Among the most popular trends in education today is an emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). While the renewed emphasis on hands‐on learning that comes with technology and engineering has its benefits, there is an unspoken reduction of math and science to that which is most beneficial to the global capitalist system. Certainly, technology can be employed to, say, reduce pollution or benefit the global south; but, if we are honest, this is seldom emphasized. Moreover, an overemphasis on that which is marketable—whether it is a job or a product—stymies the cultivation of a deeper understanding of scientific principles, a contextualization of the scientific principles in the bigger picture, and a sense of awe and wonder. From a holistic standpoint, the foundation of science should not be in rigid compartmentalization, abstraction, or technical jargon. Rather, it should rest on the foundation of the following:

1. Cosmology: the big picture.

   Cosmology is the story of the Universe and how we fit meaningfully into it. According to modern science, we have evolved from a singularity and everything and everyone is connected, part of the same evolutionary process. Whether we are studying chemistry, physics, or biology, the overarching cosmology provides the context and meaning for all of modern science.

2. Ecology: the evolution of life and embeddedness in the natural world.

   Just as it is important to understand the big picture, science also asks us to explore our specific, local place. Ecology is the foundation of the way life functions on earth and of the interconnection of all life.

3. Advocacy: finding meaning and purpose from science to help the world.

   Our approach to science cannot be divorced from ethics and social issues and, therefore, address issues like ecological justice, climate change, and the ethics of technology.

4. Awe, wonder, and curiosity.

   Finally, our children (and adults) should find awe, curiosity, and wonder in the world. This, not the fixation on jargon or abstraction, will bring us the next generation of scientists.

What follows are examples of concepts and practices that I have implemented through my work with the Chicago Wisdom Project, Wisdom Projects, Inc., and in my own home. They can be adapted to various age groups and contexts. Moreover, they can serve as a springboard to create and co‐create—with your children—new activities.

COMMUNITY

We begin with the notion that the classroom and cosmos—or school and world—cannot entirely be separated. Our community, therefore, isn't merely a group of people with whom we are studying or learning, but the layers of concentric circles extending throughout the cosmos. The world, in other words, is our classroom.

In this way, the classroom is a context for the cultivation of planetary consciousness, a space in which to instill a sense of connection to the whole. The individual isn't merely a part of a local community, but also a member of a global one. The study of science requires this sense of grandeur and awe, of a community that extends beyond that which the human has made. And at the same time, the classroom of the cosmos can be rooted in the local bioregion and in ecological principles. The small is as much a part of the cosmic community as the vast. But while cosmos and oikos are about the natural order of things, the classroom must also reflect the inherent wildness of wilderness.

In practical terms, we begin to cultivate this community through the establishment of the sacred circle, the learning space. One way to think about this is that to conceive of the world as a cosmic circle, we can create a literal circle in the classroom. This means establishing a culture and process that establishes the learning process itself as sacred and linked to the larger processes of the Universe and the natural world.

When at all possible, this is an opportunity to acknowledge the world as the classroom. A garden can be a classroom; a forest can be a classroom. A starry night can be a classroom. Too often, our classroom is shrunken down, offering merely a diminished version of the human and the world. If nothing else, science is a study of the world, creation, the cosmos, and it should yield awe and wonder—everything else comes forth from that.

INTELLECT

If there is a fundamental intellectual error in the way our schools approach science, it is the lack of context. The general approach is to focus on methods and concepts as foundational, rather than on narrative and context. For example, by the time a child reaches the age where they begin a more serious study of science, they will be introduced to a series of abstractions, coming in the form of either (a) lab work that primarily serves the purposes of teaching scientific methods rather than instilling in a child a sense of wonder and place in the world or (b) concepts that, while foundational to the study of science as an academic field, are relatively meaningless for a child.

Instead, the focus of scientific study must begin with the narrative. Before we get into the cosmology based on the scientific narrative (which I will refer to as “the Universe story”) we should understand more about what a cosmology is and some alternative cosmologies. This begins with an inquiry into the nature of myth and narrative.

A cosmology always comes in the form of a story. This is true of science as well as myth. There are, of course, epistemological differences between scientific and mythic approaches to the world, but the aim of neither is to merely convey knowledge—it is to integrate knowledge into a coherent story. The scientific approach has the advantage of a rigorous method that is open to change; the mythic approach has the advantage of being conscious of the values it conveys.

So, rather than beginning the study of science with scientific methods or abstraction, we begin with an exploration into the nature of cosmology and narrative. This is entirely rooted in neuroscientific understanding of how the brain works, and we should be teaching based on this brain science. For we understand now that we process information through story. This is why, for example, giving people more facts about climate change doesn't affect their belief about it.

The story of scientific cosmology, therefore, begins with the creation myths that preceded it. This can come in forms students are familiar with, such as the Bible. But it can and should also include creation stories from various cultural traditions. None of this is about teaching religion; rather, it is an investigation into the nature of human consciousness.

For modern science, this means the story of the Universe—the broader story within which all studies of science (and history) fit. It is the way to understand physics, astronomy, geology, chemistry, biology, and anthropology. There are many ways to tell this story, but here is an example:

The story of the Universe is the story of each of us. Each phase, each moment in this story is the Universe giving birth to us. Each moment represents the birth of our common ancestor.

Out of unimaginable light the Universe was dreamed into being. It contained all the light, energy, and potential for everything that would ever come to be, all contained within the vessel of hydrogen.

1. The Primordial Fireball (13.7 billion years ago).
2. Stars (13.3 billion years ago).
3. Galaxies (12.7 billion years ago).
4. Expansion (7 billion years ago). Dark energy overpowers the gravitational pull of dark matter and the expansion of the universe accelerates.
5. Supernova (4.6 billion years ago). Our mother star, in the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy, having consumed and sacrificed herself, collapsed. In the intense energy of that collapse, she was transformed into a supernova, exploding her stardust into space, and birthing all the new elements which would take shape as Earth's body and ours.
6. Sun (4.5 billion years ago). That exploding stardust began to slow down, cool, and condense into a community of planets around the mother star, our Sun.
7. Earth (4.1 billion years ago). Our planet slowly cooled and gradually formed an atmosphere, oceans, and land mass.
8. Life (4 billion years ago). Gradually, within the oceans, more complex arrangements began to take shape. These were the first simple cells, and through them, Earth awakened into life.
9. Photosynthesis (3.9 billion years ago). Earth learned to take nourishment from the Sun. Through these simple‐celled microbes, she learned to eat sunlight, to nurse from the Sun. And that dynamic laid the pattern for all future life forms, that each must receive nourishment from another, and give itself in return to become nourishment for another.
10. Sexual reproduction (1 billion years ago). Life was mysteriously drawn toward union, and the first simple‐celled organisms began to reproduce sexually. Different strands of genetic memory were combined in the new offspring. This opened infinite new possibilities. Around the same time, organisms began to feed on other organisms, and that relationship formed the basis of the community in which each would develop.
11. Birds (150 million years ago). The first birds took flight, and in and through them Earth broke into melody and song.
12. Flowers (120 million years ago). The first flowering plants emerged, concentrating their life energy and memory into seed, making protein in the form of seed available for the mammals who were yet to come, and, in their flowering, bringing color and fragrance to Earth.
13. Mammals (114 million years ago). The first placental mammals developed, warm‐blooded creatures who, like the supernova, carry their unborn young within their own bodies, and who nourish them from their own substance both before and after their birth.
14. Earliest hominids (2.6 million years ago). The earliest hominid types evolved from the

    primate mammals in Africa. Creatures with brains and nervous systems complex enough that in and through them Earth awakened into self‐conscious awareness of her existence.

15. “Eve” (70,000 years ago). Our common ancestor, our great‐grandmother, “mitochondrial Eve” lived in Africa. There were only 2,000 human beings at this time. Soon after, some of these humans began to leave Africa to populate the rest of the Earth.

Science, when contextualized this way, is a story of our becoming. Each subject is an emergence of an ancestor:

• Physics and astronomy are stories of our past—when we look to the stars, we are seeing our ancestors, all the way to the birth of the Universe. (Numbers 1 through 6 above)
• Chemistry emerges with the chemicals created in stars, the foundational elements for life on earth. (Numbers 5 through 8)
• Geology is the study of the Earth, which emerges in the context of the formation of the solar system. (Number 7)
• Life is not merely static; it is understood primarily through evolutionary processes. Indeed, even if one studies the workings of the human body, this is best conceptualized as part of a bigger story of evolutionary emerges. This is biology. (Numbers 8 through 13)
• Human cultures emerge in the context of the biological emergence of the human. This is the foundation of anthropology. This isn't to reduce human culture to biology; rather, it is to understand humanity in its broader, cosmic context. (Numbers 14 and 15)

It should also be understood that conceptual mathematics can be a part of the story of the Universe, too, particularly as it pertains to physics. Moreover, even for small children who won't be able to study physics, numeracy and conceptual mathematics is just as important as the practical. I've often heard it said that math must be rooted in practical matters—budgets, taxes, and so forth—and this is true (more of that in “practical life”), but equally important is a deeper understanding of the context for math in the cosmos and the underlying concepts at the root of numbers.

SOUL

There is a danger—and perhaps this is a fundamental error of Western civilization—in radically separating one's inner life from the outer. I earlier referred to the “inner climate”—the interior world that cannot be separated from the outer world, and as such, its crisis is yet another a context for, and not separate from, the climate crisis. Our inner work—whether it is meditation, therapy, or shared rituals—always have a cosmic context. (We will explore this further in Chapter 6.)

Too often, science neglects the very aspect that makes one want to explore science in the first place, the cultivation of awe and wonder. And this can only happen if we are immersed in the world. Moreover, it requires an attitude of openness and joy and inquiry. A part of all scientific exploration must involve this sense of intimacy, joy, wonder, and, especially, curiosity about our world.

Just as one's inner life—the sense of relationship to and care for the natural world—can fuel the inquiry in which scientific exploration depends, the immersion in and engagement with nature can also feed the soul. Too often, our inner work is alienated from nature. But to educate in a holistic way, one must recognize the inner life is integrated with the embodied, intimate with the ecological and cosmological webs of relationships.

A paradox of the scientist is that nearly everyone who becomes a scientist does so because of a curiosity and wonder about the natural world. This somehow tends to get lost in the classroom. In our classroom, an intimacy with nature and mindfulness practices that maintain this connection to, and love of our world remain central to scientific study. After all, the purpose of cosmology is to identify one's place in the cosmos, to find relationship, not merely detached objectivity.

In this way, the Universe story is not merely a way to understand a process that is separate from us; it is the story of us, the story of our ancestors. Each moment is the birth of an ancestor and, as such, a rite of passage, a moment when one type of being in the world passes away and another is brought forth. It is not unlike the passage from womb to world or the way that a young person, by learning together in community and growing in mind, body and soul, becomes a new kind of person with a new role in the community.

HANDS

The study of science and mathematics must be both conceptual and practical, abstract and tactile. The hands‐on aspect of the process is where learners who need to touch and feel to understand are most comfortable. For many children, mathematics is best understood through tactile techniques.

The Cosmic Walk

The cosmic walk is an exercise to understand the story of the Universe according to modern science. A 140‐foot rope can be used to represent the timeline of the Universe. Numbers should be marked to scale on the rope to indicate each new emergence in the story of the Universe. The rope can be made into a large spiral. Each student chooses a particular number or, if the group is smaller, students can walk along the rope as the story of the Universe is told.

The value of this exercise is not only found in the scientific knowledge acquired; rather, it is an opportunity to ask big questions about our place in the cosmos and to reflect on our interrelatedness. Moreover, it offers an overarching narrative—a big‐picture context—for all further scientific exploration. Begin with some questions:

• Where do we come from?
• What is a creation story?
• What purpose does it serve?
• What are some examples?

One thing I love about this activity is that it can be used with any age group. Of course, the older and more advanced the group, the more detailed and complex the conversation can become. But it's also an embodied engagement with the subject matter. When I used it while homeschooling my own children (who were ages five and seven at the time) we would race across the yard as the exploding, expanding Universe.

There are many discussion points from this exercise. How do the students feel about the scientific account of the Universe? Is it overwhelming? Does it feel meaningless? Do they prefer it to the religious accounts they may have heard? The task of the facilitator is not to tell the students what to believe; rather, the teacher should ask the students to accept the story for now and consider what it might mean for how we treat one another. What if each moment in this story represented the story of our own becoming? What if this were the story of our ancestors and us? What if we were all related? How does this story relate to other creation myths? Finally, have the students make a timeline of their own lives—past, present, and future—marking the points of emergence (rites of passage) in their own lives.

To this point, the focus has been largely on engagement within the classroom and within the human psyche. But hands‐on learning is also a time to move beyond the boundaries of the classroom and into the world at large. Science, ecology, and cosmology are above all an engagement with the natural world. While it is often true that the conventional classroom places limits on this engagement, we can also find ways, through camps and nature retreats, to cultivate a sense of relationship to the other‐than‐human world. Wisdom Projects retreats were designed by participants in collaboration with a facilitator, so they varied from season to season, but they generally included the following:

1. Check‐in, Ritual Beginning of Retreat. This should be similar to the ritual opening of all sacred circle activities: everyone comes into a circle for a meditative practice and check‐in.
   • Personal check‐in with each participant in the circle. Each person can share what they are feeling (physically or emotionally) as much as they feel comfortable.
   • The responsibility of the other students is to listen without interrupting.
   • The facilitator can interject but should also model listening.
   • Return to seasonal themes and questions or the theme of the retreat.
2. Nature Activities
   • Silent walk: a meditative walk through the woods
   • Star walk: people in urban settings seldom see the stars at night. This can be one of the most powerful experiences at a retreat.
   • Plant/bird identification: This can include common, indigenous, and scientific names, as well as medical and traditional uses.
3. Quiet Time for Reflection/Journaling
   • An important element of any retreat is quiet time for reflection. This can include meditative practices as well as solitary nature activities.
   • Each participant has a journal, to be kept at the retreat center.
4. Fire Pit
   • Every evening, participants gather at the fire pit to socialize as a group and to reflect.
   • At times, a formal ritual may be part of the fire pit experience. For example, this can be a context for an opening, closing, or rite of passage ritual.
   • Other times, this may simply be a time to share stories or music.
5. Significant Free Time
   • As much as anything else, the retreat is a time for youth to bond as a group. The retreat facilitators should allow for youth to self‐organize and to relax together. There is a tendency among educators or youth workers to over plan and try to manage the time of the youth. A major context for learning is the way that youth self‐organize and determine their own use of time.
6. Practical Life. A retreat can be an opportunity to live together in community, sharing tasks and responsibilities.
   • Youth should take responsibility for a variety of roles at the retreat.
   • Preparing food is especially important, as mealtimes are a time to gather as a group. Moreover, learning to prepare food with ingredients from our gardens can become part of healthier lifestyles.
7. Ritual and Rites of Passage
   • In one example: Youth in our programs have generally split up into boys' and girls' groups. But it is important to be aware of an find a space for nonbinary students. The facilitator is responsible for setting the tone and creating the sacred space. A talking stick is passed around. Everyone in the circle is to understand that only the facilitator and the person with the stick should speak, and no one should speak out of turn (even if their comments are meant to be helpful). The responsibility of everyone in the circle is to remain present for others. Going around the circle once, each person shares his greatest joy; going around the circle again, each person shares his greatest fear; the last time around, each person shares his greatest pain. At the conclusion, the circle can be opened for discussion, but the talking stick should still be used. The sacred circle should be ritually closed at the conclusion.
8. Sharing of Creative Work
   • The retreat can be a time for youth to share what they've done both at the retreat and throughout the year or season (see Chapter 4).
9. Ritual Closing/Reflections/Gratitude
   • It is important to close the circle, too, and to offer a time for reflection and gratitude.

***

Another hands‐on way to explore science and cosmology is through farming and food. Food can be grown, prepared, and eaten together. Businesses can be created with the produce.

So many of us have no connection to or awareness of the source of our food. But even if we don't grow our own food, an awareness of its source can be cultivated from a young age, and myriad connections and lessons can be made from this. At any age, we can bring or make food and challenge the students to come up with a list of factors that were required for it to be there in front of us. For example, if the snack is a piece of fruit, the list might include:

• Sunlight
• People who picked the fruit
• Soil
• Oil for transportation
• Rain

The list could obviously become quite long as the students begin to consider the web of relationships that allow us to obtain our food. The instructor should provide an example. Using a large piece of paper, have the students make a simple diagram with their food at the center and lines connecting it to the items on the list. Then have the students draw lines connected all the places where they used the same source. Identify what is necessary on the list (e.g. healthy soil, water, etc.) and what is unnecessary and external that are damaging to the natural process (non‐local or ‐seasonal products, oil/petroleum). This exercise is a way to (1) cultivate an awareness about the seasonal cycles from which we are often so detached and (2) expand our sense of who we are and our interconnections to a vast, living world.

Lastly, science and math can and should be employed for the purposes of advocacy. Young people can be hands‐on not merely because this is an easier and better way to learn; our youth can also learn by engaging with science as it affects their communities and their world. This begins by teaching through a social justice lens. With groups of teens, we've introduced the concept of “environmental racism” as a way for youth to understand how ecological destruction is not merely an issue that concerns the privileged, but something that, in fact, impacts the poor more than the wealthy, Black more than white, global south more than global north.

OIKOS

Ecology and evolution are central in the study of life and of the natural world. Ecology is the way that life exists in relationship; evolution is the way that life transforms and grows in relationship. Any understanding of our natural world must be grounded in these central facts.

The human is fundamentally placed in this ecological and evolutionary web. Consider the story of hawk and mouse:

Mouse spent his days running from Hawk. Hawk was so fast, his vision so precise, that Mouse could sometimes barely get enough food for his family. Hawk required him to be constantly vigilant. The friends and family members who were Hawk's victims required Mouse to create stories of remembrance. He was tired in body and in spirit.

So, Mouse prayed to the Great Mouse in the Sky. “Please, oh Great Mouse, please grant me this wish. I pray that you would make Hawk a little slower so that I could feed my family more easily and suffer less.”

The Great Mouse in the Sky granted this wish. For a time, life was easier for Mouse. But soon he began to slow down. Soon, Hawk was giving him problems again. So, he returned to the Great Mouse in the Sky and again asked for Hawk to slow down. And again, the wish was granted.

For a time, things were easier. But again, in time, Mouse slowed down. He returned to the Great Mouse and again asked for the same thing and again it was granted.

This repeated itself until Hawk could no longer fly and mouse could barely run. Mouse had no more stories to tell.

Mouse was no longer Mouse.

One last time, he returned to the Great Mouse in the Sky and asked for one final wish to be granted: “Please, oh Great Mouse. Please make Hawk faster.” (Richards 2018)

The point of the story is that hawk and mouse co‐create one another. The shape of our legs, our teeth, our minds do not come from some extrinsic power; they were created by the speed of the lion and the gazelle, the grains we ate, the weather patterns of the African plain. Our bodies and the stories we told were created—like this book—through natural, relational processes. So too must the shape of the classroom, the curriculum, and our pedagogy.

When we understand our place in ecosystem and cosmos, the study of ecology and cosmology turns into a study of the self. The role of the parent and educator is to teach our children that they are at once not the center of the world and, at the same time, the center of the universe. They are immeasurably small and unimaginably vast. This is the central lesson of cosmology and ecology.

CREATIVITY

Recently, there has been some acknowledgement, by inserting the “A” in the rebranded concept of “S.T.E.A.M” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math), that creativity can and should be a part of science education. This largely comes into play in the design aspect of engineering, for example. And indeed, it is important for our youth to engage in the creative process of building and design. But there are other, less commonly applied ways to integrate creativity and imagination into science education.

While the tactile and practical dimension of mathematics are important, math is also an exercise in the abstraction requiring the imagination. A child must be able to use the mind to conceptualize numbers and their relationships. In this way, math does not merely serve a purpose; it trains the mind to work in a particular way—through abstract, imaginal thought. To be sure, this isn't the only way to think and learn, but it is still important.

Ecology is partly a way to understand the inherent creativity of life. An ecosystem is a web of relationships, of course. What's more, it is a web of relationships creating and recreating life, imagining and reimagining life. Life evolves through the intrinsic creativity of this web. This is the foundation of human creativity and of the creative energy of the classroom. We do not learn as isolated individual on our own individual paths; rather, we learn in relationship. Content does not merely exist in some concrete fashion; it emerges through the intrinsic creativity of the classroom.

By grounding the study of science and math in cosmology, we recognize that the human cannot be separated from natural processes; there is no objective study of nature. Rather, we study nature as a part of nature, as an expression of nature, as nature. The mandala can serve as a visual conceptualization of this concept. Using a template of concentric circles, our students have drawn or painted their own mandalas—symbolic maps of the cosmos and themselves. The mandala places the individual at the center; each subsequent concentric circle a more expansive aspect of the self.

We might also return to the “I Am” poem with science in mind. At times, we have used more specific prompts to reflect more specific subject matter:

I am [something you have created]

I am [something you envision creating in the future]

I am the story of …

I am [someone or something in your ancestry]

I am [a rite of passage experience in your life]

I am [a rite of passage experience in the story of the Universe]

I am [something in your ecosystem/bioregion]

I am [an issue of environmental (in)justice]

I am [a kind of tree]

In general, it is important to understand that the cosmos itself is an expression of the intrinsic creativity of the Universe; a cosmology is how human beings, through human culture, express their understanding of the order and beauty of the Universe and their place in it. While perhaps there is an objective cosmos out there, our understanding of it requires human creativity to bring it forth in a meaningful way.

INTEGRATION

All the subjects addressed here are inherently fluid and interdisciplinary, and the study of science, cosmology, and ecology are no different. Let's look at how this subject can be integrated with the others.

• Arts: The cosmos is an expression of the creativity of the Universe; a cosmology is the story we tell about it. The arts are fundamental in integrating the ideas of science into a coherent and meaningful worldview.
• Spirit: Our schools—rooted in the Modern worldview that would radically separate spirit and matter, science and spirituality—tend to think of science and spirituality as oppositional. But the myths of our religion serve the same fundamental cultural purpose as a scientific cosmology. In addition, cultivating connection, mindfulness, awe, and wonder are part of one's spiritual life and scientific endeavor.
• Hands: Science must be rooted in the hands‐on work of not merely the lab, but the world. Building, growing food, and exploring nature and wilderness are fundamental aspects of science.
• Justice and Joy: Science and technology do not necessarily have to be considered ethically neutral. In addition to the application of nature through mindfulness practice and hands‐on projects, we can apply and study science in order to work toward a more just, sustainable, and compassionate world.

The purpose of the study of science, cosmology, and ecology is to create a more robust sense of the whole, to cultivate in each a sense of our interrelatedness and connection to the whole. This classroom is seeking to develop a world‐vision that allows for human civilization to live harmoniously with Earth. We cannot lose sight of the centrality and urgency of the ecological crisis and how educating differently is essential in addressing it. Creating a different kind of classroom—an ecological classroom—brings forth a different world‐vision and a different kind of civilization, an ecological civilization.