Udeskole (literally meaning ‘outdoor school’) is a term used to describe a form of outdoor – based education that is blossoming in the Scandinavian area (Bentsen et al., 2018). Moreover, udeskole is a way of understanding learning, a form of a ‘holistic’ and progressive education by accentuating communication, social interaction, spontaneity, play, curiosity, and fantasy. (Jordet, 1998).

The dissemination of this experiential and place – based learning approach is widely developing in schools, during the last decade; parallel to the development within the academic environment, udeskole gradually became a topic of an international outdoor course for student teachers.  

In this article we want to investigate the potential of the outdoor education from student teacher perspectives. 

This paper focuses on a single case field study at local university college in Denmark (LUC), where there is an extracurricular and international course of outdoor education for students attending the Teacher Training/Education. The ethnographic fieldwork guides the researcher during the data collection while a group of student teachers is involved in different activities outdoor - based and linked to the udeskole philosophy. After being introduced to the story of the Outdoor education and research in the Scandinavian setting, there was also an introduction to the enactment of this among same danish organizations. There are several outdoor activities, which will be analyzed in detail to discover how the Outdoor Education has been experienced. An overview about the didactics related to this topic is also provided for the students. 

During the participant observation, the researcher could rewrite stories about the different activities included visiting a food-store, drawing a family tree, walking during a street-art tour, going to a fieldtrip in the forest, guessing the age of trees, singing around a hyggelig fire camp, visiting a local farm and so on. Throughout the time of participation in the course, the researcher experiences the study activity model used by students in this local university college that put effort to bringing their own values and personality into play; at the same time, the researcher can draft a summary with the most significant features of this topic. 

The research is motivated and inspired by the ‘lust of knowing’ about the outdoor education and the Danish Educational system (Delamont, 2008), also because Scandinavian countries are often perceived as ‘country of reference’, from Italian pedagogies, concerning outdoor learning in school and pre-school systems (Rea & White, 2009).

The analysis is part of a PhD project conducted by an Italian PhD student, during her internship in Denmark at the University of Aalborg. This intercultural dimension comes out in the analysis where she deals and balances her research position as an insider (because she is involved in the fieldwork during the participant observation and interviews) and outsider of the group under study (being an external eye of the Danish context to enlighten the tacit knowledge of the participants). 

The current research is guided by the following question: what is the meaning of the Outdoor Education from different levels and perspectives? And how is it enacted and shaped from text to action?

The reader, among the analysis, will be introduced to the urgency of the researcher finding a balance between the two different poles of the participation spectrum by Gold’s typology of research roles. (Reeves et al., 2013). In this case from a complete participant level (behaving like a student at the course) to a complete observer (embodying a sense of objectivity as a PhD researcher). It is evident how the researcher often recurs to her reflexivity; by using this technique she can deal with the different roles that she covers: an outsider as an ethnographer researcher in a foreign context, an Italian Early Years and Primary school teacher and an insider during her participant observation. The research design follows the James Spradley’s approach, since the recursion between the analysis of gathering data and the need of returning to the fieldwork is a remarkable feature of his work (Spradley, 1979. – Spradley, 2006). The data collection is gained by the participant observation at the international outdoor course at LUC and through interviews with its participants. These interviews are “speech events” to let people talk about what they know about the topic under study. (Garrido, 2017). Using face – to – face relationships with the participants to learn about their lives without passing judgment on them. In this article we will use extracts from empirical material to explore how outdoor education is understood in practice. A tool used by the researcher to guide the reader is the vignette: briefly described episode to illustrate an aspect on the case. For the understanding of the policies about the enactment of the Outdoor education along different levels is used the “policy cycle” consisting of multi‐directional and non‐linear relationships across agenda setting, policy text production, and policy enactment. Ball utilizes the term “enactment” rather than “implementation” (Ball et al. 2012) to highlight how the agency and engagement of a variety of actors at global, national, provincial, systemic, and institutional levels of policy processes shape and modify policies as they move between discursive constructions and practice. This helps to find a balance between the macro-culture and the micro-culture at LUC; in this process the researcher seeks to analyze the trajectory of social and educational policies. In addition, the analysis explores ways in which student teachers interpret, adapt, or transform policies through the lens of their values, preexisting knowledge and practices.

This paper underlines how the ethnography is particularly appropriate for the investigation of many aspects of learning and teaching as there are strong similarities between the way people learn and the activities of conducting ethnographic research (Walford et al., 2008). This works aims to highlight of the culture of the outdoor education in Denmark, through different levels, appreciating its uniqueness and complexity, its embeddedness and interaction with its contexts and to give voice to the participants’ experiences. The hope is that the potentials of nature in learning and teaching could be evident in an academic context, where the Outdoor education could be integrated in the program course for student teachers. In this way there may be even greater potentials if a cross-disciplinary dialogue could be initiated, since the outdoor learning approach is often to deal with an academic subject matter or concept in its real concrete form to facilitate learning, motivation and understanding (Bentsen et al., 2010). This may both bring some indeed insights about the Outdoor education applied for teaching and learning and at the same time nurture the theoretical schemes about it. Research results can also help legislator, university heads, to improve the general curricula for the prospect teachers, but also for teachers who would like to use the outdoor education as a didactic tool. Even though the ‘school-based outdoor teaching in the local outdoor environment’ as an integrated part of the school system is a relatively new form of teaching and learning activity in Scandinavia, there are some schools where the ‘udeskole’ is characterized by compulsory educational activities outside of school on regularly basis.

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