Shifting the Gaze
A focus on hyperlocal learning
Welcome back to the third installment (of 12) exploring the actions, approaches, and stories from Learning Environment. In my previous post, The Hook & The Circle, we explored how to make student thinking visible and rebalance traditional power hierarchies within the classroom walls via routines and a Socratic Circle protocol.
In this post, we shift the gaze to the outside world and expand the walls of the classroom with an eye turned towards constructing hyperlocal learning environments.
As a New York City public school teacher, I realized that many of my students had developed a hardened urban routine - the classic tunnel vision that city-dwellers often need to get from point A to point B. A natural part of life, I suppose, but this often also meant that my students were unaware of the biodiversity living all around them.
To address this, I didn’t need a yellow school bus to get my class out of the city; I just needed my students to look up and down the block in front of our school.
A Reading from Learning Environment
For the next few days, my students continued to collect, input, and share their assessment of street trees around our school’s neighborhood, shifting their gaze from the concrete sidewalk to roots, trunks, branches, and leaves. Before long, students who just a few class periods before didn’t realize that trees came in different species could now easily distinguish a London plane tree from a Japanese zelkova and a Callery pear from a honey locust. By the end of the census period, my students-turned-community scientists had mapped the location, type, and health of hundreds of trees across dozens of blocks in the neighborhood.
— Learning Environment, page 114
In my classroom and within my pedagogy, I defined ‘Shifting the Gaze’ as realigning students’ focus away from their daily routines and digital screens through the critical examination of their community.
Action and Approach: Shifting the Gaze
In neuroscience, a gaze shift is the realignment of sight to bring a new object of interest into high resolution.
In my classroom and within my pedagogy, I defined ‘Shifting the Gaze’ as realigning students’ focus away from their daily routines and digital screens through the critical examination of their community. And in my science class, I used this framing to counter the ecological concept of shifting baselines—where successive generations accept a continuingly degraded version of nature as “normal” because they have never seen anything else.
One way I encouraged my students to shift their gaze was by conducting a Street Tree Census. My goal during the census which entailed student identifying and evaluating the health of street trees, was to get my class to stop seeing the sidewalk as a slab of concrete they had to navigate and instead view it as the site of an essential urban ecosystem.
The result of conducting the census was that my students came to understand that the services nature provides, even in the most urban places, deemed the block in front of their school as worthy of care.
Start Small: The Localized Audit
Get your students evaluating the health of the trees near their school or other campus related issues connected to the content of your classroom.
Audit Your Block: No need to travel to a park. Start with a single tree (or other environmental - air quality, invasive species, impervious surfaces or social factor - health care access, housing conditions, income inequalities) right outside your school’s front door.
Here’s a free resource to a simple street tree census activity I used in my classroom.
The Identification Tool: When conducting a census use a paper field guide or nature identification app to help students determine the species. When veering away from the environmental - focus on asking students to use the tools of the trade to investigate.
Measure Growth: Have students use a tape measure to record the trunk diameter (or get a specialized dbh tool). This makes them feel like practicing scientists contributing to real data. Not measuring trees? Ask students to determine how conditions have changed over time using public or collected data (doing so with your own archive of classroom data from previous school years is a bonus).
Share the Gospel: Encourage students to talk to curious neighbors (or classmates) who walk by during the audit. This reinforces their learning by teaching others. And getting student to teach others what they have learned (with the caveat that it is accurate and free of misconceptions) is an empirically supported way to reinforce student learning.
The Impact: Asking students to shift their gaze can turn their sidewalk (or school campus) into a community laboratory, building their background knowledge and skills for future work both in the field and beyond.
Join the Learning Environment Movement
Is your curriculum disconnected from the world right outside your window? Looking to shift the gaze of your classroom and students?
At Fox EduConsulting, I help schools design localized learning experiences that fit your unique context. Whether you are in a rural landscape or a dense urban grid, let’s work together to help students “Shift the Gaze” toward a more sustainable future and help you, your school, or your organization embrace a hyperlocal learning environment.
Coming Up Next: In post 4, “The 3 Pillars of Fieldwork Preparation,” we’ll dive into what it takes to prepare a class of students to venture outside the classroom and how this approach can transform an enjoyable outing into a rigorous academic journey.
Dr. Jared Fox, is an education expert and the founder of Fox EduConsulting. Through his consulting practice, Jared helps schools and organizations craft authentic, engaging, and comprehensive learning environments - with a specialty working at the intersection of science, the environment, and social justice.
Love this idea of shifting the gaze and focusing students attention, in this case, on trees. I can see the connection between your work and Dan Bisaccio's!