ARTICLE/CURRICULUM: Rethinking nature deficit disorder (Chem + Trees)

[Ryan Goble]

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This article ‘Before Today, I Was Afraid of Trees: Rethinking nature deficit disorder is a great story by New Jersey teacher Doug Larkin. He decided to take his chemistry class to learn about the different types of trees in downtown Trenton’s Cadwalader Park. From there he worked with a community partner and students to explore the chemistry of locally harvested Maple syrup. Some highlights:

[I] will argue that we must all be environmental educators as well. This is especially important for science teachers because fundamental ideas in biology, chemistry, physics, and earth science are crucial to making sense of pressing environmental issues such as climate change, industrial pollution, radioactive waste, food safety, and the destruction and alteration of habitats.

Three related goals frame most environmental education efforts. The first is to foster and sustain a love of nature. The second is to gain a scientific understanding of the environment, with knowledge of the factors, processes, and interrelationships that describe and explain the living world. The last is to help students make intelligent and informed choices about where they live (defined as anywhere from the local neighborhood to the planet), which may or may not include a specific focus on social and environmental justice. These goals demand that students be provided with the attitudes, tools, and skills for action on their world.

Although I hadn’t planned to teach solutions and molarity for another two months, it proved simple enough to develop an appropriate lesson on concentration that related to the task of boiling down syrup.

When I originally proposed the maple-sugaring trip to my students, they were eager to do something out of the ordinary, but expressed doubts that we would really be doing chemistry. It was not unusual in their experience to go on a “fun” field trip with the loosest of ties to any learning goals. I have certainly seen well-meaning teachers organize such outings, and I suspect that some of them were rooted in deficit notions about the experiences—often suburban in character—teachers feel students need to be considered educated.

Rather than viewing students as having nature deficit disorder, teachers can develop students’ naturalist intelligence and critical consciousness by building on the ways they actually experience the world. Educators can extend Louv’s ideas into formal science classrooms (without the deficit language baggage) by seeking to cultivate more opportunities for natural experiences. The environmental knowledge used by a student to ride the subway system across town to school in New York City is quite different in character from that of the suburban New Jersey youth who plays soccer every Saturday on a grassy field, and different also from that used by the teenager in rural Pennsylvania to plant corn and milk cows. Yet all are forms of environmental knowledge that hold opportunities for teachers to meet students where they are in their thinking about the connections between the human-influenced environment and the natural world.

Read the full, excellent article HERE.