From Screens to Streams

How Megan Bang is preparing children and teachers for a radically different world

In most schools, children are largely sequestered from the natural world. When they do go outside, it’s time for recreation; serious learning is presumed to happen mostly within classroom walls.

For professor Megan Bang (PhD09), this is precisely the wrong way to prepare young people for a world undergoing rapid climate change. What children and teachers really need, she says, is outdoor education that helps them see they are part of nature and experiences that make learning relevant.

“Kids often think science is a weird school task that has nothing do with the real world,” says Bang, a cognitive scientist and the James E. Johnson Professor of Learning Sciences at SESP. “But people are more likely to express moral concern for the natural world and make collective sustainable decisions if they view humans as a part of the natural environment and spend substantial time outdoors.”

At a time when childhood has largely moved indoors and behind screens—and climate anxiety is rising—Bang and her colleagues are redesigning outdoor education using principles of Indigenous people’s relationships with land and water.

As part of the ambitious Learning in Places research project, funded by the National Science Foundation, Bang’s team is using field-based and outdoor investigations into science, civics, and social studies to connect learning with real life.

The initiative builds directly on Bang’s decades of research with Indigenous communities that regenerated Indigenous models of education based in and with lands and waters.

Bang and Carrie Tzou (PhD08), professor of education at the University of Washington Bothell, are the project’s principal investigators; other key researchers include Shirin Vossoughi, associate professor of learning sciences at SESP, and Anna Lees, who will soon join the early childhood faculty at the University of Washington Seattle.

“Indigenous peoples—our knowledge, leadership, and territories—have to be central to any climate agenda that cares about justice,” says Bang, who is of Ojibwe and Italian descent and director of Northwestern’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. “I want kids to be able to think about how Western and Indigenous science can complement and propel each other. I also want them to understand when deep ethical differences require decisions and behavior shifts.”

Plant personhood

The Indigenous sciences, based in relationships, reciprocity, and responsibilities, view the world as a web of interdependent connections. By contrast, Western science often isolates organisms from their surroundings and seeks universal rules that apply everywhere.

Indigenous peoples tend to have a more ecocentric view of human-nature relations than do those from Western cultures, wrote Nikki Barry (PhD23) in a 2023 study published in Cognition and Instruction. Barry, now assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles, was a member of Bang’s research team and a teacher in Bang’s Indigenous STEAM summer program. “Humans are just another creature in the broader ecosystem with important and unique roles to play,” she says. 

Many Indigenous peoples have viewed entities in the natural world—like animals, rivers, and mountains—as relatives to be in relationships with. While Learning in Places does not teach children to take up Indigenous kin relations, it does incorporate a closely related concept called “personhood,” or the idea that humans aren’t the only ones with agency and perspectives. Personhood is often conflated with personification, which is projecting human qualities on non- humans.

But recent scientific advances suggest plants have their own perspectives, communication systems, and social systems—ideas that were once dismissed as pseudoscience. Now they are championed in leading academic journals across scientific fields.

Every year at Bang’s two-week Indigenous STEAM summer camps, these theories are put into practice as participants build relationships with plant relatives. One child, assigned the nettle, was asked whether it would be bad if he were stung.

“It’s just the nettle’s way of protecting itself,” the child replied, illustrating his ability to take the plant’s perspective, according to 2023 research by Barry, Bang, and others. Even more striking to the researchers was that when children thought of plants as relatives, they treated them well “not because they viewed them- selves as stewards of the environment but because they viewed plants as persons, which helped strengthen their personal relationship and their ethical concern and actions.”

“Should we?”

In addition to personhood, these projects emphasize decision-making as a core element of civic participation and ultimately for acting responsibly in a changing climate.

In both Learning in Places and Indigenous STEAM, students wrestle with dilemmas about nature, asking “should we?” questions—asking them to consider what should be done and how. In one exercise, students discovered worms on the sidewalk after a rain.

Over the course of their debate over whether the worms should be scooped back onto the grass, the children learned about worm anatomy, the ecosystem, soil, saturation, decomposition, invasive species, and how worms are connected to other creatures. Relocating the worms, they observed, could affect the food supply for birds, prompting a reason- able question: “Should we move them?”

“The question of how humans should intervene in ecosystem dynamics is one that scientists, policy makers, and agencies who manage the natural world routinely ask,” Bang notes. Tzou adds, “If we continue to think about human as apart from the natural world, the decision of whether to influence it becomes invisible. That’s a detriment and barrier when thinking about climate change. We’re striving for a connection to the natural world.”

Bang first began studying differing views of nature while working on her doctorate in learning sciences at SESP. Then, as now, she wanted schools to be places where all children have a chance to thrive. The Western system prioritizes motivation and interest, she says, but it turns out that “if you put a bunch of kids outside and help them see there’s wonder everywhere, you see different learning and new forms of well-being emerge.”

Indeed, her work draws from other fields, like medicine, that demonstrate how being outdoors improves human health, and work showing that those who learn only about problems often have decreased motivation. A key part of Bang’s programs is helping students work toward creating sustainable and just communities, using what they’ve learned in their field-based investigations.

“If we spent more time helping kids deliberate about what’s right and what’s good in the world, their politics and capacities for living differently in a changing climate will increase, as will their resiliency to the coming social changes and needs,” she says.

“We think technology can fix everything and we can just ‘green’ ourselves out of climate change, but it’s going to be bigger than that. At the core are remaking just and sustainable relationships and asking new questions about how we as human beings want to live well with ourselves and others on the planet. That is our grand climate solution.”