Outdoor pedagogies are typically marginalised through pressures driven by a neoliberal ideology, positioning children as future economic investments and education as concerned with efficiency (Sims, 2017). Teachers and student teachers experience overwhelming workload and time pressures, resulting from imposed curricula, standards and accountability measures that promote simplistic binaries in education, such as product over process (Attick, 2017). Strict government control over what and how teachers teach diminishes professional autonomy, while inspection regimes compel compliance with national curricula focused on predetermined outcomes (Moss, 2014). Discourses of risk, fear of injury, getting dirty or lost, alongside limited understanding and confidence, further reinforce compliance with impoverished views of outdoor learning. Consequently, teachers are discouraged from adopting pedagogies that fall outside dominant expectations. For outdoor pedagogy to be valued, teachers must be assured that it contributes positively to inspection outcomes (Prince and Diggory, 2023), and professional confidence must be fostered across the sector to recognise outdoor learning as a legitimate pedagogical tool.

This research examines the pedagogical importance of outdoor learning in Early Childhood Education (ECE) and explores, through the lens of a teacher educator, the challenges of embedding outdoor pedagogies into educational practice. The research took place in Wales, one of the four nations of the UK, where extensive educational reform has recently taken place. In Wales, despite recognition of the value of outdoor learning ( Estyn 2023), its implementation is not a mandatory element of the revised Curriculum for Wales (3–16yrs) (Welsh Government, 2022a), and nor is it explicitly framed as a pedagogical approach. Similarly, Rusitoru, (2023) notes that in countries including Spain, France and Cyprus, time restrictions and rigid curricula present barriers to implementation despite learning in outdoor spaces being recognised as beneficial to children’s development.   In contrast, the Welsh curriculum for funded non-maintained nurseries (ages 2–5yrs) places ‘outdoor learning and play’ at the centre of ECE provision and links it clearly to pedagogy (Welsh Government, 2022b). This disparity highlights a gap in pedagogical continuity as children progress through the education system. Children do not cease to learn through outdoor, experiential approaches as they transition into the later phase of primary education; however, policy shifts infer standardised practices (Nutbrown, 2011) which reinforce binary thinking.

This doctoral research reflects on fifteen years of lived experience, working as a teacher educator with the aim of exploring how cultural and social dynamics and practice-based innovation contribute to knowledge of outdoor pedagogies. Drawing on a range of published outputs used with teachers and student teachers, including teaching resources, continuing professional development workshops, magazine articles, journal articles and a published book, the research sought to address the following questions:

1. How have key concepts drawn from established philosophies influenced my teaching and values in relation to outdoor pedagogy in early childhood education?
2. How does knowledge co-construction address binary thinking in early childhood education and teacher education, and support outdoor learning as a valued pedagogy?
3. How does engaging with marginalised discourse in education lead to innovative pedagogies and influence teacher priorities during a time of educational reform?

An autoethnographic approach was employed to support personal reflection on the research questions and capture lived experience as described in the range of published outputs. Autoethnography, as Chang (2008) argues, extends beyond self-narrative to engage in cultural analysis and interpretation, an approach that enables personal experience to be analysed flexibly and creatively within the wider social and cultural contexts shaping the research. Autoethnography provides a way of sharing ‘privileged knowledge’, that which can only be known through personal experiences (Hamdan, 2012). Once produced, the autoethnography was analysed to generate ‘golden threads’ that ran through the outputs and to reveal pivotal moments or ‘critical junctures’ in my practice (Cooper & Lilyea, 2021). A critical juncture is a moment in which there is a probability of change taking place, in this instance, in teaching and learning, and where an enduring outcome is likely to be produced (Volpi and Gerschewski, 2020). Excavation of critical junctures allowed a layered analysis of conditions and processes that contributed to the critical junctures within my practice in teacher education, including analysis of the context of economies and politics in institutions (Collier & Munck, 2017). In this research, critical junctures included my realisation of the degree to which my students were disconnected from nature in their personal and professional lives, identification of institutional pressures that contributed to a lack of confidence as outdoor educators, the recognition of wonder and curiosity as pedagogical tools situated in a slow learning environment to aid students re-connection with nature and the usefulness of blending digital pedagogies with outdoor pedagogies to enhance students’ learning experiences. Subsequent analysis adopted a methodological bricolage approach (Papaioannou, 2024) to interrogate the complexity of the data. Janesick’s (2010) framework was used as a second layer of analysis to extract key concepts and consider the use of metaphor. Fetterman’s (2020) framework was used as a third layer to identify recurring patterns across the data and resulted in 15 major themes. Finally, Richardson’s (2000) crystalline approach was employed to enable deeper reflection on these themes. Utilising each of these frameworks enabled alternative angles of refraction on the data and a deepening of interpretation, leading to the refinement of the 15 themes into five overarching themes.

Five overarching themes have emerged from the analysis, which are as follows: reconnection with nature as foundational to learning; curiosity, wonder and slow pedagogy as important pedagogical tools; the importance of co-construction of knowledge to support an engaged pedagogy; disruption of orthodoxy and movement beyond binary thinking in education; and professional empowerment in validating outdoor pedagogy. Findings highlight that early childhood experiences of nature were important for my own development as an educator but were largely absent in the lives of my ECE students. Many philosophies including Froebel (1887), Clark (2023), Taguchi (2010) and hooks (1994) helped foster confidence and permission to simply ‘be in and with’ nature, validating my practice theoretically. Providing opportunities for co-construction of knowledge in unhurried spaces (Clark, 2023) challenged students’ and teachers’ understanding of orthodoxies, but cultivated their pedagogical flexibility where curiosity, wonder and intra-active learning (Taguchi, 2010) were found to support an increased sense of agency (Kemp and Josephidou, 2023). Through these experiences, attending to marginalised discourse enabled interrogation of binary thinking, which harnessed both blended (Ijaz and Sergeant, 2022) and disruptive pedagogies, nurturing fluidity within practice and allowing movement beyond boundaries (hooks, 1994). Finally, recognising the impact of how accessible research literature helped validate my own pedagogical values and beliefs, it highlighted the importance of making my own research accessible to ‘all who deserve to have it’ (Campbell and Levin, 2012) which has empowered students and teachers, by providing a counternarrative to help them validate outdoor pedagogies as meaningful practice. Taken together, these findings help to identify how outdoor learning can be reclaimed as a transformative pedagogical approach for early childhood teacher educators, teachers and students. The research also demonstrates how autoethnography, when analysed rigorously and reflexively can function as a legitimate source of knowledge, generating new ways of knowing in teacher education.

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