An interview with John Hendrickson Howard Bell Award Winner, 1995 John Hendrickson is a long term outdoor educator, the author of Raptors: Birds of Prey, recently retired Director of Woodleaf Outdoor School, and impromptu Keynote Speaker at the Spring 2005 AEOE Statewide Conference. When Jon Young got stuck in traffic on his way to the 2005 Statewide Conference, John Hendrickson was asked to say a few words to kick off the conference. The following interview is a follow-up to that talk. Interview by George Stratman

GS - So, How does it feel to be retired from Outdoor Education?

JH - In 32 years working as an outdoor educator I have never felt like I had a job. So to say I am retired sounds odd at best. Truth be known, I will never completely give up this field. Woodleaf Outdoor School, the program where I have spent my career, has become such a part of my life and such a part of my family, that I will always be involved at some level. I think I have had the best career possible—one that has combined my love of nature, children, photography, birds, music, butterflies, and just having fun. Truly, I have been living the best of all possible lives.

GS - What changed in outdoor education during your career?

JH - When I started in this field so much of the focus was on knowledge—give the kids what they need to know and they will do the right thing. Much of my early career was spent on this.
This all changed when I led a class with Angelica, a blind girl who when we were examining the forest kept asking me if the trees she was touching were dead or alive. What was interesting here is that in each case she knew the correct answer by feel while the rest of us had to look high into the trees to see if the branches were green. I’m sorry to say that it took three times of her doing this before I realized it was time to drop my lesson plan and let this girl really teach us something. The rest of the class we spent closing our eyes and trying to “feel” the life in the trees. This experience helped teach me how deep the levels of awareness go and how much we all have to learn. I also realized how essential this physical connection with nature is to learning and life in general. From the moment we started trying to feel the life in those trees, we began to understand them deeper and as a result were truly interested and wanted to know more. We all learned a great deal from Angelica and those trees that day.

GS - That sounds like an amazing day…

JH - It was, because for me this is where caring entered the picture. The students wanted to learn more because they began to care about the trees, animals, and nature. Immersing them in the woods, having them crawl, jump, splash—experience nature from the eyes of a frog, insect, tree, rock, or themselves! This took it deeper and brought more personal meaning to the time we were spending. It also heightened the interest and the level of the discussions and learning.

GS - So, this appreciation for nature took the learning to a deeper level?

JH - Yes, but we didn’t take the concept of caring far enough.

GS - How do you mean?

JH - I didn’t see this until much later when I observed a Woodleaf naturalist who became upset that a child on his pond class had haphazardly thrown the living things he was examining in the general direction of the pond rather than gently returning them to the water. When we investigated the background of the offending child, we found that he was in a foster home and his mother had disappeared due to her drug habit and the father had recently been put in jail. It was clear that this child felt alone in the world and that no one cared about him. How then could we expect him to care about a “bunch of bugs” that he took from a pond? While this is an extreme case, it is true that any child will turn off their own caring and their own learning if they themselves do not feel cared for.

GS - How did you address this?

JH - We took a different approach with this child and with all children. We worked hard to learn about the students in our program and to genuinely get to know them. I expect every naturalist in our program to get to know one or more kids very well during the week.

GS - To show them that someone cares about them?

JH - Yes, because caring is not something that is “taught,” it is something that must be “caught.” As such, we have made caring our first and highest priority at Woodleaf. Each child will feel that he or she is cared for at Woodleaf. If that is all they come away with, if we are able to show them one place in the world where people are interested in them, care about them, and want them to be happy, then we have done our job. If a child in the most dismal of situations feels that they are cared about somewhere, if they have “caught” a bit of caring, then that one bit of light that we have let into their lives may become the focal point for some positive change in their world. Indeed, it might be enough to help them care about the things we teach in outdoor education.
If you combine the caring with some knowledge, then you’ve got something. The children feel safe, and cared about. Now they are open to caring about nature, to understanding their environment—to learning. And this leads to action. This will make them want to recycle, to turn off the lights when they leave the room, to teach their friends and parents about nature and to want to take the time—on their own—to explore and appreciate the natural world—and, yes, to gently place that bucket of insects back into the pond.

GS - So, caring and knowledge are needed if we expect the students to get involved?

JH - The students we teach, people in general, do not do what they know, they do what they care about. Combining the caring with knowledge is a powerful thing. If you really want the children to come away from an outdoor education experience ready to take action to make the world a better place, you’d better make certain that your program is founded on caring first. The best lesson plan in the world will fail without it. But, if they truly care about something, nothing will stop them from seeking knowledge and taking action to do the right thing.