Outdoor Education with Philosophy_Eng

Outdoor education with philosophy

Kindergarten and primary school programmes and activities

MATERIALS DIDACTICS

Luca Mori

Introduction

Designing outdoor educational activities requires imagining situations capable of fostering reflective relationships with the surrounding environment, with oneself and with others that are more articulate and more complex than those of which children would be capable spontaneously. Such relationships must first be stimulated and then accompanied by questions, conversations and experiments of various kinds, recalling a principle formulated by John Dewey in the essay How We Think:

The origin of thought always lies in some perplexity, confusion or doubt. Thought is not a case of spontaneous combustion [...]. There is something that determines and evokes it. The common appeals to think, addressed to a child (as to an adult), without regard to the existence or non-existence, in its experience, of some difficulty that disturbs itself or alters its equilibrium, are as futile as, so to speak, lift itself from the ground by holding itself up with its shoelaces.1

The experiences from which this book originates suggest that philosophical conversation and outdoor education can feed off each other, transforming the landscape around the school - from the garden, if any, to the neighborhood to the town or city of reference - into an extraordinary space of discovery in which to practice reading oneself and the world.

Why and how does philosophy fit in? Philosophy has something to do with it because it gives voice and impetus to human beings' reflective relationship with nature and with themselves, and because, intertwined from its origins with other fields of human knowledge and creativity (from literature to science, from history to art), fueled by the emotion of "wonder," it can inspire questions, doubts and hypotheses that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries.

To begin with, let us consider a pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, proverbially "obscure" because of his way of expressing himself. The following fragment is attributed to him, "Nature loves to hide." By expressing so succinctly a suggestive insight, the fragment may provoke perplexity and a host of questions (precisely what John Dewey says is necessary to begin to really think). We could ask ourselves, and ask the boys and girls we work with: what did Heraclitus mean? In what sense does nature like to "hide"? Will this be true? But isn't it true, instead, that

1 J. Dewey, Come pensiamo, Milano, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2019, p. 14.

nature loves to show itself? Does it not show itself, all around us, in an infinite variety of shapes and colors, transformations and complex phenomena involving both living organisms and nonliving matter? What and how much is there then, hidden, beyond what we perceive?

Questions like the above are enough to initiate long explorations, starting with the search for hidden details in a school garden or city park: nature hides from us, for example, what is underground, what is inside the bodies we observe (inside trees, inside plants, inside a seed, etc.), cwhat is too small or too far away to be observed with the naked eye; it hides from us the stages of transformations that are too slow or too fast for our normal ability to observe; it hides from us many connections between the parts of the systems of which it is made up, and so on. Moreover, nature hides from us geometries and mathematics, which according to Galileo constitute its language and, so to speak, its grammar. Nature hides from us, as Albert Einstein intuited around the age of five, the forces that move the compass needle, without touching it. Einstein noticed it by feeling amazement, the wonder that he would later experience again as a scientist: «this 'marvel' - he wrote - manifests itself when an experience comes into conflict with a world of concepts already sufficiently stable in us. Whenever we experience such a conflict harshly and intensely, our intellectual world reacts decisively. The development of this intellectual world is in a certain sense a continuous escape from "wonder". I experienced a marvel of this kind at the age of four or five, when my father showed me a compass. The fact that that needle behaved in that certain way did not absolutely accord with the nature of the phenomena that could find a place in my conceptual world of the time, all based on the direct experience of "touching".I still remember—or at least seem to remember—that this experience made a lasting and profound impression on me. Behind things there must have been something deeply hidden».

We will see how it is possible to train yourself to observe what is hidden by going beyond what is manifest, accepting - so to speak - the challenge of a nature that plays hide and seek with us. By accepting this challenge and the others that the book proposes, open spaces will be transformed into precious discovery spaces for training perception, language and the ability to reason together with others, with all the citizenship skills that come into play when facing in group enigmas and problems that lead to the boundary between things already observed, already said and already thought of and things that had never been observed, said or thought before.

In proposing outdoor activities - in general and those centered on the concept of "landscape" in particular - we keep in mind the fact that the landscapes in which we live literally bring us into the world, because we become different people according to the landscapes around us: in fact, in them we learn to walk and orient ourselves; according to what is present or absent in them we experience our possibilities of action and understanding; in them we get used to the culture that shaped them, which finds expression in particular intertwining between natural and anthropic elements.

However, the reverse is also true: we humans bring the landscapes in which we live into the world. We do this with our actions and with our choices, which involve care or lack of care and can have different impacts on everything around us (and therefore, more or less directly and immediately, on us and on future ge-

nerations ). Thus, by proposing activities that train people to read landscapes and living environments and to question themselves on how to improve and take care of them, we are tackling one of the decisive questions for citizenship education in the 21st century.

To determine the "philosophical tension" of a conversation contributes above all the starting point that is proposed, which traces the contours of the playing field in which we will move; then the type of questions that are asked along the way makes the difference, which metaphorically correspond to the obstacles and trials to be faced; moreover, the teacher's ability to accompany the movements of the boys and girls is crucial, leaving time and space for hesitation and doubt without quelling the wonder and uncertainty with pre-packaged answers, and therefore leaving the play space free.

As responsible for the learning process, the task of the teacher who introduces the adventure and philosophical exploration will not be to suggest answers or to refer back to already given contents, nor to make up (his/her own) moral, but to accompany groups to lean beyond what they already know or think they know, with the language at their disposal, to relate intuitions, hypotheses and thoughts never thought before, with the patience to grasp harmony and contradictions between the different voices and with the taste to listen to ideas different from your own.

It should be remembered, recalling a consideration by Ludwig Wittgenstein, that «philosophical work is properly - as often in architecture - rather a work on oneself. On your own way of seeing. About how you see things. (And what is expected of them)».

Structure of chapters and management of difficulty levels

The book groups the thirty-four activities into four sections according to their type: Thoughts to Explore, Techniques of Observation, Educating Landscape in Landscape, and Exercises in Creativity

The proposed activities do not have a predefined level of difficulty: from time to time, by varying the level of difficulty of the proposal, it can be made suitable for everyone, from kindergarten to the entire primary school.

The chapters have a recurring structure:

• the idea for getting started: here is the starting point for each activity, with the basic questions from which to set up philosophical conversations and research to be done outdoors;

• outdoor activities: descriptions of the activities to be proposed outdoors;

• how to document: suggestions on how the proposed activities could be documented;

• collaborations: suggestions for involving families or other stakeholders in the community (libraries, museums, associations, etc.) in the activities;

• connections: connections with topics traditionally studied in school or with other chapters of the book, with cues to accompany conversations and to reflect on what is being done in multiple directions;

• other sources: indication of other sources (books, picture books, websites, etc.) that could be consulted to deepen and expand the proposed activities.

This book is built to focus on four cardinal points:

• reasoning

• movement

• open spaces

• philosophy.

Philosophy is found, so to speak, in the north, as a magnetic pole of attraction underlying the force fields that cross the proposals. Why philosophy? Quoting Giuseppe Cambiano, because philosophy teaches us to ask questions (how and which ones), to use words to answer these questions, to present reasons to justify the answers, to appreciate dissent accompanied by arguments, to weave relationships with other fields of knowledge and conceptions of the world, to treasure thoughts and experiences of the past and to cross cultural borders, driven by curiosity for the complexity of human thought.

Measurable and unmeasurable

The idea to get started

According to Galileo, the book of nature “is written in mathematical language” (see in the section Thoughts to Explore in “The Book of Mathematics is ‘Written in Mathematical Language,’” Activity 6). How much can be measured of what is found and happens in nature? There are things that can be measured, even if doing so is difficult. For example, what should we do to measure the height of a large tree from the ground to the top? Would we need to climb it, or find another way to stretch a measuring instrument from the highest point to the lowest? Not necessarily. SIn fact, one could use the method that the philosopher and mathematician Thales (VII-VI century BC) used to measure the height of the pyramid of Cheops, according to a testimony that has come down to us. Thales understood that the length of the shadow cast by an object on the ground depends on the height of the object in question.

By comparing the length of the shadows of two different objects, knowing the height of one of these objects it thus becomes possible to calculate the height of the other, based on the following proportion: the length of shadow 1 is to the length of shadow 2 as the height of object 1 stays at the height of object 2.

Applying this principle to the measurement of the height of a tree, one could plant a pole on the ground so that the height from the base is 1 meter, measure the length of the shadow cast by the pole and the length of the shadow cast by the tree, and carry out the following proportion:

shadow length of tree : shadow length of pole = X (height of tree) : 1 m (height of pole)

From which it follows that the height of the tree is equal to the length of the shadow of the tree multiplied by the height of the pole, divided by the length of the shadow of the pole.

How many other things or processes are measurable, being outdoors, considering both what happens in nature and what humans do?

Outdoor activity

Try to make a list of measurable things or processes: it takes a little imagination. Here are some examples.

• Suppose we want to determine the regularity and intensity of processes related to particular human behaviors. Let us start with automobile traffic:

• choosing an observation point and a road, calculate how many cars pass in ten minutes, in a moment of the morning. Repeating the observation over an equal

period of time in the afternoon, is the traffic intensity the same? Repeat the measurement on different days, at the same time and in the same time intervals: is there a constancy in the flows? Are there significant changes at different times of the day or on different days of the week? Translating the numbers into graphs helps to get an overview of the trend of flows and the variations detected. The analysis can become more subtle and complex by considering different elements of passage in a different way: cars, motorcycles, trucks, pedestrians.

• If possible we observe a line of ants engaged in their methodical coming and going from the anthill. The thing has been seen many times, but what about its regularity? Try to count, for one or more minutes, how many ants are going in one direction and how many in the opposite direction. Are the two resulting numbers close? In this case, is the traffic constant at different times of the day? And on different days? How constant is the rhythm of that coming and going? Is there a hidden regularity in it that can be translated into numbers?

• At what distance (or within what range of distances) do leaves along the same side of a branch grow? Is there any relationship between the distance they grow and the length of the leaves? Does the spacing tend to increase in trees whose leaves are longer? How many blades of grass can grow in a square decimeter of a lawn?

• Let’s move on to human movements: along a pedestrian course where there are shops, one can wonder which one the most people enter every five minutes at a given moment of the day. What is the percentage of passers-by accompanied by a dog? What is the percentage of passers-by who walk alone (not in the company of one or more people)? What is the percentage of boys or girls who follow a certain trend, easily observable by the clothes or by what they carry with them?

Inspired by questions such as the above, other questions can be found that are of interest to the group proposing them. By dividing into subgroups, it will be possible to monitor more than one dynamic simultaneously, to share and discuss the results later.

How to document

In the documentation, all the data collected and any graphs could be preceded by the question that generated them, addressed to the reader as a riddle.

Collaborations

The advice of scholars of natural sciences (for example, botany), urban planners (for the study of traffic flows, among others) and other specialists in the topics touched upon from time to time are very useful.

Connections

The activity is directly related to topics covered in the study of mathematics (proportions, graphs, percentages), but also - depending on the topics covered - with the study of natural sciences or sociology (one of all, the theme of following fashions ). See also the activities and reflections proposed in the section Thoughts to explore in «The book of nature is “written in the language of mathematics”» (Activity 6).

Other sources

The book C. Gifford, The world in numbers, Milan, Gribaudo, 2022 can be a source of inspiration on the numbers to look for and on how to present them.

The signs of the past 21

The idea to get started

As the great German naturalist, geographer and traveler Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) argued, the landscape can be seen as the totality of the features of a territory: as such, it is also the repository of the countless natural and human actions that have shaped it. In it, therefore, one can look for the traces of the work and cultures of the people who have traversed and inhabited it over the centuries.

Crossing the landscape to travel through time: how difficult is it to do so? What do the traces of the past visible in the folds and between the lines, or still in the foreground, in present-day landscapes tell us about human beings and their history?

To answer these questions it is necessary to have some significant experience. You can start by planning the route of a walk, divided into a series of stages in which it is possible to observe significant “signs of history”. It will be useful to prepare a map of the route, with an indication of the position of the various stages. If available, it will be useful to provide historical photographs of the landscape crossed.

Comparing one’s current life landscape with documents relating to the past (ancient maps, photographs, writings, testimonies) is a particularly engaging way to train in recognizing and understanding the role of human decisions in the evolutionary dynamics of landscapes: what reasons, what needs and what habits have determined the appearance or disappearance of the landscape forms most recognizable from direct observation or in ancient documents? The groups could try to relate the recent buildings to the older ones or to the traces of things that have now disappeared, making hypotheses on the how and why of what is observed, possibly questioning representative witnesses (administrators, elders, scholars, etc. .).

Outdoor activity

We begin to travel through time, through the landscape. For each stage of the walk, everyone (or in pairs or groups of three) can be asked to identify what appear to be more or less visible signs or traces of the past (buildings, monuments, but more generally «constructions» and «traces » of any type, from dry stone walls to mule tracks, to give a couple of examples). Keep in mind, in assigning the task, that anything can be considered a trace of the past, if it has not just been built: an apartment building, for example, is an element of the present landscape, but it can at the same time be considered a trace of the way houses were built in the 1970s and of the need at that time to respond quickly to the growing demand for housing (that it is a sign of the past is also gleaned from the fact that one would hardly answer positively to the question: would it be built exactly like this today?); of course, a historic building or monument references the past in different ways.

For each past sign identified, you should note down your considerations, as if you were to fill out the following form: What

Particular attention deserves, if any, those particularly representative elements of a landscape that are called icons. In Eugenio Turri’s definition, iconema refers to those «many and different anthropic elements that animate the scenario and give rise to our overall perception». Every landscape has its icons: the Lombard landscape, for example, has a large farmhouse that stands out in the green countryside; the Tuscan agricultural landscape has a country house, like many hill towns they have stone houses, towers and ancient bell towers; the Venetian landscape has stately villas or, as more recent icons, industrial sheds. Iconemes are to landscapes what phonemes are to the words of a language: they are therefore “elementary units” of an iconic nature that are placed and distinguished within wider systems; in a certain sense we could also say that they are parts that represent the whole. According to Turri, «the reading of the landscape always begins with the perception of the emerging elements, the strong icons, which give identity to a country or a region, of which they also generally represent the load-bearing structures of the territorial organization. They are often identifiable as monuments that refer to the past, others express the present». Following the experience, it will be possible to return to the question mentioned previously, going deeper: what do the traces of the past, visible in the folds and between the lines, or still in the foreground, in the current landscapes?

How to document

The activity may result in a publication-print or digital-on the signs of the past in the target landscape.

Consideration can be given to the involvement of associations and scholars interested in local history, or elders, for direct testimony and stories about the history of the most significant human signs observed during the visit.

Connections

The analysis of the evolution of landscapes is an activity directly intertwined with history and geography (when maps from different eras are used, read and compared). The analysis of maps and historical documentation on the uses of a given territory can then become the starting point for working with geometry and mathematics (tracing areas, studying proportions and percentage variations in land use, creating graphs relating to the identified changes). The sciences come into play, for example, when considering the landscape’s past from the point of view of geology.

Other sources

In-depth reading and inspiration:

• M. Agnoletti, Storia del bosco, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2018.

• M. A. Crippa, Italia dall’alto, Milano, Jaca Book, 2020.

• S. Iovino, Paesaggio civile, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 2022.

• E. Sereni, Storia del paesaggio agrario italiano, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2020.

OUTDOOR EDUCATION WITH PHILOSOPHY

For girls and boys, being outside the school building means above all moving freely, running, exploring and playing. Why then take them outdoors to "do" philosophy?

Because doing philosophy outdoors allows one to train oneself to observe and interpret nature, the landscape and oneself actively and with greater awareness.

The book offers 34 outdoor educational activities, inviting children to "lean beyond" what they already know (or think they know) to relate hypotheses and insights they never thought of before:

• thoughts to explore (7 activities) that suggest questions about the forms and transformations of nature and the world around us, looking with new eyes at the visible and going in search of the invisible;

• observation techniques (10 activities) that propose exploring the landscape with a critical eye, learning to decipher its signs, stories and possibilities hidden "between the lines."

• educating about the landscape in the landscape (10 actvities) educating about the landscape in the landscape (10 activities) that remind us how to live in nature respectfully, fostering a sense of boundaries and sensitivity to connections, so lacking in our species and so fundamental to the challenges of Agenda 2030;

• creativity exercises (7 activities) that help to recognize the countless intertwining of art, nature and landscapes, stimulating individual and group creativity. Each activity is complemented by literature suggestions, insights and tips for activating collaborative networks within the school and in the local area.

LUCA MORI

Researcher

of History of Philosophy

at the Department of Civilization and Forms of Knowledge, University of Pisa. He has been designing and conducting philosophy workshops for schools since 2005. His projects include a journey of more than 10,000 km to propose the mental experiment of utopia in preschools and elementary school throughout Italy.

Philosophy and outdoor education transform the landscape into a space of discovery in which to read oneself and the world.

Thoughts

to explore Creativity exercises