Making Them Feel Alive


This years weekly 'outdoor labs' with the grade 9 science class has lead to countless unexpected discoveries and local connections. We spend between an hour and two hours walking from the school to a local park outside the classroom, once there I use every possible teachable moment to visit the core curriculum in science and math.

Every year I see the same awful trend: if my activity I deliver is prescriptive, such as a lesson on environmental chemistry (for example, a textbook lab measuring PH of compounds with a variety of tools), the students demonstrate little to low retention of content.
Students are inherently interested in the activity due to the introduction of a tool that directly connects with the curriculum but drop interest in minutes as they have little connection with the learning, extrinsic motivation.

If the activity is non-prescriptive: take an assignment where students must design a brief survey for another grade 9 class on pollution in their community (predicting what questions they think other students will, should or will not know). Students not only demonstrate higher levels of retention, I witness a range of positives from less behavior problems to increased attendance. (much more on place-based adventures here)

After attending a few conversations at a recent ACEE conference, my oversimplified example of 'alive' teaching could be argued as a metaphor why mechanic teaching methods do more harm than good. No matter the location.

The refreshing complaint by two prominent environmental education visionaries at the conference is that the crisis failing to deepen students concerns about social issues and/or the environment is the fact students are taught prescriptive lessons.

Stan Kozak said it best (taken from my tweets):

26 Apr
"Learning locally is the best instructional method to connect students learning & the real world" Stan Kozak fr at


Better yet, when he shared his strategies on citizenship and environmental education titled 'Connecting The Dots'. His strategies had nothing to do with prescribed environmental activities and everything to do with trans-formative teaching techniques. All with a clear focus on making the students feel alive (from sharing responsibility to acting on learning to critical thinking)

Richard Louv, who also spoke at the gathering also delivered a stern warning to the crowd of environmental educators:


26 Apr
"You can get lost in studies of what makes healthy students-its about feeling fully alive" Keynote with fr


Louv, consistently reiterated that we are not doing enough for our students, he spoke to a crisis in environmental education is because teachers are not teaching in a meaningful way.

Another fact I appreciated was Louv used language that rarely spoke of teaching outdoors and spoke to making students feel alive and real, and as Kozak's 'Connecting The Dots' (and Steve Van Matre 40 years earlier) proclaims:



"Moves from pushing information, to students pulling it"

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