Research, reports and guidance on education outside the classroom and outdoor education, with a plain-English summary of each and a link to the original. New items are added every week.
The library began with Education Outside the Classroom: Applied Research Readings 2010–2017(McNatty & Boyes, University of Otago, 2017). Later items were found, summarised and checked with AI assistance using the same method: every reference is checked against the publisher's record, every summary against the published abstract, and only items rated high confidence by two independent relevance checks are published. Summaries are a guide: read the original before citing it.
40 items
On an Austrian mountain field trip, students aged 14–16 were drawn to physical features, climate-related change and ecology, and responded with feelings ranging from curiosity and joy to a sense of risk.
A settler Australian educator reframes literacy as relationship with Country and proposes storied reflective practice as professional learning for non-Indigenous educators.
In a rural Maine K–12 school that stands out for outdoor learning, key facilitators were building it into the regular school day and curriculum, professional development, long-term planning and links to local culture.
In a Canadian forest school, children's literacy took embodied, sensory, multimodal and relational forms shaped by the more-than-human world, going beyond written and spoken language.
The Dreaming and Doing model and its tested assessment tools help educators assess children's emotional and hands-on competencies for engaging with nature.
Extending Noddings' ethic of care with place-responsive and more-than-human thinking offers a way to organise outdoor learning curricula around care.
Place-based educators in Michigan treated uncertainty as a source of creativity and responsiveness, using locally grounded 'vernacular' teaching to work against the limits of conventional schooling.
Repeated nature walks in a local park elicited affective, cognitive and sensory responses to nature in Malaysian preschoolers. The authors see the walks as a low-cost, accessible way to foster nature connectedness.
Research in four rural NSW schools found that student learning was enriched when local Aboriginal community members led teachers in climate change education, in settings enabling deep relationality with nature and Culture.
Two secondary teachers and a student argue that history learning about colonisation and local ecology should not stay in the classroom, and that teachers and students should, wherever possible, go into the field alongside mana whenua.
An ethnographic study of how Forest School teachers build children's connections to forest places through the interplay of materials, meaning, time and space.
This conceptual paper argues that Forest School should combine Western affordance theory with Indigenous place-based relationality to support children's social and emotional wellbeing.
A forest closed for biosecurity cut Year 6 children off from a place that mattered to them. A creative arts project that made them environmental communicators re-established their relationship with the forest.
Outdoor environmental educators described sharing agency with students and place as complex, ongoing work that disrupts the traditional classroom hierarchy. The authors argue it can be a pathway to empowering students as agents of their own learning.
Edited by AUT's Mike Brown, this book explores the educational side of people's engagement with the ocean and 'blue spaces'. It includes a chapter on surfing and wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Māori senior student leaders valued culture and places of significance as integral to their leadership development through a place-responsive programme linked to a Year 9 festival of learning.
In a Year 7 science unit on plants, starting from mātauranga Māori, guided by tikanga and partnership, opened space for students in a superdiverse class to share their own narratives.
This article describes the development of Hui Taurima, a TLIF-funded Year 9 cross-curricular 'Festival of Learning' that puts place and culture at the heart of teaching.
Welsh hill farmers' understanding of 'cynefin', a word tied to one's relationship with place and land, has the potential to provide a counter-pedagogy in keeping with place-based and Indigenous approaches.
Irish outdoor education often looks like a standardised, 'McDonaldized' product, and the authors argue for a more place-based practice.
Five communities share what they learned while redesigning and using their educational spaces differently to build the wellbeing of students and the wider communities they serve.
Used together, sit spots, solo wanders, journalling, gathering, story-sharing and nature names enabled relationships with place and the more-than-human world to emerge for children in a Brisbane outdoor programme.
Combining Cherokee traditional ecological knowledge stories with place-based education helped middle school students reflect on cultural literacy, wellbeing and respect for nature.
Findings from a case study of two early childhood teachers suggest that inquiry-based and place-based teaching in the bush, with First Nations perspectives on plants, can build teachers' botanical knowledge and literacies.