Introduction
Outdoor education and outdoor play and learning has a long-standing heritage. Based on a desire to engage learners experientially through structured and unstructured activities, and via reflection on “learning by doing” (Dewey, 1915, p255). Distinctively, the affordances of the outdoor environment are seen to enhance opportunities for learning in ways that are interdisciplinary, authentically felt, ‘hands-on’, ‘place-based’ and connected to local contexts (Beames and Brown, 2016; Lloyd, Truong and Gray, 2018). Of late, concerns around young people’s wellbeing, and the need for an educational response to issues around sustainability, climate change and biodiversity loss, have led to renewed emphasis on provision for outdoor learning. However, internationally, little is known about the durations and locations of this provision, how prepared teachers are to facilitate these, and how countries compare in this regard.
Few countries worldwide have much in the way of empirical evidence of the extent of provision of education in outdoor settings at school and pre-school levels. Exceptions include Canada (see Asfeldt et al. 2020), Hungary (Fuz 2018), England (Prince, 2019). In New Zealand, Hill et al (2020) (basing some of their protocols on the survey reported upon herein) revealed ‘education outside the classroom’ was mostly teacher led and focused on curricular enhancement. In Denmark, for example, Barfod et al. (2021) looked back at multiple surveys in Denmark wherein school leaders reported on outdoor schooling across three time points (2007, 2014, 2019) helping them discern the regularity of grassroots udeskole provision.. In Scotland, Beames and Polack (2019) reviewed inspection reports (2011 – 2018) to show that outdoor learning in ‘grounds, local green space or local community during school hours’ appeared in ¾ of primary schools’ inspections providing another way to capture evidence of the extent of provision. Internationally, each survey team have sought to capture evidence on curricular-linked outdoor learning using approaches that mostly differ. These differences make international comparison difficult.
This paper will describe research which empirically measured outdoor provision in Scotland and in Rimini, Italy using the same methodological approach. This enables international comparisons to be made and sharing of practice across the two countries.
Findings
The evidence presented here indicates there is value and need for an approach to surveying outdoor educational provision in a national and international context. The Scottish survey data provide a valuable, evidence-based measure of provision that counters popular opinion and others’ assessment of prevalence of outdoor learning provision in Scotland. Firstly, post-Covid, over half of the teachers in our survey held the perception that provision outdoors had increasedcompared to pre-pandemic levels. This of course might have been true, adding weight to the possibility of a sustained decline between 2014 and 2022. Secondly, the survey findings also counter the perspective offered by the HMIE report (HMIE, 2022) for the same year which suggested outdoor provision was an increasing feature, and that the pandemic had ‘accelerated the breadth and depth of provision’ (though for their exemplification cases this may have been true). Our survey showed the early years sector did increase provision but our this did not hold true on average for most of our randomly sampled schools. The Italian survey data found that the impact of the pandemic had an even greater perceived impact on outdoor provision, with ¾ of practitioners across Kindergarten and Primary school settings identifying an increase. The ability to compare educators’ perceptions with the reality of provision, across settings and indeed across countries going forward, is an important step in understanding the motivators towards increased outdoor provision.
