How to Give Engaging, Effective Nature Presentations

(This post is a work in progress.)

An important part of becoming a "naturalist" is to be able to interpret nature and communicate knowledge with others. I will be gathering ideas here on how to give engaging and memorable presentations for environmental outreach activities and interpretative talks.

Based on an experience I had in an informal class learning about Participatory Methods for Community Development, I want to explore Paulo Freire's methods for adult education. The class was designed to prepare a group of students for international aid work and was run by a dynamic couple who used his methods of Experential Education in the class for our benefit.  Freire's philosophy was also adopted by civil rights leaders to train activists as it an empowering tool.

One of the main tenants is maintaining an open dialogue between the students and the "teacher" or facilitator. There is an assumption that the students are not devoid of knowledge, so there will be a robust exchange between the two parties.

The facilitator poses problems which are solved together through dialogue and questioning. The facilitator can also create situations where the students skills of observation are exercised.  These activities help develop the student's critical thinking skills.

Ecopedagogy movement....

Why the Wholistic Approach?

The wholistic (or holistic) approach is a scientific paradigm that I am choosing as a lens to view the complex interactions of the natural systems around us. It's multidisciplinary approach with an emphasis on discovering networks or webs amongst the different fields appeals to me. As I start an environmental career path, I think that this approach will encompass more than the traditional fields of the triple bottom line of sustainability - economics, ecology, and sociology.

Medicine and ecology are parallel fields where holistic approaches have gained my support and interest. In my opinion, technology has made facts and specific information abundantly available, but one can't always see the forest for the trees. It's hard to make sense of the data let alone remember much of it or use it in a meaningful way. (Side note: Data Visualization is a new field that I find really interesting. Check out videos of David McCandless' work on TED.com.) Further, scientific research has increasingly become more focused on technical specializations, but the whole picture is more than the sum of it's parts, and we often don't fully understand the whole. Many facets of the natural world and human health remain a mystery despite our advanced knowledge. The human brain and nervous system is an excellent example of our lack of understanding of a complex system. We still don't know to what extent Nature (Heredity) vs. Nurture (Environment) plays in our development. Finding connections in dynamic, organic problems such as this one are best made using the wholistic approach that accounts for more than just psychology, biology, and chemistry as in this example. The wholistic approach offers a framework to tackle these big questions. 

When this paradigm is applied to education, it encourages one to keep the child-like curiosity of the world alive, and it makes demonstrating knowledge a much more enjoyable experience. It is the complete opposite of rote memorization; instead of memorizing and repeating and defining, one aims to create relationships and make it a visceral experience that uses the five senses via models, associations, metaphors, and explorations.

Through this blog, I will record what I learn by practicing wholistic education methods. It will demonstrate confidence in my understanding of new concepts and independence to use innate and acquired skills for further learning. Moreover, the use of prior and emerging experiences to understand new knowledge will be included. Reflections and critical thinking will be evident after a discussion of new knowledge. Hopefully creativity, imagination, and even some strategery will be apparent and appreciated by readers as well.


To learn more, visit this website: http://www.learningrecord.org/

"When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." 

John Muir

"We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is;
where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know."

Carl Sagan