Nature education

Nature education is the action-oriented linking of nature experience and ecological education on the basis of specific natural phenomena as a contribution to education for sustainable development.

The concept of nature education is still relatively new in the environmental education debate and so far less well known than that of environmental education . The term was coined by Gerhard Trommer and Wilfried Janßen at the end of the 1990s , because, according to their opinion, "classical" environmental education does not give enough importance to the meaning of concrete experiences of nature.

Environmental education and nature experience

In the opinion of Trommer and Janßen, there was a tendency towards a “technical” treatment of the environmental problem in environmental education in the 1990s. The focus of the educational processes is on saving water, energy efficiency, changing consumer behavior, one-world campaigns and a change in mobility. The media and regular school lessons were declared to be essential places for didactic communication. The original encounter with nature in the open air plays almost no role in the corresponding concepts. This one-sided understanding of education is reflected today in a whole series of educational projects for sustainable development .

As a countermovement to the classic understanding of environmental education, Trommer and Janßen presented the experience of nature , i. H. the subjectively meaningful perception of natural phenomena. With the help of nature adventure games according to Joseph Bharat Cornell and an intuitive empathy with nature, important impulses for saving the earth should be given. The approach draws further suggestions from deep ecology , which emphasizes a fundamental connection between humans and nature and wants to clarify a link between all life (and thus also humans as part of nature).

definition

According to Trommer and Janßen, the concept of nature education should eliminate the apparent contradictions between environmental education and experience of nature and place the original encounter with nature on a theoretical basis. Nature education is understood as a supplement to the “classic” concept of environmental education. Nature formation is defined by Trommer and Janßen as follows:

Nature education is the action-oriented linking of nature experience and ecological education on the basis of specific natural phenomena as a contribution to education for sustainable development .

At the center of this definition are action and experience learning , original encounters with nature, ecological education , emphasis on learning as an affect-logical, self-controlled process and integration into education for sustainable development.

parameter

With the emphasis on learning to act and experience, the above definition of nature education refers to reform pedagogical concepts; Experiential educational approaches play a major role. The original encounter with nature is - similar to the American interpretation of nature - at the center of nature formation: All learning processes take place in direct connection with concrete natural phenomena. Here, the approach of experiencing nature underlines the importance of the subjective-emotional perception of the surrounding world. The concept of education, which was deliberately chosen instead of “pedagogy” ( nature pedagogy , nature experience pedagogy), is intended to emphasize an understanding of learning as a primarily self-controlled process, as expressed in pedagogical constructivism . The ecological educational approach offers a conceptual framework for the targeting of educational projects. Nature education is designed as a contribution to education for sustainable development . Nature education thus goes beyond approaches of "nature conservation-related education", which primarily want to increase the acceptance of nature conservation measures in the population.

Typical methodical building blocks of nature education projects are the elementary experience of nature , the aesthetic and recreational reference to nature, play, ecological research and participatory reflection. As an elementary experience of nature, original encounters with the primal forces of nature, e.g. B. the four elements earth, fire, water and air understood in challenging situations that are mastered with the help of simple survival techniques of indigenous peoples. Depending on the location, nature formation can be divided into various sub-disciplines: wilderness formation for wilderness areas such as national parks , cultural landscape formation for nature parks and biosphere reserves, and nature formation in urban civilization. One example of this is the establishment of urban nature experience spaces . Nature education concepts are ideal for modern educational projects in large protected areas.

Nature education and sustainable development

The research by Susanne Bögeholz and Armin Lude on the importance of experiencing nature for environmental awareness , environmental knowledge and environmental action heralded a trend reversal in the scientific assessment of original experiences of nature. It was shown that children and young people who have had a lot of experience with nature show a much higher level of environmental awareness than those who had only acquired media or (book) knowledge about nature. It also became clear, however, that simple experiences of nature are not sufficient: only the embedding of activities to experience nature in clear educational concepts leads to effective learning success. Also within the framework of a cognitively designed ecological judgment and design competence, the subjective experience of nature provides those “basic experiences” that enable many children and young people to positively evaluate natural objects in the first place (Bögeholz & Barkmann).

With his research on images of nature by young people, Rainer Brämer also emphasizes the special importance of original experiences of nature for environmental awareness. In school surveys, there was a strong alienation from nature among young people, which was initially shown by a lack of knowledge about nature. On the other hand, it also revealed images of a heavenly, harmonious nature in the minds of the students, in which the human being is only considered to be “troublemakers”. With these unrealistic conceptions of nature, it is hardly possible to develop an understanding of the sustainable use of the environment - use is generally equated here with destruction.

While environmental education in the context of education for sustainable development focuses on imparting design skills, the promotion of psychological and mental learning processes is of central importance for nature education based on these findings. The focus is on reflection on the relationship between man and nature and a changed approach to the world around us. Five aspects are particularly important here:

The bodily feeling of the own sensitive and lively nature of the human being through a careful "vegetation"
The concrete experience of the interactions between people and the environment as the basis for ecological judgment
The intense experience of wild, headstrong nature between harmony and chaos, in order to be able to develop an understanding of nature beyond romantic projections of paradise
Experiencing the wild nature as a place of personal freedom in a democratic society and discovering nature as a valuable and enjoyable place
The in-depth reflection on questions of meaning with the focus on one's own lifestyle and the idea of sufficiency , i.e. the limitation of one's own material demands

A central task of nature education is to develop educational projects that focus on these aspects and make them tangible for different target groups.

Sources and further information

swell

Berthold Langenhorst: Nature education and sustainability PDF