Comparing conceptual text and documenting photos. Researching Outdoor Education in the Context of Reichwein’s Progressive Teaching and Rousseau’s Émile

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the historic ideas and practice of outdoor education, as developed in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, and realized by Adolf Reichwein's rural teaching practice. We aimed at developing a comprehensive research design, triangulating different qualitative data (text and photos). In the paper, we explore how the idea of place-based outdoor education unfolded in Rousseaús Émile, and how Adolf Reichwein, in rural Tiefensee, enacted the practice of place-based outdoor education. We also investigate how to correlate different types of qualitative data (conceptual text and documentary photos). We show that it is possible to develop a research language, revealing how a philosophy of education can be enacted as educational practice, and our analysis demonstrates that Rousseaús and Reichwein’s works functioned as precursors for outdoor education and educational concepts, that activate the cognitive, affective, and motoric domains.     

The place and approach of outdoor learning within a holistic curricular agenda: development of Singaporean outdoor education practice

This paper details the potential contribution of outdoor education (OE) in Singaporean education given the recent raft of national curricular reforms aimed at fostering holistic and exploratory learning opportunities. In this context, we contend that increasing recognition of the value of OE, both internationally and locally, heralds specific challenges within unique Singaporean educational conditions that must be taken into account for this subject area to flourish. In particular, we seek to distil the ways in which local community, cultural and school conditions signal the need for a more place-based and contextualised version of OE. Our analysis further addresses the need for adequate professional development frameworks to be installed in order to enhance existing local teachers’ capacities to substantially educate pupils through the outdoors, within a Southeast Asian urban context.     

Environmental Education in High Schools in Kosovo—A teachers' perspective

The integration of education for sustainable development (ESD) into all levels of education is a key priority in Kosovo's environmental action plan. However, at present it is not even known how environmental education (EE) is integrated in the country's educational system. With the help of a written questionnaire and in-depth interviews with 18 teachers, this study investigated the integration of EE in high schools (optional upper secondary education) in Kosovo. The representative sample of biology, geography, chemistry, and civic education teachers (244 persons) focused on various kinds of pollution and hazards of pollutants. Teachers' choice of topics was highly relevant, place-based, and linked to the experiences of students, but excluded sustainability issues such as the loss of biodiversity. EE was approached in three ways. The first approach critically reflected links between the natural, social, and cultural environment, while the second approach was characterized by knowledge submission of environmental facts. The third approach aimed at capacity-building and, in the sense of ESD, understood learning as process-oriented, participatory, and action-oriented. However, this approach was rather uncommon, most likely due to insufficient teacher preparation, large classes (up to 50 students), and little time (just one hour per week for EE). Class size and time also restricted outdoor activities, in particular field work. Nevertheless, in view of the interviewees, ideal EE would mean outdoor education, field work and other place-based, capacity-building practical experiences, and the development of critical thinking skills. This exemplifies that approaches to ESD may find support from dedicated teachers in Kosovo.     

Development and validation of the Place-Based Learning and Constructivist Environment Survey (PLACES)

Learning environment studies acknowledge that learning takes place within the social realm and that social conditions contribute to the quality of both learning and experience. This can be said to be especially true for environmental learning programs. To access information about students?? perceptions of their learning environment, a robust instrument for describing and measuring student perceptions of environmental education in place-based educational settings was developed and validated. Focus groups with environmental educators were formed to explore (from teachers?? perspective) the factors viewed as most important to environmental learning and as most likely to influence the unique type of learning environments fostered in place-based or community-based environmental education programs. Analysis of qualitative work resulted in the inclusion of eight scales developed/adapted from previous learning environment surveys for use in the new Place-Based Learning and Constructivist Environment Survey for use in secondary settings. In this article, validity and reliability data for this instrument are presented and the implications of these data for future research within environmental education, place-based education and teacher education programs are discussed.     

Everyday teaching and outdoor learning: developing an integrated approach to support school-based provision

In the UK, teachers are increasingly being encouraged to support and undertake outdoor learning. Despite such support there is a paucity of research that has considered how outdoor learning can be implemented and offered on a regular basis by teachers. The lack of empirical research that has centralised the role of the teacher is at odds with the interest in this topic and the need for theory-driven guidance suited to teachers. Research is reported that aimed to support the provision of outdoor learning opportunities for children aged between three and eleven at nine settings (pre- or primary schools) in Scotland and England. A set of flexible guidelines that link theory and practice were used by 14 teachers. This article focuses on teachers’ reports of their activity. The incorporation of outdoor learning within conventional teaching and learning approaches is found to be feasible and the implications for practice and future research are explored.     

School Outdoors: The Pursuit of Happiness as an Educational Goal

Well known for his pioneering work on place-based education, Sobel discusses the benefits of engaging adolescents in meaningful learning experiences through outdoor education. His case study focuses on a ‘Forest Fridays’ nature-based education program developed by Eliza Minnucci, an elementary teacher in Vermont, USA. Sobel's wife, Jennifer Kramer, adapted this pedagogy for her ‘challenging’ sixth-grade class, also in Vermont, and reports on her success in improving their writing skills and performance on math tests. The key here was to make the learning practical, through real-life applications in places more stimulating than ordinary classrooms. Drawing inspiration from youth testimony and anecdotal evidence from parents, Sobel argues that outdoor education of this kind addresses a fundamental goal of education in promoting happiness: a sense of well-being that really ought to matter more than instrumental aims of education like improved math tests or preparation for higher education and careers.     

Exploring the dimensions of place: a confirmatory factor analysis of data from three ecoregional sites

Themes of place, situatedness, and locale are increasingly prominent in environmental education literature and practice. Sense-of-place research, which considers how people connect with places and the influence of those connections on engagement with the environment, may have important implications for environmental education. Prior place studies have proposed that people’s place connections have various dimensions. This paper explores four place dimensions, analyzing data from a survey (n?=?712) conducted in three ecoregional sites in which we investigated residents’ sense of place. We examine how our data fit a proposed typology of place dimensions – a four-dimension (biophysical, psychological, sociocultural, and political-economic) categorization based on previous conceptions of the dimensions of place. We use structural equation modeling to question whether a 4-factor conceptualization of the dimensions of sense of place is superior to plausible alternatives. In comparing the four-dimension model with alternative models, we find that the four-dimension model is the best fit for these data. Our findings suggest that environmental and place-based education may benefit from an understanding and consideration of this four-dimension conceptualization of place in program design, implementation, and evaluation.     

‘Knowing your place in the world’: how place and culture support and obstruct educational aims

There is increasing international interest in learning outside the classroom; place-based education is one manifestation of this. In this article, some conceptualisations of place are considered and attention drawn to alignments with habitus at micro, meso and macro levels. I develop a concept of cultural density as an explanatory tool to theorise how place and culture intersect to support some educational aims and interfere with others within a cross-sectional research study of a place-based curriculum centred on three schools located in the Southwest of England. Cultural density refers to the nature, thickness and dominance of habitus and norms of practice in places. Reflecting on the interface between how young people come to ‘know their place in the world’ and learning opportunities, careful alignment of purpose, pedagogy and place considering past, present and future is argued as a means of maximising the opportunities afforded by learning outside the classroom.     

Seeking resilience and sustainability: outdoor education in Singapore

Outdoor education is not a universal value. Rather, outdoor education's contributions need to be grounded in time, place and culture. In this paper we describe the historical and cultural milieu that has enabled the emergence of outdoor education in Singapore and report on exploratory survey research into Singaporean teachers' conceptions of outdoor education. We compare the reported outcomes of outdoor education in Singapore to similar studies from Australia and New Zealand. Further focus group research is then used to develop a vision for outdoor education in Singapore. In so doing we aim to illustrate, and celebrate, how culturally-specific circumstances must be considered in both interpreting and conceptualizing outdoor education. We conclude that while personal development outcomes are important for Singaporean outdoor educators, these are developed more for the benefits of society and the State. The future role of outdoor education in Singapore will most probably continue to be linked to ongoing and emerging social and cultural imperatives such as harmony among diverse religious groups and environmental consequences of climate change.     

Utilising place-based learning through local contexts to develop agents of change in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability

ABSTRACT

The aim of this research was to consider how young children could develop an education for sustainable mind-set, through place-based learning within a local context. This research built upon the development of an Early Childhood Education for Sustainable (ECEfS) framework (Boyd, D., H. Hirst, and C. McNeill. 2016. Early Childhood Education for Sustainable Framework 48 (ECEfS). https://www.foundationyears.org.uk/2017/09/environmental-sustainability-resources/). The place-based research focused upon Dewey's theory of experiential learning and by engaging in offsite longitudinal community-based projects, where young children become familiar with their own locality. This familiarity encourages children to develop an ecological self within place by being submerged in an ever-changing natural environment through the Forest School Philosophy, with an emphasis upon regular visits conducted over an extended period. Over a period of a year children and adults in different and diverse settings experienced opportunities for place-based learning to develop their Education for Sustainability perspective. Observations focused upon children and adults considering how they both started to become more aware of local critical issues and related them to their own reality. The research received ethical approval by LJMU and all involved chose to take part and could withdraw at any time.     

Whose place,whose history? Outdoor environmental education pedagogy as ‘reading’ the landscape

Outdoor education practice around the world occurs in diverse circumstances, environments and cultures. The application of outdoor education to specific cultural and environmental issues in particular places and communities has received little attention in research. While research in fields such as cultural geography has addressed the relationships between cultures, communities and geographical places, this is largely overlooked in outdoor education research. In this paper I draw on literature from cultural history and environmental history to explore how these disciplines might inform outdoor education research and pedagogy that addresses current cultural and environmental issues of specific communities and geographical places. With the aid of the rhizome metaphor for (re)structuring knowledge, I use examples from my practice in Australia to demonstrate how reading the landscape and the use of stories, or historical accounts, can assist outdoor educators and participants to probe and reflect on the relationships between personal experience and the complex cultural-ecological processes that have shaped the places in which we live and work.     

Using an iterative mixed-methods research design to investigate schools facing exceptionally challenging circumstances within Trinidad and Tobago

In this study, methodology and theory were linked to explicate the nature of education practice within schools facing exceptionally challenging circumstances (SFECC) in Trinidad and Tobago. The research design was an iterative quan>QUAL-quan>qual multi-method research programme, consisting of 3 independent projects linked together by overall purpose. Although large-scale quantitative data were first used to identify and describe SFECC, the overall programme was driven by an inductive theoretical thrust, with findings from the multiple-site case studies of Projects 2 and 3 used to construct substantive theory on SFECC. The integrated findings point to the pervasive role of beyond-school factors, which were magnified and intertwined with between- and within-school factors. SFECC in this study found great difficulty transcending states of chronic low performance. We hypothesized on the need for transformative school leadership, but in this context, greater external support by stakeholder agencies and broad place-based strategies appeared essential for turnaround.     

Environmentalization of the physical education curriculum in Brazilian universities: culturally comparative lessons from critical outdoor education in Australia

‘Environmentalizing’ curriculum in Brazil is a worthy goal of global educational reform for sustainability but is challenging given the limits to rational change thesis already argued in critical social science and post-structural deconstructionism. The federal government mandate to environmentalize undergraduate physical education programs poses the question of which aspects of physical education are conducive to change. ‘Nature’ sports, or outdoor/adventure activity education, is the most likely candidate. In Australia over the past three decades, the environmentalization of ‘old’ physical education outdoor activities has led to the development of ‘new’ discourse practices that integrate environmental studies and outdoor education and are designed for ecological responsibility and social sustainability. In this culturally comparative light about the possibilities for curriculum change in environmental, outdoor and physical education, we examine the potential for change in Brazilian approaches to physical and sport education by critiquing broader ‘environmentalizing’ issues as they have occurred historically within the Australian outdoor education context in the university and secondary schooling sectors.     

Measuring Primary Students’ Graph Interpretation Skills Via a Performance Assessment: A case study in instrument development

This case study was conducted within the context of a place-based education project that was implemented with primary school students in the USA. The authors and participating teachers created a performance assessment of standards-aligned tasks to examine 6–10-year-old students’ graph interpretation skills as part of an exploratory research project. Fifty-five students participated in a performance assessment interview at the beginning and end of a place-based investigation. Two forms of the assessment were created and counterbalanced within class at pre and post. In situ scoring was conducted such that responses were scored as correct versus incorrect during the assessment's administration. Criterion validity analysis demonstrated an age-level progression in student scores. Tests of discriminant validity showed that the instrument detected variability in interpretation skills across each of three graph types (line, bar, dot plot). Convergent validity was established by correlating in situ scores with those from the Graph Interpretation Scoring Rubric. Students’ proficiency with interpreting different types of graphs matched expectations based on age and the standards-based progression of graphs across primary school grades. The assessment tasks were also effective at detecting pre–post gains in students’ interpretation of line graphs and dot plots after the place-based project. The results of the case study are discussed in relation to the common challenges associated with performance assessment. Implications are presented in relation to the need for authentic and performance-based instructional and assessment tasks to respond to the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards.     

Influence of the natural setting on environmental education outcomes

Abstract

Environmental education (EE) typically occurs in natural settings, which research suggests may enhance learning outcomes. Although field trips are commonly used to teach EE, few studies have isolated the influence of different setting characteristics for enhancing participant outcomes during an EE field trip. According to the literature, certain attributes of the natural setting, including novelty, beauty, and naturalness, as well as how the setting is used such as through place-based education, immersion, and time spent inside vs. outside, are thought to positively impact people’s experiences with nature. In this study, we collected data from 334 EE field trip programs for 5-8^th grade students to investigate the influence of these natural setting characteristics on positive learning outcomes. Results suggest that the naturalness and novelty of the setting, the use of place-based education, and spending more time outside vs. inside all positively correlated with more positive student outcomes. The implications of the results for environmental educators are discussed.     

Is outdoor education a discipline? Provocations and possibilities

Outdoor education is often undervalued. As such, we believe there is merit in critiquing the field and focusing more attention on its value and importance. This paper seeks to offer a critical exploration of ‘if’ and ‘how’ outdoor education is a discipline. The paper begins with a brief overview of the literature that seeks to define a ‘discipline’. We then present a six-component discipline model and examine whether and how outdoor education aligns with its first three components: a focus of study; a worldview or paradigm; and an active research or theory development agenda. In our analysis of these components we seek to not be definitive; rather, we invite readers to ponder our evidence in light of their lived experience. The ultimate hope is that this paper will encourage readers to deliberate the arguments that arise as a consequence of assessing outdoor education as a discipline. In doing so we hope to challenge readers to conceptualise outdoor education in innovative ways and to stimulate critical discourse to strengthen the field so that it may realise its potential and best serve society.     

Early childhood educators’ use of natural outdoor settings as learning environments: an exploratory study of beliefs,practices, and barriers

In efforts to encourage use of natural outdoor settings as learning environments within early childhood education, survey research was conducted with 46 early childhood educators from northern Minnesota (United States) to explore their beliefs and practices regarding natural outdoor settings, as well investigate predictors of and barriers to the educational use of these settings. Of the beliefs measured, only two were significantly related to frequency of use of natural outdoor settings: belief regarding difficulty in using natural outdoor settings and belief regarding their relationship to nature. The strongest predictor of use was belief regarding difficulty in using natural outdoor settings, accounting for 67.7% of the variance in the regression model. Results indicate primary barriers to be lack of walking access to natural outdoor settings, lack of time, winter weather, and safety concerns. These findings suggest efforts to increase early childhood educators’ use of natural outdoor settings should not focus on influencing their beliefs about the value of using natural outdoor settings in early childhood education, but instead on reducing barriers, thereby making the use of these settings seem more feasible.     

Speaking out: perspectives of gay and lesbian practitioners in outdoor education in the UK

Outdoor education has been shaped historically and culturally by many influences. Physically challenging activities out of doors have been appropriated by a number of traditions. These include militaristic, educational and developmental ideologies. Arguably, central to these ideologies are heterosexual, white middle class values. While women have sought to challenge this and feminist and pro-feminist research is evident, very little research has been undertaken into sexuality in relation to teacher or practitioner perspective and experience. Consequently, gay and lesbian voices within outdoor education are all but silenced. This paper explores the perspectives of three lesbian and four gay men who work in the UK outdoor education ‘industry’.

In-depth interviews were held with the participants exploring a variety of issues relating to their life histories and their experiences of working in a predominantly heterosexist outdoor education culture. This paper focuses upon the ways in which the participants perceived the need to conceal their lesbian and gay identities and the consequential effects of managing their identities.