Naming and framing nature

Direct experiences of nature during childhood can be formative in developing caring relations with the natural world, and adults can not only enhance these experiences, but also learn from and with our children. By being mindful of how (and why) we name the world around us, and framing nature as a vibrant, interconnected system that we are part of, adults can make it easier for children to understand how and why to care for local and global ecosystems. 

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If you have young children, getting outside has probably been an essential way of coping with the recent lockdown, whether at home or in local green and blue spaces. Hopefully, this will have been the seed of many conversations, stories, games and questions in both familiar and new places. I love listening to children making sense of places through dialogue with themselves, peers, or adults. Thinking about how these interactions emerge and how they might affect children's perception of the world around them has become a big part of my research. In this short blog, I want to draw on this to consider how we might use language to support children to develop close relationships with local places. The two main strands I want to focus on here are naming and how adults frame experiences with nature through language and modelling.

Names are powerful things. 

To name another being is to assert some form of knowledge of them – we ‘know’, or at least know of, the people in our lives who we can name. When we extend this beyond human acquaintances, the ability to identify or name is linked with knowledge of certain fields or subjects, which are in turn closely tied up with our identities. Gardeners can name plants, mechanics can identify parts of an engine, birdwatchers name birds based on flight, plumage or song. The names of places can tell stories and point to past ecologies; they help us to better know a place through time, to notice what was important to those who came before us, to situate ourselves, even to begin decolonising processes. 

A word-mntn from Glen Girnock, produced as part of Gathering, an eco-poetic guide to the Cairngorms.

© Alec Finlay.

Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris remind us of the importance of names in natural history with The Lost Words, their beautiful book of ‘spells’ which mourns the removal of many nature words from children’s dictionaries. Like storytellers the world over, Macfarlane and Morris know that there is strong magic in knowing and using something’s ‘true’ name, but why does it matter whether children know the difference between an acorn and a pinecone, and is that all they need to know? How will that help us solve the consumption-induced crises we face? 

Image: The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris

Of course we need to nurture more in our children than an ability to correctly identify plants and animals in their local ecosystems, but learning, or making up names helps us to see diversity, understand networks of relationships and think ecologically. Our knowledge of a thing, including our ability to ‘name’, is closely linked to the process of perception. How we perceive the natural world affects how we relate to it, which in turn affects how and why we might act to care for it. 

 Sometimes listening more closely to our children is good place to start. The Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmererputs if far better than I ever could when she writes,

"Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion - until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into "natural resources." If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice."

 This resonates with me because when I first started trying to make sense of how young children perceive the natural world, I kept coming back to a somewhat strange example - diggers. As we live on a perpetually unfinished building development, my son was very interested in diggers when he was younger, and I kept noticing that in his speech, and in the way that I intuitively spoke with him, the diggers had agency. They had life force. "The digger is digging… What's it doing now? Is it making a big hole?" It wasn't Davy, the digger operator who was doing things, it was the machine itself.

Image: Digger to the Rescue by Mandy Archer and Martha Lightfoot

We talk like this about a lot of things with children, whether they're objects or other living things - police cars, toys, animals. Sometimes it's because they're acting as a representation or stand in for a 'real' living thing, such as a toy squirrel ‘being’ a squirrel, but in other situations it’s because we are trying to navigate the grammatical grey areas of something's identity or ability to act in the world. For example, we might not think that nettles have much agency in relation to humans, but the cry is usually, "The nettle stung me!", rather than "I brushed against a nettle!" 

Being able to name other (agential) beings, whether they are diggers, nettles or bumble bees creates space for us to enter into relationships with them. What happens if adults start to take this seriously and think about how earnestly the rest of nature is going about the process of living? How can we make the most of this ‘vibrancy’ that young children bring to the natural world? 

 At a general level, how we ‘frame’ nature can be very powerful. Cognitive frames are ‘stories about an area of life that is brought to mind by particular trigger words’, and framing is ‘the use of a story from one area of life (a frame) to structure how another area of life is conceptualised’ (Stibbe, 2015, p. 47). There are lots of ways we can frame nature – threat, wild, home, magic, machine – and this affects how we perceive the world. For example, if we talk with children about ‘our bees’, or how ‘we havelots of wildflowers in the fields around us’, we inadvertently frame nature as a resource. In this framing, nature is referred to mainly in relation to humans, and is of value in relation to our ‘needs’. This opens up cognitive pathways that make it easier to use or exploit nature in the same way as other (economic) resources. If we frame ecosystems as machines, we open up the idea that one component can simply be replaced with another. I wonder what might happen if, in dialogue with our children, we reframe little things like those examples as ‘the bees who visit the flowers here’, or ‘there are lots of wildflowers growing in their meadows’. It might even help change how we adults see the world. For more on how framing might affect attitudes and values towards conservation and the environment, check out the Common Cause for Nature report.

 Some children are really interested in specific plants and animals and might constantly be asking, ‘What’s this?’, but if not, adults can bring attention to biodiversity and ecological systems just by getting down low, pointing and starting a conversation about what we see. For some adults, this can be a double blow to our confidence, highlighting our own lack of knowledge of the natural world around us and making us feel discomfort when we’re unable to ‘pass on’ knowledge. However, by challenging the expectation for transmissive forms of learning about the environment (where adults know things, and teach them to children), parents and caregivers can begin to learn with, from and for their local environments and their children, through listening, noticing and researching.

Image: Following stonefly husks down the burn © Chris Mackie

It’s okay not to know the name of a plant, bird, or insect that you see. But don’t ignore them – stop and quietly bring your own attention to them and see if your child’s follows. Listen, both to the non-human being in front of you and the child beside you. If you’re going to talk, try to use open questions or statements that invite both human and non-human perspectives. Try to value the child’s understanding and names that might emerge, even if they’re not ‘correct’, perhaps by explaining that different people might use different names for the same thing. 

The same applies to places, as I’m sure you remember from your own childhood inventions, overlaid on a palimpsest of other names. In my family, for example, we have The Oven Tree, Woodpigeon Woods, The Pooh Stick Bridge, The Holly Den, The Badger Woods and so on. Some research suggests that just feeling a sense of awe, or wonder might be important in healthy human-nature relations, and giving children time to come up with and articulate their own understandings of the world is one way to foster this. With young children, it’s particularly important to give them time to respond to a prompt or a question before following up or re-phrasing – at least five seconds!

When no other grown-ups are listening, why not try saying ‘Who’s that?’, or ‘I wonder who’s been along here’ rather than ‘Whattype of bird is that?’, or ‘What left these tracks?’. Does it change your own way of thinking about other living beings? Thinking out loud with phrases like, ‘I wonder what Robin (or Horse Chestnut) is doing today,’ opens up lots of possibilities for both creative and ecoliterate responses from you, the child and even the animals or plants you’re observing, and it also takes the pressure off you to be able to give a clear cut answer. It creates space to follow up with, ‘I wonder how we could find out more?’, by using some of the great books, identification guides and apps that are available to us to extend learning through experience. For example, you might want to check out the resources available from The Field Studies Council, the RSPB, and the Wildlife Trusts, or participate in citizen science initiatives like iSpotNature.

Image: Photographing mute swans, Wester Lovat. © Chris Mackie

References

Kimmerer, R.W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions

Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics. Routledge.

Noticing change in times of uncertainty

This post was originally written for SNH’s blog, Scotland’s Nature.

Across Scotland and beyond, we are all adapting to the measures put in place to minimise the impacts of COVID-19. For many parents and carers, this means juggling work and caring for children in novel ways while schools and early learning and childcare settings are closed.  Many parents are no doubt being bombarded by advice and ideas of what they can or ‘should’ be doing to support their children’s learning at home from a range of sources, and I don’t want to add to this cacophony. In times like these, which in this country we are fortunate enough to consider extraordinary, parents’ and educators’ primary concern should be the emotional and physical health and wellbeing of their children and themselves.

©Chris Mackie

Being outdoors and in contact with the rest of the natural world is one way we can – while still following government guidelines – look after ourselves and our children. We know that spending time with nature can enhance our wellbeing in a range of ways, from promoting physical activity to boosting mood and developing our connection to the natural world. Miles Richardson of the University of Derby has recently suggested some ways to get a nature fix, even if you can’t leave the house. As a parent, and a researcher working with young children to better understand how they come to know the natural world, I’ve been thinking a lot over the last couple of weeks about how restrictions on people’s movements might be affecting children’s lives. In this post, I want to consider how staying-at-home is making some things – both positive and negative – more noticeable.

©Chris Mackie

Being told to stop and stay at home prompts us to take notice of our home-places. I want to think about two distinct forms of this, and how being mindful of each might shape how we do things on the other side of the lockdown measures. At the outset, it’s important to acknowledge that these are extraordinary times, full of individual and collective suffering and we’re all trying to do our best with what we’ve got. However, when it comes to things like quality housing, greenspace, mobility and healthy, local, sustainable food, access is not always equitable, and that’s looking at it only from the human side of things.

The first form of noticing we might engage in relates to how our lives change when we have to re-localise them, even temporarily. There are different aspects of this that I could concentrate on, such as food sovereignty or low-carbon transport, but I want to focus on how important access to natural, outdoor spaces must feel suddenly, particularly to families with children. On a ‘normal’ day at school, a primary-aged child might expect to spend nearly an hour and a half playing outdoors as an integral part of their school day, aside from any formal outdoor learning. The UK Chief Medical Officer’s physical activity guidelinesrecommend that 3 and 4 year-olds “should spend at least 180 minutes (3 hours) per day in a variety of physical activities… including active and outdoor play.” As I said at the start, the circumstances that we’re living through are not normal, but noticing how much our children need safe outdoor places to play might start to shift how we value greenspace in our local communities and our schools. It also makes visible existing inequalities, which might be amplified or reduced at present.

For those with gardens or who live in rural areas, some children may be spending moretime outdoors and active than normal, but in urban areas,  small pockets of greenspace will be subject to very high levels of use as people make the most of what’s available to them in short bursts. This also flags how dependent on private transport some forms of outdoor recreation are. We have already seen tensions emerging in some parts of the country as authorities seek to balance the public health benefits of exercise in local parks with the need to enforce physical distancing. On the other hand, reduced road traffic at present probably means that parents and carers feel differently about children cycling, running and scooting close to home.

Does (green) infrastructure support all of the members of your community equitably?  By actively noticing what’s different, what’s working well, what’s not, and trying to understand why, we can start conversations within our families and communities about what is important to us that might be extended beyond ‘lockdown’.

The second form of noticing that seems to be important at the moment is noticing the natural world around us, however we can. Several times over the last few weeks, I’ve been very grateful that we’re going through this during spring rather than autumn or midwinter – Earth is waking up, other beings are busy, changes and rhythms beyond the human continue. Noticing this might take different forms. You might be taking part in the RSPB’s #BreakfastBirdwatch, planting seeds in a garden or pots, or following the same path daily and seeing buds open or early flowers bloom. Research shows that noticing ‘good things’ in nature every day can increase nature connection, and many forms of mindfulness practice are grounded in processes which bring us into awareness of other beings and systems. As the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh writes in Love Letter to the Earth, “When we sit with this kind of awareness, we can embrace the whole world, from past to future. When we sit like that, our happiness is boundless.”

When we engage in these processes, of looking, listening, acknowledging and caring for the non-human around us and when we look to natural rhythms for peace and certainty, we show our children that this is something worth doing for ourselves and other beings. In times like these, children are learning more than ever from our responses to what’s going on in the world – remembering this is just as important as making sure you can log into Google Classrooms. Whether paying attention to nature around you is new or a familiar ritual, maybe you’ll start to see things differently from your window, in your garden or in your local greenspaces. Ask yourself whether some humans or other living beings are privileged over others. What would it look like if multiple species and people could flourish in the same space? In taking the time to notice, especially if accompanied by clear-eyed children, maybe we’ll come up with some good answers.

There are lots of ideas for ways to connect with nature on the Outdoor Learning Directory website. Many of the activities suggested by organisations like the RSPB and Learning through Landscapes can be adapted to suit a range of environments at home or as part of your daily local exercise, and hundreds of outdoor learning ideas have been compiled at Creative Star Learning. In my next post, I’ll share some of my experiences spending time with my own son, concentrating on language as a way to make sense of the world and how this might affect how children relate to the natural world. In the meantime, stay safe and take time where you can to pay attention. Old and young humans alike might find some peace in the emerging patterns of Spring, however we can acknowledge them.

Coming to know our natural community through education. Countryside Jobs Focus blog.

This post was written in the middle of lockdown and originally published in Countryside Jobs Focus.

I'm writing this at a time when it's hard to think of anything beyond COVID-19, the measures that are in place to mitigate its spread and the human tragedies playing out across the world. Our schools, nature reserves and field centres have been closed for weeks now, access to natural environments is patchy and inequitable and 'normal' already feels unfamiliar. My 'normal' is working towards a PhD thesis which tries to document what happens when young children and teachers at two schools go outside. I use video and observations to better understand how everything interacts - humans, activities, stories, plants, toys, birds, weather, computer games. What I'm hoping to find out is how any of this relates to care for the natural world and learning for sustainability. 

I had planned to write something here about how outdoor or environmental education can't, and doesn’t exist outside of social and cultural systems, and what that means if we hope it might support young people to develop skills and values to live within the means of our planet. But it feels hard to speak in generalities, or to think about what things will be like 'after' this global trauma. Maybe I can touch on some of it by thinking about what we're all living through.

We’ve already had to adapt to big adjustments in our daily lives. We’ve been reminded of all the functions that schools and other institutions perform just below the surface. Schools feed children, provide safe outdoor spaces for play, refuges for our most vulnerable children. Beyond the more crucial and subtle processes of Earth, parks, paths, woods and other greenspaces also allow us humans to exercise, find peace and maintain our wellbeing in the face of crisis. As such, we cannot ignore how unequal access to quality greenspace is, particularly in urban areas. 

Having to change how we do things recently has exposed the complexity of the systems we depend on and are part of. People have adapted their behaviour out of care, or maybe even love, in order to protect others. Presumably we aren't staying at home just because we understand the science, or because we've been told to, but because we understand that our actions have consequences, particularly for the most vulnerable members of our communities. We're aware of how we relate to the other humans around us, and we do our best to act ethically, even if it affects what we want to do.

This process should be at the heart of environmental or sustainability education - the hope being that we can extend this care, concern or love beyond our human communities. Educators aspire to help others not only 'understand' what's going on around them, but foster relations that allow them to be 'response-able', to act in caring ways. As Aldo Leopold wrote, “We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in... It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land and a high regard for its value.” 

However, it’s easy to imagine how this often plays out in real world outdoor and environmental learning - the young child carefully relocates a ladybird, builds a bug hotel, hugs a tree or plants a seedling. But then they sit down to a snack from home, a tiny nugget of mass deforestation and biodiversity loss wrapped in plastic, or leave the clean water that they've been kick sampling behind and return to the polluted air or monoculture lawns of their communities. This sounds cynical, but when we look seriously at learning (not just children's) in context and in all its complexity and ask, "Does this demonstrate love, respect, and admiration for land and a high regard for its value?", I'm not sure we always get the answer we hope for. 

This isn't necessarily because we're doing things wrong, but that human individuals are entangled in systems so complex (and compelling) that isolated interventions are ineffective in the face of  global forces and the discourses, or stories, that give them power. This isn’t news of course - when Donella Meadows outlined places to intervene in a system, back in 1999, the two most effective and challenging were the paradigm out of which the system arises, and the power to transcend paradigms. Thomas Berry’s words from over 30 years ago still ring true:

"We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story… The Old Story - the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it - is not functioning properly, and we have not learned the New Story."

Integrating new stories (and there should be more than one) of the world should be a core part of all education. New ways of framing the world might integrate rather than separate scientific, embodied, cultural and aesthetic knowledges. Direct experiences of the natural world are rich starting points for developing relations that might position humans as more response-able members of the biotic community.  However, only by extending and integrating these beyond 'environmental', 'outdoor' or 'sustainability' education into experiences that make sense as part of a coherent (if changed) culture is this likely to have a significant effect. Parents, early learning and childcare practitioners, teachers, pupil support assistants, gardeners, farmers and specialist environmental educators all have a lot to learn from each other, and alongside policy-makers, government and cultural creators, have a responsibility to craft a society whose culture shows our children why and how we value and care for the world around us.

If learning in, for, about, with and from rich natural environments were a core part of citizens' lives, the ethical decisions that we make every day would hopefully become clearer, if not necessarily 'easier'. If we can raise our children to know that we are members of a natural community, in reciprocal relation (meaning that it's not just about taking) with the other living beings and systems of this planet, then I think there's hope. As we see right now in our human context, people are willing to make sacrifices and adapt their behaviour because they care about members of their community. Our job as educators is to find ways to nurture the energy held in that relationship through joy, not just fear.

Outdoor learning and care for the natural world

This post was written for SNH’s blog Scotland’s Nature, published in February 2020.

In higher education, you’re often told that as your journey progresses, your field of inquiry goes from ’broad and shallow’ to ’narrow and deep’, like a nice neat funnel, pointing in a single direction. At the start of a PhD, it’s tempting to feel that you’re already at the start of the narrowing, and should just be able to follow your nose to the end of it.

Maybe some folk do have this experience, but my education has never felt like that. Instead, I’ve been lucky enough to spend years following tangents and ideas across a few different disciplines and settings – more like grasping at threads blowing in the wind, rather than drilling down in one place.

Thanks to the support of SNH, through the Magnus Magnusson Studentship, I’ve been able to spend the last two years following some of those threads back to their sources, and now I’m in a position to start pulling them all together and weaving something.

My research is looking at what happens when young children go outside at school, mainly with their teachers. I’m interested in this because lots of research and professional experience suggests that outdoor environments provide different opportunities for learning and teaching, as well as a range of outcomes related to health, well-being and connection to nature.

Researchers use a range of tools to learn about these different elements, but I think it’s hard to unpick such complexity into subjective human experiences, or statistical generalisations. Instead, I am specifically interested in how spending time in natural environments at school might allow children and teachers to develop the skills and desire to care for the world around them.

To do this, I’m observing the intra-actions between humans, nature and social practices during outdoor learning at school, to form a detailed account of some of the processes that emerge. I use a small video camera, audio recorder and bright orange notebook to try and capture moments where the different parts of this system that we call ‘outdoor learning’ come into relation with each other.

For example, some of the questions I ask when reviewing my observations might include:

• How do teachers and children talk about, or come to know the natural environments that they are in?

• Do the play or learning activities represent exploitative, conservationist or other relationships with nature?

• What elements of these outdoor places are children drawn to?

• How does this affect the non-human beings that live here, and how does that link to the educational goals of the activity?

This is different from some other research in the field, much of which focuses either on specific ways of teaching and learning outdoors, or measuring outcomes (such as connection to nature or physical activity) in ways that can be scaled up and applied in other situations.

Over the last sixth months, I have been visiting two schools regularly and spending time with several primary one and two classes (children aged between 4 and 7). One school is in a village with access to a garden and big old oak trees just over the wall, while the other is a large school in a recently constructed suburban housing development on the edge of a big town. They have quite contrasting approaches to primary one and the environments that are available to them, but it’s been fascinating seeing some of the commonalities in how the children play in their school’s outdoor spaces, particularly in terms of physical activity and movement.

I have over 100GB of materials that I’m now thinking my way through, before going back to see how the spring-summer term affects things. I’m looking forward to beginning to share stories about where I think ethics of care for the natural world could be nurtured during the first years of school.

At this early stage in the analysis, I’m starting by following three key strands. The first is about relationalities, and how children come to understand themselves in relation to the world around them: whether that be other living beings, like plants or minibeasts; processes such as photosynthesis; or even physical materials such as plastic. The nature of these relational entanglements form the basis of how we act ethically in the world. Seeing how they develop in early childhood may help inform practice and make links to other research on environmental identity.

My second strand looks at how the environments (physical, social and policy) of school-based early childhood education might nurture or hinder the type of relationality that leads to care. Where, when and how (or not) do children come into contact with other living beings, for example? Linked to this are considerations of how much agency both children and teachers have within these environments, and thinking in particular about play-based learning.

The final strand is how children’s direct experiences outdoors (e.g. of nature, or litter) relate to the cultural representations that they engage with in school and other contexts. For example, do the activities, places, digital media, books, stories and games that they come into contact with at school and home support or hinder the development of care for the world? What types of futures do they see represented? As young children spend more time in formal education and care settings, and the ecological crisis becomes increasingly urgent, taking a holistic view of this becomes more important, but is ethically and practically complex in itself.

These are big issues of critical importance to understanding how we may shape teaching policy and practice, to enable stronger learning for sustainability. By starting with two specific settings and the privilege of being able to pay attention to small interactions that maybe get missed in the flow of learning and play, I will be able to craft research outputs that can be put to work for a range of users.

I’d better get writing!

See the SNH website for further information on outdoor learning, including facts, activities and inspiration to help you bring Scotland’s nature and landscapes to life for learners.​

All photos are courtesy of and ©Chris Mackie.