Chapter 10: Before Today, I Was Afraid of Trees

Chapter 10 Before today, I was afraid of trees, rethinking nature deficit disorder in diverse classrooms. The last week of February turned out to be the peak of the maple sugaring season that winter, and an inch of snow remained on the ground as the juniors in my chemistry class disembarked from the bus. Kevin, our guide, met us with empty buckets, and he talked about the trees as we took a short walk around. The students ran their hands over the bark of the oaks, beaches, and maples, with an uncharacteristic quietness, as our guide talked about the different types of trees in Cadwolder Park. For the moment, it was possible to imagine that we were somewhere other than urban central New Jersey. To many of my students, it was a revelation that we were not actually standing in a natural forest, but in a place where each of the towering trees had been purposefully planted by hand decades ago. The questions led to a discussion about how trees in urban environments not only looked nice, but actually helped clean the air in lower energy costs by reducing the amount of sunlight absorbed by city surfaces on hot days. When Kevin pointed out holes in one tree made from yellow-bellied sap suckers, one group of boys began racing from tree to tree, seeing who could be the first to find and run their fingers over undiscovered sap sucker holes. A group of girls raised their eyes to the tree tops, looking for the birds. And held up the metal spout and asked if anyone would like to hammer in the first tap. Ain't it gonna hurt the tree? Came the response from one of my more solemn students? Kevin assured him that it would not. We tapped two trees that day, and everyone who wanted to turn hammering got one. When the first bucket was finally hung from the tap, the students were clearly less than impressed with the leisurely drip, drip, drip of the watery tree sap. He explained that the buckets would fill over the next few days, and he promised to bring them to us at school, a surprising confession. We thanked Kevin and boarded our bus, and returned to school shortly before the end of the 80-minute block period. Back in the classroom, one of my African American students pulled me aside, saying, "I have to tell you something." At the beginning of the semester in January, she had loudly proclaimed in front of the whole class that she did not like science. Though she dutifully completed her chemistry assignments, little in science class had seemed to hold me anywhere. When she pulled me aside, I fully admit that I was hoping for one of those minor teaching vindications, the kind of small victory that keeps weather beaten teachers in urban schools coming back year after year. What she said, however, was much more profound. Out of earshot from the students congregating by the door, she said, "Before today, I was afraid of trees." This was not the sort of thing I expected a popular high school junior, or anyone else for that matter to say. So I asked her to explain. She laughed and with a shrug said, "I mean, like I was always afraid of them. They're big and scary, and their bark is all rough looking." She went on to describe how nature and outdoor things in general had always seemed somehow dangerous to her. In thinking about what ideas my own students might have had about maple syrup making, the idea that some students might have had a fear of trees had genuinely never occurred to me. I have looked over state and national science standards carefully since then, and none of them include anything about making students comfortable around trees. Yet there it was, an unintended and valuable outcome of the trip. Diagnosing nature deficit disorder. Science teachers in urban schools often serve students whose experiences with the natural environment are more visibly constrained by human factors than their suburban or rural counterparts. At the same time, parents and teachers nationwide have been contending with an increase in sedentary indoor activities that have affected youth, and frankly adults as well, of every demographic. When coupled with the shrinking opportunities many children have for experiencing nature in an unbounded form, these factors can lead to a lack of familiarity with the fundamental features of ecology in the natural world. Journalist Richard Louve has called the resulting situation "nature deficit disorder," a term that has resonated strongly with the environmental education community. Yet those with an understanding of the history of multicultural education have good reason to be suspicious of any terminology that causes teachers to view specific students from a deficit perspective. Though Louve is careful to describe the deficit as applying to children's experiences with the natural world, like many diagnostic labels, it can easily become affixed to the students themselves. Historically, deficit language like the term "at risk" has been used to marginalize students already struggling for success in schools. Rather than explore options that seek to build upon student strengths, experiences, and prior understandings of the world, notions of cultural deprivation or deficiency have been used to explain away the failures of teachers to be effective in teaching such students. Environmental education as consciousness raising Three related goals usually frame most environmental education efforts. The first is to foster and sustain a love of nature. The second is to gain a scientific understanding of the environment, with knowledge of the factors, processes, and interrelationships that describe and explain the living world. The last is to help students make intelligent and informed choices in their lives. All are important, but depending on the school and the teacher, they may be prioritized differently. In schools such as mine, where the students experienced marginalization and oppression, these three goals may also have served the purpose of what Paulo Freire calls conscientization, or in current parlance, being woke. One need only look to historical figures such as John Muir or Rachel Carson, where the modern-day coalition of climate change activists to see what conscientization looks like in an environmental sense. In his descriptions of the criminalization of natural play, Richard Louve also clearly frames the public and private restrictions on children's experiences with nature as a form of oppression, and his work serves as a call to action. Although I was teaching a chemistry course, there were many days when a pastor by might have looked into my classroom and guessed that I was teaching an algebra, literature, or environmental science class instead. Administrators are fond of saying, particularly on testing season in the spring, that every teacher teaches reading and every teacher teaches math. I argue that all teachers must be environmental educators as well. This is especially important for science teachers, because fundamental ideas in biology, chemistry, physics, and earth science are crucial in making sense of pressing environmental issues, such as climate change, industrial pollution, radioactive waste, food safety, and the destruction and alteration of habitats. In a high school chemistry class, being able to connect matters of environmental justice to chemistry is dependent upon student's ability to recognize their personal connection to these issues at all. This is why the idea of nature deficit disorder carries weight among many environmental educators. It offers a convincing explanation for a perceived lack of personal connections between students and environmental issues. As a chemistry teacher in an urban school, I often strayed beyond the traditional sequence of topics in the discipline, which usually follow a predictable progression from properties of matter through some atomic theory and bonding, and finish somewhere around chemical reactions and electron configurations to bonding to acids and bases. Some chemistry curricula provide connections to environmental issues, and these serve as valuable resources for teaching topics like water quality, petrochemicals, and nuclear energy. There are countless possible links between chemistry and environmental justice, but like any curriculum, how far these go depends on the teacher. For example, in my chemistry class that year, my students examined the suitability of Yucca Mountain as a repository for nuclear waste as part of our nuclear chemistry unit. In a visit to the radiation laboratory in the hospital across the street from our school, recognition showed the students exactly how the instruments worked, and described the differences between the radioactive isotopes they used for scans, like Technishi M99M, with a half life of six hours, and once used in nuclear power generation, such as plutonium 239, with a half life of 24,000 years. Later during a lesson on ions, we watched clips from the movie Aaron Brockovich as a catalyst for discussions for both environmental justice and the electron configuration of hexavalent chromium, CR+6, tapping into community resources. Kevin Kopp has been a well-known environmental educator in the Central New Jersey area for years, offering workshops and educational programs for classes for a range of students. As a busy high school science teacher in Trenton, I had ignored his program announcements for many months, because many of the activities seemed to be geared towards younger children, even though they were advertised as appropriate for K-12. One of his emails finally caught my attention, it read, "Bring your class to Cadwalder Park and learn about one of the true wonders of nature. This is a special program on maple sugaring and making maple syrup. Through stories and hands-on activities, students will learn about the legends, history, and modern practices of making maple syrup. Each group will tap a tree, collect sap, and taste some Cadwalder Park maple syrup. The idea that trees in our city could produce maple syrup was too good to pass up. Not only would this trip to Cadwalder Park, a place that had been publicized in recent years more as a crime scene than for its environmental features, to provide students with a solid connection between food, chemistry, and the environment. It was also a way to develop their critical consciousness around issues of natural resources. Why was something like maple syrup, which could be gathered from trees in their neighborhoods, only a trace ingredient in the commercially produced packages of syrup that came with school breakfast? Pushing further, we could ask why some people get to control where food comes from at all. If food exists naturally in places in the world, like cod in the Atlantic, or raspberry vines on the sunny edge of a park, what responsibility does that place upon the rest of us to ensure [BLANK_AUDIO] a world that sustains these and other resources for current and future generations. Not thinking about these issues is an element of Louvre's nature deficit disorder description, but we can just as well consider it a form of oppression imposed by the modern world. My thinking was that the act of seeing their own city differently could open up possibilities of action for my students. Though I had not planned on teaching solutions and molarity for another two months, it proved simple enough to develop an appropriate lesson on concentration that related to the task of boiling down syrup. My principal quickly approved the trip, and it did not hurt that it would all take place within a single 80 minute block and required only one bus. Kevin and I constructed a minimalist lesson plan for the trip over email, agreeing to the approach of simply tapping the trees and telling stories along the way. He would focus on the history and process of maple sugaring, and I would inject science ideas into the narrative wherever appropriate. In preparation, I found myself reading widely about the science of maple sap, and reconsidering some of my own ideas about how it was produced. I unexpectedly had to review most of the tree biology I'd ever learned. Kitchen chemistry. The week after the trip, Kevin delivered two full five gallon buckets to our class. According to our plan, one was full of the maple sap, and the other was just water. We set students the challenge of identifying each without tasting, and within a short time lab groups were scribbling possible procedures in their notes. So one of the liquids was clear, and the other was cloudy. I informed them that this was insufficient evidence. After all, these buckets of liquid had been sitting outside for a few days. This in the fact that our chemistry lab equipment was not food grade, was the reason I ruled out, for the moment, tasting the unpasturized liquids. Once I had approved their procedures for safety and feasibility, I permitted my students to proceed with their ideas for testing the two liquids. Though I had hoped that at least one group would measure the densities of the two liquids, as soon as the first lab group, wearing safety goggles, started a Bunsen burner with an evaporating dish. The rest of the class took the hint and quickly followed suit. Before the end of the period, many of the dishes contained brown syrup in the bottom. There was still some skepticism on the part of the students that this was actually the same stuff they would put on waffles, especially because I would not let them taste it. So the next week's activity was designed to make this idea more plausible. I brought in some saucepan from home, careful to keep the food preparation area in the back of the room clean, safe, and free from any chemistry lab equipment that could potentially contaminate the syrup. I decided to boil down this app with the electric hotplates, but scorched my first test batch during home room, to the slight annoyance of the other teachers in my area of the building who had to endure the burnt smell for the rest of the day. I asked student volunteers from my morning physics classes to help me by stirring this app, and adding more whenever the mixture started to get too concentrated. By the time my chemistry class arrived in the afternoon, I had about 50 milliliters of cadwolder parks here ready, and together we started another batch boiling down. Though a formal study of chemical reactions was still weeks away, there would hardly be a more opportune time to discuss the chemistry of cooking. I did a brief demonstration of the differences between baking soda and baking powder, showing how each needed an acid in an aqueous solution in order to release the carbon dioxide. We examined the ingredients in a box of store-bought mix, and using a griddle from home, I whipped up a batch of pancakes, cutting them open to point out the role of the carbon dioxide and the rising of the batter as it cooked. In order not to break my own rules about food in the lab, we remained in the front half of the classroom as I passed out paper plates and plastic forks, and not a single student passed on the opportunity to eat pancakes with syrup they had literally traced to its roots. The student who had overcome her fear of trees could not contain her enthusiasm. Look at him, up their cooking pancakes like it ain't nothing. Later that week a number of my students worked together to compose an email to Kevin. It read, "Dear Mr. Cop, this is Mr. Larkin's class. Bucket number one equals water. Bucket number two equals sap." We realized this after scientifically heating the evaporating dishes. After around five to ten minutes the water began to evaporate from both dishes, soon dish number two began to turn a brownish color, while dish number one just evaporated until nothing was left. When we first examined the contents of container one and two, container two had a cloudy color, which differed from container one. The sense of smell around the dishes was also different. Thank you for your time, Luis, Muhammad, Miguel, Kendra, Brandon, Jessica, Sasha, and the rest of our period six seven chemistry class. Innovating a naturalist intelligence versus remediating deficiency. When I originally proposed the idea for the trip to my students in the first week of the new semester, they were eager to do something out of the ordinary, though some expressed doubts that we would really be doing chemistry. It was not unusual in their experience to go on fun field trips with the loosest of ties to any learning goals. Certainly, I had seen well-meaning teachers organize such trips, but I also suspected that some were rooted in deficit notions about experiences, often suburban in character, teachers felt that students needed in order to be considered educated. Therefore, I was determined to build high academic expectations into the trip. The fact that we could extend our learning about chemistry into the community and specifically the outdoors was an implicit part of my motivation, as was the opportunity to develop students' critical consciousness around issues of food production. My students' admission about overcoming her fear of trees reminded me that some outcomes will always be unplanned, but it is possible that others would view her understanding of nature as deficient or even pathological. Undoubtedly, her prior ideas about trees were influenced by the broad societal forces, described by Louvre that teach children to avoid having direct experiences with nature. Though Louvre's critique is meant to apply widely to modern childhood, it is also true that those most likely to be constructed as deficient are those living in urban environments. Given the residential demographics of the United States, it is also true that these children are more likely than not to be of African-American and Latino-Latina backgrounds. Louvre has given voice to vitally important idea, but his deficit language may be ultimately harmful to those students who could perhaps benefit from its implications the most. What's an urban environmental educator to do? In a revision to his original list of multiple intelligences, Howard Gardner added the notion of a naturalist intelligence and described it as the intelligence that enables human beings to recognize, categorize, and draw upon certain features of the environment. Rather than viewing a student's limited understanding of the natural world as a deficit to be remediated, Gardner's work suggests that student ideas and experiences are a starting point for developing this intelligence. Yet, doing so entails more than just letting students loose in nature, though that is not always a bad idea. As teachers, we need to understand not only our students' prior knowledge about the natural world, but about the ways in which they think about and experience it. I once observed a lesson in a urban middle school, where a white teacher from a suburban background assigned homework to her students, who were all African-American, in which they were to go outside and look at the sky every night in order to collect data on the phases of the moon. Sitting in the back of the room, I heard one young girl say to her friend that she could not do the assignment because she was forbidden to go outside at night where she lived. While such a situation might be considered as one more example of how nature deficit disorder has severed students' connections with the natural world, a different perspective might illustrate this restriction as a rational, parental response to living in a dangerous neighborhood. Had the teacher known more about her students' lives, she could have intentionally structured the activity differently to accommodate their realities, perhaps by anticipating times when the moon observations could be made during daylight hours. Doing so would have built upon the opportunity students actually had for engaging with the natural world, rather than relying on assumptions the teacher had constructed that were based on her own life experiences. It is equally important, however, that urban educators do not assume that students in their schools have minimal experience with the natural world. Some students and their families may be seasonal farm workers, with a rich knowledge of agriculture. Teachers such as the among students I've taught in Wisconsin regularly enjoy hunting in the forests of the Upper Midwest, leveraging their rich cultural traditions regarding the natural world towards understandings of an ecosystem quite different from the hills of Southeast Asia. Rather than viewing students as having nature deficit disorder, teachers can develop both the naturalist intelligence and the critical consciousness of students by building on the ways they actually do experience the world. Teachers can extend Louvre's idea into formal science classrooms, without the deficit language baggage, by seeking to cultivate more opportunities for natural experiences, rather than simply compensating for their absence. The environmental knowledge used by a student to ride the subway system across town to school in New York City is quite different in character from that of the suburban New Jersey youth who play soccer every Saturday on a grassy field, and different also from that used by the teenager in rural Pennsylvania, who plants corn and milks cows. It all are forms of environmental knowledge that hold opportunities for teachers to meet students where they are in their thinking, about the connections between the human influenced environment and the natural world. Making these connections also gives science teachers a good reason to make pancakes and syrup in chemistry class.