As modern culture expands, wilderness dwindles in its wake. It has become more challenging to create empathy for land through real experience. Luckily, there are people like Jim Lane. Jim teaches an Ecology and Conservation course for High School students. His approach gets students out in the bush to experience nature first hand. They learn about scientific observation, interconnectedness, ecology, history and colonialism all through observing nature. All this without leaving school property.

Resources

Jim Lane

Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic

Sponsors

West Fraser

GreenLink Forestry Inc.

Quotes

15.29 - 15.37: “A land ethic changes the role of a human from a conqueror to just a plain ordinary citizen of the biotic community.”

Takeaways

Authentic learning (04.54)

Jim always wanted to be a high school science teacher, influenced by his teachers. As a child, he loved being outside and has turned his passion for the outdoors into a profession.

Field ecology and conservation (12.40)

Jim’s students are tasked with designing a way to measure the forest. The empathy for the forest is developed as a product of that process. He teaches Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic to help students see themselves as part of the natural world. A ‘sit spot’ exercise involves authentic journaling of natural observations.

Sit Spot (20.19)

In interviewing former students, Jim learned that the ‘sit spot’ exercises had helped students overcome stress and gave them a space to process their feelings and find themselves, alongside discovering the dynamics of the natural world.

Building empathy (30.14)

Jim reflects that hope and trust are important for students to feel engaged in a course such as this. He introduces them to different birds and their lifestyles, makes them taste the bark of aspen, or challenges them to write down observations of the forest from memory. “Those experiences where you are pushed beyond that comfort zone is where you start to build… empathy”, he notes.

“Knowing that there’re things you don’t know” (43.35)

Jim observes that land and most of the natural world don’t move in a timeframe that humans understand. He shows his students how the knowledge of just one tree can “not only unlock the history of the land that it grew on but also that history of the people on the land”.

Respecting the forest (1.05.27)

Jim believes that seeing the forest over a long period helps develop respect and appreciation for it, knowing it takes very long to replant it.

Forests and fires (1.08.15)

Jim’s advice to other teachers who are looking to encourage authentic learning is to allow students to have authentic experiences with the forest. He laments how fires have made it dangerous and difficult to be outdoors. He narrates how a researcher interviewed Indigenous Elders on managing a forest using good fire, but that advice has not been followed. The destruction from wildfires has also damaged the cultural activities of the Indigenous.

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