Last year, a group of first year university students started their course by playing in the woods. They were on a mixture of degrees – early years, primary teaching and working with children and families, while one of the group was a drama lecturer keen to find out more about the benefits of learning in nature. The open-ended session included marshmallow toasting, followed by going off to experiment with clay, leaves and twigs; or making dens and sculptures in small groups.
The feeling was that some students also need to re-experience something they might have had little of growing up.
‘A lot of it is about encouraging young people to reconnect with nature and feel the benefits themselves, then they can see the benefits for children,’ says Jo Traunter, head of subject for Education, Childhood and Youth Studies. ‘Research shows between the ages of 18 and 30, young people tend to disconnect with nature. If they are going to develop problems with their mental health, often they develop around this time, but they have found if they reconnect people with nature, it has a huge impact on people’s well-being.’
This time around, while students at other universities are doing their inductions online, students here are having their first taste of university life in the woods.
‘We brought students here to do the induction outside with masks and visors. It is all socially distanced, but it is so much better for them to see us and each other,’ adds Dr Traunter.
The course has been adapted so that while there are two hours of teaching online a week per module, there at least is one hour outside as well, using sanitised equipment and with students keeping apart. Plans are being developed to get students outside ‘as much as we possibly can’, says Dr Traunter.
Learning outdoors has been a key strand of all the early childhood degrees offered by the university, which last year were taught to about 160 students.
‘We don’t have specific modules which are outdoor learning modules. It is something that we try to embed in all our programmes – we find opportunities within modules to teach outside. Every area of learning and development can be factored in,’ says Dr Traunter.
In normal circumstances, three weeks out of seven are spent outside in the play-based learning module. Safeguarding involves students being taken outside to do risk assessments, for example. This may not always be a lush woodland – though the university has 20 acres of open space including lakes, woodland, a walled garden and a botanical garden – but can also be a communal green space on the university campus, or in one of two outdoor classrooms.
WHY OUTSIDE?
Multiple pieces of research have made the link between being outside and improved health, with one 2019 study showing spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and well-being.
Long before Covid, there were already calls for nature-based interventions for mental health to enter the policy agenda. When it comes to education, Ofsted has recognised that learning outside the classroom can contribute significantly to raising standards and improving pupils’ personal, social and emotional development.
Dr Traunter says her students’ ability to focus is improved by being outside. ‘If you are in a classroom, you have a static space – the roof above you never changes, the lighting is artificial, and a lot of people find it difficult to concentrate,’ she says. ‘A lot of practitioners don’t want to go outside at first - they don’t have the confidence to know what to do. If you haven’t experienced somebody teaching you in a different environment, it is very difficult to understand how that can work.
‘But teaching them outside increases their confidence. If they feel more confident, they go into settings and demonstrate to other practitioners the kind of things you can do outside – the richness of the environment offered to them, what resources to use and how to use them.’
Interviewed last year, Monika Paluch, then a third year early childhood studies student, and Level 2 Forest School practitioner, said the focus on the outside environment was a big draw for her.
‘We spend time outside all the time, even when it is raining. The first year allowed us to do more outside and at first we were a bit scared [of it] and weren’t sure what to do,’ she said. ‘Sometimes students don’t want to get dirty. But you feel free and you can express yourself. It builds your confidence – it built my self-esteem a lot.’
Ms Paluch got her Forest School qualification as a ‘bolt-on’ (up to Level 3 is offered).
Clearly, in childcare, it is not just about adult learning. Dr Traunter adds, ‘The more you appeal to children’s senses, the more they learn.
‘If you take them into any environment where there are different smells, sounds and sights, then they have cues, they will automatically want to ask you questions. That gives you the opportunity for sustained shared thinking, for sitting with children and saying things like “Where do you think that lives?”, for example.’
SOCIAL CONTEXT
The university also has links abroad, notably with the University of Hong Kong, where Dr Traunter and her team teach the education and early years degree, which is awarded and accredited by Hull.
There, Dr Traunter says, it becomes clear how our perceptions of what is acceptable risk are ‘socially and culturally situated’. For example, in Hong Kong she observed children playing near a tree that had low branches, making it ideal for climbing. ‘It had a chain around it and a sign saying “danger, keep off”,’ she says. ‘When I asked if the children could climb it, they said yes but they would have several adults with crash helmets and harnesses standing by.’
In Scandinavia, though, children are expected to climb trees, as Dr Traunter discovered from a previous academic exchange to Nesna, a port town in Norway.
‘A child was 18ft up the tree, and no-one seemed to be noticing. I said, “what if they put a foot wrong and fall out?”, and the practitioner said the child “would know they needed to be more careful where they put their foot”. What about the parents, I asked? They replied “they would say to put the foot in a better place next time”.’
Crucially, the staff said they would never lift a child into a tree as this was tantamount to asking the child to do more than it is able to.
‘In Hong Kong, if anything happened to the children, the parents would be very upset,’ says Dr Traunter. ‘I think we are somewhere in the middle. In Scandinavia, it’s the idea of getting children to manage their own risk. In England and Hong Kong, there is also the concern of the consequences of risk.’
The Covid-19 crisis has brought the importance of outdoor learning to the fore, given the disease is much less likely to spread outdoors. ‘We know from the research that this is a healthy environment for people to learn in, so I am hoping it might make people take notice and just try it, because I think people have fixed ideas about what a learning environment looks like,’ Dr Traunter adds.
Case study – changing practice from the bottom up
Katie Parsons, a Hull PhD student and Level 3 Forest School practitioner, is on a mission to try to promote outdoor learning. Her focus is outdoor learning, as opposed to Forest School. ‘I love Forest School and the philosophy of it,’ she says. ‘It’s good first step – children can go and be themselves away from the pressure of curriculum. But it is a holistic way of children generating their own learning programme, so I don’t think it is sustainable as you go into primary school.’
Her thesis is on the lived experiences of the outdoors for children and young people before, during and after Covid, with one project examining the impact that the pandemic had on children’s access to the outdoors and their engagement with nature, and looking at helping to improve mental health and well-being in pupils.
Spreading the best outdoor practice needs a concerted effort and currently depends too much on the passion of individual teachers, she says. ‘Students go into a school with the best will in the world, and wonderful training ideas, but it’s hard to do anything – they find they can’t challenge the old structures and then they have targets to meet. For any initiative to be successful, it has to have the leadership team behind it as well.’
FURTHER INFORMATION
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14733285.2019.1694637?needAccess=true