in their school systems by providing examples of simple, successful integrated curriculum.

It is just a matter of complicating this basic approach in order to accommodate the needs of K-12 teachers and kids. AND, we at Dodge who take 3-6-year-olds outside every day can also supply basic advice for getting over logistical hurdles and worries about getting outside; in over a decade of outdoor inquiry, we haven't yet lost a kid!

honing observation skills, and impulse control

So the passel of educators at the Rivers Institute spent a good deal of time on the St. Croix River itself. We used Interstate and William O'Brien State Parks as our bases, for exploration and discussion. Each participant was issued a notebook and encouraged to use it as a science student would, keeping detailed notes, charts and observations over the course of the three days as we trained and studied. This rigorous exercise alone, keeping a detailed notebook while outside, proved to be one of the big takeaways of the program. What follows is my list of observations and takeaways from conversations, experiences and break-out sessions with my fellows; I think you'll see the tie-in to how a place like Dodge can be the poster-child for inquiry-based education for any age and how we can help public school teachers support integrated inquiry:

General Observations
-public school teachers want to get kids outside for hands-on experiences
-teachers themselves enjoy hands-on experiences
-teachers know that an inquiry model is far more meaningful than a didactic approach for most learning situations
-public school folks want to give kids opportunities to conduct long-term projects
-public schools, in particular,  tend to have rigid schedules that leave teachers vying, with each other, for time; these schedules tend to compartmentalize inquiry--science, language arts, history, math etc--rather than integrate it.
-teachers worry about taking 30 kids outside by themselves
-teachers worry about taking time out of their curriculum schedule to go outside
-teachers worry about aligning inquiry with curriculum standards
-teachers generally seem to feel powerless to lobby for change in their own schools in order to address systemic hurdles to integrated, project-based education
-teachers realize that land-based education supports social and emotional development and provides very necessary physical regulation

Personal Takeaways
-young children at Dodge practice scientific-style observation daily, they even record their observations,  even pre-verbally, in journals-- the root of science notebooks
-Dodge teachers support inquiry-based learning over didactic transfer of information
-Dodge children become very practiced at learning through hands-on experiences
-Dodge students do not anticipate or expect knowledge to come from a sheet of paper; books are well-loved, but they support and enrich experience
-Dodge students actively follow their personal intellectual interests and advocate for further inquiry; our five-year-olds, for instance, routinely request tools, materials and more experiences to support their interests
-All learning at Dodge is interdisciplinary or integrated; literacy and math, for instance are developed through their necessary application in projects, like mapping our travels around the nature center, building a camera obscura or a sculpture, constructing a fort or creating a shadow puppet show
-Projects require children to develop or draw-upon a wide-variety of skills and teachers must be flexible in order to support the project and the skills; teachers, in turn, must be able to say, "I don't know, but let's find out," and they must be able to locate the experts, materials and experiences necessary to continue inquiry. *If the structure of a school day does not support flexibility and cross-pollination, it could be really frustrating to try to pursue inquiry and STEM or STEAM programming.
-Teachers learn with kids when they pursue projects and follow a model of inquiry.

sharing information

The Rivers Institute asked me to look harder at land-based inquiry and in turn, I thought harder about Dodge Nature Preschool and Dodge Nature Center's role in what I believe is a life-long approach to learning. What we do every day at the Preschool or at the Nature Center should not constitute a one-off or stand-alone interlude in a person's education and development; it's not just a field trip. Our efforts to connect people to our environment and to support the development of flexible, innovative thinkers should be part of an educational system that develops and propels citizens through life-long learning and career goals for the greater good of our communities and the planet.  Dodge can provide the example for how to effectively proceed. It falls to our children to solve the problems, fire the economies and populate the communities of the future. I am convinced that future generations will need land-based, hands-on, integrated learning experiences in order to face the floods, feed the hungry, fight the poverty, harness the energy, write the novels and compose the symphonies of the future. Amen.

macroinvertebrates show up too

Take a closer look at education in your community. How are kids learning? How do you want them to learn? How do they learn best? Are your schools using the environment for learning opportunities and whole child development? Do kids know what is happening outside, in their community? What watershed district do you live in? Do you know where your water comes from? Do you know where it goes? How about your garbage? No, really, do you really know? Do your kids know? Should they know things like that? Whose job is it to teach our kids things like that? Whose job is it to learn things like that? What does your kid want to do when she grows up?

My twins are about to celebrate a birthday.  I asked them to consider a gift for their sibling.  One looked at the other, "What do you want?"  Her sister replied, "World peace."  "Me too, but that's not going to happen." We all laughed. But it isn't so funny, is it? I don't want a totally naive twelve-year-old, but I want my child to feel the power of her own potential.

the future