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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! 

Spirals of injustice

 

from this…..

to this………

Its not fair and its not acceptable

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.