Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

If a child has never seen nature, what does the child see during a hike?
November 14, 2007

In 2006 Richard Louv published a book discussing the “Nature-Deficit Disorder” in which he called for “no child to be left inside.” Outdoor educators instantly championed the book, both in public school systems and in the private sector, including nature centers. He believes that outdoor experiences are crucial to the development of a child.

The Sibley Nature Center occasionally asks visiting students to write 100 words on their visit to the center. What follows are comments by a number of different 4th graders, and possible interpretations of the significance of their perceptions. Before going on the trail, the kids reported that they had never played outside in a “natural setting” of mesquite, yucca, cactus, and other native vegetation.

Several of the children noticed a beer bottle near a dead cotton rat whose head had been eaten. Both were given brief attention and received a comment of "Oh, gross!" The response by most of the children to both objects was a brief glance, a quick comment, and then instantly turning away. As a culture we sweep trash and death away, hidden from sight.

Another child noticed a fallen mesquite branch and imagined it flying away like a bird. Did all the objects this child saw have the potential for animation? What an incredible worldview -- that anything and everything might just go away, disappear, or fly off.

After the group passed the dead rat, another girl noticed what was left of a dead heron, a large marsh bird. (These animals died by a natural cause -- predation. Within a few days the remains disappeared as the scavengers did their work.) Instantly, she imagined a predator that might eat it. "We thought a snake would come and get it." To see two dead animals in a hundred feet stirred fear within her. She began asking if anything would attack us.

A few more feet down the trail, a cottontail rabbit took a few hops and then settled down. At first, all the fourth graders wished to try to catch it. "The rabbit was so cute and soft and gray," wrote the girl who asked about being attacked. She had written that the little fish in the pond were nasty, and that the rat's guts were "Yuck", but she ended her essay with "We had lots of fun." Seeing all of the natural world's processes had stimulated her in a positive way.

Another child heard the girl say a snake would eat the dead bird, and he wrote that the class saw a snake come and eat it. Competition among children to invent reality can be fascinating. The one-upmanship quickly becomes logically ludicrous, but the children adamantly insist upon the validity of their words.

In one child's story the half-eaten rat became a half-eaten bobcat. The snake story grew -- first that it was huge, then finally a girl wrote that the class saw a rattlesnake going into its hole. (We did not see a snake.) This was the second to last sentence in her essay. The last -- "Then we saw animal poop." Did this comment signify that she recognized that her imagination had gone far beyond believability?

One child used the first person singular case for her essay. Most used third person plural. In our supposedly individualistic society this was quite surprising. The child that wrote in first person said that she and her teacher experienced the walk together. Her descriptions of the dead cotton rat were the most vivid: "Its insides were green and a piece of the heart was sticking out." She reported that both she and her teacher almost barfed upon smelling the gasses of natural decay at the pond. Her memory of the lecture part of the visit was skewed. "Mr. Williams talked about dinosaurs." I talked about the buffalo prairie of only a hundred and fifty years ago.

Only one child was able to construct a narrative for his essay, instead of a collection of disjointed impressions of the visit. He wrote as if he was talking to me, not the teacher or another audience. Oral storytelling is the way that humans have organized our world for most of our shared history. The best storytellers are often the best organizers. Modern children mostly hear and see recorded video narratives – pre-packaged stories that are very different from their own.

Video stories are meant to be heard once, while in the oral tradition a story was retold dozens of times. The listener participated in its development, too, by asking questions or asking for parts of the story to be repeated. Part of this child's narrative was cinematic in style. "We watched the hawk coming into land in a dead tree, which caused us to see a bat house, but the bat house was empty." Video storytelling relies on visual cues to focus the observer's attention, revealing a mood, an idea, or an understanding that carries the story along.

A number of the children wrote non-stop "sentences" that were stream-of-consciousness lists of objects they saw. Most of the children attempted to report on all of the happenings of the visit to the center. Only one child focused on a single object. He wrote about a turtle shell, contemplating the cause for its demise. "Its shell was all scratched up. Maybe a bird ate that turtle. An animal ate that turtle." He made no other mention of anything that occurred.

Several children repeated themselves in their essays without even changing the words. One started making his letters bigger and bigger, to fill up the page, and yet another wrote about being told to write an essay about visiting the Sibley Nature Center. Many of the children saw the assignment as something to have finished as soon as possible, not as a way to share their experience.

Instead of idly commenting on the "cuteness" of a child's words, we should spend some time trying to perceive the world through their eyes, to better learn how to help them “make sense” of the world around them. We should also try to provide more outdoor experiences, along with encouraging the further development of their narrative skills.

Help your child learn about our native flora and fauna by buying our “natural calendar” products. Volunteer Ronna Porter created twelve wonderful paintings of the events that occur in the natural world on the Llano Estacado each month. Buy your children (or grandchildren) one of our coloring books, or a 2008 calendar. We also have sets of notecards with the same images.