The nature of learning at forest school: practitioners' perspectives

This paper investigates forest school practitioners perceptions of learning at forest school to identify the topics covered, the learning styles, and the philosophies underpinning its delivery, based on interviews with experienced forest school practitioners. Practitioners identified the focus of learning at forest school as social development: teamwork, relationships with others, self-knowledge, and learning to take risks. Children also engaged with nature and developed an attachment to the woods where forest school took place. Learning styles were kinaesthetic, sensory, and experiential. Forest school leaders saw themselves as facilitators of learning rather than teachers.     

Rumblings in the air: understanding earthquakes in the 1690s

After a wave of earthquakes in 1692 and 1693, the astronomer John Flamsteed composed an innovative explanation of their causes. He argued that they did not originate underground but were caused by explosions of nitrous and sulphurous particles in the air. Although the idea now sounds strange, Flamsteed's account was expressed in terms that were familiar to his contemporaries in the Royal Society, drawing particularly on Boyle's chemistry and air-pressure experiments. Flamsteed was more unusual in his conviction that the earth was virtually solid; this made him an opponent of structural theories offered by Thomas Burnet, Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley. Flamsteed's ideas were dismissed by Hooke as 'nonsensicall', but by the time they were published, long after his death, they appeared closer to mainstream thinking.     

Book Review

This essay considers how teaching and learning may have functioned in late antique Roman classrooms by examining two texts: one is from the teacher’s perspective, the other – which, until recently, was unedited – provides some access to the student’s perspective. Despite much recent scholarly work on education in antiquity, there has been no attempt to bring teachers’ and students’ perspectives together through two contemporary sources from the Latin-speaking West. The first text is by Servius, a late antique teacher, whose Commentary provides detailed analysis of Virgil. The other comprises the Colloquia, containing ‘real life’ dialogues in Latin and Greek set in a school context. Through this comparison, the author aims to shed some light on what may have happened in a Latin-speaking classroom in late antiquity.