Green Parent Article

The following is the unabridged article that was published in Summer 2010 edition of Green Parent.

The Wilderness Club

Where, as humans, do we find our sense of belonging?  As adults so few of us live in the place in which we were born, or with extended family about us.   Most of us reside within buildings, using cars to get from place to place, protecting ourselves from inclement weather.  When at times we feel ‘wild’ it is often a frightening experience. 

Children naturally know how to express their wonderful, wild nature – they laugh, cry, shout, run, sing and fight – amazingly they seem to be able to do this in quick succession, if not all at the same time!  They seek to push their boundaries and want to take risks and they are curious about everything.

Child psychologist Anita Barrows, believes in an ‘ecological self’.  She urges the birth of a new child development theory that,

“…must acknowledge that, from the earliest moments of life, the infant has an awareness not only of human touch, but of the touch of the breeze on her skin, variations in light and color, temperature, texture, sound.  No one who has spent time watching an infant could fail to know this…” 

If children are separated from their natural playground of the outdoors, how will they know their ecological self and how will they understand and experience a sense of belonging – belonging, that is, to something larger than their nuclear family and society’s materialistic culture into which they are born? 

Playing outdoors, learning how to take some risks, using tools, making fire, building dens and feeling at home amidst trees, mud and insects are I believe, some of the finer things in life.  For this reason I have started an all-season outdoor Saturday Club for 8-12 year olds called, The Wilderness Club. I also run longer courses in the summer.

Come rain, snow, wind or sun, you will find a motley bunch of us spending our Saturdays playing in the woods, set within the Dartington Estate in south Devon.  I run the Wilderness Club with Nicky Love who also runs his own campcraft skills business and is a wonderful mentor for children.

The day typically runs from 10am to 3pm and we start and end our days with a circle around the fire pit.  This is a time for everyone to say how they are doing and for this we draw on ancient Native American traditions by using what is known as a ‘talking stick’. 

As you might expect, if you have the stick, in our case a large deer antler, then you get to speak and everyone else gets to listen.  This is a simple and powerful way to share communal time so that everybody gets their say.  Then its time for a game – current favourites are Capture the Flag and Wizards, Giants, Elves.

By then it’s about 11’o clock and time for the children to run their student counsel project.  They have chosen from a selection of sustainable land projects that John, the Dartington Estate Manager, has offered them.  The children receive a letter from him explaining what needs doing on the estate and why this will be helpful in maintaining the balance of biodiversity within the woodland. In the spring term the children chose to do oak tree planting and laurel cutting.

If there’s time before lunch, we have a small activity usually designed to heighten the children’s sense of nature awareness.  This may be a blindfold activity, plant identification, one of Nicky’s tracking exercises, or possibly working with clay to make faces, or figures using leaves and twigs to decorate.

After lunch we run the student counsel.  During this half an hour we offer exercises that help the children to learn about various ways to make decisions – we encourage them to think about different scenarios from the perspective of animals, elders, teenagers, adults and the earth.  Then they get to choose which project they want to run and we invite them to take responsibility for managing it themselves. 

The ethos behind the student counsel is really about how much the children can work as a team, express their own needs, take responsibility and see things from each others perspective.  They have had some amazing discussions in their counsel about how the world might be different if decisions taken by adults and politicians were more consensual. 

Learning how to make fire from different methods, how to build a survival shelter, how to cook wild food and how to make bows and arrows are other main activities that we offer.  In the closing circle wooden coin tokens are given out to each of the children in acknowledgment of a quality they have shown that day.  These coins get collected in leather pouches which they have made and then on the final Saturday, there are 6 per term, we have a customary fry-up and award ceremony which the parents / carers also attend.  The children pay for their fry-up with their tokens.

It’s wonderful to watch the children gain in confidence in the woodland environment; they don’t stop asking questions about the plants around them and they seem to soak up information and reflections that are offered by us and of course there’s plenty of knowledge that they contribute and share as peers.

During the Saturdays in the wood, it’s like time stands still.  A parent once said, “I don’t know what you do to him  [her son Toby] but he glows for days afterwards”.   Another, “Sam… did say that he wished Wilderness Club was school and school was on a Saturday!  Sam…struggles with dyslexia and school work; I believe that this is invaluable for his self esteem…”

And the funny thing is, that despite all of the skills that we teach the children, I personally believe that the most restorative part about the Wilderness Club is the opportunity for the children to simply inhabit their natural environment. This seems to engender a wider sense of belonging as they feel safe in the woodland and part of a small community and they have the chance to have fun and be the wild, beautiful people that they are.

Written by Hetti Dysch. March 2010