From classroom to coastline: Nature-based learning in Honours College
In the Honours College course 'Climate, Sustainability and Wellbeing', students do more than just sit in a lecture hall. They are encouraged to explore climate and sustainability topics by connecting them to personal, embodied experiences and the natural world.
Jelle Buijs, teacher of the course, recently joined a group of Honours students from the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences during Waddenlab, a summer school aboard a sailing ship in the Wadden Sea. The theme of the summer school was Make the Wadden Sea healthy again. ‘The students were finding themselves on a sailboat. They had to sail themselves forward, so we were pulling ropes and all of that all around the Wadden Sea,’ he says. What stood out to Buijs was the setting and structure. ‘We actually left the classroom and we found ourselves in nature. Students engaged with nature and learned through nontraditional methods.’
Learning with nature and time
The same ideas shape Buijs’s teaching during the academic year. In his Honours course Climate, Sustainability and Wellbeing, students take part in nature-based excursions that include mindfulness and reflection. ‘We try to reconnect and be with and be part of nature in a more embodied manner,’ he explains.
Slow down
In his course, each session begins with a moment of stillness followed by a check-in: how everyone is feeling at the moment. ‘Sometimes you can be in such a rush. Universities are spaces where the life can be quite fast. So to take time out of that and allow people to slow down and find stillness is something that a lot of students appreciate, as well as staff.’
Time to adjust
Some students take time to adjust. ‘Every student is different. Clearly there are some who need to settle down a bit and get used to it because it’s quite different from how they’re usually being taught. But in general, I noticed that a lot of students are very open and also quite interested in these types of excercises.’
‘To slow down and find stillness is something many students appreciate.’
Climate change as more than biophysical science
The course focuses on climate change and sustainability not just as scientific issues but also as social and human ones. ‘A lot of research and education of climate change is very biophysical, which is very important. But it’s also a partial approach if that’s the only thing we look at,’ Buijs says. ‘In our course, we look at the social and human dimensions, such as worldviews, values, systems, emotions, power dynamics and governance systems.’
A space for doing things differently
In Climate, Sustainability and Wellbeing students work in small groups and create podcasts and presentations based on a chosen topic. Buijs: ‘They’re being placed in a group of students from different disciplines, and they approach a topic from a particular theoretical angle. This is really about transcending our own discipline and learning from and with others. The Honours College allows space for other forms of education. We are not merely an extension of regular bachelor education. We do education differently; not necessarily better or worse, but different.’