At a government boys’ school in Chennai, I showed the headmaster the various resources we have made for Chennai’s biodiversity and how we intend to use them at his school. Being connected to nature is being increasingly acknowledged in the world as crucial for all forms of well-being in children. I requested him for the environmental science period to run nature-based learning sessions. He explained that that time is used for extra science and maths classes. However, he added, “This stuff is interesting. We will have to find some other time for this. I want my boys to be interested in something meaningful; normal academics feels like oppression to most of them.” I was both surprised by and grateful for his openness to such a new pedagogy of learning. A year later, he will see that his children’s language capacities, interest in science, and motivation to learn have steeply increased through nature connectedness.
Last year, for the first time, the Earth Commission quantified boundaries for all the nine processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system: climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion, and release of novel chemicals. Research showed that six of the nine planetary boundaries are being crossed. ESBs plead for a radical reallocation of attention in the spectrum of education policies. It is important to learn about climate but also about the nearby wetlands, trees, heat, food, insects and community struggles. ESBs beg to differ on the articulation of the crisis itself, which splits climate from the rest as the most impacted. The crisis really is of diminishing life and living conditions. Climate change can be abstract, but the river, rain, butterflies, trees, and people are not.
To create learning spaces emplaced in the local living world comes with more challenges than mere text-based climate literacy. Yet India is full of powerful practitioners. ‘Nature Classrooms’ create a host of local nature-based resources which schools across Karnataka and other States use. Each year, the Youth Conservation Action Network trains a cohort of young teachers from various States, who then go back and establish nature programmes in their regions. The Canopy Collective and Green Hub in the Northeast train teachers to set up their own local nature programmes in the forest while simultaneously collaborating with biodiversity management committees.
The distinction these practitioners make is that learning is just not about nature; it takes places through and in nature. For human beings to grow as environmental stewards lifelong, direct engagement with nature is a necessary part of education, as Professor Louise Chawla points out. This needs to span meaningfully across developmental age groups, with younger children observing, playing in, and connecting with local nature and older ones interacting with more complex issues and learning to be active citizens of a multispecies society.
But nature education faces many hurdles such as access to nature itself; various structural barriers to practice direct engagement; and the absence of educators who can facilitate learning in nature and a pedagogy which can support such educators. A pedagogy of action and engagement can also only be place-based — unique to, say, Ladakh’s landscape in Ladakh or Mumbai’s landscape in Mumbai. “Direct engagement with nature works far better than traditional classroom instruction for the same objectives,” says Professor Ming Kuo. Connecting with local nature can boost both literacy and conservation attitudes together.
The time has come for local nature-based learning to become a crucial part of school education. This is among the urgent pleas of the collapsing Earth systems. In almost every district, there are practitioners and communities who can make such a policy and pedagogy a reality overnight, if only there is political will. Children need nature connection, and nature needs children growing up in it. If such a diversified policy entered the mainstream, within a generation we would have healed our lands, waters, and ourselves.
Yuvan Aves is an author, environmental activist and founder of Palluyir trust for Nature education and Research
