Meandering Through the Meshwork

Written By Immesh Magazine

An Interview with Early Childhood Educator Jan White.

By Shae Wiedermann

Photographs by Sue Wiedermann

 

I had the privilege of speaking to Jan White about the concept of the meshwork and how it inspires her work in practice as the founder of Early Childhood Outdoors (ECO) and specialist educational training company Outdoors Thinking. We also discussed the significance of surfaces in early childhood development and how to build an ecological identity in young children. The initial idea was for this to be an interview, but it grew into more of an informal conversation, which then grew into me listening while Jan spoke, hesitant to interrupt her in case I disrupted her wonderful train of thought.


Q: You introduced me to Tim Ingold’s concept of the “meshwork”, which has been such an inspiration for the ethos of this magazine. Tell me how you came across it and how it is central to your work.

It started with Tim Ingold’s book Lines. I read this book, and I thought it was such a phenomenal way of thinking, an analysis of something so ordinary. At the time, I had been doing a lot of thinking about landscapes, ecology and, most importantly, pathways, which had actually revealed themselves to me long ago as being particularly important and influential things. They are one of the core things we need to meet our survival, that is, being able to travel and journey, something that children do a great deal of. 

Children move from one place to another to map a space out and they come to know that space by moving. If you go through woodland, there is often one major long, straight pathway – like a corridor – that offers very much a strong “make you run” shape, which children tend to do when they go down one. Then there are some smaller, less defined, wriggly pathways that have a lot more mystery to them: they offer intrigue and uncertainty, and they make you meander. Each type of path changes your way of being in the world, which is especially true for children.

Ingold says: “wayfaring, I believe, is the most fundamental mode by which living beings, both human and non-human, inhabit the earth”. I think those words “wayfaring” and “inhabit” are so important because our society pulls children away from building and maintaining relationships with the earth, and the task now is to help children actually inhabit the earth and, furthermore, to help adults regain that feeling of inhabiting the earth. 

The contrast of the meshwork and the network in Ingold’s book really stood out to me, too. With the network, dots are joined together by lines that have no substance. The meshwork instead emphasises the lines or pathways themselves. What this does is emphasise the wayfaring being done to forge these lines. I paraphrase it with this example: when you get on a plane somewhere and arrive somewhere else entirely, you’ve suddenly gone from one spot to the next with nothing in between. You’ve essentially been passive the whole time; you haven’t journeyed at all. But when you travel by public transport or car or, most importantly, by walking, you’re actually wayfaring, and you’re meshing your way through the world. 

So, pathways are not just remarkable physical things; they’re very metaphorical as well. When you walk along a path, even if it’s a path that’s already there, you’re creating an experience with the path. There’s an entanglement between you, the path, the world, the air you’re breathing and so forth. All of these components come together to co-create each moment. So, when you’re wayfaring, you’re unconsciously creating a future together with the world. 

One hundred years ago, or even when I was growing up, outdoor play was just what kids did. We stayed out until the streetlights came on and then had to go back inside for dinner. The British Nursery School was actually built on the idea that children had to be outdoors for their health and wellbeing. Slowly, that understanding disappeared, and there are many factors as to why that is, but the most important part is that simultaneously, within the education system, the understanding of the importance of the outdoors went away along with the understanding of the need for play. Before that, we never had to analyse whether being outdoors was good for you; we just knew it. And we knew that that’s where children ought to be. 

So, the ECO meshwork came about because, on the one hand, I was thinking about how we can help children grow up to feel a part of the world and not separate from it, and on the other hand, I also wanted to provide support to experts/consultants/centres in the field of early childhood who had a keen interest in outdoor play. These people are all over the place and there are various networking opportunities for them, such as conferences, social media and organisation memberships, but what actually brings their lives and ideas together and amplifies them? How can they feel nourished by each other? How do we create new possibilities because they’ve met each other? I wanted to do more than have people encounter one another at a conference and instead, to entangle with each other. 

When I picture the meshwork, I picture the material felt. There are all these strands in the wool, which represent individuals, ideas, things and pathways making their way through the world. Then something comes and rubs them all up against each other, and they begin to stick to one another and entangle themselves in a way where they can’t be pulled apart again. You’ve then created something that can’t be dismantled. 

What I wanted to achieve with ECO was to bring people who are trying to encourage better outdoor play for children together in order to create an understanding and knowledge that was indestructible so as to never again lose the understanding of how much it matters for children to be outdoors. I see ECO as an entity, not an organisation. What this means is it’s not the website, or the blog, or the conferences – although these are all a part of it – it’s instead the fundamental understanding that children need to be outdoors.

ECO died down a little since the pandemic, and now we’ve channelled all that energy into a training collective called Outdoors Thinking. We wanted to create a qualification course that’s going to help educators and practitioners access training that really empowers them to work outdoors. 


Q: The idea of the meshwork has been used in academic discourse and across a range of disciplines, including geography, anthropology, sociology and ecology, but this is the first time I’ve seen it used as a model to build an organisation, or entity, to use your words. Was it difficult for ECO to function in some ways since it is built in such a different and unique way?

No, it really sort of fell out. It was as if it had been there and had been growing all along, and suddenly, it became more of a tangible entity. I was bobbing about all over the country, visiting all sorts of places, meeting lots of like-minded people and realising that there wasn’t much training or support in the UK for children’s outdoor learning. We have to call it “outdoor learning” instead of “outdoor play” to legitimise it, but children are always learning and even more so when they play. This change in terminology reflects the deep loss of understanding that play is actually what children do when they are driving their own learning. It’s self-motivated. 

You watch children at school being told what to do in a classroom, and you can see them get so tired, and then it’s time for play, and they come alive. They are doing what they need to be doing; what their brain and body are telling them is right. I could see a real gap in this understanding in the UK, and I wanted to get to the point where outdoor learning and play is such an integral and unbreakable part of our knowledge base. So, the idea of the meshwork fits perfectly because if we can bring people and energy and ideas together in the right way – a way that is somewhat self-driven by all these people across the country who also have this passion – then we can create an understanding that is indestructible. That’s where Outdoors Thinking’s training is at now, as it’s something I’ve designed but now has many people putting their own energy into it. We have trainers and courses in Norfolk, Sheffield, Bristol, Aberdeen, Hounslow, Northern Ireland and Wales (delivered in Welsh), and it all just fell into place because energy came from these different people and “lines”. Because if children are self-driven learners and that’s the kind of learning that sticks, then ECO and Outdoors Thinking also had to take this kind of form.


Q: How do you interpret change happening, and do you have any suggestions for how we might cultivate change through thinking more ecologically and “meshily”? 

The most direct answer I can give for you is to do with the focus of my work, which has been on early childhood. I think that if we can help children grow up differently they can develop a different worldview and a different way of living in the world. For me, it boils down to how I feel myself in the world and how I know myself bodily in the world, and this affects the way I want to live. This is why my focus for some time has been on ecological identity, and within that, the pathway to that identification is playing with the world or knowing the world as a play partner. 

So when children play with sticks or water or mud in the multitude of ways that they do, then each of those represents the world responding to their drives. Children have psychological needs, like hiding or climbing, and the world is a responder to that. For example if there’s a puddle, every child will jump into the puddle. It’s almost as if the puddle is shouting at the child, “jump in me”, or alternatively, the child jumps in the puddle, and the puddle responds by splashing or squelching or whatever. Either way, there is this definite play partnership happening, which I think is a binding or bonding process that overtime can become ‘love’. So, if we can help children grow up and inhabit the world in a different way, then the way that they’re driven to live will be different. You’re less likely to harm –  and more likely wanting to care for –  something that you feel is your kin. It is possible for children to grow up like this; we see it in many indigenous and other cultures.

Another thing that I’ve also been thinking about is the way that we use language in our Western existence: it’s very noun-focused. Children live in the world of verbs; they live in the world of doing. We teach children nouns like nose, eyes, mouth, dog, cat, etc., but when we put a label on something to describe what it is, it generates a kind of separation between it and us. Instead, if I were to give a label that describes our interaction with it, then we get the intra-action rather than the separation. Apparently, there are languages that are verb-based and I think Ingold talks about this, but I won’t go too much into that. When I’m with children, naming things doesn’t matter so much; instead, I like to focus on looking beyond the name. To do this, I have sometimes offered children the opportunity to choose the name themselves based on what they see and understand about something. For example, when I was talking about puddles before, perhaps I should’ve termed them “jumpable” or “splashable”. Of course, sometimes labels are important in order to communicate with each other, but I feel that as soon as we say the name of something, we’ve categorised it and we’ve put it away and we have stopped looking and interacting. These (Western) human constructs of labelling really get in the way of seeing how things really are, and instead of a way of knowing, it becomes a set of knowledge. I think we can draw on the network versus meshwork contrast here as well. The verbs are the lines of the meshwork because they’re doing and they’re wayfaring and the nouns are the dots in the network that can be linked together. 

In terms of ECO and thinking more “meshily”, I don’t think I was really trying hard to initiate change through ECO, but more so, I was just throwing something out there and hoping it would catch. I was broadcasting seeds and distributing them and seeing who and what came along to feed or grow. You have to have no expectations and see what happens if you want to go with the meshwork model, I guess. The ECO blog still exists online but there’s nothing new going into it. It really did grow into Outdoors Thinking and that’s a good example of the sort of chaotic, generative way that the meshwork functions. 

Q: What can you tell us about the importance of surfaces for early childhood development and learning?

One of the things I think the outdoors does very well compared to the indoors is it gives children a variety of surfaces to move along, whether it be by rolling, crawling, walking or running. Indoors, there is one kind of floor. Even if it’s wood or carpet or vinyl, there’s very little variation, especially in how it responds to you moving things on it or moving upon it. It’s a continuous and unchanging surface. In fact, children trip over indoors more than they do outdoors. I don’t think this is evidenced by research, this is just my own observation, but they often trip over nothing when inside.

There's a Danish landscape architect called Helle Nebelong, who wrote about climbing frames being standardised in that every rung is the same distance and the same shape. She says: “When the distance between all the rungs in a climbing net or a ladder is exactly the same, the child has no need to concentrate on where he puts his feet. Standardisation is dangerous because play becomes simplified and the child does not have to worry about his movements.”

Children move differently on irregular surfaces. For example, if a child is climbing or walking on a fallen down tree, there are all these lumpy, uneven and ‘knobbly bits’ of life that they get to know about and pay attention to because every step is different and every movement is different. Children need variety and difference for their development. The more the surfaces vary, the more you have to pay attention and the more your body has to think about how to respond. There are so many different types of surfaces in the outdoors and different variations within those surfaces. For example, if it is raining a surface might be slippery when it was grippy the day before. 

Walking on uneven surfaces means you have to have loose knees and a looser way of walking because you don’t know what you’re going to land on. Shoes have an impact on this as well. There’s a book called Born to Run by Christopher McDougall  and there’s a quote I like in it by Dr. Paul Brand that says: “a barefoot walker receives a continuous stream of information about the ground and about his own relationship to it, while a shod foot sleeps inside an unchanging environment.” The foot is supposed to be splayed out. The toes are supposed to be able to grip and spread, and the arches are supposed to be able to take the pressure and push the foot forward. Shoes don’t allow for this, and I think children should be allowed to walk barefoot a lot of the time so that they develop this spring in their step and stop the shock being referred up the legs, hips and back. Feet are a great deal more robust than people think they are. How ever did we get by before shoes? Children also don’t want to wear shoes, and this makes me think that they might naturally know that shoes are not good for them. 

Q: You’ve spoken to me a bit before about the difference between nature connection and ecological identity. Could you expand on those two phrases and how they relate to surfaces and the meshwork? 

Well, the distinction I’ve been making recently about nature connection and ecological identity is that with nature connection, you have these two separate things: me and nature, and we’re building a connection between us. Ecological identity, on the other hand, has to do with inhabiting the world. This can relate to surfaces in that if you have a nice wooden indoor floor, it might be considered a nature connection, but it doesn’t go that deep in terms of active participation. Indoor floors you may use as a means to get somewhere, whereas outdoor floors, you take your time walking over, and you slow down and start to respond to the movement it affords. You’re participating with the ground, which is the key thing. 

Ingold speaks about the lines of the meshwork being typically “winding and irregular, yet comprehensively entangled into a close-knit tissue”. So, these kinds of surfaces relate to the meshwork versus the network idea. When you walk on outdoor, uneven surfaces, you are wayfaring, participating and paying attention; you are the line. If you walk on an indoor surface, you’re just crossing it; there’s no active participation, rather like the network. Meandering in ways that cannot be foreseen equals the possibility for unexpected outcomes to emerge. This is what you get with the meshwork, and this is what you get with ecology. A lot can happen when you think ecologically, and you think in pathways, but things will always tend to construct themselves. 

Jan White is a Professor of Practice with the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and co-director of specialist training company Outdoors Thinking. Her work centres on provision for outdoor play for children in ECEC settings, with particular interests in play (as self-directed learning), ecology (as the study of relationships), landscape, embodiment and the nurturing of ecological identity. During 40 years in educational practice she has studied experience in the outdoors for children from birth to twelve, collaborating with Siren Films to create the films Babies Outdoors, Toddlers Outdoors and Two Year-Olds Outdoors (2011) and her award-winning books include Playing and Learning Outdoors (3rd edn. Routledge, 2020), Outdoor Provision in the Early Years (Sage, 2011) and Every Child a Mover (Early Education, 2015).




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