People across New Mexico know and appreciate their outdoors, and they covet their time in the natural world. There’s a deep and historical understanding. That sentiment helped to drive the planning and activities at a late September Symposium on Biophilic Programming. The event was hosted by the dynamic Albuquerque Sign Language Academy (ASLA) a front-runner in the NM education sector across the domains of programming, wellness, and policy.
ASLA is successfully pursuing a growing number of partners and collaborators who offer different opportunities to connect students and families to a literal world of outdoor activities. A number of dignitaries representing Bernalillo County, New Mexico Highlands University, the University of California Los Angeles, Harvard University, and various outdoor education groups in New Mexico were in attendance. A key goal for the symposium was to connect those people and organizations in dreaming about new ways to expand and make the most of what the world is coming to understand about “biophilic” programming.
Longstanding ASLA Executive Director -and parent to two students- Rafe Martinez welcomed the two dozen participants with an acknowledgement similar to the above -- that is, that people in New Mexico bear intimate relationships with the land, sky, and other species and that “modern New Mexico” retains a culture of appreciation of and deep emersion in the natural environment. He went on to cite the state’s growing commitment to stewarding the natural resources and to making them increasingly a part of all student’s school day, another prime motivation for the Symposium. In attendance along with partners and invited guests were the ASLA Leadership Team and select staff members.
At that point, Martinez handed the program over to two longtime friends of the school who designed and facilitated the event: Kristina Lamour Sansone, founder of Design Instinct Learning and ERC Co-Founder, Dr. Larry Myatt. Myatt began with a reference to E.O. Wilson, who in the 1980’s proposed the possibility that the deep affiliations humans have with other life forms and nature as a whole are rooted in our human biology. Wilson’s work helped to cement its standing among behavioral and natural scientists and thinkers, and provided many of the possibilities for today’s intensifying “re-launch” of biophilia.
Myatt then offered an explanation for this recent surge in interest in the education sector: an urgent and intensifying quest for more therapeutic programming to cope with the mental health crisis schools are facing Link to ERC mental health blog; a hopeful, initial effort to reverse a decade of growing student disinterest in classroom learning and its causal effects on chronic flat achievement; and third, accelerating research, on an international level, of a wide range of intellectual and social-emotional benefits from biophilic programming.
Myatt then introduced Lamour Sansone whose work linking design principles with teaching and learning strategies has a long track record of success in engaging students and their teachers. Lamour Sansone welcomed the audience to a reflective journey, a succession of eye-catching, salient images symbolically recounting our human journey from the oceans to our present Anthropocene dominance.
She prompted the audience to let themselves “go deep” into memories and experience, sensory recollections and preferences, and own mental imagery, a 15-minute “deep dive” into our conscious -and sub-conscious- ties to the natural world.
Following the “image journey” participants gathered in virtual groups of 4/5 to first share their reflections on the slides, and then to pose ideas for collaboration and initiatives built on the collective resources and possibilities “in the room”. People in those groups had little trouble and clear enjoyment in recalling a host of experiences, learning, and discovery from and in natural settings, paving the way for energetic conversations about what might be possible
Bringing the audience back together, Myatt facilitated the sharing of comments and ideas from the different groups, a summary of which will be shared by ASLA soon, and closed out with a brief set of slides featuring a host of rigorous learning activities that addressed the question, “is this stuff academic??” In addition to those examples, Dr. Rebecca Gotlieb from the University of California Los Angeles Department of Neuroscience helped lay to rest the arcane idea that “academic” or intelllectual learning is different and apart of feeling, emotions and developmental growth, saying “from a neuro perceptive, the social, emotional, and cognitive are intimately entwined”.
As the event neared completion, ED Martinez introduced Dan Caruso, an architect with RMKM, based in Albuquerque, who shared his firm’s three-dimensional drawings of ASLA’s pending new facility. Groundbreaking is scheduled for January for a structure that will embrace tenets of Biophilic Design and intimacy with natural elements.
As mentioned, in addition to Dr. Gotlieb, other attendees from beyond New Mexico were Rachel Kolb, scholar, writer, and disability advocate and Junior Fellow at Harvard University and Dr. Katrina Kennett, an ERC Consulting Practitioner and faculty member at University of Montana Western with education students and in educational technology. In closing, Martinez thanked participants, with a promise that this gathering was only a first step in exploring biophilic programming for the ASLA community and the many possible collaborations among this group and others.
Note: If you’re interested in exploring authentic biophilic programming possibilities and connections, feel free to contact Katrina@educationresourcesconsortium.org and or Kristina Lamour Sansone at Kristina@designeducator.com
