Education for sustainability: Contemplative methods revitalizing our child-like awareness and kindness to mother nature

• In Event: Highlighted session: Education for sustainability and recovery of our spiritual and child-like Self: the promise of contemplative methods and pedagogies

Proposal

Children demonstrate intimacy and kindness to nature. They love animals, have strong curiosity in natural happenings, and often demonstrate empathy for the suffering of other species. As Maria Montessori said, children are our teachers. They are spiritually attuned with higher intelligences. Indeed, Children’s mental, emotional, moral, spiritual, ecological and energy state warrant deep study. They maintain the sense of oneness, feels the spirit of other beings, and they still operate on a very high energy state that everything is interconnected. They are open to the collective unconsciousness of not only human beings but also other species (Maria Montessori).

Our education has turned children and also adult university students away from nature. Students are socialized to see nature as the other, to see animal species as “wild life”, to accept the dissecting of a frog or testing human drugs on a big array of animals to make sure the drugs are ok for us. Our economic systems socialize the young people to see the sacred offering of Mother Nature as “resources” that we can plunder or wage battles to control over. With the obsession of cell phones and other technologies, children as well as adults now suffer a form of “nature deficit disorder,” becoming more and more alienated from nature.

In this paper, we explore methods that can open our heart to nature like a child, and break down the wall of us vs the “other” which is Mother Nature. We discuss methods we practice by ourselves and with our students to raise awareness and bolster the ability to feel for nature, love nature and to want to protect nature. We work with undergraduate as well as graduate students in our classrooms and programs.

In terms of significance, there are great wisdom in religions and cultural traditions about the importance of being like a child, pure in heart and sincere in intentions; sensitive to nature and connects genuinely with other life forms. Through this paper, we hope to explore contemplative methods to rekindle our child-like nature and cultivate love and respect for nature.

Authors

• Denise McHugh, University of Maryland, College Park

• Jing Lin, University of Maryland