Essays

Moseying: Outdoor Recreation Activities

The Sibley Nature Center has been doing Real-world inquiry education for 23 years
November 21, 2010

Newsweek recently published the following:

The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 'leadership competency' of the future. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities.  Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

At the Sibley Nature Center we have promoted "real-world inquiry" for all age levels for all of our 23 years of existence. For the youngest children we tell stories that describe plants to find along the trail. We tell what the plant looks like, and how animals and people use the plants in the story, and then the children have to use memory and observational skills to find the plant. With older children, we have the students collect a plant and insect specimen and then draw them, again encouraging the students to carefully observe details, and then try to figure out why the organism has the detail -- why does a plant have hair on it, or why male and female damselflies are colored differently, for example.

Older kids and adults are encouraged to do biological survey work, trying to record as many forms of life as possible in a given area, and then seek  the ecological connections between the organisms.  There is a vast amount of unknown knowledge waiting to be found in our bioregional landscape. Students, volunteers, members, and staff alike have all added to the body of knowledge about our region – and even discovered things unrecorded in scientific literature – from behavior of invertebrates to the presence of bird, snake, insect and plant populations previously unrecorded.

We publish a weekly one page newsletter for teachers to share with their students -- focusing on one organism they can find in an urban environment and then give both the teachers and students a challenge (what are the killdeer doing when they run on the playground, or why rolypolies are only found under something, or where longer lived spiders hide during the winter).

We often have out-of-town visitors arrive because of finding our website with its thousands of photos and hundreds of essays. Our website is renowned for its innovative bioregional focus – for example, recently Bill Scheer, the now retired County Extension Agent in Puyallup, Washington, who co-founded the Master Gardener Program (now an international group) visited us. Ro Wauer, retired chief naturalist for the National Park Service, visited us last week. 

We also post photos daily on Facebook, and at least one of the photos each day will have an analytical question for the 1050+ people that receive the page. Other nature centers and even State Parks have now adapted our method of using Facebook. We partner with other organizations and landowners and investigate not only the eight major habitats of the Llano Estacado, but also locations further afield. 

Our efforts in photodocumenting the biota of the Llano Estacado have received attention from state and national environmental education associations for several years. Along with other educators, we were recently invited to meet in Austin in December with staff from the Texas Education Agency and Texas Parks and Wildlife to discuss "real-world inquiry" programs and other methods of getting students and adults outside and knowledgeable about their very own surroundings.

For 23 years our mission has been focused on celebrating and exploring the diversity of life in the region, and preserving and sharing the stories of human interactions with our landscape. Once a person becomes interested in the out of doors, they step into a world of life-long learning. Once people learn the stories of their home, they develop a visceral emotional connection (also known as patriotism - the  love of home).  Exploring the world around you uses all five of your senses,  exercises the brain,  and enriches the soul!