Frequently Asked Questions -
Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature
What
is Coyote's Guide?
A blueprint you can adapt to fit your situation…
Parents, teachers, counselors, guides, and mentors, this book
is written for you. It provides a blueprint for you to easily design
an amazing learning experience that fits your people and your place.
Ancient wisdom for teaching Nature Literacy…
Coyote Mentoring is the ancient, worldwide legacy of hunter-gatherer
cultures who surrounded their children with “Invisible Schooling.” This
way of teaching will hone students’ senses and connect their imagination
to the natural world.
A fresh and edgy Curriculum Guide…
This Mentor’s Manual and Activities Guide is Coyote’s Guide
because it speaks with a magical voice and issues a challenging invitation
to improvise and mentor with a sparkle in the eye.
A set of 54 sparkling, field-tested Activities…
Each Activity is primed with a story and goes well beyond “How-to,”
taking you “Inside the Mind of the Mentor” and out to “Alternatives
and Extensions.”
The best of Jon Young…
With this book, Jon Young unveils the mentoring principles
that underlie his classic works, Seeing Through Native Eyes and
Kamana Naturalist Training Program, and finishes it off with
an Afterword that puts Coyote in Context.
The Essential Manual for the No Child Left Inside movement…
The principles in this book are already at the heart of a vibrant
educational movement that is spreading worldwide. 134 Affiliated learning
communities and wilderness schools are listed. Join us!
12 pages of Suggested Reading Resources…
A huge bibliography of print and audio-visual resources, compiled
by friends from all regions, offers something to fit your needs in the
fields of Environmental Education, Primitive Skills, Field Identification,
Natural History, Science, and Literature.
Feels like a Field Guide…
Keyed, tabbed, illustrated, and glossy, just like a field guide.
More
about The Mentor’s Manual
Instills good habits of Nature Connection…
Leaves “No Child Inside.” Shifts our indoor Routines of Awareness
outdoors. Develops in-depth 13 essential Core Routines for Nature Connection.
Uses Child Passions as Teaching Tools…
Tells the Adrenaline Secret: Shows how to use Games, Questioning, Storytelling,
and Music-Making to fire up the passion for learning.
Offers Spirited Resources for Nature Literacy…
Aims for Meaningful Relationships with 8 species-groups of
the Book of Nature: Hazards, Catchables, Trackables, Edibles,..and more!
Goes with the flow of the Natural Cycle…
Orients you to the Natural Cycle as you design your learning
experience from Inspiration to Perspiration to Celebration to Integration…and
round again.
Sets new standards for Environmental Education…
“If our end is restoring healthy connection between humans
and the rest of nature, then our means of assessing success must be
natural, vibrant, vital, and sustainable criteria.”
Why is this book so
important?
The developed world we live in largely ignores the need for connection
with nature. Many factors contribute to the trend that Richard Louv
so compellingly describes as “nature deficit disorder.” The terrain
of childhood is dominated more and more by indoor focus and technology.
Fears of strangers and dangers keep children tightly supervised. Growing
population replaces wilderness with houses and roads. Growing emphasis
on test scores and schedules keeps kids busy in structured activities.
These things each have value. But collectively they result in no time
left for children to bond with nature. Not only do kids get the short-end
of the developmental stick, but the natural world has fewer people who
know and love it, fewer adults who have nature built into their habits
of awareness, and therefore fewer humans who care to be good tenders
of their habitat.
Playful, meaningful connection with the wild world outdoors needs to
be a fundamental ingredient of every childhood. We cannot let it invisibly
slip away. We must consciously choose it for our children. We’ve never
needed to more than now.
Coyote’s Guide is the Manual for the No Child Left Inside movement
that can turn the tide. It responds to an urgent need of parents, teachers,
counselors and guides for practical help in reconnecting their kids
to the natural world.
Why
is this Coyote’s Guide?
This is Coyote’s Guide because it entices us off the beaten
path, to experiment with creative approaches, to do something different
from what's generally being tried.
Coyote goads us to have a true sense of play and abandon,—teasing us
out of our usual routines to connect in an intimate and meaningful way
with the natural world and our natural selves. We use a radical approach
without textbooks or tests, engaging people in direct experience with
the plants and animals just beyond the edge of their back yards. This
book hopes to inspire you and coach you, the nature mentoring guide,
into stretching your own creativity.
Guiding like Coyote requires that you get to know the people you mentor.
You have to watch carefully for what will capture their curiosity, engage
their natural gifts, and challenge them in ways they can handle in their
personal learning journey. Look for their edges: the edge of their comfort
zone, the edge of their awareness, the edge of their knowledge, the
edge of their experience. Then, you can stretch and pull them to a new
edge, and then another, deeper and deeper into a sense of comfort and
kinship with the wildness of the natural world.
Finally, Coyote’s Guide encourages you to straddle both the
human-made world with its vast scientific vocabulary and technology,
and the instinctive, imagination-based world of our ancestors. Both
worlds offer rich, educational potential. As Coyote Mentors, you will
tap into zoology and botany textbooks, field guides, the scientific
method, child development theories, and wildlife videos. Yet you will
also explore the ancient cultural wisdom from around the world, its
mythic animal stories, nature-based ceremonies, and tools for survival.
What
is the Invisible School?
A long, long time ago, maybe two hundred thousand years ago, and
in a few places still today, the native people who lived off their land
schooled their children – but they did it invisibly. Our ancestors’
children didn’t go to school. School surrounded them. Nature was a living
teacher. There were many relatives for every child and every relative
was a mentor. Stories filled the air, games and laughter filled the
days, and ceremonies of gratitude filled mundane lives.
This Guide passes on this method of invisible schooling, so that people
will connect with nature without knowing it. They'll soak up the language
of plants and animals as naturally as any of us learned our native language.
Do you remember learning to talk? Probably not. Spoken language happened
around you all the time, and allowed you to experiment with words, make
mistakes, and every single day grow vocabulary. Mentoring with the language
of nature happens just the same. With stories, games, songs, place-names,
animal names, and more, you invisibly and subtly stretch your students’
language edges.
The invisible school of nature proves to be more than just effective,
it is also fun, healing, and empowering. Like the Coyote whose methods
at first seem unorthodox or even foolish, in the end, it works better
than anyone could dream.
How
is this curriculum guide organized?
It’s a field guide and a cookbook, made of a Mentor’s Manual and
an Activities Guide.
Mentor’s
Manual
Shifting Routines and Core Routines of Nature Connection explain
the practices that learners do. Repeating these invisibly and visibly
all the time, in every way and in every situation, develops good habits
for connecting with nature.
Child Passions as Teaching Tools, Questioning and Answering, Storytelling,
and Music Making highlight the universal instincts that children and
playful adults possess, and show how to use these as doorways through
which Core Routines and knowledge of natural history may enter the lives
of "children from 1 to 100," that is, everyone.
Book of Nature points to the most fertile places to start when connecting
people with natural history. It narrows down the infinite possibilities
by emphasizing meaningful relationships.
Natural Cycle and Learning and Teaching Cycles convey a vision of how
energies move through a day, a week, or a lifetime, giving you a feel
for the rhythm that allows you both to plan and improvise for success.
Indicators of Awareness paints a handful of universal character traits
fostered through connecting with nature. They describe the goals of
Coyote Mentoring in terms of personal growth that emerges naturally
through practicing these routines and activities.
Activities
Guide:
Activities begin with a Primer Story, provide a brief How-To,
take you Inside the Mind of the Mentor, and expand into Alternatives
and Extensions. Each activity cross-references to the Mentor’s Manual.
As you choose activities for your lesson plan, consider which Core Routines
to practice through the activity, which Child Passions to tap into,
which parts of the Book of Nature could be emphasized, where the activity
fits in the Natural Cycle, and which Indicators of Awareness you want
to cultivate. This interweaving allows you to create, adapt, or otherwise
"cook" your own activities in your own local ecosystem.
Can
parents use this book?
Totally! Coyote theory and practice has been field tested with
parents for decades. This book is “for kids of all ages” because it
teaches the parents as well as the kids how to wake up childlike curiosity
to explore, imitate, and get down and dirty with the Book of Nature.
Does
this book work for classroom teachers?
This book was written with creative classroom teachers in mind.
It’s like a cookbook with recipes you can easily adapt to fit your schools’
learning goals. We offer you a bunch of tools and strip them down to
underlying principles that you can apply to your situation. The Mentor’s
Manual teaches the “naturalist intelligence” and “nature literacy” through
“meaningful connection” with hazards, catchables, mammal, plants, trees,
birds, ecological indicators, and heritage species. This Activities
Guide can work wonders for teachers who can meet the challenge of getting
their kids outside the classroom walls.
What
if it’s too dangerous to send my kids to a Sit Spot?
Really good question. No easy answer.
Coyote’s essential Core Routine is the Sit Spot: “Find one place in
our natural world that you visit all the time and get to know it as
your best friend. Let this be a place where you learn to sit still –
alone, often, and quietly – This will become your place of intimate
connection with nature.”
We discuss at length the importance and the difficulty of making Sit
Spot work, in both the Mentors Manual and the Activities Guide. The
Sit may not be still, and the Spot may not be wild, and you may not
be truly alone, but we know you can find a way to make Sit Spot a Core
Routine.
What if I have a class of 30 kids and only one teacher?
You can’t take 30 kids into the woods with only one adult. It’s bad
for the woods and boring for the kids. The solution is to enlist a Teaching
Team or cultivate a Village of Relatives to help you out. See our discussion
of Cooperative Learning Groups and Orientation for Program Management.
What
if my children don’t want me as their teacher?
You may need to Shift your Routines. If you’re a tall parent who
guides from the front, get down on all fours and corral from behind.
If you like to give answers, shift into questioning. If you have goals
and deadlines, try wandering for a while. Become childlike and let your
children and Mother Nature do most of the teaching.
What if I have
to meet essential Learning Goals for Science Education?
Coyote’s approach highly values the scientific method and puts
a premium on questioning, exploring, experimenting, and critical thinking.
Use the Who, What, When, Where, How, and Why of Tracking as a teaching
tool, track how everything is connected to everything, and bring field
questions into the lab and field guide library.
What
if I want to teach my students Language Arts with nature as an integrating
context?
The Book of Nature is rife with character, setting, plot and theme,
field guides are magnificent literature, and natural history writing
is a widespread and eloquent genre. See our discussions of the Core
Routines of Story of the Day, Exploring Field Guides, and Journaling.
What
if I my religious beliefs are challenged by this book?
Coyote’s Guide is ultimately about deepening our spiritual connection
with nature, community, and self. It emphasizes peacefulness, awe, reverence,
and thanksgiving along with respectfulness, caring and tending. Its
encourages appreciation of the universal qualities of the Natural Cycle.
All these are spiritual emphases found at the core of religions throughout
time across the world. They will probably deepen, not distract from,
your religious beliefs.
What
if I already know all this stuff?
'Burn This Book'
This book is not for anyone to make a banner out of,
to quote at length as some new bible.
It is a gentle companion in your own process,
a process of dancing alive in the moment
With children, squirrel tracks and clouds, a falling leaf.
If anything, let this book bump you along
into your own way of doing things,
into your own way of being the educator you already are.
This book will teach you a few dances,
but we really want you to remember the place
where dances are made, before the first step.
When you start to move to your own steps,
Burn this book. Please.
– Evan McGown, coauthor, storyteller
What’s
Coming Next?
Your journey as a mentor to facilitate nature connection in children
and adults alike is just beginning, As your powers grow, you will begin
to discover a need to foster a village culture that holds, protects,
and integrates the accumulated understanding of what it means to be
a human in deep connection with nature. The work of the cultural mentor
in creating Regenerative Mentoring Villages is the subject of our next
book.
- Jon Young, coauthor, founder of Wilderness
Awareness School and many affiliates
Our Trainings for Parents, Mentors and Teachers
Coyote
Mentoring
Get hands-on training in the basic principles behind Coyote's Guide
during this weekend workshop...
Art
of Mentoring
Live within a vibrant mentoring culture for a week as you explore Coyote
Mentoring in a powerful way...
See our other Nature Mentoring Trainings
