Exploring Schools’ Use of Natural Spaces

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the changing ways in which schools are using natural spaces as part of their pupils' learning experience. We suggest that learning in natural spaces has undergone something of a renaissance in recent times, and explore the reasons that this might be so. We then examine ways in which schools and other practitioners are using outdoor spaces for play, for non-curricular and for curricular learning. The chapter draws on a range of countries for examples that show how a nation's cultural ideas about the outdoors can be incorporated into a country's outdoor learning, and how other ideas travel across boundaries to be interpreted in different practical ways. Within these sections, we consider different theoretical underpinnings that inform learning outside. Finally, the benefits of and challenges to outdoor learning are considered. of the conflict between 'short-term capitalist exploitation of natural resources and longer-term sustainable production' (Eagleton, 2011, p.229).Abstract desire for the bucolic, however, was followed by action of a more practical nature. During the late nineteenth century, for instance, the establishment of National Parks in the US and Australia encouraged and protected both people's engagement with the natural world and the wildlife within it, and provided a model that is followed by a large number of countries today. This type of conservation work has subsequently been developed and augmented into a wide-ranging social and political environmental movement that includes international and local organisations, political parties, scientists and individual advocates. And over the last fifteen years or so, it has been possible to see a parallel process of increased awareness of and advocacy for the value of the natural world within the education sector, whereby children and young people's diminishing engagement with the natural world (e.g. Louv, 2008) has led to something of a renaissance in the use of outdoor spaces for teaching and learning among different nations across the globe.In this chapter we discuss why this may be so, the ways in which teachers and other practitioners who educate pupils up to the age of sixteen are using the outdoor environment, and the different effects this has. We present research on outdoor learning from different nations to illustrate different debates, and describe briefly our own contribution to this body of work through the Natural Connections Demonstration Project. Finally, we bring the chapter to a close with a range of recommendations for the future. Our discussion includes all aspects of learning outside the classroom in the natural environment such as adventure education, curricular learning outdoors in a variety of settings such as school grounds or national parks, and more informal types of learning that might take place in, for example, other outdoor activities and / or residential settings. Patterns of change -why a renaissance of learning in the natural environment?Learning in the natural environment for children follows a trad...

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