Over the last year, as part of the English-based school curriculum in his school in the Cayman Islands, my 14-year-old son has been studying WW2 history, and specifically the D-Day landings. Last week I took him and his brothers there to learn more. I chose a tour with Dale Booth, who has a self-avowed “insatiable hunger for, knowledge of both the D Day landings and the many inland battles of Normandy“.
In our full day with Dale, he took us to a number of sites from the D-Day landings, and at each point stopped and shared the history.
The photo above is of Dale explaining to a group about the “widerstandnesten”, the “resistance nests” of multi-layered fortifications that the German army built and put in pace, some as long as 700m along the beachfront and including artillery batteries, machine gun nests, and of course barbed wire and mines.
It was a powerful experience for Dale to stand on Sword Beach with us explaining about the widerstandnesten. As with the photo above, he told this story while drawing a map of the fortifications with a stick in the sand. He then brought out his ever-present large scale folder of photos, showing us using landmarks such as house and sea walls photos of the invasion day etc.
As if that experience were not experiential and visceral enough, what was even more powerful was that at each location he told individual stories, in depth, of soliders, pilots, even a paratrooper dog.
Just before I wrote this, I asked my 14 year old son for his most memorable experiences of the summer. High on his list was learning about history outdoors, with stories. He then mused “my school should do this at least one week a month”.
Dale Booth is a master and my boys and I will always remember such experiential learning, it is embedded.
Outdoor storytelling.
Where could you use it in your leadership and for your organisation?
Two more examples of this spring to mind and I’ll close with them.
First, Jay Nehra was the Head of Science for years and an inspirational Physics teacher for my two older children. A couple of years ago he and his wife (my colleague at the time, Samantha Nehra) decided to take a one year sabbatical and give their children (who were still of Primary School age) the experience of a year together as a family in an RV, what they called their “coddiwompler”. Jay blogged their year under the title “Radical Sabbatical – Life in a Tin Can”. As they went, he took his skills as a storyteller and teacher and their two girls will have experienced enormous amounts of outdoor storytelling and learned so much !
Second, this idea of outdoor storytelling is not new, though it is relatively new to me. About two years ago I literally bumped into two specialists in this field at the top of one of my favourite places in Edinburgh, Calton Hill.
One of them was visiting from New Zealand to learn from the Edinburgh University department of Outdoor and Environmental Education. From our brief chat, the lady from Edinburgh University and I arranged to meet to talk further a few days later. As befit the topic, we arranged to meet and have a walking meeting (Nilofer Merchant, a great proponent of walking meetings, would be happy to know she inspired this idea for that meeting).
At that meeting, the atmosphere of walking and talking by the river inspired fresh and different conversation. We talked about taking the teachings from their area and combining with my leadership work. The timing wasn’t right then, but writing this now means I will connect with them again now and see if it is ripe to open up again. More inspiration, all thanks to Dale Booth and Outdoor Storytelling.