August 12, 2024

We set out on a winding, thin path, thick with moss covered rocks gently protruding, creek beds off to the right, and hardwood trees of quite a few species. These forest trails can be tricky to follow. You need to find ways to pay attention, ways you never need in town or class. You study your own attention, and you study the trail, both. The slightest flattening of leaves could be the path you find or miss. You squint your eyes for subtle openings of light.

I am no painter, but my travels with the Grand Canyon plein air painter and teacher Cody DeLong to Pancho’s Kitchen revealed to me how seeing goes beyond intellectual analysis—it’s an intricate interplay between our visual perception and a deeper, instinctive awareness. I am no yogi, but yogic master, surfer and teacher Eoin Finn showed me how mindful kinesthetic activities can help improve student focus, memory, and cognitive function. 

“If you want to pay full attention to the trail, it starts in your diaphragm,” I encourage the students, knowing they need some focus. “This is what the ancient trackers, skilled in reading the land, did.”

Eoin Finn

The diaphragm isn’t just a muscle; it’s the core of our breath, the subtle engine behind each inhale and exhale that steadies our thoughts and calms us so we can pay attention. If these students can pay attention to the way the diaphragm moves, they can shift the way they engage with the world around them, with this trail. I use a simple game that encourages them to notice the direct impact of controlled breathing as they slow down on the trail, every step a breath, and things they would never have noticed become clear. Breathing slower and deeper, we begin to notice the details in nature that the trackers observed.

I once plotted out the trip from Dublin to Dripsey, in Cork, Ireland, to meet Eoin O Riabhaigh, the great uillean piper, pipes maker and teacher. His hands, attuned to the texture and potential of the wood, work in concert with his tools to tune the pipes to perfection. The resulting music, distinct and ethereal, is powered by the diaphragm as breath moves across the ebony wood chanters and out the pipes’ hardwood drones with sound that seems to come from the forest of an otherworldly realm. This synthesis of knowledge, skill, sensory awareness and phenomenal breath control is where intuition lives. Roger White Eyes, a Pine Ridge medicine carrier and Lakota studies teacher is a conduit to understanding the world through intuitive means. The medicine carrier interprets the subtle languages of nature and spirit. This understanding is not solely acquired through logical thought but through stories, rituals, and an openness to the wisdom that transcends conventional learning and is discovered like new in every sweat lodge or ceremony. In the dimly lit confines of the sweat lodge, each breath becomes deliberate and slow, a necessary adaptation as we endure the intense, purifying heat. Steam rises and swirls around us, the air thickens—almost tangible in its heat—and we are challenged to find calm in the enveloping warmth that seeks to cleanse both body and spirit. These are the elements of real teaching.

Out on the trail, my seventh graders don’t just walk; they become ancient trackers, their eyes training to perceive what remains invisible to the uninitiated. They are trying to read the earth’s subtle signs—a language spoken without words.

We seek insight from those who have mastered their crafts outside the classroom—be they artists, spiritual leaders, or warriors. Today, we channel the native wisdom of the trackers.  

The forest darkens as we move further in. Even on the right path, there can be distractions and places to turn an ankle or slip and fall, or feel lost, and the commitment is real as we go deep in here. This is no Peloton treadmill. As we seek pathways in forests we are developing unique neural pathways. 

Proprioception: one of creation’s great teachers. This innate sense engages the entire body and nervous system, informing us of our body’s position and motion. As we move, proprioception facilitates a unique type of learning that deepens our intelligence: it heightens our sensitivity to the environment, enabling us to interact with it more intuitively and effectively.

Here are some standard, required teacher professional development topics:

• Effective Classroom Management Techniques,
• Strategic Curriculum Mapping,
• Fostering Literacy Across Content Areas, and
• Implementing Data-Driven Instructional Strategies.

Here are some tracker curricula that venture into diverse and enriching territories of mind and body:

• Open spaces and contemplation.
• Mindfulness and Movement in Education: The intuitive connection between physical movement and cognitive clarity
• Adventure-Based Learning and Orienteering: We move through uncertainty through practicing multisensory attunement with the natural world, finding and following our internal guide.
• Mastery of Tracking and Mapping: We practice keen observation and pattern recognition to sharpen the ability to perceive and interpret subtle signs and signals from the environment.

Intuition goes beyond the cognitive schooling, tapping into the emotional and instinctual realms that are its key components. 

My students and I are trackers today, and a primal form of knowing feels alive and fun. You can’t take a step for granted for the jutting roots, jagged stones or slippery patches that make every step different and that pique your mind-body alertness: proprioception. Your fingertips brush the black oak bark. Your pupils dilate.

The voices of older and other intelligences, and of nature itself, are the original teachers. The ocean surf shows the mind how to behave, and the mountain trails teach us focus, the calm energy of our group teaches us how to lead.

I ask who wants to lead. Two kids do, and they pace on ahead of the group. They pause up ahead and we learn they want to try the Summer Cut Off. They are drawn forward, happily, but go a little too fast and I say what I always say, “You’re not a leader if you don’t have followers,” as they identify the trail ahead and round a sandy bend. 

Leadership is synthesis: combining different ideas to create new directions. We are finding new pathways. The main thing that makes the leader an expert is the habit of seeing details so small that almost no one else would see or value them—then folding them into the whole. How can we teach this to students and enable our teachers to teach this?

The trail markers are so subtle deep in the forest that you may not see them, maybe a slight depression ahead that barely shows a sheen of light when you squint your eyes, or a broken branch.  Todd and Jeremy, grade 7, one small and intense, the other quite large for this age and who has what often had been called “ADD,” pick a fork in the trail, and soon they must face the fact that there are more cut offs. 

Now a heightened sense overtakes us, or at least me, and I remember to move slow, like nature moves. At some point you may not be on that same trail at all, but rather on a fork or tributary. This can be discouraging and frustrating, or nerve-wracking. Todd and Jeremy must make that gut wrenching decision: follow one of two cutoffs, or turn back, if they can even find our way back. 

In the classroom, how far do we follow the stray thoughts or even frustrations that our Socratic method might provoke? How far down a mental trail must we go? Wait, is this a digression? We keep hearing how there is no bad question. Really? Many kids have heard many times how off topic they are. Maybe those are the trackers.

We are not lost, we say, we are finding our way. 

Now the cutoff gets us back on the main artery again, a relief like finishing a test, like going back to a story after a digression, like knowing you are not lost. Todd and Jeremy, never friends before, so opposite in learning styles, have lost sight of which of them had led us back here and which followed. They high five. 

There are fields within fields in education, and forests. As teachers, we are in a field that needs new pathways and new voices. The voices of experiential schooling, free schooling, democratic schooling, public schooling, small schooling, alternative schooling, microschooling, charter schooling, and Socratic method each have different insights to track. 

Paying attention is the path. We try to map the path so it becomes replicable, testable, but it is not. How can you replicate discovery?

We huddle. “Quiet. [Pause for listening…]” 

“The animals can hear your breathing,” I whisper into our huddle. I don’t know what animals hear. But I know this is a great notion and that the trackers learned to be incredibly aware of their own presence. 

We speak in whispers, with a sensitivity and attentiveness reserved for the most exceptional classrooms. We are listening to the listening. We are trackers: they surely must have been the first meditators. 

Now a faint peripheral twitch. 20 feet ahead on the trail, a snake winds slowly across and we have the kids’ attention. 

Fear catches us and evokes sensitivity and attention that I have hardly ever seen in a classroom, a momentary loss of direction. I confess I want my students to experience that fear, that vulnerability. Because feeling lost, taking stock, and finding your own way again is the only real lesson I can think of. 

No matter the course of study or requirement, if our students are not developing a sensitivity for the natural world, we are going to fail. I think schools are afraid of intuition, and of following its trail.

Here on the trail, every one of us is noticing a different thing. 

When we study the research on the schools we have created nationwide—both independent and public—we normally find them to be relatively lonely places for many who would be wayfinders.  

Microschools are proliferating—a full circle predated but never anticipated by The Grauer School. 

Last year, a senior student once wrote to me, “Grauer is a school where I can be completely myself and explore the beauty of the Earth through a new lens.” He sounds like a tracker. 

We have heard corporate cultures described as greenhouses, but that would never do for a senior fully prepared to graduate and go forth. If we want students to develop and refine skills like observation, attention to detail, and intuitive decision-making through guided experiences in different settings (like navigating a trail) we will have to be a forest. 

As we plod on, careful not to even snap a branch, a funnel of light starts to open up ahead, Todd and Jeremy make a run for it, with the rest of us close behind, and we safely arrive back at the vans.

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You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Stuart Grauer for Intrepid Ed News.