Roseleen Shanley
Principal Teacher,
Bankhead Academy

Natural Change - Inspiring Partnership

Almost two weeks since our last Natural Change residential weekend in Cambusbarron.

How did it go?

A combination of wilderness experience and amazing academic stimulation which provoked creative thoughts and quality discussion.

Sunrise over Cambusbarron

 On my way home I sat on the train scribbling down all my ideas in a journal.

The wood where I spent most of my solo time

 Once more the solo experience provoked thought, creativity and fun. I had once more felt like the child. This time I was exploring a wood with the heightened senses of childhood. Magical.

Natural Change and the Teacher

I was asked to speak at a conference on the 21 of January in Edinburgh regarding how I felt the Natural Change project had influenced my teaching. It took me some time to think about this and I asked my students what they thought. I enclose my power point for the conference and where my thinking has got so far.

I guess I am still on a process which will take some time to unravel.  But…it is an amazing experience! I think my teaching and relationships with my students will be strengthened and much more focused on what really matters.

I seem to have a little problem uploading my powerpoint so I direct you to a site where it can be found.

http://www.cifalfindhorn.org/docs/Roseleen_Shanley_Bankhead.pdf

 Comments welcome.

Gandhi’s Platform

This week a colleague and I visited the Scottish Parliament for a WWF Footprinting event. Here many celebrated all the hard work that was being done to reduce our country’s footprint and there were many fine examples of how people were living in a more sustainable way. So much great work is being done yet, we still have a long way to go and there are many obstacles to overcome.

As I travelled by train to Edinburgh, I recalled an event from the life of Gandhi. This event he later described as his most humbling, creative and  productive moment.

Gandhi had bought a first class train ticket by post to travel through South Africa. He sat on the train unaware of the apartheid law which forbade anyone other than a white person from sitting in the first class compartment. The train guard was called and he demanded Gandhi occupy the seats set aside for other ethnic groups. Gandhi refused to move and was thrown off the train at the next stop. He spent the night alone on the train platform. He thought about the injustice of apartheid and became determined to challenge the system that demeaned people because of their race or colour. On his return to India, Gandhi wishing to end British involvement in his country, immersed himself in nature and travelled around India studying the landscape and the people.These events triggered the birth of the human rights, peaceful protest movement and the rest is an amazing historical story which did so much good for humanity.  Great change cannot happen without knowledge of the environment, your place and the place of others within it. Gandhi built teams of change around this philosophy and his work is still ongoing in his absence.

I think we have all experienced the Gandhi platform - Ouch!!  I guess our efforts to bring about change are also much more basic.                      

The Natural Change Project has given us all that the opportunity to “get off” and break away from our hectic lifestyles. It has enabled us to stop, think, reflect and gather our ideas on sustainable lifestyles and attitudes. Our isolation days put us on the Gandhi platform. Immersing ourselves in nature has stimulated our thoughts, creativity and drive to protect. We have to respect ourselves and others, but also our beautiful world. Nature has been our teacher and has enabled us all to believe we can make a difference.

Perhaps we all have to jump off the busy and sometimes hectic train of life from time to time. Spend time on the platform contemplating and making sense of our individual journeys. However, we all have to be clear what the purpose of our journey is and travel together to find the most effective route to take in our quest for living in a more sustainable way. We cannot do this alone as Gandhi also found out.

We all need the platform of nature to catch the train and make the journey of change together.

A blog for the children - Why do we love snow?

Last weekend we were lucky in Aberdeenshire because it snowed. Sometimes, it snows so much we get days off school which makes us happy because we can play in the snow. Does that ever happen to you? 

The snow this time was not too deep but it looked lovely. Sometimes it blows off the fields and lies in deep bundles where the wind blows it. We call that drifts, and sometimes drifts block roads and you can’t drive your car through a drift. In a nearby village called Whiterashes, people got caught in a drift and had to get out their cars and spend the night in a local hall. Adults in the village brought them food but they had to wait until a snow plough came and cleared the road the next day.

I opened my curtains on Sunday morning and could not believe what I saw on the window.

There was a little heart at the corner of the window.

 I smiled so much when I saw it and wondered how it got there.

Perhaps you can tell me how you think it appeared on my window because I have no idea how it got there.

Lots of children went out sledging in my village and I could hear them playing and laughing. They all had a great time.

So why do we love snow?  Why do we build snowmen? Why does snow make us play and laugh, even when it is so cold?

If you have any answers to these questions, do let me know.

Eco Psychology and the School Curriculum 1

I am still gathering my thoughts on the Natural Change Project and Eco Psychology and how best I can relate this to the school curriculum. 

I will be giving some examples in future blogs of the environmental work which has been undertaken within my own school, our associated primaries and Marlpool Special School. However, in the light of my Natural Change experience, I feel there is indeed a place for Eco Psychology to strengthen current practice in Environmental Education and I think it is important to begin by explaining Eco Psychology’s links to the school curriculum.

Children are well aware of the key environmental issues facing the world today and Eco Schools and The Curriculum for Excellence programmes are driving this knowledge and active citizenship forward. It still remains however, that there are great challenges but also opportunities for young people growing up in our country today and both have to be balanced. Environmental Psychology is the bridge between the theory and the action. Environmental Education cannot be effective if it is not bringing a change in attitude which results in life long care and participation at a personal, neighbourhood, local, national and international level.

Eco Psychology is linked to the personal, social and health education curriculum where aspects of this curricular area make their way into every subject area within the school. Currently, I am writing our school’s PSHE course and policy documents and have seen real opportunities to build Eco Psychology within our citizenship programmes. PSHE enables young people to understand how we develop physically, mentally, emotionally and socially. It is a subject where basic human needs and emotions are recognised and discussed. To understand who we are, our purpose and future, nature can be the stimulus to help us achieve this. It enables us to reach into the very heart of why we are on this planet and the role we have in saving it for future generations and species.

History demonstrates many examples of peoples love, care, knowledge and sense of wonder for the natural environment. However, previous generations were much closer to nature, its cycles and rythmns. Their lives depended on this knowledge and care for basic survival. We modern humans have sought to control nature but have forgotten we actually need it and are a part of it. We need to be stewards and carers again. Technology, commercialism, celebrity culture etc. etc. are taking many of us and our young people, away from nature and the positive role models who have much to teach us all about life and its true meaning. Sensible and balanced approaches are needed here though, as we all need to laugh and find happiness and joy in our lives. Modern living can be good fun and we have the right to enjoy it but we need to educate ourselves to have the vision to experience the joy, but to see the exploitation and its harm and develop the strategies to combat the destruction. Eco Psychology can help us regain our knowledge and relationship with nature which as humans, is part of our very being and we have much to learn from it.

To be effective in the long term, environmental work has to be linked to the the emotional needs of the young. They have to explore what it is to be a human being and what their relationship is with nature. They have to experience the spiritual dimension to learning and relationships in order to make active, life long contributions. The term “spirituality” can have a religious and non religious interpretation. In this blog I refer to it in its non religious, secular context.

Carol Attrill in her article “Getting into the Spirit” Secondary Education” 2005 outlined the importance of spirituality to the learning process. Here are some of  points she made.

“It is a greater conscious awareness of and engagement with all aspects of our being, not just the more mundane….it goes beyond body, emotions and intellect to embrace a higher level of consciousness”

“one does not need to be religious to be spiritual”

Spirituality is the positive feeling that can arise when humans work together to make life better for all that inhabit the planet.

It is the search to find the answers to poverty, environmental concerns, war and other forms of suffering.

It is the positive ethos of a classroom where fairness, justice, compassion, kindness, respect for others runs true. That feeling of positive energy that is created where a sense of goodness emerges. It can be that feeling that inspires people to find the drive and determination to do the right thing or work towards a humanitarian project.

All these characteristics I have found within the Natural Change Group.!!

I believe Eco Psychology techniques can foster this sense of spirituality which in turn creates the climate for change and action based work within communities.

I leave you with the logo for the first year of our school unity project. The young people and community groups worked together on a range of environmental projects and achieved so much. It was an incredible experience!

 unity       I think you click on “unity”  to view? I hope so! 

From Knoydart to Blair Atholl

 I’m writing this blog in the second phase of the Natural Change Project. This time we are based in Forest Lodge on the Blair Atholl Estate. The landscape is quite different here compared with Knoydart. I am in a deep valley, eight miles up a dirt track road, with steep hills all around. No mobile phone reception, internet or television. 

Forest Lodge

The weekend has been extremely stimulating and challenging. We have discussed many world issues with a special focus upon environmental concerns and how we can change things for the better. We have debated what human qualities are required to bring about this change.

 Today we were outside for most of the time, examining the natural environment and local habitats in a bid to inspire us in our quest to bring more people to a sense of appreciation and care for the beautiful world that surrounds us.

 We have looked at our own interactions with nature and related these to our own lives in a bid to understand our deepest personal emotions and thoughts for nature. By drawing from this spiritual base, peoples affinity and passion for change is driven more directly than by more conventional ways such as “telling people how best to approach change”

The noise of the fast flowing river was a dominant feature at Forest Lodge

The relationships within the Natural Change group are very strong and the passion for change overwhelming. We all feel very privileged to be part of this research and I feel I am developing enhanced skills of observation and knowledge of the environment.

How will I relate this to the education of our young people in schools?

I think there is a place for Eco Psychology within the school curriculum and it can be used to complement the current excellence within environmental education.

Over the next few weeks I will be collecting data and comments on the role of Eco Psychology in Education.

If you have any thoughts or information on this, please contact me through the blog comment section and I will get back to you to enable us to share thoughts and ideas.

Thanks. Roseleen

Reflections on The Natural Change Project

It is five weeks now since Knoydart and the first Natural Change experience. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the philosophy behind the project and the effect the experience will have on me, both personally and professionally.

When I returned to home and work I did feel a more heightened awareness of the senses. I found myself much more aware of sound and texture. The staffroom at school felt a very noisy place and I found myself standing back and looking in more as the conversations took place. I found that when I looked at pictures and paintings in my home, I could feel the texture within the paintings for example, the cat’s coat in one picture felt more real, yet I was merely looking at the picture. I found this quite strange at first. 

I went out on my usual walks with the dogs in the fields around my home, but again seemed to have more heightened awareness to sound and the textures of the straw, grasses and stones that I lifted. I was also more aware of where light fell and what sparkled in its glow.

                           The fields around my home

I wanted to share the beauty of where I lived and took some friends children to  the fields around my home and to the beach during the October holidays.  I got the opportunity to watch these children observe the world through a child’s eye. They would stop and pick up stones, watch a slug slither, have a little touch at it. We threw stones in the fields for the dogs to chase. The day at the beach was amazing. October in Aberdeenshire did not stop these children paddling in the sea, finding bird skeletons etc. Even a washed up onion became a toy to throw into the water or play football with. The day was magical as I watched them play and enjoy themselves. “This is the best day of my life” one said. They spied on people coming along the path with the binoculars, watched ships and wildlife. What a great time we had.

                                                     The beach where the children played.

I thought a lot about the school curriculum and the lovely sunny days when our young people are stuck inside and sitting at desks. Things are getting better thanks to The Curriculum For Excellence initiatives. Certainly when you take pupils outside into the environment you often see a transformation in many children. In my experience that childhood curiosity returns and for many, there is a new found confidence as they explore and play in the outdoors. So many great lessons take place and can cover most of the curricular areas. Life long learning experiences and memories take place in these situations. They require to be utilised much more.

I feel a great sense of wanting to enrich learning by using the environment more. I will outline some of the ways this could be done in my next blog.

Group Reflections On Isolation Experience

The following day (Sunday) the group met at 8.30 in the tepee at the beach. At last we could break our silence and chat about our isolation experience, our solo day.  We were given an interesting storytelling format to adopt which would ensure reflection and interpretation of each individual story. We stopped for breakfast before returning to the tepee to share our stories.

We all sat in a circle in the tepee and when ready, one member of the group would begin to tell their unique story. The stories always began with the line…”This is my story” and when finished, the story teller would end by saying, “That was my story” On this cue, other members of the group would begin, one by one, commenting and interpreting the story they had heard. Once more, there was a format for introduction   ”I hear a story about a man/woman who…..” Once their comments were complete they would end by saying “This is the story I hear”.

Key experiences, themes and interpretations arose from each of the stories. Some stories were very different, while others shared common threads. The story telling sequence of telling and sharing bound the group in a sense of closeness and care. I felt a sense of human spirituality, an atmosphere/ethos of trust and unity.

That evening at dinner this atmosphere of warmth and companionship continued. There were great conversations and much laughter.

This had been an amazing day where human needs, thoughts and emotions were expressed, shared and interpreted within a trusting and caring community of people. We had all found out in our own way what is was to be a human being truly in touch with themselves and their natural environment.

Day in Isolation - Heading Home

My day was drawing to a close. I was very aware of the sky, trees, rocks and grass behind me, the pebbles, sea, mountains and sky in front. I began to feel part of the landscape and took a photograph to symbolise this.

As I gazed out to sea, I saw my seal. He had returned. The tide was coming in and he was having great fun playing with the current. He lay on his back and glided through the water. It was as though the current was tickling his back. I watched and watched this seal repeat his gliding through the water. He made me laugh. I did not see otters today but I got my own solo performance from my seal. It was an amazing show. The seal finally disappeared. I listened as the tide came in and the water lapped on to the pebbles beside me.

I gathered up my things and returned the den to its natural state.

It was time to go. I felt quite emotional as I left the bay. I think I had just experienced one of the best days of my life. I felt great. Happy and contented.