Children experiencing nature online

FAYETTEVILLE -- Nonprofit organizations specializing in outdoor educational programs for children have had to put on their online thinking caps to provide the same type of experience as before the pandemic.

Springtime typically means school buses piled up at Apple Seeds, Beaver Watershed Alliance, the Illinois River Watershed Partnership, Ozark Natural Science Center and others. It's a chance for students to take field trips or for parents to have their children get hands-on interaction with nature.

The coronavirus pandemic has caused schools in the state to close and made social distancing the norm. Many organizations are learning on their own, through video and web production, to provide children some semblance of an outdoor experience.

A shift

The Arkansas Environmental Education Association in Greenland provides an online hub for organizations to talk about how they're changing their programs and to collaborate.

The idea is to be strategic about online environmental education efforts and to ensure students are still participating where possible, said Sophia Stephenson, the association's director.

"For environmental education, we're used to it being very hands-on and based on where you are," she said. "It might be outside; it might be in a classroom. But it's such a different model than doing things virtually. It's quite a shift in thinking for our community and how we're going to do that."

The association has a running list of online programming and the relevant organizations on its website.

Apple Seeds in Fayetteville, for instance, has been putting its cooking courses to video and sharing them online. Normally, students would prepare food at school during the day and take ingredients home.

The organization is still growing food at its 2-acre garden at Gulley Park, said Tanya Collins, marketing director. But the food is going to food pantries for schoolchildren and their families in Fayetteville and Springdale.

Children also can watch shorter weekly segments, about 4 minutes long. The videos serve as a sort of boredom-buster, Collins said, that encourage families to experiment in the kitchen and learn some basic cooking skills. The organization plans to put together some creative videos telling the life story of vegetables from planting to getting on the plate, she said.

It's also been an adjustment for staff and volunteers. Hundreds of volunteers typically help year-round. The operational staff is now down to nine people, four of whom are AmeriCorps service members.

Not to mention, the staff has had to take on video production, Collins said.

"None of us have backgrounds in videography or scriptwriting or editing," she said. "We've learned all of that over the last three weeks, in addition to harvesting."

Maintaining the mission

Nonprofit groups providing environmental education also still have to meet grant requirements. Ozark Natural Science Center near Huntsville, for example, relies on Walton Family Foundation money and monetary donations from the public. The foundation gives the center money for each student served, and when students could no longer be served, the center had to go virtual. The foundation was on board, said Roslyn Imrie, the center's executive director.

With grant money still coming and the federal government's payroll protection program, the center has been able to keep its staff. It has transformed its operation to a robust online curriculum, complete with videos, documents and graphics for a five-week course.

The center's residential program is its most popular, Imrie said. Children stay at lodges and interact with nature on 15,000 Ozarks acres. So the staff is used to coming up with long-term programming, she said.

The online course's target audience is fourth- through sixth-graders, who are usually pretty adept at technology by that age, Imrie said. The challenge is to reach children who don't have a reliable internet connection at home. The center has lesson plans that can be printed so the child doesn't have to maintain an internet connection the whole time while learning.

Teacher naturalists also outline simple ways for children to experience nature in their own backyards, Imrie said. It could be something like putting a log down and seeing what kinds of decomposers grab onto it, or watching birds at a bird feeder or taking note of what sort of creatures are flying in the sky.

"There's a lot of nature all around us we don't necessarily notice," Imrie said.

The center is not encouraging children to go to nature areas or state parks. Even though those areas may be open, people frequently violate social distancing, Imrie said.

Hands-on

Water quality and education centers are sending the same message. The Illinois River Watershed Partners sanctuary in Cave Springs is still technically open, but children should stick with the online classroom the organization set up on its website, said Casey Rector, program manager. Field trips are canceled.

Instead, program instructors have been recording videos of the hikes they'd normally take with students and putting them with lessons, Rector said. Lessons might showcase the importance of bugs and lifeforms at local creeks and what children can do to help maintain the health of those streams once conditions are appropriate.

The videos have been made available for schools to use in their online classrooms, Rector said. Field trips are free to the schools anyway.

"For youth education, we created something to encompass things we talk about out here at the watershed sanctuary. We talk about water quality; we talk about erosion," Rector said. "The resources we're applying aren't out of the blue; they're really focused on things we actually do talk about here during our field trips that we host."

The Beaver Watershed Alliance started doing live presentations for online classrooms. It held a virtual Earth Day for EAST students in Springdale on Wednesday. EAST stands for education accelerated by service and technology.

Environmental educators are doing what they can, but learning from watching versus learning from doing are vastly different concepts, said Carrie Byron, outreach coordinator with the alliance. Going virtual is a challenge for a presenter trying to captivate an audience through a computer screen.

It's also a learning challenge for students, Byron said. Seeing someone else take a water sample doesn't have the same effect as a student doing it and seeing what's crawling around in there.

"Those hands-on activities definitely have a lasting impression," Byron said. "For me as a student, it was so much easier learning that way. It's just a different level of understanding of how something works."

NW News on 04/26/2020