…spending time in nature connects us to each other and to our place in the world.
Multiple Multisensory Rooms: Myth Busting the Magic
Even if you haven’t sniffed a handful of soil up close, you will most likely have smelled petrichor, the delicious earthy scent after rainfall, when oil from plants is released into the air. In 2007, chemists at Brown University in the United States discovered the organic compound responsible for the metallic smell of soil or earth, which is more pronounced after it has rained. It is called geosmin.
Humans are acutely sensitive to the smell and can detect low concentrations of geosmin at five parts per trillion. There may be an evolutionary explanation for our sensitivity. Some suggest that the reason we’re so attuned to the earth’s perfume is because our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have followed their noses to find rainy, irrigated landscapes for food and survival.
Losing Eden : Our Fundamental Need for the Natural World and Its Ability to Heal Body and Soul
Table of Contents
- 🌳 Immediate Contact with the Outdoors
- ⛰ A Connection to Place
- Reciprocal Ethical Unity
- As Long as We Protect Nature, Nature Will Protect Us
- Soil Is Home to a Vibrant World
- Place Based
- 🚀 It’s Not Rocket Science: Ensure there is quiet space and outdoor space that people can access at any time .
- Further Reading
🌳 Immediate Contact with the Outdoors
William Alcott – and we’re talking early 1830s and he was, more or less, creating schools from almost nothing – talked about how the garden was essential, how a collection of distracting wonders was essential, how a covered porch – allowing learning to stay outdoors in any weather – was essential.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
Imagine contemporary learning spaces that challenge every convention of the places we built as schools in the twentieth century. Imagine gathering spaces that encourage young people to work and play together in natural learning communities supported by teachers who create pathways that guide them towards adulthood. Imagine a merger of transparent natural and built environments that allow learners the delight of multisensory inputs through access to natural light, fresh air, and green space. Imagine a continuum of flexible spaces designed to create an atmosphere of choice and comfort as students pursue their interests and passions through transdisciplinary learning that fosters collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and communication.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
school should go further than providing space, light, and air: “It should be a place where the child can feel that he belongs, where he can move in freedom, and where he can enjoy immediate contact with the outdoors.”
The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids
Children must be challenged educationally, however the wisdom emanating from the building itself is explicit: children deserve and flourish in an atmosphere of love, community, mutual respect, beauty and a connectivity to nature.
The school building as third teacher
I’m telling my story on behalf of the thousands of people with autism and / or learning disabilities who are inappropriately detained in hospitals…
I don’t respond well in a hospital, so I was stimming and pacing.
Stimming feels good to me and counteracted the busy, chaotic sensory environment of the hospital.
Overloaded that day, I desperately needed my walk. The staff, as usual, were very busy. I didn’t want to disturb them, but I had to have someone let me out. There were three doors between me and the outside world.
“Unbroken: Learning to Live Beyond Diagnosis” by Alexis Quinn
A covered porch – allowing learning to stay outdoors in any weather – was essential.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
⛰ A Connection to Place
When children have a storied relationship with a place, when they know its history and understand the flora and fauna that call it home, they care.
Take It Outside. Exploring Place-Based Learning and Risk | by Abe Moore | Medium
Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair. Golden green and glossy above, the stems are banded with purple and white where they meet the ground. Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand its scientific name: Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.
Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
I could hand you a braid of sweetgrass, as thick and shining as the plait that hung down my grandmother’s back. But it is not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself. So I offer, in its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.
Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
By building sensory connections with the natural environment people are more likely to care about and feel a closer bond with the earth.
Sensory Experiences – Sensory Trust
Organisations such as the Sensory Trust seek to find ways to make nature more accessible rather than to offer alternatives to it.
Multiple Multisensory Rooms: Myth Busting the Magic
Where is nature in your room? Items sourced from nature were a central feature in the first multisensory rooms. Is nature present in your room? Are natural experiences facilitated in another way? Or has nature been lost to a world of gadgetry?
Multiple Multisensory Rooms: Myth Busting the Magic
…spending time in nature connects us to each other and to our place in the world.
Multiple Multisensory Rooms: Myth Busting the Magic
Reciprocal Ethical Unity
To name sacred mountain spirits after mortal men, who blow through for just a few decades, is to denude relationship.
We need to regain the sense of wonder that comes from being deeply interconnected in a sacred way.
Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth
According to Barry Lopez, a framework for developing a lasting connection to place should go beyond function or beauty. Lopez posits three qualities are required, paying intimate attention, creating a storied relationship rather than a purely sensory awareness, and engaging in reciprocal ethical unity.
Take It Outside. Exploring Place-Based Learning and Risk | by Abe Moore | Medium
It was through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land, that the original immigrant became indigenous. For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.
Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Onondaga Chief and Faithkeeper Oren Lyons discusses the increasingly urgent issues of global warming and climate change and points to Indigenous peoples, their core values, and their reciprocal relationships to the natural world as sources of instruction for human beings to heed in order to combat those issues.
The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations
For Aboriginal peoples, country is much more than a place. Rock, tree, river, hill, animal, human — all were formed of the same substance by the Ancestors who continue to live in land, water, sky. Country is filled with relations speaking language and following Law, no matter whether the shape of that relation is human, rock, crow, wattle. Country is loved, needed, and cared for, and country loves, needs, and cares for her peoples in turn. Country is family, culture, identity. Country is self.
Seeing the Light: Aboriginal Law, Learning and Sustainable Living in Country.
Msit No'kmaq For all the life The trees The air This is how we end our prayer Way ha Way ha hey ho
Msit No’kmaq by Morgan Toney
Msit No’kmaq means “All My Relations” in Mi’kmaq.
Our Story — Msit no’kmaq
Msit No’kmaq aims to support people in reconnecting with themselves, each other, the land, waters, and all beings…
As Long as We Protect Nature, Nature Will Protect Us
Oftentimes, we hear the phrase that our ancestors are watching over us, but my father always told me that our animal and plant relatives are also watching over us. He always told me that as long as we protect nature, nature will protect us.
Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science
Taking care of nature, and nature taking care of us in return, is the greatest teaching my father has taught me. Indeed, nature protects us as long as we protect nature. This is something Western science has failed to understand or explain. Settler colonialism introduced ideologies and beliefs that nature is meant to provide us resources, to meet our needs, without requiring us to protect it as well. Nature has been described as an infinite sink, and this is what has led to overfishing, overharvesting, and essentially environmental degradation. Environmental degradation is the destruction that continues to occur in our environments. It is why our environment continues to face severe droughts, wildfires, and other natural disasters and our ecosystems continue to decline.
As long as we continue to remove ourselves from nature, nature will not be able to protect us from environmental impacts.
Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science
Soil Is Home to a Vibrant World
Recognizing soil as a form of life reframes our perception of another interconnected, self-regulating system: Earth. We owe many of Earth’s defining features — its breathable atmosphere, blue sky, mineral diversity, ocean chemistry and wildfires — to life. Over time, Earth and life, much like soil and the organisms that maintain it, formed a single evolving system that has endured for billions of years. The living earth beneath our feet mirrors our larger living planet.
The challenge before us, then, is not simply to amend Earth’s soils, but to revitalize them before they’re lost forever. Modern agriculture must respect soil as a wondrous yet vulnerable living entity. Two core principles can guide this shift: minimizing soil disturbance and emphasizing biodiversity. In practice, this entails significantly reducing tillage; rotating crops; prioritizing organic inputs over synthetic fertilizers; integrating crops, trees and livestock; and shielding soil from erosion with cover crops, among other interventions.
Opinion | Soil Is Home to a Vibrant World – The New York Times
Running my fingers through the soil, I understood, more clearly than ever before, that it was not simply a layer sitting atop the planet, but an extension of Earth itself — that soil, like all life, is not so much an inhabitant of the planet as an expression of a living world.
Opinion | Soil Is Home to a Vibrant World – The New York Times
Place Based
It is important to reemphasize that Indigenous knowledge and teachings are described as place based. This means that every Indigenous tribe, pueblo, or community has their own unique ways of thinking and managing their landscapes. Place based for Indigenous peoples goes more in depth than just an enclosed natural place. It broadens to the landscape, and this more holistic lens is embedded among Indigenous knowledge systems.
Everything is interconnected, even during our environmental and climate justice movements. We do not just advocate for our rights and natural resources, as it should be if we were applying this systems thinking into our ways of knowing. We also advocate for language, gender, spirituality, and everything else that is integral to our identity as Indigenous peoples. Everything is interconnected ultimately to our environment through our cultural values and ways of knowing.
Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science
In the times we find ourselves in, with the crashing of ecosystems, dying out of fish and trees, change and destabilization of climate, our relationship to place and to relatives—whether they have fins or roots—merits reconsideration.
Indigenous peoples are place-based societies, and at the center of those places are the most sacred of our sites, where we reaffirm our relationships.
Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth
You’re either gonna change your values, or you’re not gonna survive.
Chief Oren Lyons
🚀 It’s Not Rocket Science: Ensure there is quiet space and outdoor space that people can access at any time.
Ensure there is quiet space and outdoor space that people can access at any time.
It’s Not Rocket Science: Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic children and young people
This is a list of useful research papers and Commissioned documents that have changed how we think about autistic people, and how we respond to their distress and their brain events.
Useful New Autism Info for Care Settings
Autism. Nearly 80 years on from the original misunderstandings in the 1940s. So, what’s changed, in research? Almost everything.
Autism: Some Vital Research Links
Just listen. It’s not rocket science, just listen.
Daisy
The number of autistic young people who stop attending mainstream schools appears to be rising.
My research suggests these absent pupils are not rejecting learning but rejecting a setting that makes it impossible for them to learn.
We need to change the circumstances.
Walk in My Shoes – The Donaldson Trust
Outside space. Many people find being outside and in natural very calming. Space to move away from other people, internal noises and distractions can be a good way to self-regulate.
“I think things that are useful for autistic people would be beneficial for everyone. It would have stopped a lot of distress for a lot of people if they can take themselves away and calm down.”
EmilyA sensory room or de-stress room. Easy access to a quiet space to de-stress can be an enormously helpful tool for people to be able to self-manage. Ideally, this room will be away from areas where there is heavy footfall or other outside noise. Many people find neutral spaces beneficial, with the option of lights and other sensory stimulus.
“I think you should just be able to walk into the sensory room instead of asking staff and waiting for them to unlock it.”
It’s Not Rocket Science: Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic children and young people
Jamie
