The wild turkeys on my street don’t wear booties in the winter and the mouse in my house doesn’t wear bonnets from a closet! Should environmental education start with realism in the early years?

Suzanne Major Ph.D.

Anthropology of Early Childhood Education

Books and movies have made animals, insects and plants so charming and sympathetic, and at times so frightfully magnificent and impressive. Can young children do without these entertaining animations and anthropomorphism, that is, making animals, insects and plants look and behave like humans? Do we dress them up, make them talk and have them drink tea from porcelain cups because we don’t know anything about them? Or do we think that young children can’t appreciate them for what they are? Young children across the world easily demonstrate that they are capable of perceiving, observing and remembering the descriptive elements belonging to an animal, a plant or insect. They can collect information and draw knowledge from it. My friend Omar in Cairo, three years old, knows not to treat the wild dogs as pets if only, because they are infested with fleas. My neighbour Maddy learned at two-years-old not to bother the bees in the hive hanging from the apple tree. Jenny, in Moncton New Brunswick, four years old, can identify the leaves of poison ivy in the forest and knows to wear long pants to protect her legs when she goes for walks with her family. Children learn very early on what is dangerous or not, comestible or not, pleasant or disagreeable. They are also capable of attaching symbolic value to things. Children everywhere offer flowers to their mothers and grandmothers to express their feelings or to create a nice event! As you know, they learn using observation, imitation, repetition or as Piaget wrote "perception, assimilation and accommodation". They also identify with the knowledge of others or the information offered by nature. They encode it just because others use it, or they happened to observe it. They sometimes need information quickly, so they identify with the information others have, to fill the gap until they can adapt or replace it with more personal information. Through a very individualistic process of thought creation they retain or ignore elements of information and knowledge. They set the ones they favour in memory and replay others in thought, all sorts of ways assessing what works or not.

Finding animals, insects, plants or things cute, vulnerable or charming stems from the capability of empathy which is more difficult to use for what is ugly, threatening or disgusting. This notion of finding things cute is a cultural one that is cultivated and exploited by stories, books, animations and movies. Empathy is used to ensure survival among our own and can be transferred to animals, insects and plants. But it also allows sentiments to emerge that can be directed, intentions that can be instructed and behaviours that can be modelled. It is often used because of marketing interests but it can also serve pedagogically to create empathy. "Charlotte, the spider" is a good example!

The question here is do we need to create stories to nurture environmental education with children? Are we trying to sell them nature? Do we need to manipulate them towards environmental education or can we let them acquire a more significant first-hand experience? Should we not have a more functional approach about how everything has a place and time and is part of a balance of all and everything in the universe? Should we not let nature imprint itself on children, so they can sense by themselves their place on earth? Is that not fascinating enough? Let’s take the booties and the bonnets off the turkeys and the mice on these pages to see where this can go! Pink and white mice are mammals of the order of Rodentia and the genus MUS.[1] Wikipedia tells us that they are climbers, jumpers and swimmers and have lots of energy. They use their tail for tripoding so they can observe, listen and feel their environment. They can sense surface and air movements with their whiskers and use pheromones for communication. It is difficult for them to survive away from human settlements and in our houses, they actually become domesticated! They eat plant matter or anything else they can get their paws on. They will even eat their own feces for nutrients produced by intestinal bacteria. They are great at reproducing. They have a 19 to 21 days gestation, have 3 to 14 pups and 5 to 10 litters a year and females are sexually mature at 6 weeks. Do the math! We like them outside in the fields and not in our houses. Where I live, coyotes can hear and smell them and eagerly feast on them. Small falcons and owls can see them easily and pick them up in a flash. Last summer was very warm and wet. The vegetation exploded as well as the mice population. As I walked in my garden, they would jump up right and left to move away from me.

What can we infer from this information for environmental education? Young children spontaneously sit on their legs, hold up their bent hands and wiggle their noses to imitate mice. By observing mice and comparing their bodies with them, young children can engage in an array of locomotive and motor activities. Experimenting with sensing surfaces and air movements with their skin and their hair they can discover how this gives them information and knowledge. They can explore and sense space with the whole body like the security of a small shelter and the unsettling feeling of wide-open spaces. Discovering smells and odours for two and three-year- olds can be a lot of fun and for older children, linking those to chemical reactions can awake them to science. Seeking the mice out in the fields can be very interesting as they make little tunnels that go everywhere under the snow and through the dried grass. Reflecting with young children over three years old on the mice population in relation to the weather and the consequences this brings is interesting because the phenomenon attracts coyotes near houses which creates a real threat to house pets and small farm animals.

Let’s consider wild turkeys or Meleagris Gallopavo. Wikipedia[2] informs us that the females are called hens and the males are known as toms. The males have huge tails they fan out to attract the females and impress the other males. They have up to 6,000 feathers and they can fly for 400 metres. To protect themselves from storms, they can roost up to 16 metres above ground in tall conifers. They gobble and emit a low-pitched drumming sound. If cornered, they can be aggressive towards humans. They are omnivores but prefer nuts, seeds and berries. They will eat amphibians, snakes and reptiles. Their babies are called poults. The hens lay 10 to 14 eggs and incubate for 28 days and the little ones are ready to go 12 to 24 hours after hatching. They can fall prey to coyotes, grey wolfs, lynxes and foxes.

The adults are around four feet tall and the big males can weigh some 37 pounds. I observe them regularly around my house. Hens flock together with the young ones, 12 or 14 together as they walk around the fields and woods. When they cross the road, one leads on and at least one or two stay behind to gather everyone. They are very attentive, looking right and left and right again. One might even stand guard in the middle of the street to make sure everyone has crossed. I am told they made a comeback in recent years as they had disappeared because of over hunting. At night in the summer, when there is a storm, we can hear them gobble after each clap of thunder.

What can we infer from this information for environmental education? It’s a magnificent bird when it struts around displaying its beautiful black tail, but I reckon a young child would be impressed even afraid if it came face to face with a tom or a hen on the street or in the back yard. It certainly offers the opportunity to acquire new vocabulary with the wattle or snood hanging from its beak, the caruncles pending from its neck, its hairless head crown and beard or beards on a single bird, the spurs on the back of its legs and the three long toes on its feet. Two and three- year-olds would delight in knowing by heart the body parts of the wild turkey and comparing it with the ones of a chicken. Young children would also be impressed to measure themselves against the life-size drawing of a male turkey. Three and four-year-olds could explore what low-pitch drumming sounds are and could discuss why the turkeys gobble after the clap of thunder and even do a little research. As an educator, I would not miss the chance to make a parallel between the turkeys looking right and left and right again before crossing the street and children attempting to do the same but unable to fly away from danger! Finally, with older children it would be interesting to place the mice, the turkeys and the coyotes in their environment and talk about the relation between them.

Nature provides real and fascinating animations all by herself and children can appreciate the reality of animals, insects and plants. All sorts of elements can create the desire for observation and exploration. Exploration calls on focus which brings attention to details which creates in turn the need for manipulation. Manipulation and/or representation will lead to curiosity for functions which is knowledge. Knowledge for young children establishes the feeling of competence. Competence cultivates initiatives and permits the experience of trials and successes. In turn, the need and the pleasure for demonstration can take place, then patience to practice, to persist and develop skills becomes a reality. Later, mastering will open the cognitive door to metaknowledge.

Observation, exploration, focus, manipulation, representation, curiosity, knowledge, competence, initiative, demonstration, patience, mastering, metaknowledge, is a pedagogical sequence that young children can start experiencing when they are just a few months old.

SM/sm February 2019, blog 3

[1] https//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/house_mouse

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_turkey