Detuned from Nature: Why outdoor experiential education is a neglected necessity for today’s youth

The experience of education in Western cultures for the last two centuries has remained largely unchallenged and unchanged. The factory model of education, that emerged in education in a response to the industrial age, has students spend 7-9 hours a day in a highly structured environment. Even though this style of education may have sufficed for students over a hundred years ago in an era when the norm was lifelong factory jobs through adulthood, I don’t believe this method of instruction is aptly suited for the world we live in today. Students today don’t have the benefit of living in such a structured and consistent world as those who came generations before did. The world we live in is becoming increasingly complex and interconnected and as educators we have a responsibility to aptly prepare our students for the world they will enter as adults. I believe that as educators we should  begin look to the outdoors for some of our answers as evidence has shown that outdoor education can address some of the issues inherent in our education system. Research has shown that outdoor education has the potential to increase student focus, student physical health, and the potential to raise self confidence for students.

A Traditional Middle School Building

Instead of trying to change the format of our educational systems to respond to the changing nature of our world, educational institutions have rather scaled up the content knowledge and workload required of students in recent decades. The last 20 years have seen an intense narrowing of curricula in response to increased standardized testing and an increased dependence on the use of technology to attain knowledge and demonstrate content mastery (school based experiential outdoor ed). This trend in educational practice constrains the opportunities students have for learning and has been proven as an ineffective method to provide the best educational experience for all students. Luckily, recent efforts in the field of education have been moving towards changing curricula and assessment through personalization and proficiency based grading, but even so are we doing enough as educators to reimagine how we could provide the best learning experiences for our students. No matter how much we challenge ourselves to provide the best curricula and methods for educating our students there is still another barrier to education that I believe we must begin to break down to find more effective means of teaching our youth. What I am speaking to is the inherent lack of outdoor experiential learning opportunities for our students. Outdoor education opportunities for youth are few and far between and the potential for learning in outdoor environments has remained largely untapped by educators. Yet, studies show that there is evidence to demonstrate that outdoor education has the potential to improve the well being of students, and the potential to be able to provide a more effective and engaging learning environment over a traditional classroom setting.

Students using a microscope outdoors at
 Fiddleheads Forest School,
a pioneer all outdoors school in Oregon

Improving student focus isn’t the only benefit of spending time in the great outdoors either, there are numerous health benefits that our younger generations both desperately need and deserve. For example, just by spending more time outside, people are less likely to have nearsightedness (Spencer, 2014), they are less likely to be obese, less likely to be depressed and they will have lower rates of heart disease, osteoporosis and MS (Klasky, 2014). Honestly, these reasons alone should be enough to convince someone to break out of the brick and mortar institutions. If the future well being of our students is what we care about, why do we choose to continue to make such an egregious error in trying to create a productive learning environment. We struggle as educators to make an effective environment for learning when a perfect one has already been created for us.

The benefits of the great outdoors and outdoor experiential learning are not only limited to physical health and student engagement either, student self image and self worth is drastically improved by spending time in nature. This is especially true for young women as well. Through the middle and early high school years our society puts a lot of pressure on adolescent girls to adhere towards aesthetic expectations that are often unreasonable, unattainable, and often unhealthy. Spending time outdoors may be a healthy component that could be added to the lives of these young adolescents. By spending time outdoors, young adolescents can escape the systems that confine their perception of identity and form new ones. For example, say a student has a novel outdoor learning experience that involves her learning how to use a kayak for the first time. This student now has gained a new life skill and can now add that to their own list of self identifying traits.

You may be asking now, how can a student learning how to kayak improve their learning? And albeit, the connection isn’t terribly direct either, but let me explain. According to psychology a big component to our feelings of purposeful existence is due to Role Theory. Role Theory argues that a large component of our self identity is from the roles we fulfill through our day to day experience. By providing a novel skill or experience for a student through something such as outdoor learning, we provide students the opportunity to develop new roles within their lives. Why is this significant? Well, because often times students don’t feel as though they can uphold or adhere to the roles expected of them in their day to day lives. What providing this new role or experience can do for a student is both creating the opportunity for new intrinsic interests to develop and also allows for student to expand their personal identity into other facets of life. Through expanding the number of one’s own defined roles it can make perceived failure at one role far less detrimental to the individual’s own well being. A personal example of this for me was in highschool. If there were times when I felt excluded from my peer group at school as a student, I always had the role and peer group of being a snowboarder to fall back on. By having this additional dimension to my identity throughout my high school experience I was able allow failure in other facets of my life impact me to a lesser degree. This tertiary role I identified with helped me to both persevere academically and socially. Speaking from my experience, I feel as though every student deserves additional self identifying roles like I had and as educators  we can through outdoor education help to create experiences that can develop into lifelong passions for our students.

I believe as educators it is our responsibility to provide the best experience we can for our students to help prepare them for adulthood and if we can begin to include outdoor experiences into our curricula I think we will be headed in the right direction. Outdoor education has been shown to improve student focus, student physical health, and has potential to raise self confidence for students. That being said the cost of using nature as a classroom is very little in terms of capital required as the classroom has already been created for us. If we wish to provide these outdoor opportunities for our students our responsibility as educators is to figure out the logistics of bringing our students into nature. If we can manage to do that, then I believe that in the same way nature provides us the resources to survive, nature can provide the our students the opportunity to thrive.

Bibliography

Abbatiello, J. (2014, January 1). Perceived Impact on Student Engagement When Learning Middle School Science in an Outdoor Setting. ProQuest LLC,

Henry, Chris. "A Classroom as Big as All Outdoors." Kitsap Sun. USA Today, 14 Feb. 2017. Web.

Hovey, K., Foland, J., Foley, J. T., Kniffin, M., & Bailey, J. (2016). Predictors of Change in Body Image in Female Participants of an Outdoor Education Program. Journal Of Outdoor Recreation, Education & Leadership, 8(2), 200-208.

Klasky, B. (2014). “Get hooked on Nature.” USA: TEDxRainer. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArhjLa4xbNk&t=306s

Quetteville, Harry De. "Waldkindergärten: The Forest Nurseries Where Children Learn

in Nature's Classroom." The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 18 Oct. 2008. Web.

James, J. j., & Williams, T. (2017). School-Based Experiential Outdoor Education: A Neglected Necessity. Journal Of Experiential Education, 40(1), 58-71. doi:10.1177/1053825916676190

Spencer, Ben. "Too Much Time Indoors Damages Children's Eyes: Lack of Natural

Sunlight Thought to Be Driving up Rates of Short-sightedness among the Young ." Daily

Mail Online. Associated Newspapers, 24 Apr. 2015. Web.