TAKE FIVE!

April 20, 2021

Cortney Larson:
Hi, I’m Cortney Larson. Welcome to Sullivan 180 Presents… Take Five! Our guests today are Caroline Baillie and Eric Feinblatt from “Standing People Together”. They run what they call “a Forest Exploratorium” in our local area. Welcome Caroline and Eric. Thanks for being here.

Eric Feinblatt:
Thank you so much.

Cortney Larson:
Please introduce yourself, and tell us a bit about the ‘forest exploratorium’, and the’forest school’ on which it is based.

Caroline Baillie:
We fell in love with this pedagogical approach: getting kids back into nature in what’s called “forest school”. When our child was very young, we were at the time in Australia and we were going back to my home country, England for a few months. And somebody said, you should enroll him in ‘forest school’. And we said, “what’s that?”. Zoom forward, and we are now trained as far as school leaders, and we’ve been running a school in Australia and here for some time. We just fell in love with the idea of kids being outside in nature, and learning how to connect with nature. There are a lot of different features of it that we can talk about that are very special. And we now focus on helping schools learn how to connect kids with nature through the forest school approach.

Eric Feinblatt:
Just additional background, both Caroline and I have been involved in educational development at the university level. Caroline has had different positions, and me at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. And both of us have worked with faculty, helping them develop better pedagogical practices.

Cortney Larson:
What can “forest school” do for physical and mental health?

Caroline Baillie:
So one of the things that really intrigued me, was how kids just changed behavior, attitude, motivation, and just loved being outdoors. I mean, many of us grew up where we were just running around out doors and because of, you know, recent developments, stranger danger, playgrounds have become kind of plastic and hermetically sealed. It seems that kids are just not kind of ‘out in the woods’ as much as they used to be, even in a rural area like this. And so the idea of somehow re-introducing this was fascinating to me, and what I learned from the training and all the people that we met in the UK that were doing this… was that it really helped a whole variety of different health issues: physical and also mental health. So if you had children with learning difficulties, they might be anxious. They might be anxious about math, for example, and being outside distracted them enough to be fascinated by the worm that they just saw ,or the bird and the tree, and they would forget that they were doing math and have fun instead. And all the kids report that they are “just outside having fun and this isn’t learning”, and yet they are actually learning extremely well. So it reduces anxiety and increases motivation. And things like ADHD has also been proven to be reduced. It’s a help to autism and other things as well because the kids are using a different part of their brain. They’re calming down. They’re not quite as stressed as they are in the classroom. They don’t feel as if they have to perform. They’re literally just having fun, and the learning sneaks in on the side of it. So it has some surprising side effects!

Cortney Larson:
Could you highlight ideas for parents and educators to use while learning from home to get more connected to outside?

Caroline Baillie:
Yes, sure! So in the early part of last year, when we first had a lockdown for COVID, I was experimenting with ‘what it was like to be a parent’, (which I am, and the teacher), but experimenting being a parent who was trying to help my child remote school. And so I had this idea to try to see how much of the school curriculum we could do outside. And a lot of the work that I do with teachers is to help them understand how to bring the curriculum outside, how to teach everything, not just plant ecology and biology and the things that make sense, but physics and math and chemistry and poetry. Everything can be taught outside can be enhanced as well. So we were doing this, not from the perspective of being in a classroom, but from the perspective of just one-to-one at home, parent and a child. Essentially there are many different, fun things that you can do to try to motivate your child. So even just going online and searching “forest school” is a good term to use: ‘forest school’ and then ‘learning math’ or ‘forest school’ and ‘learning three digit addition’. You’d be surprised what pops up and you can go outside with sticks and stones and do a ‘place value chart’… and suddenly, what seemed awful, trying to get the kids to move the one over or trying to work out how you turn thousands into hundreds suddenly becomes a really fun thing with sticks and stones outside and the sun shining and adults running around. So, yes, I would just recommend parents share ideas. I’ve joined a lot of Facebook sites for our school ideas. And honestly, people just put onto those Facebook sites, things like, “okay, I want to motivate my child who happens to really love boats… or airplanes, or whatever it is. What can I do outside in the forest?” And then there’ll be a stream of ideas that get posted: “You can build this out of sticks and you can have a boat race and then you can do this”. So, I would totally recommend just using what’s out there, getting ideas, sharing them. And of course, people can contact us for ideas too. We’re always willing to spend ages talking about this stuff!