Free Article from our Fall 2020 issue: Transformational Zooming 

By Vanessa LeBourdais

As I write this, all provinces here in Canada are planning to have some version of school-as-usual this fall. My hope is that no one needs this article at all, and that the “Zoomification” of environmental education becomes a distant memory. But I’m writing this in case you need it, because I don’t think we are done with quarantine just yet.

This past spring when COVID-19 hit, educators the world over were suddenly thrust into teaching via video conferencing. The environmental education sector was devastated[1] by the shuttering of schools during quarantine. 89% of teachers[2] said they were concerned about their students’ mental health. And still, the climate emergency is accelerating and the need for quality environmental education is only increasing. The pandemic looks like it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. How can we have as great an impact on young minds as we did when we were able to take them on a bus out on the land? How can we use this situation and not just survive but even thrive? How can we be present, embodied and connected to the land and each other, even when we are all just pixels on a screen?

I create transformational learning experiences on environmental topics through digital media, and I want you to have the benefit of my expertise so that you can keep being the awesome educators you are, no matter what. In this article, I hope to help you bring your own teaching approach, your own ways of being, and your own brilliance to your students, even when you just see each other virtually. While I do offer some ideas of activities, this article is more about how to create a transformational learning environment, no matter what specific environmental curriculum you need to teach.

Grades: While our programs and activities below are designed for intermediates, the core principles transcend age, and have been used successfully with kids aged two to 83, as well as in business meetings and trainings, even!

“Going to Jedi School”

Ten years ago, the charity I co-founded, DreamRider Productions, began a transition from our popular live eco-theatre shows so that we could figure out how to deeply engage children with environmental topics through digital resources. We wanted to make our digital classroom programs feel like “going to Jedi school.” We wanted to create a transformational learning space, accessible to any kid, any school, online — and yet for it to be embodied, engaging and fun. Now, kids participating in our digital programs, in over 150 cities around the world, learn, laugh, play, collaborate, and change their families’ and communities’ environmental habits.

When we developed our resources, working closely with teachers, parents, kids and subject experts, we asked these key questions:

• How can we engage, inspire, and educate kids via digital technology?
• How can we be connected in a learning environment together?
• How can we be embodied together, when we are not in the same space and are only two-dimensional images on a screen?
• How can we teach about connecting with the land, when we are virtual?
• How can our digital programs engage the whole child, body/mind/spirit (as our live theatre shows did)?

I believe that pretty much everyone in the educational space is now grappling with similar questions, and I want you to benefit from our 10 years of trial and success. When COVID hit and schools closed, we were very possibly the most prepared environmental education charity in the world. Here’s what we’ve learned in these ten years:

A few key principles:

• Start with you.
• Remember the body, the breath, the land.
• Remember to play, to create, and to connect.

When we are present, embodied and connected with each other, we can create a transformational learning space that transcends the distances between us.

Start with you.

How are you? Right now, as you’re reading this, how does your body feel? Take a breath. No, really, you’re already breathing while you read this, so come on, take a big breath and a sigh. Feel the weight of your body in the chair or sofa or wherever you are.

Great, now you know everything I’m going to tell you in this article. 🙂 But seriously, these are the first things most of us forget as soon as we get on a video call. We forget we’re in bodies.

When you teach in a classroom, I bet you are present in the room, in your body, moving about, doing different things like writing on the whiteboard, opening up a book, walking around as you talk, going up to each student one at a time and talking with them, looking from student to student as you talk.

Video conferencing, we sit rigidly immobile at a desk. But our bodies and beings don’t do well sitting still. We forget to breathe. Shallow breathing affects how we process stress and studies show[3] that deeper breathing improves attention. In front of a screen, people either shallow-breathe or stop breathing altogether in a syndrome called screen apnea[4]. Remember to breathe!

Online, we tend to keep our eyes at a fixed focal length staring at a screen, even if it’s full of kids’ faces. Relentless eye contact is associated with aggression and decreases persuasion[5]— not the feelings we want to give as educators! Allow your view to shift and your eyes to be freed from looking at the screen all the time. Look “off-camera” sometimes while you talk and listen.

While video conferencing, we constantly have a view on our screen of our own face — who does that in real life? There we are staring at our own reflection in self-judgement in the middle of Grade 3 Science, feeling that we ought to somehow look as good as Hollywood actors in a million-dollar movie with a hairstylist and two makeup artists. Fun! This self-consciousness is not only self-harming, it also drags our (and our students’!) attention away from the subject matter at hand, and acts like a barrier to connection. Turn the dang self-view off if you can (yay Zoom, boo Google). Or at least cover it with a sticky note — or just practice ignoring it. The more you ignore the self-view, the more connection with your kids.

The problem with Zoom isn’t just Zoom (or any other video conferencing tech). It’s about how we let the technology change us. That’s what’s exhausting. Video conferencing makes us forget we’re in bodies. It makes us think we’re just a two-dimensional image instead of a whole person.

So, what if we threw all that out? What if we allow ourselves to be more embodied — more whole human and less “talking heads” — online?

At DreamRider, our audience is elementary-school children; these activities are primarily aimed at them, but the principles are universal regardless of age. These principles are a foundation for creating a transformational learning environment — a container we create together, in which almost anything can be learned. Try them out, and then add whatever environmental topic you have in your curriculum into the container you’ve created!

Remember the body

Our bodies are part of the Earth. Forgetting our bodies while we study environmental education disconnects us from the very thing we want to study. Children of course don’t forget their bodies until they’ve been trained to forget them, an unfortunate side effect of our need for them to stop wriggling around so some actual teaching can happen. As hard as it is for us to be online physically, it’s especially difficult for young kids.

Here are some things we do:

• Body breaks
  • Have regular body breaks. A really fun way to do this is to have kids write in chat (or say aloud if they’re not able to write) suggestions for the next body break. You can then use a poll so kids can vote on their favourite. “Act like a monkey” is by far the favourite for the kids in our program.

• “Buzz in”

• • When you’re asking a question of your students, have them “buzz in” — put their hand on their heads and say, “Bzzzz.” Use your buzzer!

• Stand like a superhero

• • Doing a superhero pose can help boost self-confidence[6].

• Allow wriggling

• • Especially when on a video call, allowing kids to move and shake can help a lot. Shift your screen, stand up with it, use your phone as a camera sometimes, switch it up. Dance, jump, move as you are able, in your chair or on your legs — invite your kids to join you! Let go of “how I ought to be” or ideas of “what is professional movement and posture” (within the bounds of safety and propriety of course).

• Turn off cameras

• • Using chat, polls, and other tech to communicate can actually help a lot of kids pay better attention.

Remember the breath

The pandemic is causing stress, anxiety, and a host of other emotional issues that interfere with learning. We teach kids what we call the “Superhero Calming Breath,” otherwise known as “box breathing” or “rectangular breathing.” During our spring COVID programing, we talked about our feelings about the pandemic, and different stressors. We gave kids this tool and told them to use it whenever they felt stressed, upset, or anxious. 80% of kids said they felt calmer because of our program, and many parents said they needed the “Superhero Calming Breath” more than their kids. Here’s our short video that explains it.

Taking a moment of silence and meditation, we can ask kids to “sense” each other — eyes closed, silent, feeling our bodies, and staying aware of our breaths. “Use the Force, Luke.” It’s surprising how much we can feel each other this way as well as the connected space it creates. Interconnectedness is a key piece of nature. COVID has taught us how interconnected we all are! Learning to sense our interconnectedness this way helps transcend social distancing and teaches us important lessons about the reality of the natural world — that, as my advisor Kelly Terbasket of the Okanagan Nation says, “We all share one membrane.”

The Okanagan (Syilx) people The Okanagan or Syilx people are the traditional caretakers of the Okanagan region, which is unceded (without a treaty with the Canadian government) Indigenous territory in the interior of British Columbia.

Remember the land

Wherever we are, we are on the land. The western/colonial disconnection from the land is something we can heal, even in the middle of a city, even online. Place-based education can happen even in quarantine, even inside your home. Here are some ideas:

• Ask students to research the Indigenous Nation(s) that have been the traditional custodians of the land where they live.
• Do a grounding exercise: imagine what’s below you, underneath your feet — imagine there are roots coming out from your feet, going down and heading to the centre of the Earth, connecting with the Earth’s core.
• Be aware of the weather outside, the season, animals, and vegetation around you. Send kids to (safely) explore their immediate surroundings.
• Map your neighbourhood — map the path to the nearest transit, the location of trees.
• Identify plants that are in your street or yard. Which are native? Which are invasive?
• Identify local bird sounds.
• Research local animals.
• Discover the name of the nearest freshwater, and if you can, visit it. As our young Cree superhero character Lashyla says, “Say thank you” to the fresh water near your home.

Indigenous wisdom With gratitude to our Indigenous collaborators, Elders and Culture Keepers, we have created a series of 16 short videos, Messages from Mother Earth. In Season Two, each of six episodes features our Cree Superhero Lashyla, interviewing Indigenous culture keepers and artists, each of whom shares a piece of wisdom from their culture along with a land-based, body-based practice to help connect us to the Earth in this time of climate change and pandemic. These videos are part of our Planet Protector Academy and are available free on youtube: https://bit.ly/messagesfrommotherEarth2

Remember to play

I’ve heard from many teachers that play is one of the things they’ve missed during teaching online. Many are finding inventive ways to bring play back; I’m sure you know lots of them! One of the good things about play is that it can create anticipation, and help students stay engaged with the less-amusing content, with the promise of fun to come.

I love one of the ideas that play consultant Sue Biely of Nudge Consulting uses when she holds online creativity workshops for adults: she gives a ‘theme’ for each day — for example, “glitter” or “wave.” Each participant then brings whatever expresses that idea to the video call. For “glitter,” one might wear a sparkly hat; another might hang twinkly lights in the room behind them; another put on a shimmering video backdrop. “I use play as a tool,” Sue says, “in any group that I want to be able to listen, think, and co-create together.”

We find that teams and points can turn virtually any topic into a game.

• Divide the class into teams; have the members name their team according to a natural element.
• On some platforms you can use breakout rooms to have the teams brainstorm and collaborate on answers and problem solving.
• Assign points for almost anything: teamwork, collaboration, kindness, project completion, communicating well, answering a question — you name it. You can also use a program like Classcraft to really gamify your classroom.
• Rewards: a reward can be as simple as a certificate, or being named the winning team for the day, week, month, or semester.
• For more on this, read my other Green Teacher article Let the Games Begin. 

Remember to create

Even at a distance, we can share art with each other.

• Draw and doodle while listening; it has proven benefits[7] to engagement and listening for many children.
• Hold an “art show.” We do this daily at the end of the lesson — another motivation to stay engaged throughout the lesson. Draw whatever you’re learning! For example, the water system from source to tap, your favourite season, your understanding of climate change.
• Do a rap or poem: each student writes a line or two of a rap into the chat box, and another student reads it out; students can video themselves rapping. E.g., rap about one thing you can do to save energy.

Remember to connect

Fundamentally, our approach is all about connection: to the body, to the self, to each other, and to the land we live on. Often, people feel that there is a fundamental disconnect between people during online learning, as well as a deficit in community that we love when we have it in the classroom. With these practices, we can still have each of these things. Breathing together synchronizes us across space. Even though we are apart, we can be together, we can breathe together, we can play together, we can learn together. Video conferencing is a barrier we can transcend.

Vanessa LeBourdais, Executive Producer, DreamRider Productions Society.

Since her grandmother taught her to love one piece of land in Anishinabewaki, Mississauga, and Huron-Wendat Territory, Vanessa has had a deep and profound relationship with the land, which, along with her theatre practice, has taught her most of what is in this article. She’s an Ashoka Fellow, a lifetime recognition for global leaders in social change. She’s a youth engagement expert, having created award-winning programs on climate, water, waste, and emergency preparedness that have reached over a million kids in over 150 cities across Canada, the US, and India. Her programs are rooted in being, play, presence, creativity, love, and fun, which is of course why 97% of teachers say they love and recommend them. For more information, go to www.PlanetProtectorAcademy.com.

Endnotes:

[1] Collins, M., Dorph, R., Foreman, J., Pande, A., Strang, C., & Young, A. (2020). A Field at Risk: The Impact of COVID-19 on Environmental and Outdoor Science Education. Policy brief. Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley, 2020; [abstract]

[2]Mascarenhas, N. (2020, June 9). Edtech is surging, and parents have some notes: Parents reflect on the past few months of remote learning. Techcrunch. Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/09/edtech-is-surging-and-parents-have-some-notes/?guccounter=2

[3]Ma, X., Yue, Z., Gong, Z., Zhang, H., Duan, N., Shi, Y., Wei, G., & Li, Y. (2017). The Effect of Diaphragmatic Breathing on Attention, Negative Affect and Stress in Healthy Adults. Front Psychol. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00874

[4]Petrogiannakis, K. (2016, September 15). Stop, breathe: How Screen Apnea can affect your health. NBNCO. Retrieved from https://www.nbnco.com.au/blog/health/stop-breathe-dangers-of-screen-apnea

[5]Chen, F. S., Minson, J. A., Schöne, M., & Heinrichs, M. (2013, September 25). In the Eye of the Beholder: Eye Contact Increases Resistance to Persuasion. Sage Journals. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613491968

[6]Rosenberg, R. S., Ph.D. (2011, July 14). Why You May Want to Stand Like a Superhero. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-superheroes/201107/why-you-may-want-stand-superhero

[7]Fábrega, M. (n.d.). 7 Benefits of Doodling and How to Get Started. Daring to Live Fully. Retrieved from https://daringtolivefully.com/doodling-benefits