Randy White & Vicki L. Stoecklin
Extensive research in children’s development and experience in early childhood education has shown that young children:
- Have unique learning styles that match their stages of development, which occur in an orderly sequence during their lives. All domains of development—physical, emotional, social, language and cognitive—change in a predictable way.
- Form their values in their earliest years.
The way children learn is completely different than adults. To be effective, children’s environmental education needs to be designed to match children’s developmental needs, interests, abilities and learning styles. Young children are active learners. Their best learning occurs with hands-on, interactive play and discovery rather than on trying to impart knowledge. Young children have a natural curiosity that requires direct sensory experience rather than conceptual generalization. To be effective and engage children based upon their developmental abilities and ways of learning, their hands-on sensory experiences need to be immersive and open-ended rather than structured and scripted. When it comes to environmental education, the best learning environments are informal and naturalistic outdoor nature-scapes where children have unmediated opportunities for adventure and self-initiated play, exploration and discovery.
“Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking and feeling and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.”— Jean Jacques Rousseau
Children experience the natural environment differently than adults. Adults usually see nature as background for what they are doing, as a visual aesthetic experience. Children experience nature not as background for events, but rather as a stimulator and experiential component of their activities. They look for its affordances, what it affords them to do. Children judge nature not by its asesthetics, but rather by the nature of their interactions with it.
Children have an innate biological tendency to bond with the natural world known as biophilia. For children’s natural inclination of biophilia to develop they must be given developmentally appropriate opportunities to learn about the natural world based on sound principles of child development and learning.
If children’s natural attraction to nature is not given opportunities to be flourish during their early years, biophobia, an aversion to nature, may develop. Biophobia ranges from discomfort in natural places to contempt for whatever is not man-made, managed or air-conditioned. Biophobia is also manifest in regarding nature as nothing more than a disposable resource.
Children have an innate biological tendency to bond with the natural world known as biophilia.
John Burroughs cautioned that, “Knowledge without love will not stick. But if love comes first, knowledge is sure to follow.” The problem with most environmental education programs is that they try to impart knowledge and responsibility before children have been allowed to develop a loving relationship with the natural world. Children’s emotional and affective values of nature develop earlier than their abstract, logical and rational perspectives. We need to allow children to develop their biophilia, their love for the Earth, before we ask them to academically learn about it and become guardians of it.
A problem with most young children’s environmental education programs is that they approach education from an adult’s, rather than a child’s perspective. One of the main problems is premature abstraction, teaching children too abstractly. Children do not even begin to develop the ability for abstract reasoning until age nine. One result of trying to teach to children at too early an age about abstract concepts like rainforest destruction, acid rain, ozone holes and whale hunting can be dissociation. When we ask children to deal with problems beyond their cognitive abilities, understanding and control, they can become anxious, tune out and develop a phobia to the issues. In the case of environmental issues, biophobia—a fear of the natural world and ecological problems—a fear of just being outside—can develop. Studying about the loss of rainforests and endangered species may be perfectly appropriate starting in middle school, but is developmentally inappropriate for younger children.
Children’s experiences during early childhood should nurture the concept of the child as a part of nature. It is during early childhood when children’s experiences give form to the values, attitudes, and basic orientation toward the world that they will carry with them throughout their lives. Regular positive interactions within nature allow children to feel comfortable in it, develop empathy with it and grow to love it. No one can love what he or she doesn’t know through intimate association. Not only are regular developmentally appropriate experiences in nature important, but also adults, both parents and teachers, need to model enjoyment of, comfort with and respect for nature.
About the Author:
Randy White is the CEO and Vicki L. Stoecklin is the Education & Child Development Director of the White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group, a Kansas City, Missouri-based firm that specializes in the design of children’s indoor and outdoor learning, play and leisure environments. Randy and Vicki can be reached via the company’s website www.whitehutchinson.com/children and at 816.931-1040
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