The Restorative Power of Nature.
By Marsh Naidoo
Misha Davydov is an early childhood educator at A New Leaf Preschool in Nashville, TN. This nature school/farm is inspired by the Reggio Emilia Philosophy. Misha's passion for teaching is evident in his blog withoutwindows.com and on Episode 19 of the Raising Kellan Podcast, were he discusses: How We Learn and the Biology of Why It Feels Good Being Outdoors. This is a brainy yet easy to follow episode and it contains several gems including an unexpected discussion of how gardening is beneficial to those with dementia. A previous blog on neuroplasticity is also good resource on the science of learning.
What is the Reggio Emilia Approach?
It is an educational philosophy based on teaching children through their interactions with each other and the environment. Constructive feedback is provided by teachers while the child uses play, art and nature to express themselves. Check out anewleafnashville.org for more information.
Photo Credit: Misha Davydov
Child with bug in hand. Photo Credit: Misha Davydov
How We Can Leverage the Power of Nature Now!
written by Misha Davydov
In our rapidly narrowing world, it has become easier than ever to spend our time focused on places and things that are distant from where we are. Loss of green spaces, fear of the unknown, increasing screen time, and the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic have pushed us inside for larger and larger portions of the day.
For developing minds and bodies, outdoor exposure is more important than ever despite being harder to access. Spending time outside is and always has been about more than just flexing muscles and getting out our wiggles:
Photo Credit: Misha Davydov
Painting Tree Cross Sections Photo Credit: Misha Davydov
1. The Great Outdoors is the most sensory-diverse, sensory-rich classroom. It is constantly shifting, constantly changing, and full of limitless potential to engage our faculties as humans.
2. Being outside feels good because it is a hard-wired component of our biology; the euphoria we feel when we are outside is our body’s way of rewarding us to create a habit.
3. Learning is non-geographic. Reading doesn’t happen at the library, art doesn’t happen in the studio, and gross motor play is not just for outside. With the right mindset, every domain of learning can be engaged with outside.
4. Outside is free, openly accessible, and full of potential.
5. The outdoors has the power to deepen our sense of self. Connection goes beyond human-human contact. Getting acquainted with the lands and creatures in our environs helps us understand the role we play as humans and as unique individuals.
Child Planting. Photo Credit: Misha Davydov
Referenced research articles discussed in the podcast.
Midouhas et al. BMC Public Health (2019) 19:406 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-6733-1. The quality of air outside and inside the home: associations with emotional and behavioral problem scores in early childhood.
David Buttelmann & Anne-Kristin Römpke (2014) Anxiety-Reducing Effect: Dog, Fish and Plant in Direct Comparison, Anthrozoös, 27:2, 267-277, DOI: 10.2752/175303714X13903827487647
Sin-Ae Park 1,*, A-Young Lee 1, Hee-Geun Park 2 and Wang-Lok Lee 3. Benefits of Gardening Activities for Cognitive Function According to Measurement of Brain Nerve Growth Factor Levels. Published: 2 March 2019
Transcript
Kellan Julal (00:13):
Welcome to this episode of Raising Kellan. The Podcast to motivate, inspire and educate parents raising kids with special needs.
Marsh Naidoo (00:34):
Hi guys. Welcome to this episode of Raising Kellan. I am your host, Marsh Naidoo. Today we bring to you the final installment of our quarantine strategy series. In this episode, part three, we talk to Misha Davydov, who is a teacher at A New Leaf preschool in Nashville, Tennessee. Misha, as an educator practices the Regio method of teaching, and today we are going to hear more about this philosophy as well as the restorative power of nature and the importance of being outdoors. So without further to, let's dive into it. Hello, Misha.
Misha Davydov (01:33):
Hey, how are you? Marsh?
Marsh Naidoo (01:35):
Doing well, thank you. Your preschool in Nashville is based on the Regio philosophy. Can you explain a little bit about that to us, Misha?
Misha Davydov (01:47):
So the Regio approach is first, it's non dogmatic, so it's not hard and fast. And the idea is to, so a lot of schools that use the Regio approach incorporate a lot of elements that people are really familiar with. We use a lot of Montessori materials at our school. We use a lot of different discipline approaches. So we implement conscious discipline, if you're familiar. So we are allowed to blend our model a little bit, come up with an educational practice that works best for us as teachers. At the core of Regio Amelia is this idea that children are agents, children are empowered, and children are extremely important to the fabric of our society. So Regio started in Regio, Amelia, Italy, post World War ii, and basically the idea was some members of the Italian population that were affected heavily by World War II wanted to create a climate in their small towns where children were respected and raised to be conscientious.
(03:03):
Individuals who cared about their societies, cared about the wellbeing of the people who lived next to them and would ultimately grow up to avoid a world catastrophe like World War ii. So it was a way to kind of reclaim kindness in the hearts of children and get them tied into the fabric of their societies instead of just being this thing that we care for and forget about and don't expect to do anything except for what we tell them to. So citizenship is really the core. It's all about raising children and cultivating children and developing with children in a way that helps them feel empowered, helps them feel like they make a difference in the world, and helps them feel like they're relevant, contributing members to the society that we participate in every day.
Marsh Naidoo (03:52):
This is a really interesting concept to me. I've heard of Montessori before <affirmative> that while researching the philosophy your preschool is based on, I came across something which I wasn't quite sure about, so I just wanna kind of get more clarification on Sure. It talked about the hundred languages of children. How does, certainly, how does that tie in to the you?
Misha Davydov (04:19):
Laura Maui is the founder of the Reggio Amelia approach. He was kind of the one that blazed the path and started to unify the educational models in Italy to build towards this sort of implementation of these ideas that he had. But the a hundred Languages of Children is this, it's a fantastic poem that he wrote, but basically it's sort of held up as this sort of document that distills the ideas of Reggie Amelia. But basically the principle is children borrow everything they could ever learn from what they perceive and what they see and what they experience. And the way they learn is not by us dumping content on them. The way they learn is by seeing what we do, absorbing the things we believe and practicing those in real life. So the Hundred Languages of Children is sort of a metaphor for the idea that children are always watching, children are always listening, and children are able to take the things they see and hear and touch and turn them into something relevant for them, something tactile that they make their own, which is really special. And it's something for us as adults and me as a teacher to constantly be mindful of is that the way they learn is to borrow what we do and make it real for them.
Marsh Naidoo (05:49):
Misha, what sets you on the trajectory of becoming an educator and what inspired you to incorporate the outdoors in your teaching?
Misha Davydov (06:00):
So I worked in marketing for a long time. Really? Yes, I was very good at it. I sold telecommunications face to face, so I did face to face sales and I didn't like it. It wasn't me. I was good at it, admittedly. It was a way for me to make money for my family, but it wasn't me. I hold to the idea that we should all do our part to make a little bit of a difference in somebody's life. And I had been in the field of education before working with young children, and I loved it. I lived in Japan for three years, teaching public school there, teaching Japanese children how to speak conversational English, and I kind of fell in love with nature. While I was there. I became friends with a lot of farmers and restaurant tours in a rural area that I lived in, and they sort of showed me the magic that nature has.
(07:00):
I mean, Japan is a very small country, but there are still places there that are untouched. There are places that I visited while I was there that no one had been to, no human had stumbled across for 300 years. And those are just, they're power spots for me. I'm not a particularly spiritual person, but I visited many places while I was there. That just made me feel small, but also made me feel like I was one of a pretty large network of things that are constantly interacting in a way I can't understand. And that resonates with me. And when I came back to the states, I looked for jobs in early childhood education and that sort of reg philosophy, it drew me in. And when I started working in the field, I did a lot of indoor education. Most of what I did was housed in the classroom with a lot of materials, a lot of which are mass produced and easily accessible.
(08:01):
And we gradually sort of transitioned this program to being nature focused because we saw the difference that made in the children. We would hike up in the woods and their play was different. The way they spoke with each other and with their teachers was different. And we couldn't quite put our finger on it, but we knew we wanted to explore it a little more. We were just so impressed with over time how hardy the students became. They became more physically and emotionally resilient, sort of mentally acute. So they were solving problems that we'd never seen them solve before regulating in different ways.
(08:42):
And I sort started to, there's sort of an expression that I like to use a lot, that diamonds are formed under dirt with pressure. And I just feel like that's so relevant to the lives of children that we expose them to these adverse situations and these crazy contexts of being outside and being dirty and having to move over obstacles and move around things and collect stuff and observe living creatures. And what it creates in children is this acuteness, this awareness of what's happening around them and their ability to react to it in a meaningful and productive and powerful way.
Marsh Naidoo (09:28):
This is just a little side, side step, but that's something I've always thought of being that our intelligence or how we perceive the world is actually a byproduct of our experiences. So I can see how that outdoor experience would tie into teaching you resilience, being able to adapt to the change.
Misha Davydov (09:52):
Exactly. Yeah.
(09:56):
And that's so powerful. I mean, that's it in a nutshell for me. I mean, the idea that we learn where we are is something that it's very easy to forget now more than ever. The world is so small now. I mean, because of the internet. I mean, it blows my mind sometimes that children know what a zebra is and they don't know what a squirrel is, and they're everywhere where we are. They see them every day, but no one's ever talked about them because they're not exotic and they're not special in the minds of people. But that's a misconception that what makes them special is that we see them every day. That our connection to place is one of the things that we can use to start to understand not just who we are, but what role we play. How do we fit into this whole crazy thing that is our society or in a larger context humanity or in even larger context of what role do we play in the scope of the world as individuals acting together or acting separately?
(11:10):
And I think while we can explain those things to children, in my opinion, children don't really learn by us explaining things they learn by them experiencing these things in a real tactile way and going outside is what that's all about. It's about letting them form those organic connections of and start to understand not just what they're doing here as individuals, kind of distant islands floating alone, but more importantly how they function in the context of what the world really is. We don't just build a microcosm for them to exist in a bubble they're born. All humans, in my mind, are born to experience their world in the richest possible way, and it's how they understand themselves.
Marsh Naidoo (12:03):
Misha, how is the current situation regarding the pandemic and the Corona virus, how is that affecting your school? How is that affecting your school?
Misha Davydov (12:18):
Well, so it's really difficult for us. I mean, we sort of predicate most of our educational ideas on getting children away from screens, which is kind of tricky because now we're forced to come face to face at those screens. And it's how we keep our sense of community going, which is so important to our school. That being said, we do use the internet, we use face to face communications with our classes to keep those children connected to one another, get them taking those meaningful bonds forward, even through the covid crisis and helping them feel like they're not alone. But the other part of that is of turning the reins over in a certain way to the parents. And that is so important, mean a lot of us have more time than ever at home and it puts a lot of stress on us. And this idea that learning happens at school is a myth.
(13:21):
Learning happens all the time, even when we don't see it, even when we don't recognize it as learning. Learning is always happening. And if we are in proximity to children, whether we are an uncle or an aunt or a mother or a father or a guardian or a parent, it's our responsibility to look for that learning and seize all the opportunities we can at all times to enrich that learning for them. And I think the pandemic is very difficult for a lot of people because they're no longer able to share that burden. It used to be that teachers and parents and all the guardians could work together to make that happen. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child, but that village just became a village of two people. <laugh> sometimes one person, which is really hard. You can't do it all. And so what we've done as a staff at a New Leaf is take kind of a multi-pronged approach and pair that kind of face to face connection through the internet with written blog posts on our virtual blog that are designed to give parents the tools to take meaningful, natural learning into their own hands.
(14:37):
We've basically constructed a bunch of series of easy activities with instructions for parents to read, consume first, gather the materials for and engage with their children in academic context and socially emotional context without them ever coming in contact with a screen. We are trying to give them the fuel and the tools and the reasons to get outside with their kids and engage in the same kind of games, the same kind of activities that we would be doing at school where we in session.
Marsh Naidoo (15:14):
So guys for that are listening this morning, I would really encourage y'all to pop over to Misha's website for the school, Misha, that website, and please correct me if I'm wrong, sir, is a new life nashville org
Misha Davydov (15:33):
<affirmative>, I see a new leaf nashville.org. Please hop on over. I mean, the website itself does a great job explaining our program philosophy, kind of our ideas, what kind of things we offer. And our virtual blog is embedded there too. So if you're looking for ideas, please hop on over. We've got some good blog posts, all kinds of nature hunts, scavengers, hiking activities you guys can do that we just adore and kind of silly games that are made for the outdoors too. We've got a few that we serialize and play all the time that I know you guys would enjoy.
Marsh Naidoo (16:08):
Thank you. Misha
Misha Davydov (16:10):
<affirmative>.
Marsh Naidoo (16:11):
Guys, we gonna take a small break. Right now we find ourselves in the middle of Teacher Appreciation Week. We would like to give a shout out to all those teachers in Berg Primary School who we have been with for these last five years. I hate that we were not able to say goodbye in person with our school here being disrupted, but know that we miss your, And here is a little shout out from Kien Kien. Who would you like to give a shout out to
Kellan Julal (16:52):
When and my teachers in offer them? Ms. Amber,
Marsh Naidoo (16:56):
Miss
Kellan Julal (16:57):
Amber, and Miss Brooke and my friends,
Marsh Naidoo (16:59):
Miss Amber, Miss Brooke and your friends, what message would you like to give to Miss Linda? What would you like to tell Miss Linda? They
Kellan Julal (17:07):
For giving me the sticker?
Marsh Naidoo (17:09):
What sticker that Ms. Linda give you?
Kellan Julal (17:12):
Ms. Star.
Marsh Naidoo (17:15):
So without further ado, we are gonna get back to the show with Misha, and now we are gonna delve more into the science and the biology of why it is important being outdoors. So without further ado, here is Misha. So I came across the work that you do basically at the school from a women, a webinar that you did recently <affirmative>. And that topic was the restorative power of being outdoors and the benefit on not only developing minds, but across the board. So what I would like to focus on now is a little bit of the science as to the why is it important being outdoors, and how can we leverage that, especially now at this time?
Misha Davydov (18:12):
Well, so one of the first points that I sort of like to make is that we all know that it feels good when we spend out time outside, out time, time outside. When we've been inside for a long time. We feel fresher, we feel better, and we all do. And I think somewhere we're all aware of that. But a really important thing to keep in mind is that the reason why we feel better is that we're hard coded for it biologically. As human beings, when we spend time outside, our brain releases neurotransmitters that make us happy because it wants us to form a habit. There is an understanding somewhere deep inside of us that being outside is good for us. And the more we do it, the better we will feel. The reason we feel good is because our body is trying to serialize us.
(19:09):
Doing that more and more beyond just our mental considerations. Subconsciously we need it. And for me it's about calm, which is what a lot of people use nature for, but it's also about productivity and it's about diversity and it's about perspective. It's about keeping our lived experience fresh is the power of the outdoors, especially given the pandemic. And for children. I think that's one of the most meaningful things. Routine is important for kids. Routine is important for adults, but novelty is so important too. By mixing up our environment, by letting nature do its thing every day and just exposing ourselves to it, it makes our lives so much more diverse, so much more full of a variety of activities and experiences and sensory exposures. And it helps punctuate this sort of one setting life. We're all forced to live right now, and that has a huge number of effects.
(20:23):
I mean, it affects our ability to interact with each other. One of the things I mentioned in my webinar is just walking the dog, just being near an animal that isn't particularly a human. It makes us more willing to interact with other humans productively and kindly. There's some awesome research that's been out there. I mean it's been going on for 60 years as to the effect of what they call HAIs human animal interactions. And they've found that they affect how families interact with each other. They affect how children interact with each other. They affect how adults have conversations. They affect our stress reduction levels, they affect our production of all kinds of neurotransmitters, including our release of endorphins.
(21:09):
It's so panoramic in the effect that it has on us. And house plants do that. I mean, just being near a living organism that isn't humans just makes us more connected to each other, even within our species. And that's something we can't do inside. I mean, it's something that is profoundly different. There's just stuff living out there and it's up to us to go and experience it. And it can really add a lot to our lives when we're locked down like this. And I think one of the other huge benefits is just like I mentioned before, mental acuity, the outdoors. That's really powerful, keeping us focused. And one of the ways we've sort of built up the outdoors in recent years is this museum mentality that you can look at it and you can hear it, and that's all that if you touch it, you might break it, or if you touch it worse yet it might break you.
(22:16):
And I find that to be so limiting and so destructive and it's so important that we interact with nature in a safe way, especially as guardians taking children into nature. But the other part of that is that nature is the most sensory, diverse, sensory rich classroom there is. And taking children out there and encouraging them to sample it all. I mean, foraging is so huge for my daughter, and it's something that I've taught her over time is that, hey, that flower, that's pretty, but it's also tasty. <laugh>. Yeah, those wild violets, you munch away girl. There's henbit and dead net are two weeds that grow everywhere and they put out these little purple flowers in early spring that are sweet and she'll just sit and just sample those. She'll just munch away in the yard. And that's powerful. This idea that sweetness can come from nature and these aromas that we turn a blind eye to, the sounds and the touches that are in nature are just amazing.
(23:23):
And the idea of moss, like my daughter calls moss, nature's carpet, and these connections between things we have inside and outside, they make the inside more relevant and they help contextualize what we're even doing here, which to me is a worth that you can't quite explain, you can't quite put your finger on. But you see in children over time, when you expose them to the natural world, you start to notice that they think a little different and they use their senses a little differently and things start to become richer for them. They start to become relevant to not just what they're doing in the moment, but who they are, which I think is so meaningful. And really what all of us as parents and all of us as teachers want is to build them up, who they are, not just what they know.
Marsh Naidoo (24:22):
I think incorporating those senses in my understanding as well, Misha allows for the foundation of the cognitive brain to develop.
Misha Davydov (24:33):
I mean, the one thing that I want to add really, really quickly is that it's a leveling of the playing field. That the senses are inherent to everyone. We all have a capacity for our senses and it's how we absorb the information from our world around us. And I love sensory based education because it is for everyone. Taking this pan sensory approach to education and towards child development is a way that we can make sure that no one is ever left behind, that no one is ever forgotten. And it's a way for us to protect that right for every child and every adult to learn.
Marsh Naidoo (25:19):
So I'm gonna do a little bit of a spoiler alert here. This is gonna be a little bit of a geek out session. I looked at some of the studies that you sent me on that zip file and sure, you know what, it would be a travesty if we didn't touch on a few of those studies. I think we all understand it's important being outside, but there's also research that supports this idea. So the one study I found really interesting was the importance and the link between air quality and how being indoors with exposure to contaminants, damp and condensation actually affects a child's behavior.
Misha Davydov (26:08):
So that's me, Dohas and Flury study that was conducted in the UK just last year. And it's very relevant because the study was originally designed, I believe, to test the effects of secondhand smoke. And there has been extensive research as to the health implications, the physical health implications of secondhand smoke. So these researchers wanted to get into what other effects we observe beyond just the immediate physical effects on the lungs on development of tissues. They wanted to actually look at how air quality specifically secondhand smoke affects brain development. The social centers mostly they wanted to look at do children behave differently over time when exposed to things like secondhand smoke in indoor environment. And they tested a variety of factors in putting this study together and it ended up being relevant for environmental air conditions inside that are not secondhand smoke. They found stuffy air basically having a lack of air circulation in indoor environments for prolonged period of times.
(27:23):
Detrimentally affects children's cognitive development, but it also detrimentally affects their social development. They found that basically by improving air quality, we can assure that children develop more socially positive capacities, which is fascinating. It's kind of one of those things that we don't always think about with air quality and isolating variables is admittedly very, very difficult in that study. But basically they found, I mean to summarize the results is that a lack of fresh air makes people and children more irritable. That's it scientifically, which is pretty impressive and very surprising that it can have that big of an impact. And whether it's oxygenation and how the brain is breathing or whether it's like we talked about a lack of outdoor exposure, it's difficult to isolate, but we do know that there is positive correlation there even if it's not direct causation.
Marsh Naidoo (28:30):
This one here was a real gem. I think it's a German study done by Battlement in 2015 that you said the anxiety reducing effect of dog of fish and a plant in a direct comparison
Misha Davydov (28:46):
Study. Yes, that is butman and Roka. Yeah, I love that study and I adore it. And for me it's such a win for house plants everywhere. <laugh> like it. It's a direct comparison of these three organisms. Basically they gave a group of adults a public speaking activity, which causes a lot of anxiety for a lot of people. And then they put these adults in a room with either a dog or a fish in a fishbowl or a house plant and they let them interact with these organisms for 15 minutes and then they measured, they compared the values of their prestress levels and their post-stress levels and the results are just mind blowing. They found a 56.2% reduction in stress for the dog. They found a 58.2% reduction for the fish and they found a 45.6% reduction in stress for the house plant. I mean, that's a 13 point spread between all of those.
(29:43):
And we think about plants as so innocuous, non interactive, they don't do anything. They're just respirating and making oxygen or whatever. But people weren't even talking to the plant. They were just touching the plant or just sitting next to the plant. And it calms them down so much. And I love that study because again, it's so hard to isolate the variables and people have, researchers have their preferences and participants have their preferences in what they'd like to interact with. But I just think it's so great that people sitting near a plant for 15 minutes can have a 50% reduction in stress mean it speaks so much of the power of just growing, living things near you. And it doesn't have to be foraging, it doesn't have to be wandering out in the woods in the deep of the trails. You could just have a house plant and just spending some time with your house plant name it touched every once in a while, care for it. It makes such a difference in our stress levels and in our ability to interact productively with our world.
Marsh Naidoo (30:47):
Guys, we are gonna take just our last break. And while we take that break, I would strongly encourage those educators listening today to check out Misha's blog called Without windows.com. That again is without windows.com where he reflects on his role in life as an educator. His article or blog on the power of words especially resonated with me. And during this teacher appreciation week, I would like to give my own little shoutout to Miss Linda DeBerry, the principal at Berg Primary School. Ma'am, during the last five years, you have always welcome kien up that corridor to the doorway. You welcomed us with a warm smile and a sticker, a star shaped sticker saying that Kean, I see you working so hard. I see you getting stronger. Those words of encouragement have always been a framework on which Kellen and myself have set and worked on our positive mindset.
(32:08):
We have actually collected, believe it or not, those stickers over the past year. And our intention was to put that on a car to give you at the end of the school here. But that is no longer a possibility. However, it is my intent to get that to you somehow. So without further due, Misha's going to give us a quick rundown on the last two studies, which is the importance of gardening and how that affects those individuals with dementia, which is an important topic and relevant to many people in today's society. And the last study touches on how looking at green spaces within the urban context can affect the behavior of the urban youth. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand it over to Misha. Let's just do this one here quickly, because I think this talks really well about the memory and how this helps our older patients. Yeah, so the study was the benefits of gardening activities for the cognitive function and actually where they measure the brain nerve growth factor levels. Yes. Let's talk about that one
Misha Davydov (33:39):
Niche. Yeah, that's Park Lee Park and Lee from, That was last year as well, that was conducted in South Korea. And basically what they did was they took geriatric patients that were subject to dementia symptoms of dementia. And they took 'em out and just did one hour of gardening, multiple times a week, very light stress levels. So it was cleaning pots and planting seeds, removing weeds, no tilling, no hard, difficult labor involving extensive tools or skills-based operations. And basically they took blood samples before and after these gardening activities to test the levels of three factors that are directly correlated to the formation of new nerve connections in the brain. And basically what they found was after doing these activities, all of the patients demonstrated significant increases in brain derived neurotropic factor and platelet derived growth factor, both of which are so influential in forming new neural connections.
(34:55):
And the practical upshot of that is that we can use gardening as a way to mitigate dementia, which is, and the research is preliminary obviously, and fresh, but that is so powerful and those studies are not unique. Those studies are part of a whole umbrella of studies aimed at fixing our social anxiety disorders, fixing our neurological deterioration through outdoor exposure. It's relevant to dementia patients that are geriatric. It's also relevant to people with chronic depressive disorders. It's relevant to people with social anxiety. It's relevant to children that have difficult, with difficulty with integration in school environments. They've found children with autism spectrum disorders in blended inclusive environments and classrooms are able to interact more effectively with their peers when they're unified by simple repetitive tasks outdoors. They can kind of connect with each other and cooperate in ways through tactile experiences that otherwise they can't do with their words. And it just goes back to what we were talking about before is that the census, especially in the context of nature, they are the great leveler. They are the thing that keeps us all able to learn in our own unique paradigm, regardless of our ability, regardless of our age, regardless of the way we think and the way we're constructed, we can do it outside. We can all learn in the way that fits us best.
Marsh Naidoo (36:37):
Misha, for our youth that are in urban areas that may not necessarily have access to wide open spaces, how can we brainstorm around that idea? What strategies are there for kids in urban areas?
Misha Davydov (36:52):
I mean, this marcis kind of connects to Sobol's thinking. David Sobel is all about place-based education. He's a great writer who's been talking about it forever and how important it is. But nature is everywhere. Nature is in the heart of the city. Nature is in the middle of the woods or the middle of the plains. It's in the mountains, it's in our living rooms. I mean, this idea that it doesn't count unless you're immersed is simply not true. And any amount more is the right amount. And especially for children in urban areas, helping them get connected to the nature that is present where they are is so important. And instead of trying to replace that nature or create artificial context or put children that are used to urban environments in non-urban environments that might surprise them or jar them, it's so powerful to get them to take a second look and notice the nature where they are because it is everywhere.
(37:56):
Teaching children about the varieties and the genetic variation within pigeons is amazing. Teaching children about songbirds that are present all over, even in urban areas and keeping children attached to the green. They do find cities are full of trees now more than ever. People are realizing that it's important and learning the names of those trees make walks very, very different in urban environments. Squirrels are everywhere. There are living things to be seen and experienced. And sometimes in an urban environment, it's all about drawing attention to those things because they're there there to be seen and touched and experienced. And again, it has to be done in a safe way. But there's some pretty fascinating research that's ongoing. It's been done for a long time by the Kaplan Foundation. The caps are fantastic researchers, they're psychological researchers, specifically focused on natural exposure. But Francis quo at the University of Champaign Urbana, um, has been doing this awesome research in the Robert Taylor homes, which is one of the world's largest affordable housing initiatives.
(39:11):
So they've been studying urban children in that environment and how basically exposure to green spaces affects their ability to socialize effectively, the ability to integrate with their peers productively. And the results are astounding. And these are not, like I said, these are not immersive outdoor environments. These are not children's access to the middle of the woods or spaces where there's cranes and turtles and things like that. These are open plots of land with grass, sometimes with a tree. And they've found that children that can see these spaces out their window, even within the same massive housing projects have markedly different behavior. Their ability to regulate, their ability to critically think their ability to work together is like night and day. And it's not about them getting to the Appalachians, it's about them just looking out their window and seeing that there's something green and growing and forming that connection. Because no matter how that connection is formed, no matter how it looks, it matters. It really matters in the way we think and the way we feel and the way we interact with each other.
Marsh Naidoo (40:29):
So Misha, we ta, this is gonna be part two of the quarantine strategy series. What would be your takeaway for parents from this talk today?
Misha Davydov (40:44):
So there's a couple of things that are important that we touched on a little bit in our conversation. The first is that the outdoors is the most sensory rich environment you can ever find. And as parents and as teachers, we can spend our time creating diverse and dynamic environments inside. And we'll pull our hair out and we will buy lots of stuff and we'll try and keep it rich and fresh and exciting. Or we can let nature do that on its own. Cuz it does. It changes every day. Every day is different. Every day has something new, something fresh, something exciting, something new alive, something new, not alive for children to experience. And when we do away with spending time on artificially constructing those things and just get out there with them, we find that all that time we used to spend on artificially constructing things can be spent. Just being with them and just connecting with them on a different level and really getting to know them in a fresh and exciting context. Yeah.
Marsh Naidoo (41:54):
Sorry, Misha, for those parents and educators that would like to reach out to you, we mentioned your website for the school. Yeah. Can we just go ahead and give them that information again please, sir?
Misha Davydov (42:08):
Yeah. The school's website is www.anewleaf.org. I also have a personal blog, so if you're interested in checking that out, I have a blog that's called Without Windows, so www.withoutwindows.com. And that is specifically focused on all range of topics for teachers and parents about the dovetailing of the Reggie Amelia approach and nature education. So it's all over the board, but please check that out as well and put your 2 cents in because that's an ongoing dialogue for all of the articles I have written there. And that touches on topics like the War on Play, why children are Allowed, aren't allowed to play as much anymore. It talks about music, natural exposure, the benefits of being lost. There's so many articles that are relevant now more than ever.
Marsh Naidoo (43:02):
I think we're gonna have to wrap that up. But thank you so, so much.
Misha Davydov (43:07):
No problem, Marsh, thank you so much for having me. I had a blast talking to you and it just, it's nice to be tied into as many communities I can be tied into. That's, and I just, That's right. Connection's more important than it ever has been. And if you ever need anything, reach out. And if your listeners have any questions, feel free to reach out whenever you guys,
Marsh Naidoo (43:29):
Thank you Misha, for providing us with that awesome content. To remind you again, Misha blogs@withoutwindows.com, please check that out. And the preschool in Nashville that he works at is called A New Leaf. And they have a website as well, a new leaf nashville.org. Well, we have come to the end of another show, guys. And remember, check out our blog at raisingkellan.org. And if you need to reach me, you can reach me at raisingkellan@gmail And as always, I would like to remind you to get to the top of your mountain. And today I'm gonna be signing out together with Kellan.
Kellan Julal (44:31):
Bye Ice. No, now I,
Marsh Naidoo (44:36):
And then you have a good job Kellan.