Creative Teaching Idea:
Wrapping the Coyote
Teaching Bundle

By Chris Laliberte

Over the last few articles, we've explored the three "Primary Colors" of good Coyote Teaching: The Art of Questioning; Didactic Teaching; and the Dynamics of Trickster. These aren't the only tools and techniques involved in Coyote Teaching: for instance, storytelling is another skill on par with these three. The jouny of the mentor is one of accumulating skills and techniques that will fill out your mentoring palette. In this article, we will tackle the question of just what to do with this box of tools you are collecting.

Approach It Like Art

The painting metaphor is a very appropriate one for mentoring. Like any art, Coyote Teaching is about expressing a feeling that comes from inside you. This feeling is your intuitive sense of how you can coach and cajole your student into greater growth and awareness. Thus, the skill of the artist is in translating that internal feeling into an effective external action.

Take improvisational music as an example. In order to jam, you have to learn the basic techniques of your instrument - how to make each note. Then, you have to learn something about music theory to make sense of all the possible notes, and how and why they go together, etc. Ultimately, artistic musicians master these techniques of instrument and theory so thoroughly that they are internalized, and without thinking about any of the techniques, musicians are able to simply play the music that they are feeling, or hearing, inside of them. But the road to that point is one of long hours practicing techniques, and then practicing with other people. During this stage, musicians are applying scales and theory intentionally. They are in their head, trying to "do it right", and play the right scale, the right riff. This can sometimes sound really good, but it's not the essence of improvisation. The goal is to play what you hear in your head, not execute a pre-memorized lick or apply the appropriate scale or formula. When you are playing what you are feeling, you are truly present. You are responding beautifully and uniquely to the actual situation, and you are literally at one with your environment.

It is EXACTLY the same with Coyote Teaching. You have to internalize the different techniques to the point where you apply them with your students without conscious effort or thought. At this stage, you don't know why you are doing what you are doing. You're just present to the moment, and it feels right, and it is beautiful. Trusting your feelings and having faith that you will "do it right" if you let yourself improvise is scary. People who have jammed with a band have made some lousy mistakes that, let's face it, were wrong and sounded horrible. But they have also had some amazing moments where they hi the groove and sounded better than they ever had practicing by themselves. Artists call it "meeting the muse," and in art as well as in mentoring, it is truly a moment of divine inspiration. It is something much bigger and wiser than you coming through. And often, it is really hard for you to see it when it is happening.

Back to the jam session metaphor. It is usually the other musicians who will let you know when you are sounding really good (or lousy). It is the same with mentoring. Do it with other mentors! Especially as you are learning, be assertive about getting other people's perspective on the situation: "Do you think that worked? Should I have answered that question? Should I have stretched that mystery a little further?" You'd be amazed at how many times I have congratulated instructors on what I saw as a brilliant mentoring moment, or pointed out a blunder that they just made, and they did not know what I was talking about. To them, it was ordinary and mundane, just the obvious thing to do (or they were completely unaware of the dynamic I was watching). Having another viewpoint really helps.

Be Guided By the Ultimate Goal

What is the goal of Coyote Teaching? What are we trying to do with these different techniques? Wilderness Awareness School's goal is to help our students gain a deeper awareness of nature, themselves, and their community. Most of our curriculum seems focused primarily on cultivating awareness of nature but that is just our camouflage. Learning to track animals is fun, but the ultimate value of it comes from the fact that in learning to do so, our students cultivate the skills and awareness they will need to learn how to track themselves. They will discover who they really are, and understand how they fit into their community and environment.

So here are two really important fundamental concepts, or search images for your mentoring awareness:

Education. The classical meaning of the word comes from educare, which means "to lead it out." Lead what out? Well, there are many layers to that question. From a modern perspective, curiosity is the best catalyst for learning, so lead out the student's curiosity. From the classical perspective, the Socratic Method was to lead the answer out of the student by good questioning. On the deepest level, Chief Jake Swamp (of the Mohawk Nation) refers to the idea that all people have a "natural gift", but they don't know how to see it themselves. From this perspective (and it seems to have existed all around the world in earlier times), every person has a unique gift to bring to the world, and it is exactly what the world needs right now. The Coyote mentor is trying to lead this gift out.

Instruction. This comes from instruare, which means "to build (put) it in." Put what in? From the modern perspective, we are probably all familiar with the amount of curriculum and information that teachers were expected to put into us during our schooling. From the survival or awareness perspective, there are numerous brain patterns and search images individuals need to put into their brains to survive and thrive in their "native" environment. And in every culture around the world, there are important teachings (in the form of stories, songs, dances, ceremonies) that are divinely inspired, and need to be learned, practiced, and passed on to the next generations in order for the society to survive.

I believe it will be helpful for you to develop the search images of "Lead It Out" and "Put It In," so that you are constantly attending to this dialectic process, even if you are not consciously doing so. To make a gross generalization, you can be fairly confident of the following rule when working with most people in the modern situation: "Lead it out before you put it in." Without specific knowledge of your student, you will be right more often than wrong if you assume that the rest of his or her life has overemphasized "putting it in," and that your best bet will be to "lead it out" first. Think of it as a simple matter of cultural overeating - you need to make room before anything new will be able to go in. It is probably not necessary to take that particular metaphor any further.

So, there are no simple instructions fro successfully applying the tools of Coyote Teaching. As you can see, we are not just talking about facts and information, so in some sense we are involved in a dangerous task. The consequence of a mistake is more than a bad grade on a test. After all, we are working with the emergence of the spirit of our students. But hey, if it were not dangerous, Coyote wouldn't be interested!

To learn more about Coyote Teaching, check out:

Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature




To Return from Wrapping the Bundle to more Creative Teaching Ideas