Why St. Louis Needs Nature Based Education

Children are happier outside. Give a little one an hour in the sun to enjoy some fresh air and they will be more regulated, creative, and content. Allow a child to spend multiple hours outside, enjoying unstructured play and exploration - and you will have a forest school student. A child who is not just regulated - but has a strong sense of autonomy, agency, and understanding of the natural world (Sella et al., 2023).

Our school structure allows for significant time outside, specifically in the heavily wooded areas surrounding campus. Students take their work outside with them, with the outdoors acting as a third teacher and primary guide. Our educational practice of leaning on the forest as an extension of our classrooms and homes, encourages exploration of many different dimensions, including self and community. This approach to education yields a bountiful outcome for our students, positively affecting their social and cooperative skills, physical skills, self-confidence and esteem, learning performance and cognitive skills, emotional well being, and risk management skills (Dabaja, 2021). Additionally, our teachers observe enhanced motivation and concentration when it comes to challenges children encounter in the natural world. Students display a keen desire to engage in exploratory learning and play while outdoors, often able to attend to tasks for longer than in a traditional classroom setting. Even more impressively, children are able to draw conclusions about cause and effect more easily when they are outdoors - not just when interacting with nature, but each other as well. (Tiplady et al., 2020).

Through place-based education (PBE), our school is able to respond to the community and environment in tangible, experiential ways to help students gain a greater, more cohesive understanding of local culture and their place in a given community. This method of education utilizes active, hands-on learning modalities to create both an attachment to local community, and also allows children to practice being stewards, leaders, and investigators in the natural world (Yemini et al., 2023).

Using this method of education encourages children to form their own civic identity - ensuring they are able to live and thrive within the context of a larger community. The implications of the PBE practice are numerous, most notably that children are enabled to identify issues within their community and allowed the autonomy to act on those concerns. Of course, another benefit of PBE is that it fosters a deeper sense of awareness regarding the complexities of a place, and how it may be similar or different from another. This goes beyond a grasp of seasons and local culture - this is integration of politics and economics, social norms, social responsibility, ethics - all while fostering a deep connection to the earth and the people around us (Sianturi et al., 2019).

When children are outside together, we see beautiful relationships blossom. Students provide one another with support, celebrating each other’s successes, and providing assistance to one another when a friend is having a hard time. The stewardship our students develop at Raintree is not just for the land, but also for their school family. Students are able to enter the forest as their full selves, and take what they need from nature in return. Naturally scaffolded interactions with one another and the world encourage children to take risks, explore new things, and observe on a deeper level than can be achieved within the four walls of the classroom (Harris, 2021). This structure allows for children in urban communities like St. Louis to flourish, embracing the natural world and learning to care for it in a practical, ethical manner from an early age. When students in St. Louis attend a nature based school, they grow up to be stewards of land and champions of the diminishing green spaces in our city.