As modern culture expands, wilderness dwindles in its wake. It has become more challenging to create empathy for land through real experience. Luckily, there are people like Jim Lane. Jim teaches an Ecology and Conservation course for High School students. His approach gets students out in the bush to experience nature first hand. They learn about scientific observation, interconnectedness, ecology, history and colonialism all through observing nature. All this without leaving school property.
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Quotes
15.29 - 15.37: “A land ethic changes the role of a human from a conqueror to just a plain ordinary citizen of the biotic community.”
1.02.50 - 1.03.12: “I firmly believe that if we are going to really make changes at a global scale, we have to understand and appreciate the local, the hyperlocal environment and recognize our impacts on that. We have to be able to see the value of a tree and honour the stories that it has.”
Takeaways
Authentic learning (04.54)
Jim always wanted to be a high school science teacher, influenced by his teachers. As a child, he loved being outside and has turned his passion for the outdoors into a profession. He was mentored by someone to discover the connections between the different components of the outdoors, and he applies that experience to his teaching, to create an authentic place for students to understand those connections too.
Field ecology and conservation (12.40)
Jim has crafted his field ecology and conservation class for high schoolers to employ the investigative process of ecology to explore the outdoors. His students are tasked with designing a way to measure the forest. The empathy for the forest is developed as a product of that process. He teaches Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic to help students see themselves as part of the natural world. A ‘sit spot’ exercise involves authentic journaling of natural observations.
Sit Spot (20.19)
In interviewing former students, Jim learned that the ‘sit spot’ exercises had helped students overcome stress and gave them a space to process their feelings and find themselves, alongside discovering the dynamics of the natural world. Many students found such value in this exercise that they continued doing it at home or after they graduated. The grading for the course is also aimed to reinforce the authentic nature of learning and awareness.
Building empathy (30.14)
Jim reflects that hope and trust are important for students to feel engaged in a course such as this. He learns a lot from his students too, as he helps them dismantle myths about the natural world. He introduces them to different birds and their lifestyles, makes them taste the bark of aspen, or challenges them to write down observations of the forest from memory. “Those experiences where you are pushed beyond that comfort zone is where you start to build… empathy”, he notes.
“Knowing that there’re things you don’t know” (43.35)
Jim observes that land and most of the natural world don’t move in a timeframe that humans understand. He shows his students how the knowledge of just one tree can “not only unlock the history of the land that it grew on but also that history of the people on the land”. He also explains how he encourages his students to hypothesize the reasons for different tree processes.