Forest schools are not only wonderful for children’s wellbeing and learning, but they could also be fundamental for long term sustainability. This article explains how nurturing children in nature from young can help with conservation efforts long term.
What is sustainability?
When I was in my early twenties, I spent several months living in an eco-community in the desert in the South of Spain. A beautiful, run-down, sun-baked valley peopled with food growers, permaculturists, hippies, turtles and stray cats. In the garden there was a hand-painted sign. Created long ago, now chipped, it read: If you want to know if something is sustainable ask yourself – can I do this forever?
For me, this question cuts through the greenwash, the jargon, the myriad ways with which this word is thrown around, to the very heart of the issue. The etymology of the word sustain speaks to the concept of ‘giving support’, and ‘holding up’. Also a sense of enduring. It is these readings of the word sustain that colours the work that we do with children in the woods.
Forest School through the season
At our Forest School nursery, children enrol for a minimum of a year. However, most children join at the age of 2 ½, and stay for two years, before they go to school. Spending this formative time immersed in the woods is an experience that embeds itself in their developing psyches. It is the most experiential way to teach children about sustainability that I know. The children begin their time in the woods in September, in mushroom season. They learn to spot fungi at the base of trees, to let their friends know what they’ve found, to check a guidebook to see if they can identify it. They learn that we do not touch mushrooms with our hands, only poke them gently with a stick. They learn the hard way what a puffball mushroom is, and what it does!
As the seasons change they learn about the changes to the light and the effect this has on the leaves. They learn what deciduous means, and play in the falling leaves. And they discover the value of the evergreens: playing in the safety of Ivy Palace in the depths of Highgate Woods when all of the other trees are bare; climbing its ladder of horizontal branches. The children learn that the birds eat berries in deepest winter, and so we gather a few blackberries but leave the rest for the robins, crows, magpies that they learn to name. A robin visits us each morning at snacktime, so we sprinkle a few crumbs each day.
We play in the snow, and the slush after the snow, then the mud left after the slush is gone. We pull on waterproofs so that we can play in the woods in any weather, and we celebrate the rain by jumping in the puddles. We notice the buds on the blackthorn before anyone else, because we are in the woods each day down at toddler level, and we spot the hawthorn leaves unfurling early in the spring. The children learn to spot each small change and to celebrate the changing of the seasons. With change comes loss, and the woods teaches us this too. As the trees become leafy once more the children discover they can no longer see across camp, and the landscape changes completely. The playscape changes as they develop: suddenly they can hide behind the bushy foliage, and so we must grow our trust in them, as they become more confident.
We miss the fungus in the summer, and so instead we gather flower petals for hapa zome, practising our fine motor skills and experiencing the magic of natural dyes. As is the gift of foraging, we understand the brief season of each plant, its finite nature, and we take only a little of each. And in exchange for the many ways that the woods sustains us, giving us resources and opportunities for play, we teach the children to reciprocate their care.
Reciprocal care in the woods
We leave most of the berries for the birds, most of the flowers for the insects. We offer sleepy bees water and we turn over the bugs who we find struggling on their backs. We bury dead birds with ceremony, and we test the branches we climb on with a small bounce to make sure they are strong enough to hold us without breaking. These children learn that they are a part of the woods. They do not yet know of the innumerous cases of humans destroying natural environments. Nor have they received the message, perpetuated by many contemporary conservation efforts – that humans must stay away and leave nature to itself. Instead they learn each day that we are a part of this environment – that we always were and we always will be, if we can sustain these ancient woodlands and protect them for the future. These children discover that the woods is a place that gives them shelter from rain, shade from sun, wild food, animal friends and endless invitations to play.
As a part of their natural and healthy development, children play with their power. They play with the creative drive, and the drive to destruction. This is a vital part of development, of growing up and discovering the impact you can have in the world. The woods is the place to learn this. Each child at some point builds a den. Perhaps their friend builds a den. And each child at some point must knock down their den. Perhaps their friend’s den too. Just to see what happens. To experience the thrill of the clatter of the logs, the collapse of the delicate structure. Their friend’s tears, even. Each child too will snap a flower off its stem. Rip every leaf off a stalk. Run after a bird and scare it out of camp. And therein lies the learning. The den can be rebuilt, the friendship too, in time. But the bird will have to be coaxed back into camp with breadcrumbs, and the flower will not come back this season. Actions have consequences, and the woods is an interactive place in which to learn this. Cree and Rob conclude: ‘the familiar song of the robin is part of the Forest School community, and while we value its company, we need to respect its home and take care of the community. The reciprocal feeling with the robin has the comparable worth of a rainforest or coral reef’ (1).
Toddlers and tools
We can extend our engagement with the woodland, and our discoveries of our own powers to create and destroy, using tools. The sight of toddlers wielding saws, hammers and axes is a sight you will never forget. The sight of two toddlers helping each other to use a bow saw to cut a log in half, or using a froe to split wood for the fire, reminds us that these children are the environmental stewards of the future. We use only hand tools in the woods – flints and steels to light fires for cooking, mallets to hit pegs when we create shelters. In doing so, we engage more deeply with the woodland as a resource that can be renewable only if we do not exploit it. We remember that wood can be fuel, that stakes and binders from coppice woodlands can be fences, that a hedgerow is a habitat. Each of these acts of tool use is an act of transformation.
Cree and Robb write that ‘being able to make an item from a tree that you can harvest and then used to produce something of utility, while consciously honoring this, provides access to, and gives voice to the more-than-human world’(2). These simple tools enable us to work with the woodland in a way that is sustainable, that factors in the delicate balance of its ecosystem, but that allows for an interaction with the woods where so much more can be learned than if we simply left alone. Including children in that work develops their relationship with the woodland profoundly. By teaching children to look after the woodland in reciprocation of the ways in which the woodland cares for them, we give them a message that humans can be forces for good within a habitat, if we proceed with care.
Education for sustainability
At the ages of 2 and 3 our brains and neural pathways are still forming. In later life we can consciously recall very little, if anything, from these years. And yet, the experiences we have during these years, and in particular the attachments that we make, form a key part of our development. If we experience the reciprocal care of a woodland during these formative years, we carry this sense with us for the rest of our lives. While talking about the transformative potential of Forest School for young children, we must take a moment to look around us at our context. As a result of rapid urbanization of environments and the population over the twentieth and twenty first century, children’s access to the natural world has been shrinking correspondingly.
A culture of outdoor play in urban areas has been replaced with ‘stranger danger’, fears of traffic and an unwillingness or inability to give children hours of unstructured time to explore (3). So often this has a socio-economic correlation: parents working long hours on low wages are unable to supervise their children, who must then stay indoors; families living in polluted or built-up areas do not have access to local wild spaces. While acknowledging the importance of access to outdoor space, and to curated, long-term experiences of nature connection, we must also consider which children have access, and which do not. Bringing Forest School to all primary schools, so that all children can participate in their early lives, is a vital part of developing the breadth and potential of this educational method (4).
Education for sustainability is a critical part of the work that needs to be done in these times. One element of making education sustainable, is to pass this knowledge on to children. This generation will grow up to discover the damage done to wild lands at the hands of humans, and will be well served to act differently when it is their turn to act, with the inherent knowledge of how to exist peacefully within an ecosystem, embedded in them at the age of 2. As David Sobel so eloquently writes: ‘If we want children to flourish, to be truly empowered, we must first allow them to love the earth before we can ask them to save it’.
References
- Cree, Jon, and Marina Robb. The Essential Guide to Forest School and Nature Pedagogy. Routledge, 2021. p. 13
- Cree, Jon, and Marina Robb. The Essential Guide to Forest School and Nature Pedagogy. Routledge, 2021. p. 296
- Wilson, RA, and D.A. Simmons. “Helping Children Learn to Love the Earth Before We Ask Them to Save It:.” Dimensions Educational Research Foundation, https://dimensionsfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/helpingchildrenlovetheearth.pdf. Accessed 9 August 2022.
- Knight, Sara, ed. 2011. Forest School for All. SAGE Publication
- Sobel, David. Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education. Orion Society, 1996
