In recent years, early childhood education advocates have aired concerns regarding children’s access to opportunities to experience risk and adventure (Masters & Grogan, 2018). Exposing children to risky situations and discussing safe behaviours builds their safety risk intelligence and develops resilience (O’Neill, 2016). Safety risk intelligence (O’Neill, 2016) forms where children’s competencies and skill development are promoted, and children are empowered to take ownership of their safety. Risk-taking experiences, challenges and play opportunities can provide a rich context for building risk intelligence.

Children’s risk-taking can be facilitated by exploring natural, underdeveloped play spaces (Sandseter, 2009). Venturing into the environment for science teaching and learning purposes is advantageous to children’s risk taking. In recent decades, there has been growth in context of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in nature-based settings such as nature kindergartens and forest schools. This growth has resulted in many different interpretations of ‘nature kindergartens’ and ‘forest schools’ around the world (Knight, 2016). Recently, the European forest kindergarten approach to ECEC has been taken up in growing numbers in Australia. In many cases, it has translated into bush kinder, an approach to nature-based ECEC adapted to suit Australian conditions informed by their European and UK counterparts.

Research indicates that the most significant benefit children gain from interacting with natural settings is that participation helps children to appreciate and care for the environment (Harvey et al., 2020). In addition to appreciating the environment whilst undertaking nature play, that is children’s play that is specifically unstructured and nature-based (Dankiw et al., 2020), children often have been observed to develop risk taking behaviours (Sandseter et al., 2020). The level of child’s risk taking in play-based activity differs between children (Sandseter, 2009) yet research indicates that all children engage in risky play (Kvalnes, 2023).  Time spent playing outside contributes to reducing risk of peer difficulties and enhanced prosocial behaviours (Mygind et al., 2022).

Australian research around the benefits of a bush kinder approach (Christiansen et al., 2018) and the research of nature-based ECEC (Wilson, 2019) has tended towards the positive aspects of children’s affinity with the natural world. More recently Australian bush kinder scholarship has contributed to the discourse relating to pedagogy and STEM teaching and learning (Speldewinde et al., 2023). Yet, the connections between children’s risky play in nature and science learning that includes biological and ecological systems, physical and chemical sciences evident in bush kinders, has received little attention to date. To define science here, it is considered as the knowledge or a system of knowledge covering the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method (Merriam Webster online dictionary, 2020). The method and the knowledge of science are equally important to taking a “systematic approach in which hypotheses are tested through observation and experimentation” (Turner & Williams, 2020, p. 3). The definition of science in ECEC is reliant upon pre-primary school level curriculum documents such as the Australian Early Years Learning Framework (AGDE, 2022). The interpretation of science is where children become independent observers of everyday objects, materials and living things.

This presentation applies EBH Sandseter’s work and her important contribution to theorising risky play. Understanding the significant properties which allow learning to occur within these settings, as well as the impact of individuals within the setting, forms part of the consideration here. This presentation contributes to the scholarship of both risky play discourse and how the environment available in natural surroundings contributes to young children’s science learning. It responds to the research question, how does the risky play that occurs in a bush kinder support children’s science learning in the early years? 

This study took an ethnographic design as ethnography is suited to research in bush kinder settings due to the field site being open and necessitating researcher mobility (Speldewinde, 2022). The researcher cannot be limited to only video recording or interviewing owing to range of events and activities occurring simultaneously across a wide space where children are free to move about. Madden (2016) describes ethnography as a methodology that uses ‘a particular set of methods (a toolkit)’ which includes interviewing and video recording as well as participating and listening (Forsey 2010). The methodological toolkit used in the study included participant observation of teachers and children, listening to conversations between teachers, between children and between children and teacher. At times, I was drawn into these conversations as a participant observer (Speldewinde, 2022). Semi-structured interviews, informal discussions, and images captured using photographs and video of play and teaching moments were also data. The observations and the interactions that occur between children and educators, written as vignettes, are applied in this presentation to illustrate how risky play intersects with science learning in bush kinders. Regular site visits over four distinct periods of fieldwork, firstly in 2015 then again in 2017, 2020 and 2023. These weekly visits took place over a two-to-five-hour duration for three different five-week blocks in both 2015, 2017 and 2023. In 2020, I returned to interview the educators and discuss how bush kinders had developed further however the fieldwork was curtailed due to the COVID pandemic. These data collection visits over eight years allowed us to engage with the teachers and to understand what was happening over time. It gave us a broader understanding of events, rather than a one-off snapshot of the site and teachers. The fieldwork associated with this research project took place at four bush kinder sites in south-eastern Australia. The sites were selected due to their proximity to the researchers’ University and each other. Each of the four bush kinders was visited for between three and five hours each week for three to four weeks across three school terms. 15 educators and approximately 220 children were observed as four separate bush kinder groups.

As we chart our way forward in nature-based early childhood education, science teaching and learning has an important place in supporting children’s development of risk-taking behaviour. Through ongoing experience of teaching in a bush kinder, the educators have been observed to encourage the risks that children take during nature play. Embedding risky play in nature-based education contexts can play a role in further developing approaches to nature-based teaching in ECEC, this will be important as nature-based programs such as bush kinders and forest schools proliferate. With program growth will come deeper understandings of connections between children’s growing awareness of the science in the environment and risky play. This awareness of children’s risky play may lend itself to investigating the intersections with other learning domains such as technology, mathematics and integrated STEM teaching and learning. It is important to acknowledge that in some contexts, nature may not provide suitable materials for some or all the elements of risky play. The Australian education landscape for example is one that is often risk averse (Sandseter et al., 2012) so it is important to acknowledge that a shift in educator thinking may be necessary to overcome predispositions towards risky play within this type of nature-based teaching and learning. Climatic conditions may also impede on children’s capacity to undertake risky play. In winter trees may be too slippery to climb, in summer months venomous animals may make it too risky to play vicariously or out of sight. These issues form part of the risk assessments educators may need to undertake to allow for risky play. Continuing to theorise how risky play forms part of the teaching and learning processes are applicable in nature-based ECEC contexts will become increasingly important as these sites flourish.

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