Learning outside the classroom works, but how do we do it?

4 Ways to Turn your kids into Social Demographers

This list aims (for any subject you teach) to deepen one’s relationship with their community and their local natural world. Distinct from formal demography, which focuses more generally on population composition and distribution, social demography investigates the social-status composition and distribution of communities.

1) Community Visioning
Take a walk; however, pose specific questions, dynamic relations are formed using mindful questioning with a sustainable lens. Activities in the module below are a few examples:
How is everything interconnected?
Should you care about others and/or your place?
Are the current ‘relationships’ (between humans, between humans and the ‘environment’, etc.) ‘continue-able’? ie. able to persist?
Are the ‘relationships’ fair?
Can you change the ‘relationships’?
**Simple & extremely productive activity that can be modified for any age Activity #3 Community Walk and Map page 33**

 2) Utilize sites to evoke a fact based world view:

Sites such as the Gapminder Foundation guides educators in constructing a fact based world view, priming students to crave researching the real world.**please note**review the data first on gapminder to ensure you are prepared to speak to stats such as ‘pregnancy rates in Sudan’ with young students.
Notably: ‘200 years that changed the world’

3) Solitude Spots from Steve Van Matre & The Institute for Earth Education :


As well as the ‘Wow’ and the ‘Aha’ included in placed-based learning, solitude and reflection are very much part of it too, and ‘Solitude Spots’ is a time when each student goes off to be alone in the natural world. The idea is that they might see and experience things they have never seen before thus, along with the other activities providing rich, firsthand experience with the natural world. Optimal engagement is for students to revisit the say spot every week, in silence, stationary and apart from others. Ensure this is modeled by the teacher/leader or one fails to “walk their talk”.
“Awakening people to the marvels and mysteries of daily life they are missing-increasing their perception by holding on to the childlike qualities of bubbling effervescent joy at being alive; their marvelous ability to totally immerse themselves in the moment, to lose track of time and space and just merge with the flow of life; their insatiable curiosity and sense of wonder about everything around them’. (Van Matre, 1979)
4) Clipboards/Pocket Log Books for writing in the lens of a researcher & social demographer:

Keep the assignment broad at first, instructing students to log field notes and see where this connects to outcomes of the curriculum or program of studies. Youth making a positive connection between math & community experiences (a positive experience needs to be well planned)  

Comments

Anonymous said…
I have something to say about number 3 and 4 above:

(3) It doesn't get any simpler and smarter than that....(Please have a look at my Time with Trees page on FB, https://www.facebook.com/pages/TimeWithTrees/202018593220175)...and yet the window for that opportunity seems to close awfully early these days, before adolescence really kicks in.

(4) Nature journaling is one version of this. With younger kids I have found that carrying around the journal is a distraction, and the "flow" of their outdoor experience can also be interrupted by stopping to take notes or sketch something. There's a bit of a conundrum involved. I read Clare Walker Leslie and David Sobel and I feel very inspired, but this very much has to be tailored to the age you're working with and the setting. I'm primarily in an afterschool setting so it's a little different and I'm still figuring this out.
May 13, 2012 at 7:22 PM
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