Friction Fire Lighting for Team Building

Last year I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Experiential Educators Europe conference in Candriai Italy and if you check out the link to my post about that conference you will see that I had a great time.

I was hoping to attend this year as well but due to other commitments was unable to but I was really excited to share a workshop at the conference based on some of my experiences of friction fire lighting with teams and so prepared a video that could be shown in my absence highlighting some of the lessons that can be learned by groups taking part in this sort of bushcraft activity.

I'd like to thank the National Trust Academy Rangers for taking part in the filming of this video and for enthusiastically taking part in the activities.

I hope the video is useful to you and that you learn something about bow drill firelighting and it's potential as an activity for team development as well as just recreational bushcraft or as a survival as a survival skill. 

Hope you enjoy it 

Geoff 

Reaseheath College Experimental Archaeology and Bushcraft Course

Places on Reaseheath Colleges Experimental Archaeology and Bushcraft course are going fast; have a look at some of Reaseheath Colleges resources here and sign up TODAY. 

Alto Adige Italy and the 2015 EEE Conference

This year I was very lucky to be awarded a scholarship to the Annual Experiential Educators Europe (eee) Conference held this year in Candriai, Italy.  

It was the first time I had attended the conference although I had been familiar with the eee organisation for a couple of years. 

Late in the planning stages of my trip to Italy I was also awarded a small scholarship by Reaseheath Colleges Scholarly Activity Committee to contribute towards the cost of my transport. 

Due to slightly convoluted travel plans (the cheapest tickets aren't always the most strait forward) I was left with a few days at either end of the conference I was left with a few days to explore the Alto Adige area of Northern Italy, a place I had never been before. 

 I had been delighted to discover while planning my trip that my amazingly cheap airline tickets would take me to a town called Bolzano, about 70km from the conference venue, this town just happens to be the town which houses Ötzi the ice man in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. So on my arrival in Bolzano on the afternoon of Friday the 24th of April I was able to visit the museum and look at the exhibits of Ötzi's clothes and equipment and recognise a lot of the materials and methods of construction that I use in my own practice of Bushcraft.

The Reconstruction of Ötzi

After an unplanned night in the youth hostel in Bolzano due to a bag lost by the airline (and therefore no bivi or sleeping bag) I headed onto the Paganella mountain on the edge of the Brenta Dolomites for a short walk before the conference began on the afternoon of the 26th. The scenery was beautiful, although low cloud shrouded most of the views to begin with and I never got a clear view of the Brentas there was plenty to see close at hand.

At lower altitudes I saw a lot of Star of Bethlehem (above) and Greater Celandine (below)

As I climbed higher I began to see Colts Foot (above) and where the snow had melted the Alpine Crocuses had started to appear (below). 

There was also plenty of Lungwort (above) and Vaccinium sp (below) these belong to the blueberry and cranberry family although I'm not sure exactly which species these flowers belong to, but they certainly weren't the bilberries that I'm familiar with in this country 

Most exciting of all were these tracks which I suspect are lynx tracks, they were much too high up (about 2000 meters) and much too large and heavy to be any sort of domestic or feral cat. 

    

 I also saw Capercaillie and roe deer on my short walk (about 20 kilometers in total) and was actually woken at one in the morning while in my bivi by a roe deer barking just a few meters from my head, it must have been startled to see my fly sheet. After a night in my bivi at about 1500 meters above sea level and a walk in which I foolishly strayed into deep snow for a few km's and floundered around before getting back to more easily navigable paths I descended to the beautiful village of Covelo 

Covelo

From there I continued my walk on Country roads towards Candriai. However my encounter with deep snow at about 2000 meters earlier in the day had slowed me down and I was running out of time to get to the conference centre in Candriai before the evening meal. Luckily as I laboured up yet another hill I was met by two delegates of the conference also on their way up the hill in a camper van and who guessed I might be on my way to the eee conference as well and kindly offered me a lift for the last few km's. That was a great relief and I owe my thanks to them. 

The conference it'self was very different to what I had expected but was absolutely fantastic, the Italian team who organised it did a fantastic job. The workshops throughout the week were very informative and interesting and I learned a great deal which I hope to apply to both my formal teaching at Reaseheath College and also to the teaching I do through Bushcraft Education and the Riddy Wood Project. 

The workshop I delivered at the conference was a practical workshop on the kind of activities you can do with children which involve knives and hand tools both as an opportunity to help them reconnect with nature and to develop their strength and dexterity. We made kazoo's and wooden flowers and the workshop was over subscribed by almost double with people offering to bring their own pocket knives to make up for the fact that I had only brought enough knives for ten participants. I even ended up repeating the workshop on the Friday morning, the final day of the conference. The material which accompanied the workshop can be found here for the poster and here for a handout .

The theme of the conference was 'Do ut des' or give to receive and I certainly felt I received a great deal and hope that I was able to contribute something as well. In fact the atmosphere of openness and sharing was so great that it has inspired me to run a new series on this blog. I have shared ideas for using bushcraft as a tool for education ever since I started this blog but I have not shared many 'how to' type articles but in a few months I will start the bushcraft education 'do ut des' series sharing in detail HOW to carry out a range of bushcraft activities and traditional skill and will also show how I use these activities as teaching tools. 

The conference venue it'self was fantastic and offered plenty of interesting views of wildlife.

Hawfinches (above) and Nuthatches (below) were regular visitors to the bird feeders around the venue. 

   Unlike any other conference I have ever attended there was a very sharing attitude at the conference with people willing to share ideas for activities, management of educational events and businesses and just a really nice atmosphere that made everyone feel at home and able to contribute. 

After the conference I had another opportunity for a short hike and another night in the beautiful Italian countryside this time in the Monte Bondone area to the north of the mountain Il Palon. I was treated to some beautiful weather and fantastic views as well as some very interesting wildlife including sightings of Ibex and Red deer. 

A view of Il Palon

Looking out across the Adige valley

Green Hairstreak

Owly Sulfer a species of lacewing. 

 All in all it was a fantastic trip and has whetted my appetite for more trips to the area to watch the wildlife and walk in the mountains but has also started what I hope will be a long association with eee. 

Self Taught Bowyer; because school wasn't enough.

This fantastic talk by Dong Woo Jang, who was fifteen at the time he gave this talk, epitomises self directed experiential learning. Although teachers can guide and enhance experiential learning there is also the argument that true experiential learning must take place without the direct intervention or 'mediation' by a teacher.
Dong has clearly found his passion in bow making and to escape from the pressures of school he, of his own initiative, found and pursued an activity which he has mastered only through practice and self directed, self motivated study. Through his free time activity he has developed an interest in history and traditional Korean bow making, I think this begs the question; What kind of traditional skills could our youth in the UK reinvent?

Bushcraft would be a fantastic medium for awaking an enthusiasm in the younger generation for traditional skills such as green woodwork, archery, basketry, timber sports etc... There are surely many self taught people out there who like Dong have found an activity you enjoy and become proficient purely by your own practice and experience, WHAT TRADITIONAL SKILLS HAVE YOU LEARNED YOURSELVES?

Creating Bushcraft Teaching Resources and Proving it's Value in Environmental Education

A key part of my personal development as a bushcraft instructor and probably the catalyst to my interest in Bushcraft as a tool in formal education was a project I carried out a few years ago as part of my studies at University;

RESEARCH INTO THE RELEVANCE OF ‘BUSHCRAFT’ WITHIN REAL WORLD ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION

Indigenous peoples have within the context of their own lifestyles been practicing ‘environmental education’ for thousands of years (Sterling 2001), but although the skills practiced by indigenous peoples survive in remote areas of the globe those skills have in our modern society been tagged as ‘bushcraft’ and become little more than an adventurous free time activity or a topic of interesting TV documentaries. Several case studies have made the observation that the effectiveness of environmental education could be increased by the inclusion of ‘free time’ and adventurous activities within environmental education programs (Cooper 1998). The purpose of this research was to establish the value of bushcraft within environmental education not only as an additional adventurous element to a program but as a relevant part of a course with appropriate links with the curriculum. As a result of this research it was hoped that a curriculum could be prepared for a number of bushcraft sessions which could be used within formal education to meet some objectives of a course rather than just being an enrichment activity.


The full write up of this project and my conclusions can be found here;
http://www.academia.edu/4748355/RESEARCH_INTO_THE_RELEVANCE_OF_BUSHCRAFT_WITHIN_REAL_WORLD_ENVIRONMENTAL_EDUCATION

Is our impatience the reason children aren't developing as quickly as they could?

Modern society does expect that children are supervised more closely than they once used to be, they can't walk to school or the shops on their own or play in the woods on their own, there even seems to be a general consensus that getting dirty, picking up worms and slugs and beetles is somehow wrong or dangerous. Yet we are willing to let children play video games or watch TV unsupervised for hours on end, I would argue that a child will far more easily come to harm, perhaps not physically, but harm nonetheless in-front of computers and TV than outside.

As important as an element of freedom is in the life of any child there are occasions when children need supervision, of course there are, but I think too often they are given safe things to do so that we can get on with our busy lives, the ironing needs doing, dinner cooking or a report for work needs finishing or maybe we just want to update our facebook status, so what could be easier than plonking a child down in-front of a cartoon for a couple of hours. But surely they would benefit from being given some 'hard' tasks to accomplish under our supervision that they would really benefit from, if only we had the patience to provide that supervision. I really feel strongly that children should not be denied opportunities to do these things because we don't have the time or can't be bothered to supervise them. Surely our children would develop skills such as hazard perception, dexterity, self reliance and confidence, to name but a few, if we helped and supervised them and then let them do these 'grown up things'.

If only we had the patience to provide appropriate supervision where required we might find that they develop skills which might nowadays be considered beyond the grasp of a younger child; the picture bellow illustrates this perfectly.

This is a picture of an 11 month old Efe baby in the Democratic Republic of Congo cutting fruit with a machete (Rogoff 2003 pg6)

References;

nRogoff B. (2003) The Cultural Nature of Human Development. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Bushcraft Links to UK key stage 2 and 3 Curricula

This table shows links to key stage 2 and 3 Geography and Science curricula with activities devised for a schools 'ecology club', a full description of each of these activities can be found here. 

Activity	Key Stage 2 Curriculum Links	Key Stage 3 Curriculum Links	Activity description  (page number)
Food Webs	Sc 2 (1 b,c, 3 a,b,c 5 a,d,e)	Geog (6 e) Sc2 (4 a,b, 5 b,d,e,f)	2
Each One Teach (Plant)	Sc 2 (1 b,c, 3 a,b,c, 4 a,b,c, 5 b,c)	Geog (6 e) Sc2 (4 a,b)	2
Each One Teach (Animal/Birds)	Sc 2 (1 b,c, 3 a,b,c, 4 a,b.c) (5 b,c)	Geog (6 e) Sc2 (4 a,b, 5 b,d,e)	3
Tracks and Trails	Sc2 (5 a,b,c)	Geog (2 e) Sc2 (4 a,b, 5 b,d,e)	3
Pond Dipping	Geog (1 a,b,c, 7 c) Sc1 (2 a,b,c,d,e,g,I,k,l) Sc2 (4 a,b,c, 5 b,c)	Geog (1 a,b,c,d, 2 b) Sc1 (1a,b, 2 a,b,c,d,e,f,k,l,m,o) Sc2 (4 a,b, 5b,c,d,e)	4
Nature Skits	Sc 2 (5 a,d,e)	Geog (6 e) Sc2 (4 a,b, 5 b,d,e,f)	5
Craft	Sc3 (1 a)	Geog (6 k)	5
The Incredible Journey	Geog (6 c)	Geog (6 d)	5
Scavenger Hunt	Geog (6 e, 7 c)	N/A	6
Map Making	Geog (7 c)	Geog (2 e)	7
Create A Critter	Sc2 (5 a,b,c,d)	N/A	6
Fire Making			10
Shelter Building			13
Camouflage	Sc2 (5 a,b,c,d)	N/A	8
Follow That Log			14
Pollution Tag	Geog (5 a,b, 6 e)	N/A	9
Key Species	Geog (5 a,b, 6 e) Sc2 (5 a,b,c,d)	Geog (3 c,d,e, 5 a, 6 e,j) Sc2 (a,b, 5 b,c,d,e)	9

Why 'risk' and 'danger' are a necesary part of childhood

Some more thoughts on risk and danger in childhood which I wrote to contribute to an online discussion on the 'Key Critiques made in Gills No Fear; growing up in a risk averse society (2006)' as part of my studies towards a Masters Degree in Outdoor Education.

The central argument to Gills 2006 work No Fear; growing up in a risk averse society is the point that in our modern society is at risk of restricting children and young people from exposure to important formative experiences by limiting freedom to take part in self-directed play/leisure activities and increasing levels of supervision. He refers to this phenomenon on page 12 as ‘the shrinking horizons of childhood’. This opinion is shared by many, particularly with regard to children’s opportunities to engage with the natural environment (Louv, 2005). A study by the Countryside Recreation Network titled Taking a Chance Outdoors - Is Fear of Risk Damaging our Children? (2009)  Explains that when questioned “virtually none of the children actually played in the woods…… The woodland was an adventure as much because it was out of reach as it was because of what it offered.” Despite the documented benefits of outdoor activities there seems to be decreasing opportunities for children to be alone and unsupervised in any situation, possibly because it is no longer socially acceptable for parents to allow their children to do things alone (Furedi, 2004). This increasing level of supervision is quantified in One False Move; A study of children’s independent mobility (Hillman, et al., 1993) and Childs Play; Facilitating play on housing estates (Wheway & Millward , 1997)and cited by Gill who explains that in 1971 eight out of ten seven to eight year olds walked to school on their own but by 1990 less than one in ten were walking to school on their own, equating to three years of lost freedom of movement. Gill suggests that that this freedom is being restricted because of a fear that children are at risk either from their environment or from risks posed by other people. He combats this assumption of danger with a quote from Innocence Betrayed; Paedophilia, the media and society (Silverman & Wilson, 2002) “our children are, statistically, at no greater risk in the year 2002 than they were in 1972 of being abducted and killed”.

This lack of unsupervised experiential play is even recognised as a negative by children themselves and Gill quotes Hannan a teenager from Newcastle “kids should be allowed to experiment and try things. Otherwise when they grow up they’ll make very stupid mistakes” and the Better Regulation Commission (2006) agree that “risk can be beneficial and should be encouraged”. In the Adventure Alternative (Mortlock, 1984 , pp. 41-45) investigates the idea that risk bordering on misadventure, as long as the experience is not too traumatic, is extremely beneficial and indeed essential to giving children and young people a real understanding of how to cope with risk and danger. Based on these sources it is my oppinion that without some risk with or without supervision, obviously there should be some supervision for activities where there is a real risk and need for trained supervision such as the examples that Mortlock uses, children and young people are going to miss out on vital formative experiences.   

References

Better Regulation Commission (2006) Risk, Responsibility and Regulation; Whose risk is it anyway?, London: Better Regulation Commission.

Countryside Recreation Network (2009) Taking a chance Outdoors - Is Fear of Risk Damaging Our Children?. s.l., Sheffield Hallam University Press .
 
Furedi, F (2004) Paranoid Parenting. s.l.:Independent on Sunday.

Hillman, M., Adams, J. & Whitelegg, J (1993) One False Move; A study of children's independent mobility. London: Policy Studies Institute .

Louv, R (2005) Last Child in the Woods; Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Chapel Hill : Algonquin Books .

Mortlock, C (1984) The Adventure Alternative. Milnthorpe : Cicerone Press .

Silverman, J. & Wilson, D (2002) Innocence Betrayed; Paedophilia, the media and society. Cambridge: Polity.

Wheway, R. & Millward , A (1997) Childs Play; Facilitating play on housing estates. London: Chartered Institute of Housing.

In Defence of IT

Modern smartphones have ever improving cameras and can be a valuable tool in taking 'spur of the moment' pictures not just of your friends doing silly things but of plants, invertebrates, or in this case a grass snake either for identification later on or just because you can.
This picture was taken with a the camera from a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone.

I recently blogged on the topic of the use of IT and expressed my elation at finding that in an age where the smartphone and tablet have largely replaced the penknife and string in the pockets of  young people that a group of students were more interested in being outdoors than watching a video. However I have found that a group of students I have been involved with this year have been using their phones to great effect and are demonstrating a commendable level of enthusiasm. Just today I have been asked to identify pictures of fungi and seen another student talking animatedly with another lecturer about the picture he had taken on his phone of what he thought was a privet hawk moth.

Picture Courtesy of countryside management students Brady Chabot and Joe Noble of some fungi they had seen. 

Can IT enhance outdoor teaching?

Up until the end of the 2012-2013 academic year I have always, as part of my teaching timetable at the college where I teach countryside management, taught a special needs group once a week. The lesson I take them for is their countryside and conservation lesson and effectively what they do with me is a 35 week long forest schools course. This includes animal tracking, firelighting, campfire cooking, willow coppicing, shelter building, woodwork, taking care of quail and pheasants, environmental art and other activities.

I was encouraged at one point to try and include more interactive technology in my lessons (not specifically these sessions) but I thought I would give it a try with this group, I got hold of a bunch of video cameras and asked the group to film all the signs of spring they could find. This was in late March, and they walked around the colleges farm filming buds bursting, shoots emerging, birds nests etc.. They really enjoyed to process of looking for signs of spring, taking turns operating the camera, and for those who were able making a commentary on film. I promised them that I would compile all their videos and make one film that they could watch out in the woods the following week. 

When it was time for their next lesson and I sat them down in the woods around our campfire site to watch the video they had made on an ipad, it took them all of about 20 seconds before they were bored with the technology and wanted to watch the birds in the woods. Using the technology was fine, they were happy to go and try and film birds and plants and tractors and anything else they could find but watching the videos even though they had made them themselves WAS NOT AS INTERESTING AS BEING OUTDOORS! When they were making the film they were in an environment where their attention was automatically on the task at hand (Jensen 2008). There was no need for a special strategy to engage the students, they were meant to be learning about the countryside and they were in the countryside, they had a fun activity to do and they got on and did it and as a result some students with very special needs learned in the course of about two hours to identify several different plant species just from their buds and twigs.  

I was delighted that at a time where computers, smart phones, ipads, ipods and TV seem to rule the lives of so many young people that this group of students found nature more interesting than a video.  

References;

Jensen, E (2008) Super Teaching; 4th ed; Corwin

The Cavemans Theory of Reflection

In a rather sarcastic comment in response to the being told "Schon is the father of reflective theory" (referring to Donald Schon and his theory's on reflective practice in education) by a tutor while I was studying for my Certificate in Education I said that cavemen had been reflecting on things long before anyone wrote it down and made 'reflection' into a theory, (in my defence it was late in the evening and I had been teaching for seven hours that day) now having thought about it further I present to you;

The Cavemans Theory of Reflection.

Example 1;
Prehistoric man may have started off sleeping under the stars with very little to protect them from the cold, they may have seen animals with thick fur coats and 'reflecting' on the nights they spent shivering with cold made themselves a coat or blanket from animal skin.

Example 2;
Having been eating tough raw meat for ages prehistoric man discovers that the bodies of animals killed by forest fires smell quite nice, not long later after a bit of 'reflection' prehistoric man  starts chucking meat on his own fire to eat.

I know it's not really a theory and my assumption in the examples above are merely that, assumptions, they are not based on fact or a detailed knowledge of prehistoric man or their habits, technology or society. They are merely generalizations and guesses as to how things may have been. This kind of reflection is an interesting principle to apply to teaching bushcraft though (something I will be looking at over the next few months as I experiment with the use of 'learning logs' with students learning friction fire lighting) as it is how most of us learn our bushcraft skills in the first place. I certainly never had money to spend on going on a bushcraft or survival skills course and what I know now is a result of thousands of hours of practice and trial and error. Trial and error is a wonderful way of developing bushcraft skills, time consuming, but wonderful. I strongly believe that it also makes us better teachers, if we can remember back to the time that our technique was poor or inefficient or both we are better able to direct our students to make the same improvements that we discovered for ourselves. Better still if we can encourage students to reflect on the difficulties they are facing, identify areas of strength, notice things that may be holding them back, and experiment with other options they will be able to make those same discoveries themselves and as I said in an earlier post then they will 'own' that knowledge, it will be theirs.

The Origin of Friction Fire

I was talking over the weekend about friction fire lighting and how it may have been discovered and expressed the opinion that it might have been the accidental result of using a hand drill for boring through a piece of wood which created the first ember from friction. I'm sure that I have read something along these lines before and so had a search online and found  of Primitive Ways.

It's interesting isn't it that you can use one relatively simple technique to achieve so many different outcomes. 

This principle can be useful for the teacher too; I have taught bow drill fire lighting for years now but have also always encouraged my students to 'think outside the box' in terms of what they can achieve with the basic tools they have. So in reverse of the way that friction fire might have been developed as explained in the article above the bow drill that students have learned to use to make fire suddenly becomes a drill for boring holes in a piece of antler to make a fishing hook. 

Other examples might be the flint tool which is used for cutting and providing a spark for firelighting, the elm bark that is used for making string and containers, the birch bark for tinder, containers, oil, medicine, tar and on and on. Instilling this idea that that almost everything can be put to more than just the obvious uses helps when teaching bushcraft but it can also be put to excellent use when teaching students about sustainability. 

For example; students may at first see a willow coppice as a bunch of trees, after a bit of practical work they may be able to list a few uses; willow hurdles, duck baskets, pea sticks but after a bit more thinking and teaching and they will realise that the possibilities are endless and that it can even be turned into pelletised fuel for heating houses and firing power stations. Thats what experiential learning is about, once enough experience has been facilitated then students will start to work out the answers for themselves, and if they have worked out the answers for themselves then they will remember it because it's 'their' answer, they will own that knowledge.