The little piece of urban nature

This article is machine translated by Google from Norwegian

We all want the best for our children.
Therefore, it also affects the vast majority when the world with global warming
face difficult times. And it evokes reflection to bring 47
people between 11 and 15 years out in a small piece of urban nature for 10 weeks, encircled
of the hustle and bustle, pollution and noise of the big city – seen from the cinema chair.

Director Phie Ambo has committed
documentary Genopdagelsen, which recently had its world premiere in Copenhagen. The purpose of
the project – seen in a teaching process – is to remind the children of it
nature that surrounds us. Through the senses.

"Can you feel me?" Asks a certain woman at the beginning of the movie. "I have something I'd like to teach you. Something that has been lost through generations, but that you have to rediscover. ”It's the rediscovery of this is what the film is about.

The outside world

Even before we come to the world, our perception of the outside world is developing. Our 11-15-year-old children in the film have already – driven by curiosity in play and by physical interaction with the outside world – developed their own ways of sensing and understanding the world.

The children in the film get to meet nature
the task together to establish a building consisting of wooden beams, rafters and
branches as well as an imported igloo shell. Based on my own experiences and my own imagination
gives the film glimpses of the process, of the children's play and conflicts, all while
nature lives in its own rhythm with sun, rain and wind. They will rediscover it,
there has been lost. Lovely images, which most people associate with
scout life. The question that blows in the wind is: Rediscovered children
then the relation to the material, the materials, to the physical world?

Man lives with declines in biodiversity and global warming – and alienated from nature, without the necessary awakening taking place. To this end, children and young people around the world demand action from politicians. But the adult world remains more interested in developing children into "soldiers" for the competitive state. And therefore also in controlling the learning of children and young people rather than in developing the framework for the child's versatile development (including the body-physical world relation) and the potential of the individual child. A new study from Aarhus University even concludes that children who have grown up in the greenest environment are significantly less likely to develop a mental illness later in life than children who have grown up in the least green environment.

It is a culture that has been lost, but as upbringing and education
may to some extent be able to remedy.

But it's not about us having
more trees in the streets, as the report recommends. It is a culture that has gone
lost, but which upbringing and education will perhaps be able to compensate to some extent
on. As part of a general awakening – a renaissance.

Crafts

So when changing UN reports document how we have misunderstood our natural foundations and today – in our part of the world – living as if we had 3-4 planets available, a natural question becomes: How can an educational plan assist the growing human being – based on your own assumptions – to interact with the world? As an active integral part of a large coherent organic whole? What craft has mankind historically developed on that journey?

In the encounter with nature, man has the knife
a magic tool to work, for example, wood – into a grater, a spoon or
a butter knife, but on a larger scale also for a house. In the sheep's wool, man has
a material for processing, so it can get clothes on the body and protect itself against
windy and cold. A willow fence? Shoe? A jar? Processing of human food by
nature's own products?

The many crafts gain knowledge to
settle in the body. But at the same time, the crafts also contribute to what we do
sensory experiences. Man is deeply dependent on nature.

Practical knowledge

At the end of the movie, zoom out, and the little piece of urban nature that has been a classroom for the 42 children is revealed as being surrounded by the city's asphalt and parked cars. A cinematic clou? If the children were not stimulated for more than ten weeks by simply being on this small piece of nature in the big city, then the active guidance of the art teacher on the student's direct processing of the substance (soil, trees, plants, animals) in nature should be considered. Practical concrete knowledge of the crafts and their cultural history is a life-affirming methodological-didactic contribution to the child's versatile development and formation.

But in the real world, the area is today
built up.