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.
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.
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.