Tag: Outdoors

Feral

I am as deep into George Monbiot’s Feral as he is in ling, or wrack, or any other dense vegetation he encounters as he travels through the book. His view of nature and landscape is only dwarfed by this vision of what might be or what might have been in the “re-wilding” of Europe, of Britain in particular:

The sward on the verge was an exuberance of colours as rich as the Lord Mayor’s Show. Here were dropping red spikes of sorrel, golden bird’s foot trefoil like Quaker bonnets, the delicate umbels of pignut, heath milkwort – some pink, some blue – red campion and cut-leaved cranesbill. Here were little white flowers of eyebright, with egg yolk on their tongues, dark figworts, which released a foxy smell when I ran my hand through them,, purple knapweed, pink and white yarrow, foxglove, mouse ear, male fern, deep cushions of bedstraw, wild raspberry, heath speedwell, hogweed and willowherb…

It is as lyrical a use of plant names as any poet might employ.

His wrath at the violation of his vision employs the poetics of the fire-and-brimstone preacher, and while he is at home with the humour of black cat spotting, and has an eye for the quirky detail when talking about beavers or woolly rhinos, he reserves a particular distaste for the “sepia-toned” conservationist who seeks to preserve rather than rewild. Monbiot hits out at the Nazi sympathies of Konrad Lorenz and the “strong suite of what might have been psychopathic traits” of Joy Adamson. This is a not a man to mince his words.

And it is this keen sense of how poor our vision of landscape is, how bound up in the artificialities of the pastoral that is the most intriguing thing for me. The imperialist and imperious “assemblage of species” that Monbiot attacks is at the heart of young children’s literature; the re-presentation of the desired, the nostalgic landscape that provides setting but also instructs the reader: this is where the narrative happens, but also this is how the outdoors should be.

Reader beware, therefore: if Red Grouse are a “key indicator” (a view challenged by Monbiot at one point), I worry that so are the small, mixed woodlands and rolling hills and small fields of the Each Peach Pear Plum, or the quiet country lanes of Joe’s Cafe, or the magnificent spread of scenery in Bear Hunt.

Addendum, Easter Tuesday

The latest in the Guardian from George Monbiot. I may come back to this.

Outdoor Learning Whan That Aprille With His Shoures Soote

Two things coincide tomorrow (Tues 1st April) that I am involved in: Whan That Aprille Day, Maistre Chaucer-off-Twitter’s way of celebrating ancient languages, and the Oxford Brookes Learning and Teaching Conference. I am tweeting about one, and giving a paper (more of a napkin or even a serviette, really) on whether students need to go outside to learning about outdoor learning.  This is my punt:

While many people writing about the nature of young children’s learning underline the importance of first-hand experience (e.g. Fisher 2013; Canning 2013), little attention has yet been paid to whether teaching adults about young children outdoors is best done through practical experience. This session would aim to look at:

  • what elements of outdoors learning for young children can most effectively be translated into adult experience and why.
  • whether practical experience of being outside adds substantially to the students’ understanding of young children’s learning.
  • whether experience of being outdoors should be an integral part of the “learning journey” of a programme that does not have a required professional output such as QTS.

Canning N (2013) “‘Where’s the bear? Over there!’ – creative thinking and imagination in den making” Early Child Development and Care, Volume 183, Number 8, 1 August 2013 , pp. 1042-1053(12)

Fisher J (2013, 4th ed) Starting from the Child. Maidenhead: Open University Press

And I thought, foolishly, that translating some of my powerpoint into Latin would be a good thing to do. Maybe just the title of the module I’m talking about.

Translating Outdoor Learning in the Early Years seems a good enough project until you realise that outdoor learning is not an easily translated, and neither is Early Years. Neither concept is really around in classical Rome, although of course both education and  the joys of the locus amoenus are well documented.

What kind of learning are we talking about? Eruditio? No, that’s not it. Doctrina? Educatio? Ah, but is learning the same as education? Even if we can translate “learning” as “education,” will that fit? Disciplina? Well, that begs the question as to whether outdoor learning is a set of skills and cultural practices: maybe it is. Perhaps the verb-noun infinitive of a word like cognosco? Hmmm. Well then, disco? How’s about a gerund, signifying “something that is to be taught”? A plural form?

Tomorrow the title of Module U70124 (Cursus U70124) will be Discenda (those things which should be learned) Puerilia (in childhood) Extranea (to do with being outside). I am uncomfortably aware that cognates of another possibility, eruditio puerilis extranea, come very close to extraneous and puerile erudtion.

Absit omen.

Open Air Schools

A now lost phenomenon, largely built on how people understood tuberculosis – but does the Open Air School movement have something to teach 21st Century Britain?
Check this out: http://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/aspen-house-open-air-school-lambeth-doing-the-world-of-good/

As the blog post states:

This was an education rooted squarely – though without the rhetoric – in the principles of the Swiss pedagogue, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi: a focus on the equilibrium between head, hands and heart, a belief in the free development of each child’s potential through observation and discovery of nature and the material world.

The Inimical Outdoors

“There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.”

I’ve met the saying in all sorts of places, from reminiscences of Swedish preschools to being traced to Alfred Wainright. It gets very bad press (in a comic way) from expat blogger David Nikel in his post “Sh*t Norwegians Say.”

But what does the EY practitioner in England make of weather that we’re seeing at the moment? There are things to move us to a sense of awe and wonder like this from October (the Telegraph seems to lead the way on these (here’s another, more recent one!); the Mail has doom and gloom disaster pics, like these, of impending snow, to judge by a quick Google trawl, but perhaps this is unfair). There are, however, images and experiences closer to home that are not awe-inspiring, not conventionally beautiful, but inconvenient at best, destructive and potentially fatal at their worst.

Is it about context? Are we willing to see the dramatic surge in pictures of fierce waves  on the web, but lament the long rides into work, the slow, smelly seep of floods and the even smellier aftermath? Do we actually not think “There’s no such thing as bad weather”? There is inconvenient weather, destructive weather, enjoyable weather, whether (!) we are referring to blazing summers, windy springs and autumns or the varying styles of forms of winter precipitation. Some of it is welcome; some of it, let’s be honest, is not.

Cheap Tricks

When Gombrich talked about woods, fields, hills and a Church spire in the distance as the “cheap tricks” of English landscape painting, he might have had S R Badmin’s painting in mind – such as this Christmas card , which I discussed in my last internal paper, the reading for which is at the end of this post.

Certainly, Badmin does have a particular view of the English Countryside: this link and this (scroll through Gentleman and Hilder to Badmin’s West Yorkshire)  will illustrate it sufficiently – although he is able to depict quite explicit human activity like this picture and this show. [Logging, is, in some ways, anti-totemic; woodland is to be “preserved,” and perhaps unconsciously this implies “kept inviolate.” Portraying woodland as resource runs counter to the idea of the innocent landscape. Echoes of Manley Hopkins and Clare: much more to think about here – for example, George Monbiot on Clare as “poet of the environment” and Blake Morrison on nation and landscape.]

Of course, what I failed to recognise was the mutual dependence of (traditional) landscape art and the preservation or creation of (traditional) landscape.  I’m not sure what “traditional” really implies, but let’s leave that for now. Badmin paints the scene of skaters on a winter’s evening and we appreciate it as “beautiful,” see the landscape in a particular way – but the landscape is formed that way because the landscape artists of the past (and maybe of the present: see this blog from Cornwall, for example)have taught us to look for it.

We look for snow at Christmas (the gale and the rain outside as I type are more like the weather that must precede the flood at the start of The Children of Green Knowe (this is a quick blog post), and as the Grandmother remarks in Green Knowe, “Whoever heard of thunder at Christmas?”), and we look for the Church spire, the trees in the middle distance, a brightly lit sky. The landed creators of estates and agrarian revolution farms looked for (and paid for) landscapes they knew were beautiful. We are into Richard Mabey’s views on the planting of the Chiltern beechwoods.

Our “outdoors” is partly formulated by an interplay of economics and art appreciation. Cosgrove and co have already told us this, I know; my reiterating it is maybe my own “cheap trick” about landscape.

——-

Appleton, J (1996) The experience of landscape. Chichester : Wiley 1996

Bonnett, A (2009) The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 26(1): 45–70

Coverley, M (2006) Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials

Donovan, V (1982) Christianity rediscovered: an epistle from the Masai. London : aSCM 1982

Kaplan, R and Kaplan, S (1989) The experience of nature: a psychological perspective. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press

Salisbury, M and Styles, M (2012) Children’s Picturebooks. London: Laurence King

 

Two events

to be recorded here, both slightly off message. One is to share the marvellous poem I had on my Office door yesterday for National Poetry Day from the late Seamus Heaney:

In Illo Tempore

The big missal splayed

and dangled silky ribbons

of emerald and purple and watery white.

 

Intransitively we would assist,

confess, receive. The verbs

assumed us. We adored.

 

And we lifted our eyes to the nouns.

Altar stone was dawn and monstrance noon,

the word rubric itself a bloodshot sunset.

 

Now I live by a famous strand

where seabirds cry in the small hours

like incredible souls

 

and even the range wall of the promenade

that I press down on for conviction

hardly tempts me to credit it.

 

and the other, of less craft but engaging nonetheless, and useful (to some extent) because of the conjuncture of my outdoor learning module and the feast of St Francis, is Donovan’s version of the Canticle of the Sun from Brother Sun, Sister Moon. autumn-09003

 

 

 

Gruffalo Hunting

Well now, this is an interesting project: Gruffalo hunting is the new Bear Hunt…

Outdoor nation makes some important points about children (and parents) and their thinking about outdoor exploration, suggesting this is an area worthy of some serious discourse analysis.

But starting from Outdoor Nation, we move to the blog In Search of the Gruffalo’s Child. This looks well worth following: personal, enlightening and still managing to link to Gruffalo-related material.