How Lifelong Learning in Nature Education Translates to Practice

“ Environmental Education is regarded as the embodiment of a philosophy which should be pervasive, rather than a subject to be taught and learnt.” – Joy Palmer in ‘Environmental Education in the 21st Century: Theory, Practice, Progress and Promise’.

I first came across Aravind Kudla (Aravind Sir, as I know him) while doing an evaluation of resources created by ‘Early Bird’. Aravind had been using Early Bird’s flash cards, posters and pocket guides to teach his students birding. He introduced me to Makkala Jagali, an online magazine in Kannada, curated for the use of teachers and students across Karnataka.

He writes Hakki Kathe (bird stories), for this magazine every week. Later that year, a newspaper article in a local Kannada daily reported that Aravind Sir’s school had won the Wipro earthian Award for 2021-22. We had been corresponding regularly, exchanging resources and ideas that not only helped me learn more about nature education but also inspired me as an educationist.

Nature education comes effortlessly to Aravind, a government schoolteacher. The school he teaches in is located in the lap of the Western Ghats at Moodambailu, a small village in the Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka. He has imbibed the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours necessary for nature learning to the extent that it has become a way of life for him.

What do these necessary aspects of nature education entail? How has he managed to learn them and put them to practice in the classroom? Here is a peep into Aravind’s journey as a teacher and a lifelong learner in nature education.

Aravind has always been interested in trekking and other outdoor activities. When he got his first posting as a teacher, he found himself in a school, located at the tip of a hillock bordering the Kudremukh National Park. Surrounded by hills, forests and lush green environs, he would cycle to his school each day to teach mathematics for 8th, 9th and 10th grades.

“The workload was not much,” he tells me. “I would teach mathematics in the three classes, then take a few non-scholastic and free periods each week. The rest of the time was spent exploring every nook and cranny of the diverse wilderness around the school,” he says.

One day, he decided to cycle all the way down to Mangalore (where he hails from) through the Kudremukh Ghat from Samse, where his school was located. On this journey whilst cruising through nature, he realized that he wanted to capture some of his observations and missed the presence of a camera. He borrowed a point and shoot camera to take pictures of plants, flowers and everything around him during his free time. In a couple of years, he had saved enough money to equip himself with a more efficient camera and could be seen pottering around in the hills and valleys around his school. “If someone at school asked, where is Aravind? The answer would be…Sir is on some hilltop with his camera,” he muses.

His students soon began to follow him around on his short trips into the jungle. They had innumerable questions for him, “Why did you take a photo of that particular insect? What was this flower? If all leaves were leaves, why did they have different shapes?” While the time for his peaceful getaways had ended, he is delighted to share his knowledge with the students and, more importantly, even open to learning from them.

“These students came from agrarian backgrounds. They knew so much about plants, what could be eaten, how to eat it, what is medicinal, which plant the cows do not eat, etc. It was more than I could ever learn from a book or the internet,” he tells me. “Back then in 2010, the internet was accessible only through computers for us. Smartphones had not yet become popular. Samse did not even have a phone network to make calls,” he says.

Two years later, Aravind found himself as a high school teacher in Moodambailu Government School, still surrounded by nature and this time with the internet and phone being easily accessible. He began to attend workshops on identifying plants, birds, frogs and insects. He volunteered to do tiger surveys with the forest department while teaching, participating in theatrebased activities and spending time with his beloved family. Each time he went to do these activities, he found himself new contacts, friends and well-wishers.

“Most of the people who attended these biodiversity identification workshops were engineers and techies from Bengaluru. They would tell me, “Oh! You are a teacher? It is awesome that you are learning this. You can now reach out to so many students and teach them about it too! Tell us how we can support you,” he says.

Through his vast network of people and organizations, built over time, Aravind has been able to harness human, material and financial resources to perform various activities in his school. He himself has been a resource person for talks on bird watching and other nature based activities in various government schools in the District.

His colleagues from other schools were soon asking for more information about the activities he conducted for his own students. This encouraged him to open a Facebook Page on behalf of the school to communicate with his network easily. If you take a look at it, you can have a glimpse of the narratives from various nature based activities conducted in his school. Not only is nature education being implemented, it is linked with the performing and visual arts, literacy, mathematics, science and local cultural activities. It focuses on helping students to reflect on their day-to-day experiences.

Aravind soon realized that he could convert his photographs into teaching learning material. A fellow teacher suggested that he add short snippets of information along with his photos. Later, when he became part of the group that planned Makkala Jagali, they asked him, “Sir, why don’t you write about birds for children?” Hence, began Hakki Kathe. He extended the idea of putting his experiences in the form of a narrative and thought about making short videos of bird behaviour to encourage his students to go beyond identification. If you look at one of the videos, you will observe that each is a snippet of a particular bird behaviour that you may use individually or as a set to teach children about birds. “During the lockdown through COVID-19 times, sharing resources like these with the teaching community became even more meaningful,” he says.

Communicating his observations through writing was not as easy as Aravind had thought. Putting his observations in the form of a write up or a video made them concrete and fixed. Hence, he had to ensure that he got all the facts right. The narrative and language had to also cater to a diverse audience across age groups, and keep them interested enough to engage with the content. Curating each article involved research, use of his photos, and reflections in the manner of communication, which enhanced his learning.

He recognized that ‘communicating observations’ was an important skill in itself for students to acquire. He also came to value the ways in which it enhanced their learning. Soon he had his students making daily observations about nature around them, writing about it in their own words or by using drawings. He encouraged them to go beyond identifying an organism. “What was it doing?” He would ask them. “Go, see what it is doing and come back,” he would tell them. He recalls a recent incident in which students came running to him and said, “Sir, we saw a Malabar Giant Squirrel today! We had gone to pluck mangoes and we saw it. You know what it did? It ate the peel of the mango and left the pulp as is! What a waste sir. Now even we can’t eat it.”

This narrative had several implications for Aravind as a nature educator. First, he explored the range and distribution of Malabar Giant Squirrels across the state, to check if, indeed his students had seen one. Next, he began to ask ecologists from his network, if the behaviour students had noticed, could indeed be observed in the squirrels. Lastly, he came across farmers in the village and when he mentioned this incident while talking to them, they told him, “Yes, it is true! These squirrels eat all the peel and waste the pulp. The children want to eat the fruits. Of course they are mad that the squirrel got there first.”

“The manner in which students came about this observation fascinates me. These squirrels are arboreal and move 10-20 meters above the ground. They are not in the way of the students for them to be easily sighted. The children happened to come across the squirrel while doing an activity they were interested in (plucking mangoes) and made an observation of the behaviour because it impacted their interest,” he reflects.

The more the students began to explore and bring observations like these to Aravind, the more he thought about documenting these and putting them together in some form. An opportunity was given to take this idea forward when a friend suggested that these nature-based observations could possibly take the form of a ‘biodiversity library’. Aravind then thought that creating an online forum for this might be practical, as children would be able to access it from anywhere.

This project is currently in the planning stage. Various logistical aspects, including the manner in which students should access it and the degree of access in terms of students uploading and managing data, are being discussed and worked out. Not only does Aravind look at integrating school subjects with nature learning, he also extends the same to help students acquire relevant skills related to computers and the internet.

“You teach mathematics right?” I ask him. He laughs and says, “Yes, I do teach mathematics. However, how can any subject be limited to the discussion of just its own methods? Students make meaning out of it by linking it with their surroundings. The surroundings of my students are green, brown, full of movements and sounds, smells, rain and other things. How can I not converse with them about these things if they ask me? They process everything at once, not maths, science and history,” he tells me.

“A student once came to me,” he says. “The student said, ‘Sir! I killed a garden lizard today. Threw stones at it and completely killed it. Did you know that it burns a lot if you get bitten by a garden lizard?” I told the student, “Well…is it completely dead?” “Yes sir!” He replied. “Well, good. Now go bring it back to life.” I told him. “What?” He asked me. “You took an action that had a consequence on something else, not just on yourself. So can you undo that action or reverse the consequence to bring things back to their natural state?” “No,” the student reflected. I asked, “Do you know for sure if a garden lizard’s bite causes burning? Does it even bite in the first place?” “No sir,” he replied. “I heard it from someone and assumed it to be true,” he said, reflecting on it. “Then perhaps you should explore and find out more before taking an action next time,” I told him as I consoled him, he tells me. These are the kind of events and experiences that students must process with their peers and with us, not just subjects mapped as separate chunks,” he tells me.

Aravind’s reflections on learning are not just limited to himself and his students. He observes his daughter as she learns to say her first words while gathering a vocabulary and links it to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. “She looks and learns the word, starts recognizing things around her, then links it to other things she has learnt to recognize, while building concepts. Observing her process of acquiring knowledge through thinking, navigating through experiences and feeling through senses is a lesson for me in how to go about teaching my students,” he tells me. The manner in which his students learn, and his daughter trying to make sense of the world around her, reinforce for him the point that everything is interwoven and linked in the minds of children and exists in a state of dynamism. Just like things are in reality.

“Somehow our education system destroys this thought process and makes them process everything as individual units. A few here and there might be able to grasp the process and re-construct this thinking. However, most end up acquiring tunnel vision at the end of which a job is visualized,” he muses.

“What can we do to help children retain their intuitive and justified thought process of linking all their experiences, reflecting about them and seeing the world through that lens?” He seems to be asking himself these questions more than directing them towards me. I listen to him open-mouthed and say, “But sir, you are already doing it!”