A sense of belonging

Engaging schools in a co-ordinated educational project on the River Tyne

Malcolm Green

Many children today have little sense of belonging to place, little sense of what sustains them and keeps them alive, little knowledge or understanding of the natural world around them. Many aspects of modern life remove them from it.

Children are, however, crying out for this contact. To feel the earth under their feet, to climb trees, to make shelters, to feel the air in their faces, to get wet, to make stories, play games, to feel they belong.

The River Tyne is and always has been a great provider for the communities that live along it, offering amongst many other things: water, food, waste disposal, transport, inspiration and a sense of belonging. Today, it is cleaner than it has been for many years, but the threats to it and its ecosystem come from other sources: climate change, farming activity, the proposed new tunnel. It is as important as ever that people feel a sense of its crucial place in their lives.

A Sense of Belonging, a project proposed by Malcolm Green and Paula Turner, aims to connect children to the river as their home, build awareness of it and to create a sense of belonging.

The project is designed to be experiential, based on learning outside at places along the river. Children’s curiosity and imaginations are stimulated by a creative, multi-disciplinary approach working with science and the arts, with body and mind.

A Sense of Belonging looks for and strengthens connections: to the children’s lives, to other schools, to the local community and to bigger global issues. It involves the children in active and real decision making about management of the river and the positive role they can have in effecting change and awareness in their communities.

Working with stories

The river and our lives are full of stories. It is the stories that connect us to our communities and to the place itself. The project will work with the stories brought by the river:

The story of its people past and present.
The story of its creatures, like the salmon and the otter.
The story of the rock or water droplet.
The story of our adventures to meet it.
The stories that are our imaginings stimulated by the river.
Its legends and folktales;

These stories may be explored or communicated by the spoken word, by dance, by making, by song, by music.

Project approaches

Being outdoors

Creating the opportunity for children to have the experience of being out of doors regularly allows a shift in awareness and perception, to tune into the essence of their local environments. This is crucial especially where children seldom leave the place where they live. Being able to connect to the local environment needs careful facilitation through such activities as storywalks, guided discovery, creative investigations. Cultivating a sense of wonder about the things found on their doorstep.

Identifying with a creature or story

Having an interest in a key animal, such as the salmon, is a very effective way of engaging children. It becomes something the children can identify with, connecting both the local and the global. With creatures such as a salmon or a kittiwake, investigations of their journeying and sense of home become rich metaphors to be explored for us as humans for animals and for the river itself. These journeys make the geography of the river and the world more real.

Decision making and linking with the local community

It is important that the children see that their work is valued, so an important element of the project will be to engage the children as citizen scientists, talking to local people, knowledgeable specialists, making management decisions over areas of their environment, whether in the school garden or on a stretch of riverbank.

Connections and communications

An important element of the project will be to connect the schools along the river. This may be done with visits, sharings, boat journeys, messages in bottles, interlinking stories, tracing the path and behaviour of the salmon or the otter.

Connections may also be made abroad with countries that are affected by or affect the river, for example Greenland, where the salmon migrate to or central Africa, where many of the birds migrate.

TR14ers | Index | A sense of place

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