Limited research exists that considers the usefulness of outdoor learning as a legitimate pedagogical approach for the delivery of a mainstream secondary school curriculum. To address this shortcoming, we investigated the ways in which mathematics and geography teachers and students from three secondary schools in Scotland responded to the Outdoor Journeys programme, which is a schoolbased teaching approach that enables pupils to learn about the people and place in which they live. Data collection included participant observation, short questionnaires and interviews with approximately 150 students (11-14 years old) and 10 teachers. In most cases, pupils enjoyed the opportunity to guide their own learning experientially and beyond the familiar classroom context. Teachers acknowledged that such an approach presented an opportunity to develop pupils' critical thinking skills and that these skills can, in some cases, be overlooked in early secondary education. Following these findings, we discuss the pedagogical implications arising from the inclusion of critical thinking as a key outcome of outdoor learning, and as part of the Outdoor Journeys programme, within a secondary school context. We continue by adding our voice to the nascent literature addressing outdoor learning approaches that seek to gain traction within the broader social ecology of established school cultures.
She is the Chair of the Australian Tertiary Outdoor Education Network (ATOEN) and has been involved in wilderness studies and outdoor education for over 35 years.
Loss, impermanence, and death are facts of life difficult to face squarely. Our own mortality and that of loved ones feels painful and threatening, the mortality of the biosphere unthinkable. Consequently, we do our best to dodge these thoughts, and the current globalizing culture supports and colludes in our evasiveness. Even environmental educators tend to foreground "sustainability" whilst sidelining the reality of decline, decay, and loss. And yet, human life and ecological health require experiencing "unsustainability" too, and a pedagogy for life requires a pedagogy of death. In this paper we explore experiences of loss and dying in both human relationships and the natural world through four different types of death affording situations, the cemetery, caring-unto-death, sudden death, and personal mortality. We trace the confluence of death in nature and human life, and consider some pedagogical affordance within and between these experiences as an invitation to foster an honest relationship with the mortality of self, others, and nature. We end by suggesting art as an ally in this reconnaissance, which can scaffold teaching and learning and support us to courageously accept both the beauty and the ugliness that death delivers to life.
In the context of a resurgence of civic activism to address climate change, we present findings from an exploratory research project on climate justice education (CJE). We conducted deliberative focus groups and interviews with activists, advocacy workers and educators in order to address three broad aims: to consider the ways in which different stakeholders conceptualise climate justice; to examine how teachers and activists perceive challenges to, and opportunities for, developing climate justice education; to explore the potential for recognising activism and civic engagement as an educational process, considering both activists' views on education and educators' views on activism in this context. Activists recognised the potential for CJE which is connected to social movements (especially youth-led movements), local communities, and addresses the affective dimensions of the climate crisis.Although our teacher participants shared some of the analyses of the activists, they were less well informed about climate justice as a concept and were more ambivalent about the prospect of learning through and from activism.
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