By Ralph Pite (University of Bristol)
My first attempts to bring the environment into my teaching of English turned out to be moves away – into nature reserves miles away from the classroom and burning fossil fuel to get there. How do you avoid that? How can you make the natural world an everyday, ‘natural’ presence for students? How can you generate (or restore or recover) their awareness of being themselves part of nature as organic beings?
The University of Worcester has several campuses in and around the city; the Institute of Education occupies part of the campus on the western bank of the River Severn, on land that was once the grounds of a grand hose, Henwick Grove. It was taken over by the RAF during the Second World, the house itself was demolished. After the war, the RAF buildings became a teacher training college and, from there, the University has grown.
This is an 1880s map of the site:
And this is a present-day aerial view (the road around the left-hand side is the Oldbury Road, running along the bottom of the 1880s map)
This means that student accommodation, sports grounds, and teaching facilities sit within the remnants of nineteenth-century parkland. In other words, like many educational settings, Worcster’s Institute of Education has nature right outside, in various forms and mixed up with the everyday and the ordinary – car-parks, astroturf, recycling and waste collection, a housing estate to one side, a school on another, and a major road closing off a third.
So, in collaboration with Elena Lengthorn, a teacher educator in Geography at the University of Worcester, I developed outdoor teaching materials, linking together a series of places around the campus: a pond, a spectacular tree, a lawned, picnic area with memorial trees, the recycling centre, a growing area, and finally a raised mound that gave views off-campus and into the city. At each stopping-point, we combined looking, listening, and identifying with reading some pieces of literature that encouraged attention and prompted reflection. Some of these were modern, some older.
We asked them to listen to the birdsong and use the Merlin app (Merlin Bird ID – Free, instant bird identification help and guide for thousands of birds – Identify the birds you see) to help them identify the birds’ singing. (It was January so we heard little other than robins but they were very noisy); and we asked them to use INaturalist or Flora Incognita to identify species of plants (A Community for Naturalists · iNaturalist United Kingdom; Flora Incognita | EN – The Flora Incognita app – Interactive plant species identification)
Alongside that ‘fieldwork’, and complementing it, we asked the students to write creatively, take their own photos, and add to the descriptions provided by the apps – that is, to respond personally as well as objectively or scientifically to what they encountered outside. One exercise asked them to move differently in an outdoor space and to reflect on how their relationship to it changed when they did that.
The spectacular tree was an American Sycamore, with its distinctive bark.
There were Douglas Firs elsewhere which we noticed later. The apps don’t mention nineteenth-century garden design and its connection with importing trees, with imperial expansion. This news story was news to the group: More giant redwoods in UK than in native US, study says | UK News | Sky News. Looking at the tree and the other trees and plants nearby, we read an extract from Elif Shaffak’s Island of Missing Trees, including her suggestion that different trees suit us at different times and in different moods – that they embody various qualities that we need; that we can turn to them (‘For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper).
At the planting area, where there was an apple tree with some fruit still hanging and some fallen to the ground, being eaten by the birds, we read a poem about ‘Apple Buttering’, thought about growing, harvesting and about food security. On top of the mound we thought about greening the city, about feasibility and the forces restricting change, about Utopian ideas and how they can energise or provide merely escape.
The students responded very well both years we have tried it out with them, making really thoughtful and helpful suggestions about what worked well and what less well. It’s an ongoing work-in-progress.
All the materials we used are here: 16th January 2026 Worcester Walking in Nature please feel free to try them out and do send me any feedback you may have (ralph.pite@bristol.ac.uk) . The Worcester campus is similar to any number of urban parks, and has areas in common with many school grounds so my hope is that you’ll be able to adapt these activities and pieces of writing to your setting and situation.
