Take It Outside: Preparing Teachers for Nature-Based Education
Projektdauer:
01.07.21 bis 31.12.25
Kurzinhalt:
Take It Outside studies teachers’ preparation to use nature-based pedagogies in historic and current times to develop new possibilities for teaching and learning in the natural world. Learning outside and in nature can enhance children’s development, improve their learning outcomes, and influence their knowledge and practice of environmental sustainability. Nature-based education (NBE) in Forest Schools, where most learning is outside, was an important international reform movement at the turn of the 20th century, which followed on the Nature Study initiative of a century earlier. Much evidence supports NBE as a powerful means to explore and interrogate concepts of childhood, nature, and education. However, we still lack a clear understanding of how to prepare teachers for nature-based teaching. Given the pressing issues of environmental sustainability, insights into educational processes that support informed and engaged teachers are crucial.
A transnational framework informs this study, in which we examine the diffusion and transfer of nature education ideas through networks within and across three countries, in two languages, with rich and intersecting nature education histories—Germany, England, and the United States. We will investigate how nature education ideas developed in one context, travel across boundaries, and are adapted in new contexts. Our approach is organized around three objectives: (1) to examine the social, political, and historical pre-conditions for the emergence of NBE practices; (2) to track the temporal and geographic circulation and variations of two institutional versions of NBE—called nature study and forest school—by following the transcontinental networks of ideas and experts of the past and present that supported these developments; and (3) to investigate how forest school educators were and are prepared to teach—by exploring the intersection of theory with practice in teachers’ preparation for NBE, focusing on programs for preschool and kindergarten-aged children in the same countries.
Forschungs- & Publikationsdatenbank
Dr. Nawrotzki, KristenProfil
PI: Larry Prochner, University of Alberta/Kanada