BETWEEN THE PAGES: Creating Teaching-Learning Resources for Nature Education
-by Anagha S
An Internship Diary#01
"How do we bring back the “spark” behind discovering more about nature? How do we associate "wonder" with learning instead of memorising terms?"
From a very young age, I was always excited to share what I learned with others around me. My first taste of engaging with nature was during my undergraduate studies in Sociology at Stella Maris College, Chennai. I noticed an energetic group of students from the Zoology department, led by their professors, following butterflies and noticing ant trails. I promptly joined their adventures for the next two years, learning as much as I could. Determined to take this interest further, I enrolled at ATREE to formally learn about ecology, the environment, and everything in between.
Leading up to my last semester at ATREE, we had a brief field immersion, where we could choose our own projects at different field stations. I spent two weeks at a government school in Darjeeling, implementing place-based nature education with a mixed group of learners from Grades 5 to 9. I selected topics from their EVS textbooks and contextualised the content to their surroundings. While the students knew concepts like climate change and global warming, they couldn’t understand how they were affected by it because textbook examples like flooding or drought were not a part of their lived experiences. They were able to connect climate change to their lived experience of landslides. Through discussion, brainstorming and games, explore how it could affect their lives.
Those two weeks of preparing lesson plans, teaching classes and interacting with the students gave me some clarity on what I wanted to do. I realised that along with my passion for nature education, I was also interested in discovering different ways of delivering it. Experiencing first-hand what it’s like to create lesson plans, adapting them on the go according to learner needs and refining them based on feedback was an eye-opening process. That’s when I discovered there’s so much planning that goes into delivering a session; it is not just “teaching” them the answers to their questions. It is about facilitating in a way that helps them discover answers on their own.
For my final semester project, I knew I wanted to continue exploring nature education. I found myself asking questions that had shaped my own journey so far: How do we bring back the “spark” behind discovering more about nature? How do we associate "wonder" with learning instead of memorising terms? How do we create resources that support educators, keeping in mind their constraints such as–time, space, materials and support?
I looked for an organisation where I could intern and be guided through the process of creating resources for nature education. That’s when I found Nature Classrooms, which works across resource creation, public engagement, research and educator capacity building.
For my internship, I was to develop a teaching-learning module for educators on the topic of “Food”. I started by going through school textbooks to map the topics covered and understanding how environmental science was taught to students. I noticed that most textbooks frame topics in EVS from a ‘human-centric’ point of view. However, Nature Classrooms follows a pedagogy that considers humans and the rest of nature on an equal footing, rather than viewing nature primarily through the lens of human experience. This meant that, for a topic like "Food", while students are often introduced to “nutrition” and where our food comes from, it could also be taught in terms of animal diets, how they source their food, their role in the environment, etc. Most students are familiar with oversimplified food chains or broad diet categories like 'herbivore', 'carnivore' and 'omnivore'. Most learners know by rote that a cow eats grass and a lion eats deer. However, they are seldom encouraged to observe what and how animals in their immediate environment, like squirrels and crows, eat.
As I flipped through each page of the textbook, my mind was bursting with ideas on the gaps I wanted to address. What do animals eat? How do they eat? Are their bodies different to accommodate their special diets and eating habits? I began to think about how these questions could help learners look at food from the perspective of other animals, rather than only through what humans derive from it.
Before starting the project, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the people I would be creating the resource for. What would I enjoy as a learner, and what would I need from a lesson plan as an educator? The answers to these questions shaped the priorities of the module. For learners, I wanted to make the learning experience fun and exploratory. For educators, I wanted to develop lesson plans that provided enough background information to prepare for a session and a module layout that was intuitive to use. Combining these two perspectives, I developed a series of lessons around the theme “Food in Nature”.
Starting from a general whiteboarding session with the team about the broad concepts I wanted to cover, I narrowed them down to a few specific objectives. While doing this, I decided which age group of learners I wanted to write for. I then laid out the topics in a sequence that followed a logical progression from simple to complex. Then came the task of deciding on a general lesson plan layout that gave the resource some structure to follow. Every lesson plan began with a warm-up to slowly introduce the topic to learners in a relatable manner, prompts to aid observation, outdoor activities like learning through animal sounds and actions, and games, followed by locally grounded examples, before finally wrapping up the session with circle time for reflection.
The following months, I focused on writing the content within this layout. While I had planned out sessions before, it was much different from creating resources for another educator. I had to use simple language and clear instructions because the resource would be used by an educator to understand the topic and also facilitate the lesson with learners. The aim was to make it straightforward so that any educator, even without an ecological background, could pick up the resource and easily adapt it to their classroom’s context.
Each lesson plan was then carefully reviewed by different team members to ensure that the resource reflected the Nature Classrooms pedagogy in practice. Their feedback pushed me to think carefully about how the lessons could be grounded in the learners’ local environment. They suggested locally observable animals as examples for various lessons and even paid attention to including appropriate species-specific illustrations so that the examples remained accurate. These decisions helped contextually ground the topics in the learners’ local environment.
Once the resources were ready, it was finally time to pilot them with learners in real classrooms. I reached out to several schools, and two were ready to host me and allow me to engage their learners using the newly developed lesson plans. At Sunnyside Learning in Chennai, I adapted these lesson plans for primary learners aged 2.5-6 years old in an alternative (Montessori-inspired) learning space, whereas in Parikrma Centre for Learning, Sahakaranagar, I piloted the module with Grades 5 and 6 (aged 10-11) in a Karnataka state board curricular system. Working across these two different learning contexts also gave me a chance to see how the lesson plans could fit into different approaches to learning. These pilot sessions allowed me to shift from developing the module to facilitating it as a nature educator. I was able to see my work transform from words on paper to actions in real time.
This was the most exciting part of the internship because it allowed me to test the assumptions I had made while formulating the lesson plans. I had prepared each lesson plan with a certain age group, an estimated session duration and possible learner questions in mind. However, the pilot sessions helped me see how these considerations played out in an actual classroom.
This helped me identify gaps in the lesson plans, add more scaffolding and include facilitation insights that would be useful for any educator picking up the resource.
What stayed with me most from the pilot sessions was how learners’ questions could take the session in unexpected directions. I still cherish a moment from my first pilot session with children under six. At the end of the session, one learner remarked, "But we are not animals. We make our own food while animals just collect theirs." I quickly reminded myself that my task wasn’t to give them a concrete answer or explain; it was to lead them to the answer through a few questions. I thought of some relatable examples and asked where honey comes from. When they answered, “Bees”, I prompted further: “And yet, do we not collect it?" When I posed the example of milk as well, it became clear to the learner that humans, like other animals, often collect food that other animals make.
A lot of my sessions also had me thinking on my feet to navigate through some challenges. For example, sometimes, when taking learners outdoors to experience nature, they might naturally feel curious to touch and feel things that they find around them. However, they might channel that excitement in different ways, like touching or poking an insect to see its reaction or chasing a reptile. In these moments, I felt like there was a learning opportunity, but I also had to discuss these actions in a way that didn’t sound like a lecture or a warning to stay away from experiencing nature. For example, there was an instance when I took learners from middle school to a nearby park for a nature walk. We paused beside a tree to observe some bark spiders. While trying to show them the features of the spiders and how they move, I noticed that some of them were trying to poke it to make it move.
I was initially unsure how to address the action because while the core value of Nature Classrooms was essentially outdoor hands-on learning, it was personally crucial to me that they observed nature without necessarily disturbing creatures in their habitat. I was still learning how to navigate these situations as an educator, and they reminded me that nature education involves not just what learners come to know about the natural world, but also how they learn to relate to it.
The pilot sessions also showed me how differently an activity could unfold from what I had imagined while writing it. For instance, I had designed a card-based activity for learners to match different foods to the animals that eat them. When I adapted it for the younger learners aged 2.5-6 years at Sunnyside Learning, Palavakkam, I found that they were more interested in holding and examining the cards than matching them to the animals. This made me rethink how I designed activities, from the materials I used to the instructions I gave, so that they are age-appropriate for different learners. During my last month of internship, I documented these classroom experiences, adding tips for educators throughout the lesson plans and then focused on the design. I was thinking from the perspective of a teacher who would pick up these resources for their sessions without prior knowledge of how they were created. So, over visual aesthetics and appeal, ease of use was prioritised.
At the end of my internship, I felt that working with Nature Classrooms had given me a much deeper understanding of what it means to be a nature educator. I learnt to confidently pitch my ideas, work with a team, write educator resources with greater nuance and understand the technicalities of design. More importantly, I walked away with a deeper understanding of how much thought goes into creating and facilitating a session. As someone starting my career in this field, I know these experiences will have a significant impact on the way I approach future sessions with children – not simply by thinking about what I want them to learn, but by thinking about how I can create the space for them to observe, question and discover.
I carry so much gratitude and love in my heart for the kind educators and learners at Sunnyside Learning, Chennai, and Parikrma Centre for Learning, Bengaluru, who welcomed me into their spaces and allowed me to conduct the pilot sessions. Those real classroom moments, and everything they taught me, are what ultimately shaped the teaching-learning resources into the form they have taken today.
Written by : Anagha S, Alumni of Nature Classrooms
Food in Nature Lesson Plans by Anagha and her internship report: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1CXYUZ2LESewNfZ-80vspo_UoZU3otiNf
If you are an educator looking to engage with articles and opinion pieces on nature education and pedagogy, a student looking to explore discourses in nature education, or just curious about these things - here's a curated list of essential readings available online.
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