Unplugged Schools? – Orion Magazine

This is an excerpt from an excellent article on the need for schools to provide a balance to the over saturation of technology children receive in their daily lives. To see the entire article please follow this link. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/334/ Please check out Orion Magazine itself while you’re at it. They provide a beautiful discourse on the philosophies of environmentalism.

- Ilana Gustafson Turner

See Our January Calendar of Outdoor Events for Los Angeles Youth

Is it Time to Unplug Our Schools?

by Lowell Monke

AN EXCERPT – See entire article here.

“THE HEALTH OF OUR CHILDREN’S INNER LIVES, their civic engagement, and their relationship with nature all would be improved if schools turned down the thermostat on that technologically overheated aspect of American culture. Schools dedicated to that task—we might call them “unplugged schools”—would identify the values associated with technological culture and design curricula and an environment focused on strengthening the human values at the other end of the scale.

The most obvious thing schools can do in this regard is give children experiences with the real things toward which symbols are only dim pointers. Unless emotionally connected to some direct experience with the world, symbols reach kids as merely arbitrary bits of data. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but to a second grader who has held a squiggly nightcrawler in her hand, even the printed symbol “worm” resonates with far deeper meaning than a thousand pictures or a dozen Discovery Channel videos. “

“So much daily communication is now mediated by machines that the U.S. News & World Report has estimated that youth graduating from schools today have had about one-third fewer face-to-face conversations than their parents had when they came out of school. Unplugged schools would compensate for this by creating an environment teeming with adults and older students conversing with, telling stories to, and working directly with younger students. Resources and time spent by other schools to integrate technology into the classroom would be spent integrating community members.”

“he efforts to label and sort children while constantly seeking technical means to accelerate, enhance, and otherwise tinker with their intellectual, emotional, and physical development are acts of mechanistic abuse (there is really no other name for it) committed against children’s nature. There is no more critical task for schools than to counter this unfolding tragedy. Schools can make headway simply by patiently honoring and nurturing each child’s internally timed, naturally unfolding developmental growth, by abandoning anxious efforts to hurry children toward adulthood, and by giving these young souls time to heal from the wounds inflicted by a culture that shows no respect for childhood innocence. As Richard Louv and others have argued, nature is a particularly effective antidote for this condition. Eliminating the clock as the means of governing everything is another more modest but important move. However it is undertaken, what is important to recognize is that compensating for the dominant view of children-as-mechanisms is, at its core, spiritual work. It acknowledges that some facet of a child’s inner life must remain sacred—off-limits to our machinations—to be viewed not as new territory for scientific investigation and technical manipulation but simply with awe and reverence and our own best, most human, expressions of support. To grant the dignity of that inner core is perhaps the most important gift unplugged schools can give children in the technological age. And, in turn, to foster within children those once universal but now nearly extinct childhood qualities of awe and reverence is spiritual education in its most elemental sense.”

Vista Hermosa Park – L.A. Times

“I can play on the slide and play on the rocks and get on the snake and practice balancing,” she said. “I can touch the water and wade through the waterfall.

“It’s inspiring, because we didn’t really have anyplace to play before,” she said. “Now we do.”

- Pamela, 10 years old

Vista Hermosa Park opens Downtown

The land once slated for the Belmont Learning Center features trails, playgrounds and education programs. It’s downtown L.A.’s first new public park since 1895.

By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

July 20, 2008

Link to Original Article

In downtown Los Angeles on Saturday there were sights and smells and sounds of a milestone event the concrete urban core had not hosted in more than a century.

Fresh bark. Tinkling water cascading down a rocky slope. California sycamores and coast live oaks, an expansive meadow of velvety green grass and squealing children everywhere — in soccer fields and on slides, clambering atop playground snakes and turtles.

After a decade of political battles over what to do with land once slated for the Belmont Learning Center, a new park has bloomed on top of old oil fields, an earthquake fault and what had become a weed-infested, dusty lot.

Vista Hermosa Park — whose name, Spanish for “beautiful view,” reflects its backdrop of the downtown skyline — was formally opened Saturday by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy as downtown’s first new public park since 1895, giving residents of a city with far less green space than other major urban centers a chance to breathe, relax and play.

The park also represents a triumph for the low-income, largely immigrant community that had pushed for a larger share of public resources, said Councilman Ed Reyes, who represents the area.

“This is very symbolic of how a community can persevere and actually be counted, not just be displaced and thrown away,” Reyes said.

A slate of the city’s political elite helped pushed the project through and showed up for speeches Saturday.

They included Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, County Supervisor Gloria Molina, state Sen. Gil Cedillo, Assemblyman Kevin de Leon, Councilman Jose Huizar, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent David L. Brewer III and Los Angeles Board of Education President Monica Garcia.

In his remarks, De Leon said the park would help assuage what one environmentalist called the city’s “nature deficit disorder.”

Only 33% of Los Angeles residents live within a quarter-mile of a park, compared with 97% for Boston and 91% for New York, he said.

Nationwide, the average park space per 1,000 residents is six to 10 acres; in Los Angeles it is 3.4 acres, he said.

“This is a fundamental problem of access and equity,” De Leon said. “This is a civil rights issue. When a child can’t run freely and play safely in a park, it speaks to our fundamental values.”

The park, he said, “sends a message that regardless of who you are, regardless of where your parents came from, regardless of the color of your skin, regardless of your legal status, you deserve access to nature.”

Brewer linked the lack of city parks to youth violence and drug use and urged families to embrace Vista Hermosa as their own by using it often and keeping it safe and clean.

“This is an alternative to the streets,” he said. “I want to see this park full of children.”

Families that flocked to the park’s opening said they would do just that.

Rosie Escobar, a Guatemala native with twin daughters, said her family had already plotted out how they planned to use it.

The girls would bring their homework there to study a bit, eat a picnic lunch and play, then kick back and maybe read, she said.

Escobar said she had lived in a nearby apartment for 12 years without green space for her daughters to play.

Several of her neighbors kept their children inside for safety and didn’t have cars to drive to parks farther away, she said.

“We think this park will transform everything here,” Escobar said. “It’s the best thing that’s ever happened in the neighborhood.”

The park, on school district land at 1st and Toluca streets, features 10.5 acres of trails, meadows, a waterfall and streams, picnic grounds, art elements, a children’s play area, a soccer field and an outdoor amphitheater.

It also features “green technologies” such as permeable parking lots to allow water to return to the natural aquifer below or an underground 20,000-gallon cistern that will recycle the water for irrigation.

The $15-million park, funded by public and private sources, will be operated by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, a local government agency that partners the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the Conejo Recreation and Park District and the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District.

Naturalists will offer environmental education programs, including hands-on lessons about animals and scientific phenomena, monthly visits to the Santa Monica mountains, a junior ranger program and a weekly family campfire and singalong complete with marshmallow roasts.

The park will also serve as an outdoor learning laboratory for students at the adjacent Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, a high school scheduled to open this fall.

On Saturday, naturalists transfixed several young children with lessons about bird beaks. The children vied to pick up dead worms and grasshoppers with chopsticks — imitating bird beaks — and played guessing games about what kind of bird ate what food.

Reyes and Huizar said the park site’s troubled history began in the mid-1990s, when plans to build a high school there were put on hold after the discovery of underground toxic gases and an earthquake fault. Officials battled over whether to sell the land to private developers or keep their promise to develop it for public use.

In 2003, Reyes and Huizar, who was then a school board member, began promoting a plan to scale back the high school to about 30% of its original size and use the rest for a park, after cleaning up the toxins. They enlisted the support of top political officials to break the decade-long stalemate.

“We made what was a terrible situation into one of the most beautiful things in downtown Los Angeles,” Reyes said.

Armando Gonzalez and his 10-year-old daughter, Pamela, agreed.

Gonzalez, a laundry room supervisor, said the park offered him a place to take his daughter away from TV and video games to smell fresh air and run through the grass. “This is healthy for everyone,” he said. “It’s going to change our lives.”

For Pamela, it already had.

“I can play on the slide and play on the rocks and get on the snake and practice balancing,” she said. “I can touch the water and wade through the waterfall.

“It’s inspiring, because we didn’t really have anyplace to play before,” she said. “Now we do.”

Teaching Wonder

“Doing science is about learning to read the world. It’s about understanding how things are organized and what makes them tick. It requires us to get close to things and to wonder about them. It’s about making ourselves at home wherever we are, and getting excited about it.” – Doug Noon

To view the entire article please visit the New York Times

September 10, 2008, 9:00 pm

New York Times

A Natural Enthusiasm

By Doug Noon

(This is a truncated version of the original article. To view it in it’s entirety please visit the above link)

I’m teaching sixth-grade this year, and school started smoothly about two weeks ago. Besides seeing some familiar student faces, I’m also participating in the second year of a partnership with a University of Alaska Fairbanks program called TASK GK-12 — Teaching Alaskans…Sharing Knowledge. The university provides me with a “scientist in residence,” in this case, Tumi, a graduate student from Iceland studying plant biology. He works with us on science and math projects. Tumi and I collaborated throughout last year, and the kids maintained a high enthusiasm for science. He brought in things for them to dissect, took them on field trips, and taught them about neuroscience, food webs, and climate change, among other things.

To start out the year, if we want the kids to learn much about plants, we have to get them outside before everything freezes. There’s a small patch of woods near a baseball field across the street from the school, and we went over there last week with Ziplock baggies to gather plant samples. The kids were supposed to find samples from two different species of tree, shrub, and herb. It’s a simple classification system, but it comprehensively includes everything growing out there, except for mushrooms. Tumi taught them that trees and shrubs have woody stems, while herbs do not, and that there are some general differences in height between members of each group. He also told them how much of a plant would make a good sample, and advised the students to take note of where the plant was growing.

You might think that kids in interior Alaska would know a few things about plants because we’re surrounded by forests. But really, kids who live in town aren’t any more likely than any kid, anywhere, to know what’s what in the plant kingdom. As we approached the woods, I could see clover and prickly rose from where we stood on the sidewalk. I tried to show a few people standing near me that the wild rose has a thorny stem, but they took no notice, and raced off, tearing past perfectly collectible herbs and shrubs, looking here and there at everything at once. I heard lots of calling back and forth, crashing through the undergrowth, and much laughter.

This was an active lesson. A few students came to show me different things they found. And when I approached any of them to see how they were doing, they all reported success, and had things in their sample bags. After about 20 minutes we headed back to the classroom to sort and identify the samples. On the way back, I heard a couple of boys behind me talking.

“These branches are strong!”

“These are pokey plants.”

“I couldn’t grab the woody part of this, so should I count it as a shrub or an herb?”

“Look! You can whip these.”

“Is this a shrub? What’s a shrub look like? I finally found a shrub. I only got one shrub. We were looking around and then I forgot what a shrub looks like. Can I use this for a shrub?”

This chatter was like music for me. In the age of test-driven accountability, kids spend too much time pinned to their desks preparing for tests to mark their progress along a standardized continuum of skills. But what are they actually learning? Not much that matters to a kid, if you ask me — especially a kid who doesn’t like to read or write, and sees no value in doing math. Doing science is about learning to read the world. It’s about understanding how things are organized and what makes them tick. It requires us to get close to things and to wonder about them. It’s about making ourselves at home wherever we are, and getting excited about it.

Reading, writing, and math are important, certainly. But so is experience and wonder. Our objective for this classification activity had little to do with standardized outcomes. It was a lesson with many points of entry, and many more points of departure, important considerations, given a group with a broad range of abilities and backgrounds. Activities that get the kids thinking about what they’re doing, making choices, and talking about them are powerful learning opportunities. Not only that, they give me a chance to see the natural enthusiasm for learning that I hoped to encourage when I made up my mind to become a teacher.

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Los Angeles Children Need Nature

The purpose of Nature p.L.A.y. (Nature Places for Los Angeles Youth) is to address a condition coined by Richard Louv, “Nature Deficit Disorder”, in Los Angeles children. Children are increasingly spending less time outdoors and many believe that this is linked to several health issues in our youth. We aim to open up a dialog about this condition and to serve as a resource for our community of Los Angelenos toward finding and building solutions. We can transform the image of Los Angeles from that of urban sprawl to a city that offers an abundance of natural resources for it’s children.

Los Angeles is home to incredible opportunities for outdoor discoveries such as the Angeles National Forest which covers 655,387 acres and holds 66 campgrounds, 2 ski slopes, and wildlife-watching galore. The Santa Monica Mountains cover 40 miles of land and have over 1,000 sites of archaeological significance. Griffith Park and it’s 4,200 acres make it one of the nation’s largest urban parks. Our coast spans 70 miles and is home to 30 miles of beaches. The Los Angeles River (51 miles long), San Gabriel River (75 miles), and the Rio Hondo Tributary (20 miles) combined offer over 140 miles of opportunities for recreation along side a great blue heron or a flock of migrating geese. The Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation boasts 52 hiking trails and encourages people to use them. The outdoor opportunities LA has to offer do not simply exist on the perimeters of our city or merely in close proximity to the affluent. There are botanical gardens and outdoor recreational areas in such unlikely places as South El Monte where you can find the incredible 1,400 acre Whittier Narrows Recreational Area or the 300 acre Deb’s Park in Highland Park, containing an Audubon Center which provides bilingual nature programing year-round.

Are Los Angeles children being exposed to these incredible resources?

Studies have proven that children who are exposed to nature and unstructured outdoor play have:

• Decreased risk of developing anxiety and depression
• Reduced symptoms of ADD
• Increased self-esteem
• Lower risk of developing childhood obesity
• Opportunity to develop skills such as negotiation, creative-thinking, conflict resolution, leadership, among others

The evidence is there, yet our youth are spending an average of over two hours per day in front of the television and a mere four minutes per day engaging in outdoor play. The rate of obesity in children is expected to reach one in five by 2010.

QUESTION: Where CAN the Children Play?

ANSWER: IN L.A.

Los Angeles has an opportunity to set an example for healthy city living by making our children’s exposure to the outdoors a priority. We hope that Nature p.L.A.y. can help by providing resources, links, information, tips, a forum for discussion, and a home to unite others working toward this goal.