Education Week - January 18, 2017 - 7

'Nature Preschools'
Spread Like Weeds
By Julie Depenbrock
Chevy Chase, Md.

At Audubon Nature Preschool, a
"classroom" can be a pond, a bamboo forest, a meadow, or a garden.
That's because Audubon is a "nature preschool"-one of a growing number of preprimary schools
where children spend all or part of
their days outdoors.
Five years ago, only a couple
dozen such schools operated in the
United States. Today, there are close
to 250, according to the Natural
Start Alliance, a coalition supporting early-childhood and environmental education.
The surge in nature preschools can
be partially attributed to Richard
Louv's decade-old best-seller, Last
Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.
Louv, a journalist and author,
theorizes that the shift toward nature-based education is happening
quickly at the pre-K level because
preschools can be less structured
than K-12 schools.
"Many preschools are private or
independent, so there's more flexibility there," he said in an interview.
Louv coined the term "naturedeficit disorder" to describe the price
of humans' isolation from nature,
including "diminished use of the
senses, attention difficulties, and
higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses."
Louv's ideas come at a time when
the prevailing trend in schools is
toward more academic instruction. And many believe the level
of academic rigor has ratcheted up
because of the Common Core State
Standards.
"Teachers are so tired of the direction that much of education has
been going toward," Louv said, "toward more and more testing, toward
canceling recess, toward longer
school hours, toward anything but
real experience in the real world."

A Different Pedagogy
In San Diego, Susan Seiguer, the
founder and lead teacher at All
Friends Nature School, has used the
early-childhood-education program
"Growing Up Wild" as her curricular
guidepost.
She also borrows the pedagogy of
a Waldkindergarten, or forest school.
At these schools, children between
the ages of 3 and 6 spend their days
outdoors, either in a forest or some
other natural environment.
All Friends enrolls 11 children,
with one teacher for every four to
six students.
"All of our days are spent outside,
rain or shine," Seiguer said. "There
is no facility."
"Some days we spend our afternoons building a shelter so we have
a shady spot to eat our lunch or just
to play in," she said. "Other days we
may go on a bug hunt and see how

many different types of insects are
living around us, counting the different types and learning their names."
While San Diego's temperate
climate may provide an ideal location for outdoor education, nature
preschools have also cropped up in
places with more extreme weather.
"One of the big things we say in
the nature-based-education world
is there's no such thing as bad
weather, only poor choices in clothing," said Madison Powell, the director of the Chippewa Nature Preschool in Midland, Mich.
Every Chippewa student has a
pair of waterproof, head-to-toe coveralls, as well as boots, gloves, hats,
scarves, balaclavas, and changes of
clothes and shoes for "indoor" school.
Children spend about half the day
outside, barring hazardous weather.
"If it's dangerous to be outside-
if it's dangerous to be in the elements-then we are inside," Powell
said. "We're not throwing them outside just because we're a nature preschool and we say we have to."
At Chippewa, four-day preschool
costs around $355 per month. Eligible parents in Michigan can apply
for tuition-free preschool through the
state-funded Great Start Readiness
Program. The Chippewa Nature Center also provides scholarship funding,
so no family pays more than 5 percent of its household income.
Powell said about half of the 140
students enrolled receive some form
of financial aid.

School Without Walls
At Fiddleheads Forest School in
Seattle, co-director Kit Harrington
said she keeps enrollment low to
strengthen relationships with families. This year, 42 students are enrolled and 180 are in a "waitpool."
(Tuition at Fiddleheads is close to
$800 a month.)
Like All Friends Nature School,
Fiddleheads has no building affiliated with its program. Students retreat to a heated greenhouse-which
has electricity and running water-
when high winds make it impossible
to be outside.
Otherwise, students' "classrooms"
are two forest groves in the University of Washington Botanic Gardens.
"We sort of are a bridge in between
what may be considered a more
typical forest school approach and a
more structured approach," said Harrington, a former Montessori teacher.
She co-directs the preschool with
Sarah Heller, whose background is in
environmental education.
In winter, Fiddleheads students
hike and explore the arboretum,
learning about natural science.
"We follow an arc of the year,"
Harrington said.
"At the start of the school year,
we really emphasize grounding the
children in the environment, helping them connect with the space,
developing a foundational aware-

Julie Depenbrock/Education Week

Pupils spend bulk of school days outdoors

Students and teachers gather at the Audubon Nature Preschool in Chevy Chase, Md. Pupils begin their days outside,
come together for a morning circle, and then head to learning centers. The day ends with a story and a hike.

ness of themselves in relation to the
environment," she said, "giving them
language to describe their emotional
and physical states, as well as giving
them an awareness of the expectations of the setting so they are empowered to have ownership over caring for the space and caring for each
other."
In the decade since Last Child in the
Woods was published, the volume of
studies on nature-deficit disorder and
the effects of green spaces on schoolage children has grown, Louv said.
A 2009 study from England's University of Essex, for example, concludes that "participating in physical
activity and experiencing nature play
an important role in positively influencing our health and well-being."
"Yet," the authors go on to say,
"physical activity levels have dropped
dramatically, and inactivity results in
1.9 million deaths worldwide annually, roughly 1 in 25 of all deaths."

'Containerized' Children
Likewise, Jane Clark, the dean
of public health at the University
of Maryland College Park, argues
that the current generation of children has been made sedentary-
"containerized" in strollers, car seats,
high-chairs, and all manner of accident-preventive secure seating, which
allows them little free movement.
"When they get to day care-I
used to say-if a parent could just
pass their child through the window,
they would," Clark said.
Clark drew a diagram from a
study in which three generations
were asked where they played as
children. The grandparent drew a
radius around the house, extending
several miles in each direction. The
parent's circle was smaller, but still
included much of the neighborhood
and the surrounding woods. Finally,
the child drew a circle with just the
house and the backyard.
There are a lot of reasons for the
shrinking play space, Louv said: the
advent of "stranger danger"-parents'
perceptions of threats to their children
from strangers, increasing urbanization, and the strong pull of technologybased and indoor entertainment.
The schools are not without some
criticism, though. "Certainly there
are many potential benefits to outdoor education, and they provide an
important alternative to the increasing and troubling amount of 'seat-

MULTIMEDIA: See what a school day looks like at Audubon Nature Preschool.

www.edweek.org/go/nature

work' and teacher-directed learning
that young children are faced with
in preschool, pre-K, and kindergarten settings," said Fikile Nxumalo,
an assistant professor of early-childhood education at the University of
Texas at Austin.
But she is "also concerned about
prevailing romanticized engagements with nature in many of these
schools-where there is this assumed 'natural' connection between
children and nature, and where nature is seen as primarily a site for
child development."
Nxumalo favors nature preschools
that take a more complex view of
the environment and define nature
education "within current ecological
challenges"-for example, discussing what it means to live ethically
with animals deemed "pests" and
dealing with litter in the natural
environment.

Problem of Access
Though she believes nature schools
are a step in the right direction,
Nxumalo also sees room for improvement, especially in ease of access to
these schools for many urban and
economically disadvantaged children.
"I think part of the risk of 'nature
preschool as passing trend' is that
nature preschool remains something
that is not widely accessible to children and families from economically
marginalized communities," Nxumalo
said. "I think this needs to change."
Louv is hopeful that the more
principals, administrators, and
school boards get involved, the better chance nature-based education
has of reaching the masses.
As for environmental barriers, he
contends that even in the densest of
cities, nature can be found. It may be
less sprawling than it is in the countryside, but it's there-and it's vital.
"Much of our pathology, I think, as a
species is we think we can go it alone.
The immersion in species not our own
is extraordinarily important. This is
who we are-it's part of our biology,
part of our humanity," Louv said.
At Maryland's Audubon Nature
Preschool, located on 40 acres of
nature sanctuary, students spend
as much time as possible outdoors,

said Director Stephanie Bozzo.
"The curriculum emerges from
what the children are interested in,
but we have a broad idea of which
spots on our sanctuary are most
appealing during the different seasons," Bozzo said.
Days at Audubon, which costs an
average of nearly $800 per month, follow a familiar rhythm. Each morning,
children begin outside, come together
for a morning circle, and go to learning centers where they move through
preplanned activities. Then, they read
a story and end the day with a hike.
If the weather is nice and no one
complains, Bozzo said, they might
spend the entire day outdoors.
Airen Hall has had two sons attend Audubon. Before moving to the
area, she said, her oldest had gone
to a traditional nursery school in
Syracuse, N.Y.
"In our experience, the difference
goes far beyond just the kids spending a lot of time outside," Hall said.
"The most important differences
are in the whole philosophy of the
program. [Audubon] is just such a
learning-rich environment. They encourage the kids to ask a lot of questions and explore and be curious."
Audubon parents choose from five
different classes: Acorns, Sprouts,
Saplings, and Oaks. Acorns have
class once a week for 90 minutes on
the sanctuary grounds. Sprouts and
Saplings divide their three hours between indoor and outdoor activities.
Oaks, dubbed forest "kindergartners,"
meet four days a week from 9 a.m. to
2 p.m. and spend half the day outside.
Bozzo tries to keep the children's
boundaries wide-"wider than typical teachers are comfortable letting
children explore," she said.
"Children don't necessarily feel like
they're being watched at all times,
which we think is very central to our
mission-that children are exploring
on their own and what they gravitate
towards is whatever they're intrinsically interested in," Bozzo said.
And each day is different.
"That's the beauty of nature-that
it's surprising and it's dynamic,"
Bozzo said.
Research assistance was provided
by Library Intern Laura Zollers.

EDUCATION WEEK | January 18, 2017 | www.edweek.org | 7

http://www.edweek.org/go/nature http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - January 18, 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - January 18, 2017