Nature Helps Students Learn

It’s an overcast morning at M.S. 51 - William Alexander Middle School in Brooklyn, N.Y., and nine 7th grade students listen as their teacher, Mitchell Porcelan, starts the day off with a recap of a transportation survey the class recently completed. As they discuss air quality, attention shifts to the clouds outside. “Is the sun still there?” Porcelan asks them.

The students waver, but decide that yes, it is. Hands shoot up around the room and their questions pour out: “But why can’t we see the rays?” “You said the sun is so far away from earth … so how do we get the technology to get the sunlight to hit the electricity panels?"

While questions like these may be expected in some of M.S. 51’s classrooms — it is a “gifted and talented” school, and students must score above a certain level on state exams to enroll — they are unusual in this class, which is designated “special education.”

But this is not a typical special education class, and on most days, the students are not sitting in a classroom at all. Using the natural environment as a teaching tool, Porcelan infuses environmental education into every aspect of the curriculum. And while the students do learn about the challenges the planet faces and the changes they can make, the real benefit is in the profound affect the planet has on the students themselves and their ability to learn.
 

Neurons and Nature

Porcelan explained that special education students tend to be closed off from the world around them. “But if you can open them up emotionally through environmental education, make them feel compassion,” he said, “then you can open them up to learning.

Much of his philosophy is based on the scholar E.O. Wilson’s “biophilia” theory, which says that human beings have an innate affinity with nature and that the brain has the ability to repair damaged neural networks when it is immersed in the natural world, because that is where it originally developed.

Porcelan’s students have varying degrees of neurological damage, but for all of them, environmental education can help repair it. These reparations are made through building meaningful connections between class work, the local environment, and the students’ lives.

“I’m not doing as much as nature is doing, as the local environment is doing,” he said, “the classroom exists right outside the school."

Stepping Outside

Taking the students out into their natural environment helps them make connections to the material they are learning in class.

Several prominent environmental theorists, such as E.O Wilson and Stephen Kellert, have seen connections between learning in nature and increased success in special needs children. In 2005, Richard Louv made headlines across the country when his book The Last Child in the Woods coined the term “nature-deficit” disorder to describe the harmful effects the lack of a relationship with nature can have on a developing child.

 “According to a range of studies, children in outdoor-education settings show increases in self-esteem, problem solving, and motivation to learn,” Louv wrote in a 2007 article in Orion magazine, “Recent research also shows a positive correlation between the length of children’s attention spans and direct experience in nature.”

In recent years, Porcelan’s students have gone canoeing on the Gowanus Canal and to the Green Brooklyn…Green City fair. They have tested the water quality of the Hudson River and measured particulate matter in the air around their school. They conducted transportation surveys among their fellow students and have created no-idling public service announcements. These students are living science on a consistent basis.

While it is impossible to draw a perfect parallel between nature and their ability to learn, Porcelan’s students do exhibit an incredible enthusiasm and engagement in learning, which has impressed many of his colleagues. Rebecca Jacobs, an outreach coordinator for the Livable Streets Initiative who has worked with Porcelan on several projects, was blown away by his students’ behavior when she visited the class in spring 2009. “I asked him, ‘How are they like this? Why are they like this?’” Jacobs said.

Lenore Berner, the principal at M.S. 51, says that Porcelan’s high expectations of his students and his focus on reasoning skills helps them progress, both inside and outside of the classroom. "He sees the big picture and tries to make many different life connections as he plans curriculum and teaching methods," she remarked, “In years past, it was thought that special education students could not meet proficiency for the grade. But Mitch has helped many of his students make progress and meet proficiency on their state exams."

And while the student’s test scores are improving, they are also beginning to understand the impact that they have on the environment around them. “Citizens needs to be ecologically literate for the future of the city,” Porcelan said, “I feel that I have just begun.”

In a lesson on climate change, the students react dramatically to images of destruction around the world. Porcelan tells them to stop and “think about the possibilities that people can change, people can learn.”
It’s unclear whether the students believe him — and then one sighs loudly in relief, “Well, at least we can change our community.”