The Untapped Potential of Outdoor Classrooms in Early Education

Balancing Outdoor Learning and Play: Adult Perspectives of Teacher Roles and Practice in an Outdoor Classroom

Criteria:  Qualitative research study on an amazing new outdoor learning opportunity and learning initiatives within it – the outdoor classroom.  Definitive recommendations for enhancing the value of these spaces by creating more professional development opportunities in environmental education

Key Takeaway: This study delves into the untapped potential of outdoor classrooms in early education.  The study presents outdoor classrooms as exciting avenues for fostering novel learning experiences in children, underlining the need for specialized environmental curriculum and teacher training to fully realize their benefits.

Summation and Insights:   Children across the nation are experiencing a brand new type of educational space – the outdoor classroom, which can be used both for outdoor play activities as well as amazing new educational activities, such as learning about the environment.  Outdoor classrooms tend to be filled with things like garden plots and building areas with logs for stacking rather than traditional playground sets featuring slides and swings.  This ethnographic study examined the use of a newly installed Nature Explore Certified Outdoor classroom in an early childhood center.  It attempted to examine how adults (parents, teachers) thought the space should be used and what kind of learning (structured, unstructured) happened for children in the new space.  The study also makes strong recommendations for creating professional development training geared toward outdoor learning classrooms; the need for training for an environmental educational curriculum is a particular imperative.

This study produced some interesting findings regarding the need for professional development regarding outdoor learning classrooms.  The early childhood center featured in the study tended to practice a child-led, emergent curriculum and valued teachers roles as facilitators.  An interesting tension in the study is that many of the parents felt that the new space was being used for unstructured play and recess rather than systematically used for environmental and outdoor active learning. Interestingly, the teachers at the early childhood center, while valuing a child-led curriculum and spontaneous moments of learning, also expressed that environmental education in the outdoor classroom may require a greater amount of intentional planning and pedagogy.  Teachers also described some of the activities naturally offered by the outdoor classroom, such as gardening, to need more pedagogical planning to be successful.  

Both structured and unstructured activities have potential value in outdoor learning spaces; this study suggests that both teachers and parents desired the opportunity (despite being at an early childhood center with a child-led learning orientation!) to create more structured activities that could really utilize all that an outdoor learning classroom has to offer.  One thing the authors of this research study also note is that they observed very little intentional environmental learning.  Yet, they also note, teachers and administrators were excited to take on environmental objectives and curriculum within the new space, something that parents also desired.  

Outdoor learning classrooms have amazing potential to create new types of knowledge for young people.  As this new outdoor learning environment continues to emerge and become a part of schools and child care centers, specific environmental curriculum and professional development for training educators how to fully take advantage of these wonderful spaces will continue to be needed.

For reference: https://certified.natureexplore.org/

Resource:   https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1254849
Year:  2020
Author: Hunter, Joshua; Syversen, Kristina Brodal; Graves, Cherie; Bodensteiner, Anne
Primary Author:  Joshua Hunter, https://und.edu/directory/joshua.hunter