In this article, I am not going to cite the latest research. I am not going to analyze how all of what I am espousing will fit into the target goals or the state standards. I will not spend time justifying the value of intimately experiencing creation to an educational system that sometimes seems to believe that inside is where all the education happens.
But also I am not going to stop going outside with my students.
I am a sixth grade teacher at Rockford Christian School in Rockford, Michigan. In tandem with my fifth-grade teaching partner, Julie Barrett, we have been allowed to call ourselves the RCS Environmental Program. We host and lead three different overnight experiences with our students—one per season during the school year. We have two class periods each week that allow us to be outdoors, and we use these opportunities to study various issues in creation. We visit parks and have discussions with caretakers. We learn about threats like pollution and garbage by visiting the local waste-to-energy facility, the recycling center, and the wastewater treatment plant. We have an ongoing relationship with a Christian camp, Camp Roger, just three miles down the road, and their staff allow us to visit frequently. We have had an Adopt-a-Highway sign in front of school, and therefore we are responsible for picking up trash along these two miles of highway twice each year. My students spend a lot of time outdoors. I recognize immediately that I am blessed to be able to educate using these opportunities. As a Christian educator, I cannot imagine teaching without them.
As stewards of creation, we have a biblical mandate to take care of the world that God has created. Picking up trash can be seen as merely a task, but we know it to be an opportunity to live out this responsibility. It can be argued that this alone makes us environmentalists and not necessarily faith-based people. So if this is indeed a reflection of living out our faith, how do we keep God in the center of what we do?
In our program we never refer to the outdoors as “nature.” It is always spoken of as “creation.” A simple semantic ploy, perhaps, but one that inherently reflects the existence of a Creator. He is the author of all beauty. We can marvel at a beautiful piece of art, but we don’t worship the art. We are instead amazed at the skill of the artist. By getting outside often, we can point to the majesty of the God we serve.
While it should seem obvious, I also believe we are living in an age when safety and comfort and videos and technology rule the lives of our children. These things insulate today’s children from the adventures of playing outside after school. Without becoming the critical old uncle in the corner at family reunions who wishes to tell everyone about what is wrong with kids these days, I do want to point out that our children do not have the opportunities to run outside, get muddy, build forts, and learn to appreciate the outdoors that I had when I was younger. By not having these experiences as children, I fear ignorance and apathy toward the created world will be evident in these same people as adults.
But there is another component to all of this inaction. If we hope to train up our children to appreciate the importance of the created world and to wonder at its intricacies, how can that be done without immersing them in that world? Test tubes and microscopes certainly help, but so does the wind in our faces, the smell of the woods after a gentle rain, the sounds of bird calls and their activities. This is what can spark curiosity in our students, but we have inadvertently erased these opportunities by keeping them inside for the vast majority of their education. When we keep them in the classroom all the time, we miss a perfect chance to create lifelong learners and lovers of creation. If we hope our students see the importance of creation as adults and learn to recognize their role as advocates for it, we need to give them positive experiences now while they are young.
Let me illustrate this with an example from my school. Over the last two years, my class has been building a half-mile long trail in an adjacent woodlot. We had to seek permission from the land owner, because our campus is well-manicured with ball fields and beautiful lawns (a friend of mine labeled it a “sod farm”). The trail has bridges and stairs that were built by the students using repurposed wood, which by itself serves as an illustration of reusing our resources. Some nails are bent, some spacing between the boards is inconsistent, but student-built efforts offer student-felt achievement. There are fourteen guideposts along the way, and each one is numbered with a small sign that was routered out and painted by the students. Each post signifies a point of interest along the trail that students identified and described in a shared script. My students are the trained tour guides on this trail, interpreting the things that are seen and learned at each post; we have led different groups of guests (younger students, visiting families looking for a school home, even a couple of random adult groups from outside our school community) on nature hikes. All this increases ownership in “our trail” and also serves to motivate our students to take care of this parcel of God’s world.
Once we, as a class, have established the value of creation in the mind-set of who we are and whose we are, then we can begin noticing how this world is broken. We have a renewed sense of horror at the floating garbage patches in the ocean. We feel outrage at six-pack rings around the necks of herring gulls. We feel deeply when we see oil-coated sea animals following a spill in the ocean. While these images are universally abhorred, my students are also learning to recognize the more subtle instances of creation in crisis. It may be how a hillside is slowly eroding into a nearby stream because the foliage has been removed. It could be the spread of an invasive species in our woodlot that mandates attention. It may include the importance of composting rather than filling a landfill unnecessarily. These observations can then be followed up with action plans, again designed by students, to work at the restoration of small parts of God’s world. This then is where the power of “I can do something” is realized.
I understand and have heard the counterarguments about how we as teachers do not have enough time in the day to get all our curricular demands covered. We are individualizing and managing and hurrying and planning and documenting all day long. But I also understand and have seen that these outdoor experiences can deepen learning, form a child’s genuine appreciation for creation, and, ultimately, nurture a relationship with the Creator. State standards do not always measure or quantify this, yet I know it all to be vital in the character development of my students.
Phil Warners has followed a strange career path. He was a classroom teacher for seventeen years, took sixteen years off to work at a Christian camp, and returned to the classroom four years ago. Currently Phil teaches sixth graders at Rockford Christian School (Rockford, MI) while the sixth graders in his class continue to also teach him. He enjoys long-distance backpacking trips and resurgent health following a scary cancer experience. Phil has one wife, six children, two sons-in-law, five grandchildren, and a really cool pick-up truck.
