Off the Grid: Learning as a whole-body experience

Before public education and formal education, before Socrates took Plato under his wing, and the Xia dynasty was teaching aristocrats aristocratic things, knowledge was acquired through lived experience, firelight stories and song, mentorships of necessity and survival.

What we learned of nature came from observations, carefully whittled as lunar calendars into bone tablets.

We inherently knew things about our environments, weather patterns, migration, animal habits, edible plants and the ecosystems that supported us. When we emerged into our days, our senses perceived our world and flooded us with a knowledge natural to our evolving beings. Thus our brains and current form came to be from the lectures and lessons of millions of years.

It is a far cry from our current fluorescent-lit classroom setting.

“We were meant to live in direct relationship to nature,” Jeannine Tidwell said.

Tidwell is an owner of Twin Eagles Wilderness School, a school devoted to fostering that relationship for youths and adult students. They offer everything from summer camps to internships to retreats, all with the intention of mentoring a deeper knowledge of nature and self.

Tidwell believes that learning is a whole-body experience achieved optimally when all the senses are engaged, and most important, when the conditions for learning are in place. She describes something more thrilling than curiosity, more controlled than passion, a kind of inquisitive drive into the unknown where the seeking is as fruitful as the answer. Where sometimes risk is one of the ingredients.

Researchers have long explored how risk has influenced our cognitive evolution, and how the lack of risk or discomfort can inhibit the development of the individual. In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” a book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, they argue that “safetyism” in education can inhibit intellectual freedom and minimize the ability to develop resilience and tolerance.

When the learning environment is devoid of unknowns and wonder, when it is curated to isolated variables and predictable outcomes, what kind of learning takes place?

It is fair to note that our environment has changed since our predecessors learned how to pre-empt risk. What constituted risk in the past (freezing to death, saber-toothed tigers) are equally as dangerous as what constitutes risk now (credit card debt, Type 2 diabetes) and we must learn how to navigate this modern world if we are to survive through its advancements. The classroom is ideal for much of that, particularly for students pursuing subsequent higher education. Yet are we favoring too heavily one component of education and losing other knowledge essential to human well-being in the process?

“We run the risk of being conditioned by things like comfort and safety and security,” Tidwell said. “They are dangerous for children, because children are our greatest possibility for what growth can look like.”

In some ways, we recreate this perception through athletics programs and outdoor sports, but they are not available to all students and still operate within specific containers. Public school teachers, as creative and inspired as they may be, are also limited by curriculum restrictions and tightening budgets.

If we are of-nature and evolved in symbiosis with that nature, it would behoove us to become knowledgeable about it in ways that expand beyond understanding osmosis or plant reproduction. The concept of “green bathing” to expose oneself to the benefits of nature as a passive recipient is hardly a replacement for the experiences of time learning within a natural or wilderness environment.

Nature is not a prescriptive remedy to be taken in doses. It is our home and imperative to our mental and physical health. Our disconnection from it as a society has led to our decimation of it. Our lack of relation and understanding to our natural environment has broader implications.

Tidwell refers to this as “knowledge of place” and how it deepens also knowledge of self. She imagines the possibility of communities where people inherently have this kind of knowledge. They have an inventory of the ecology, know what plants are utilitarian, medicinal, edible. They would understand animal patterns, human patterns, weather patterns, why fern grow here but not there.

“Imagine if you knew a cottonwood by smell rather than sight,” she said.

I am transported back to my childhood, when the cottonwoods unfurled their tiny seed pods and filled forest meadows and creek beds . The air turned sweet and sticky then, filled with the sound of shivering leaves, and I knew it meant the creeks were high, and the Devil’s Club hard to see. I knew that cottonwood was heavy, and should we fell one, it would be a day’s work to move those combustible rounds anywhere.

I knew other things, too. Things about myself and my own place in the world as my scrawny legs ran down the dark earthen path along the water’s edge. Just as I learned to observe the wonders around me, I learned to observe changes within me. I learned that cottonwood is the scent of summer runs and joy.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com