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Geography’s capacity to reconnect young people with nature: Part 1 of 2

Geography’s capacity to reconnect young people with nature: Part 1 of 2

17 June 2025

Read time: 35mins

‘The conversations that I have had with students since showing them the basics of birdwatching and teaching them the types of bumblebee that they might see out and about have been startling, with some bounding to me in the morning with a picture of an insect they want identifying.’

Daniella Marston

Part 2: The theory

Teaching background

During my Geography BSc at the University of Birmingham (2016-2019), I was fortunate enough to be able to complete modules which involved teaching school students outside – from welcoming international students to a marine protected area on the Caribbean coast in Mexico to birdwatching and pond-dipping with primary school students visiting a RSPB reserve in Birmingham.

Seeing young people experiencing things we might take for granted was such an eye-opening experience – from noticing that many secondary school students had never been in saltwater or seen a crab before, to convincing primary school students that cows aren’t just black and white like they are on McDonald’s adverts!

When I started teacher training in 2019, I made a promise to myself that I would spend as much of my teaching as possible trying to reconnect students with the outdoors and nature (BES, 2019), but this has been something that I have found difficult; it is so easy to let the ‘extras’ slip away when battling with the schemes of work and exam specifications that we need to zoom through as teachers, as well as everything else on our to-do lists.

Why connecting with nature is important for young people

My first teaching classroom as an NQT (now ECT) was in the heart of urban Birmingham, at the end of Birmingham International Airport’s main runway. Whilst Birmingham might be considered by some to be a ‘concrete jungle’ (it certainly is in comparison to those of you teaching in more rural settings!), there are still so many opportunities to connect our young people with nature experiences.

I will go through some quick and free ways to remove barriers and implement this in our school environments at both primary and secondary level in the next blog of this two-part series.

For this instalment, I wanted to explain why experiencing nature is so important for students here in the UK and globally. Nature deficit disorder, a term coined by Richard Louv (2005), explains the alienation of children away from the natural world. This has physical, emotional and cognitive costs – from academic worries such as decreased attainment and concentration in school to health concerns such as obesity and low mood. This is alongside decreasing ecological awareness and stewardship (Louv, 2019) – which ultimately reduces younger generations’ drive and desire to conserve the natural world.

Soga and Gaston’s (2024) study last year revealed that ‘pro-biodiversity’ behaviour increases with personal nature engagement. As geography teachers, I would strongly contend that it’s part of our role to encourage this essence of global citizenship amongst our pupils in order to help address the world’s largest environmental issues.

Just as we would propose ecotourism as a means to promote connection with the tropical rainforest, we could suggest a walk in the local nature reserve as an approach to promote connection with the drainage basins and food chains by our homes. As suggested by Jones and Greenway (2021), ‘If (children) can’t recognise a swift, will they care if it doesn’t come back?’ It’s the foundation of our discipline and a rather large responsibility to hold!

The conversations that I have had with students since showing them the basics of birdwatching and teaching them the types of bumblebee that they might see out and about have been startling, with some bounding to me in the morning with a picture of an insect they want identifying.

While they might seem small, these little steps are vital in creating a generation of young people who notice changes in their natural environment and fight to conserve our natural systems. It also hugely helps with buy-in from those classes which might be that little bit more difficult to motivate.

So perhaps you could start by encouraging your students to reconnect with nature by counting the number of different bird species they hear on the way to school next week, and taking out those AirPods. If anything, I assure you that it will do wonders for their general wellbeing!

Read part 2 here