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The Learning Curve Podcast, a feature of the School of Education at University of Aberdeen.
Welcome to The Learning Curve, the official podcast of the University of Aberdeen’s School of Education. Join us as we go beyond the syllabus to explore the bold ideas, high-impact research, and personal ambitions of our staff, students, and leaders.
Every episode features candid conversations with experts in areas ranging from Early Years Education and Outdoor Learning to Inclusive Practice and Leadership Development. Whether you’re a prospective student seeking career paths, a teacher looking for CPD, or an academic tracking the latest insights in STEM and Digital Pedagogy, The Learning Curve is essential listening.
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TLC S1E9 Outdoor Education
Shannon: Welcome back to The Learning Curve, friends. I'm Dr Shannon Babbie. This is a University of Aberdeen podcast. And today we're continuing our deep dive into the specialized areas of the School of Education. Last week we explored the fascinating world of Mindfulness, but today we're headed outdoors to discuss the unique benefits of learning outside the classroom.
Joining me today are two experts in outdoor education, Dr Elizabeth Curtis and Dr Catherine Francis. Thank you both for being here. Pleasure.
Cathy: Thank you very much for asking.
Liz: Thank you for inviting me.
Shannon: Happy to have you. Please explain to the listeners who you are and what you do here at Aberdeen.
Cathy: Okay, so my name is Cathy Francis and I have been at Aberdeen for about eight years now. I am a lecturer here and I work mostly with ITE students and I do a little bit of PhD supervision on the side.
Liz: Hi, I'm Liz Curtis. I also work in the School of Education. I'm a senior lecturer. I've been here now twenty one years, a long time. Um, I also work on our initial teacher education programmes for primary.
Shannon: So what exciting projects are you focusing on right now?
Liz: Well, I'm actually coming to the end of working on a project all about trees and learning and thinking about trees as the centre of curriculum. So building what you learn from encounters with trees. And that can be trees on your way to work, school. It could be trees in your school playground. It could be trees in a forest, it could be a hedge. But the idea is getting children, young people, their teachers interested in looking and being curious about trees as living beings, and then how you can think about much bigger issues of sustainability, like climate and things from the tree.
Shannon: Yeah, that sounds fascinating.
Cathy: Nice. And the most recent conversation I've had is to do with the connected to the MA program, the IT program with the, with the program director. And we are absolutely determined to get outdoor learning and learning for sustainability embedded across every single year of that MA program, because policy says as far as schoolchildren goes, learners are entitled to planned progressive experiences in the outdoors. So therefore, why shouldn't our ITE students have the same.
Shannon: Sounds great.
Liz: Actually, can I come in on that?
Shannon: Go on please.
Liz: Because exactly on that score, because one, one of the schools we work with in our project has recently been inspected. And indeed, that is one of the things that school inspectors the Inspectorate now looks for.
Cathy: Wonderful.
Liz: They need to find. They need to be able to see evidence of schools creating that space for for young people to have that entitlement. So what does it look like? What does it look like enacted? And arguments as trees are quite fundamental or one of the ways in which you can do that.
Shannon: So people shouldn't see this as an add on.
Cathy: Absolutely not.
Liz: No. Absolutely fundamental.
Shannon: So, learning outside the classroom isn't just all about a field trip then, is it? So what are the unique benefits of outdoor education and how does it impact a pupil's learning and development?
Cathy: Okay, so I would there's many ways to answer that, but one of the things I would immediately talk about is that maybe teachers reluctance to take children outside, because teachers are concerned about the perceived risks of taking children outside of those safe four walls. However, I would pose to you what is the risk of never venturing outside of the classroom to learn?
So it's the way that when you go outside, you can connect learning experiences to lived experiences of the children. Very often, for example, you'll be in a school with a bunch of children and they will know that outdoor environment better than you do. So it's a wonderful moment where you can properly, authentically be learning alongside each other. So, it just opens horizons, opens opportunity to learning, um, in a wonderful way.
Liz: Yeah, no, I would agree with that. And I think the other thing about thinking about this, it shouldn't be a one-off experience. It should be something that's built into a regular, it could be weekly or biweekly, you know.
Cathy: Yes.
Liz: But it has to be something regular. So it builds. And I think the other thing I'm going to add to this at this point is I've talked about trees earlier and I'm really interested in urban environment. So if we think about issues around sustainability, um, you know, a lot of people live in cities and access to green spaces is not necessarily something everybody has got equal access to. So I think the other one is actually getting to understand your place within a sort of broader urban environment that allows you the possibility of thinking about these sort of bigger issues of sustainability, which you will if you do street trails along with more natural trails as well. You begin to encounter it's about, as you were saying, about learning to live in the real world.
Cathy: Yes. 100%
Liz: And then taking and then taking those experiences back into the classroom. So it's a two way street.
Cathy: You've got two things there, haven't you? Outdoor learning is not visiting this pristine green untouched in inverted commas space. Well, apart from anything else, spaces like that do not exist any longer. I would argue, um, so anything outside of the classroom is entirely valid. And the other thing Liz mentioned there about bringing that learning back into the classroom.
So what I'm very much interested is that interface about taking children outside to learn whatever they're learning, come back into the classroom. Do some learning there because some learning is suited to being in a classroom. Can't believe I'm saying that, but maybe sitting down quietly at a desk with a pencil in your hand, maybe at a at one moment, a adequate way to learn. But it's that it's that interface. It's joining. Joining the learning up.
Liz: Yeah, I think(sorry) I was going to say I was going to add to this the Danes in Denmark, they have a concept called udeskole. And if that that incorporates going to museums and galleries. But it is about taking learning in the classroom, out of the classroom, back into the classroom. And it's a bit like here, it's across primary and secondary.
Cathy: Exactly. Yes. And that's the joy of being in Scotland with Curriculum for Excellence as it is, because teachers have the opportunity, or rather they're encouraged to explore this. Um, yeah. So it's a, it's a good place to be.
Shannon: I have a follow up question that just occurred to me. So, Aberdeen really prides itself on being sort of like the epicentre of the inclusive practice movement.
Cathy: Indeed.
Shannon: I'd love to know your perspectives on how this can help actually accomplish that inclusive effort for the children, the diverse learners we have.
Cathy: Well, I mean, I can speak from, from anecdotal evidence, from being a classroom teacher years and years ago, I had a bunch of children working away in class, achieving this, that and the other, blah, blah, blah. We began an allotment initiative going down the road half a mile, half a mile walk down the road to grandad's allotment, as we called it. And I remember one particular little girl who absolutely came to life. She absolutely shone when she was outside.
And that as a classroom practitioner twenty or so years ago, it struck me and I thought, what is it about this child in this environment that allows her to thrive and look like she's enjoying school and teaching her peers something which was amazing that then was stymied as soon as she got inside. So that made me challenge my practice in the classroom. Like, what could I do to allow this child to express herself as she was obviously clearly capable of doing, which I had completely missed. Completely missed.
Liz: Yeah... And I think that is, again, it's a bit like centuries ago. Before I worked in the university a long time ago, I spent a year working for an urban environmental studies centre here in Aberdeen. And often teachers would come with their classes and they'd go, you'll watch out for this child and this child. And often they, in fact, were the ones that contributed most to noticing things, having things to discuss, and asking really, really pertinent questions.
Cathy: Absolutely.
Liz: And I think it's that change of not being forced to be sitting…Yeah.
Cathy: Yes. And why does all learning have to be focused on the written word? You know, if you think about learning in real life, that is not. That's where maybe some accountability is recognized as the only place to be, which is contentious anyway. But, you know, learning is not limited to the written word.
Shannon: (silly laugh in the background) Well said. So how can outdoor education or place based education be integrated into different curriculums? You know, say science or art or history? And can you provide a few examples of how teachers can bring this into their own practice if they're not sure?
Cathy: That's a really good question. And it's a focus that we've been working on in PGDE course in particular. I run part of the curriculum studies was formerly known as Outdoor Learning, but I have renamed it, I've renamed it Curriculum in the Open. And I took that from Margaret Somerville, I do believe; she wrote a paper about curriculum in the open, but what it means is that it's not just about taking the curriculum outside, taking learning outside. It means opening your eyes to the possibilities of learning in other ways than you would normally expect children to or anyone to do, Sat down, shut up, at a desk, for example.
So Curriculum in the Open is the notion and title that I use a lot. And that also allows connection with every single bit of learning you might possibly do. I mean, we silo our teaching and learning at school, don't we?
Shannon: We do.
Cathy: Even in, you know, with curriculum for excellence, where we're, we're promoting interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary links and we recognize learning in other ways and forms. We still silo it. So curriculum in the open for me, outdoor learning, learning for sustainability, they all become a big, big, mangled, wonderful heap of joy and pleasure and knowledge and understanding that you can just you can't disconnect it, actually. I don't feel like I'm making connections. I feel like I'm recognizing the connections that are inherently there.
Shannon: I love that reframe,
Liz: Funnily enough. I you were just saying that I think I turned the question on its head, because it's not so much about taking outdoor learning into curriculum. This building, what Cathy was saying, for me, it's all about finding it. I think it's curriculum is something that is just sort of it's just sort of bubbling along.
Cathy: Yes.
Liz: And I think one of the, you know, an experienced teacher will find it and enact it. And that's a very different model to thinking here is the curriculum. How do I implement it? So I think it changes. So for me, it's not so much taking the outdoors to the curriculum. It's about recognizing the curriculum is imminent and it's in lots of different places. It's in your classrooms, it's in textbooks, it's on the internet.
Cathy: I've just had a brainwave. I'm thinking about curriculum and learning and teaching. It's not a menu from which to select. It's a diet; that is different, isn't it? It's inherently different. That diet is that lifelong sustaining. Sorry. Do carry on.
Liz: But no, for me, it's yeah, definitely. It's a sort of finding and enabling. So it's, I suppose in curriculum speak, it's that planning for possibility.
Cathy: Yes.
Liz: Where you kind of a hunch that if I if we if we do this, if we're in this place and we do these things,
Cathy: …it is likely that …
Liz: …it is likely that there is the possibility of this kind of learning happening.
Cathy: And depending on the bunch of learners that you're working with, which links back exactly to your question about inclusion earlier on. Um, it is place person more than human weather dependent.
Shannon: So what makes School of Education a top choice for somebody who's interested in, in this kind of approach to education?
Cathy: Well, it connects with what we were saying previously about, about outdoor learning, outdoor education, being, um, coming from or surfacing through a connection of people place more than human, etc., etc.. So for example, on the it course, on the, both the undergrad and the PGD course. Students experiences of learning outside will be on campus, around and about paved and bricked areas. There's a beautiful memorial garden, for example, that I always take students to for many, many reasons. There's the beach, which is about twelve minutes walk away, and it's not just getting to the beach and doing stuff at the beach in that blue space.
Because for me, blue space is a really important. It goes beyond the green and beyond the urban. Not that there's necessarily a distinction between the two, because we have the river flowing through Aberdeen, of course, and that walked journey from the building to the beach. And we stop periodically along that route and we just take a moment and say, well, how do we feel? It's like a body check in, an embodied cognition sort of. Well, it's the we practice what we preach, don't we? And so we take the students out to do that. And then there's Seaton Park, and then there's the river, the nature reserve on our doorstep. berdeen is just. It's just such a rich environment, isn't it?
Liz: Yeah, yeah. It is so locally opportunities locally it's rich and then you can get out of Aberdeen. One of one of its really lovely things is we're gateway for going up Deeside. If you're interested in mountains and big forests, we can easily access that from campus. But I think what Cathy's saying is, is that, you know, if you're interested in this from an educational point of view, it's built into our programs and beyond being badged a learning curriculum...Curriculum and the Open, I teach social studies.
And again, one of the things that we ask students to do is to go around the local area and find evidence of the three big strands. So a evidence for place and place making evidence for people in the past, so sort of historical things and then evidence for people in society. So we're helping students to learn how to read the places and the kinds of places they're in from different ways. We could be doing maths in a similar sort of way. You could be looking at shape and pattern,
Cathy: and I think that's really important as well. It made me think about it, is the fact that it's the outdoor experiences that we try and share with students, or that we do share are like inverted commas, normal. Like it's not, um, abseiling down the building and skinning rabbits and surviving for forty eight hours in three feet of snow. It is just regular normal, as I would call it, ordinary outdoor experiences that any, any teacher can, can, can explore with any bunch of children at any given moment or space or place in time.
Shannon: So that old metaphor about it being more… less about the destination and more about the journey. We're walking the walk there.
Cathy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, one hundred percent, one hundred percent. And assessment is connected to that as well. There's an elective course that I that I work on, and Liz joins me with. And even the assessment is linked to, directly to the outdoor learning experiences that the students have. So instead of a 3000-word digital essay, for example, the students create a 3D portfolio, a scrapbook in old money, and they stick leaves in and smudge mud up the side of the page. And then they write small accounts of how they're feeling and what they're learning, and they connect it to theory that we've suggested because it it's absolutely one hundred percent full of academic rigor. And yet it's presented in a, I would suggest, a more human way.
Liz: It is actually on that score. Thinking about that particular course. Again, what's really nice is that we. You use the different context of the beach and park and. But we also we go to Saint Machar's Cathedral, which is on the doorstep or the cemetery.
Cathy: Fantastic places to go take children to. Yes.
Liz: But again, that allows us to look at ideas of circles, of life and life and death. So yes, sort of human circle of that. But also this you talk about more than humans, so things like lichens and …
Cathy: …exactly the biodiversity in a cemetery.
Liz: …It's really rich, but it shows how you can use places that perhaps aren't necessarily on people's radar as something that connects. And it's a very connecting visit in that particular one.
Cathy: Absolutely. It's really we do it at Halloween as well, don't we? Which is quite exciting as well, bringing some storytelling and things.
Shannon: You know me, I like to bring everything back to Inclusion somehow. And it sounds to me like you're saying, “there's more than one way to learn, and also more than one way to demonstrate you've learned something.”
Liz: (laughing) Definitely
Cathy: (laughing) Who knew? Who knew?
Shannon: (laughing) Wow.
Liz: I think that's a really important point. And, you know, this is probably more tangential to learning outside, but I think it's highly relevant is I'm really interested in Bruner talks about three ways in which we understand the world. So I think the first is Active. So it's a learning by doing and it's Iconic. So sites, pictures and maps and things. And the last one is Symbolic. And often in education we're in such a rush to get off symbolic, I mean, get to symbolic. So write everything down. But I mean, why can't they paint it or do a piece of drama or do something outside that communicates, you know, things that you can do pieces of weaving and tell a story, but if you alter the way in which you think about how someone can demonstrate what they know and give them different opportunities, then everyone has a shot at knowing something. Whereas if you make it that, you have to write it.
Cathy: Absolutely. I'm thinking of us dancing the twig dance in the Botanic Garden because we haven't mentioned the Botanic Garden, of course, which is a wonderful place. We work, we work in, don't we? So yeah, twig dancing,
Liz: …twig dancing for recognizing trees without their leaves…
Cathy: [in background] So tree identification without leaves
Liz: …very basic. So this is I'm not I am not a tree expert. But basically your buds will either come in pairs. So they've got a partner. So they're Buddy Buds or they might be a sort of… I don't know how you would describe that.
Shannon: Offset.
Liz: Offset. Yes. And we call them dancing buds. And so we've had our students doing this [Cathy: literally dancing] literally. Here's my partner. There's my offset buds.
Cathy: And that came that came from one of the students in the group because we I mean, I know this focus isn't about relationships, particularly in teaching and learning, but we know this is the heart of, of good learning in my community. [Shannon: We do] Thank you.
I knew one of the students in the group was a dance teacher. So, and I was I was thinking of them in that moment. How would they express their learning connected to trees and tree ID? Because she very much I don't know anything about trees. I don't know what I'm doing. I said, “yeah, but you can dance. Dance me that twig.” And she did. [Liz: Yeah.] And the whole group copied her. And Liz and I now do this regularly.
Shannon: Yeah. Brilliant.
Liz: But that sense of embodied [Cathy: sense, of embodied knowledge] knowledge and learning.
Cathy: And I think, you know, you and you can't do that in a classroom, can you? Because you fall over a chair or you upset the teacher in the classroom next door.
Liz: So you're remembering your bodies differently.
Shannon: Outside is the ultimate ‘open plan.’
Cathy: Indeed.
Liz: Yeah.
Shannon: I'd love to ask this question. What do you wish I had asked you today and what would be the answer?
Cathy: Well, the question I asked myself is why doesn't everyone get this? Why doesn't? To me, it's obvious this is what I know. When I was a classroom teacher, this is when I took those children outside. That's when I saw them come to life. And teaching and learning should be about being alive.
Liz: And mine's about risk. Why are we risk averse? What is frustrating is the reason. I think one of the reasons going outside can be perceived as difficult is that it does take time. It involves learning more slowly. So I have a massive interest in slow pedagogies. [Shannon: That pesky weather.] Yeah, well, there's the weather. [Cathy: Yeah] but I think but I think the big thing about the risk is, and this isn't to do with physical risk of being outside.
I think the risk is if you let your classes go outside too often, you are then not going to achieve all these millions of E's and OS for every last sentence of literacy, for example. Or somehow they all, you know, if we spend too much time outside, they won't learn to spell properly or count properly. And they're not really very sure what that's based on. But that that I think is I think there is a risk thing we don't like. When I say planning for possibility, well, little ones can do that, but you wouldn't risk doing that with your P6s or 7s or your first, second and third year in a secondary school, because then they might not learn all this content that they need.
Shannon: So, I picked up on what might be just a really subtle little bit of language you used earlier, when we were talking about curriculum. And at one point you said someone was enacting curriculum and then at another point you said, implementing curriculum. So do you think that there might be a risk aversion?
Cathy: I think one hundred percent.
Liz: I think there's a big risk aversion because an implemented curriculum that comes down from the top. So we have our consultations on what will be in the next phase of curriculum for excellence, for example, because that's the element that's going to be tweaked. Um, and what will happen is that will percolate down through the local authorities and into schools, and there will be various models. And as much as people would prefer not to use the word implement, implement tends to be the language that's used. How will we implement this? What will it look like? So we will then get models of what it will look like.
And the difference for me is that if you enact it, then hopefully you will achieve the goals that have been set at the top, but you might not have done it in a way that looks like the implementation model. But the safe bet is the implementation model because that's been worked and tested and tried. And we know that if we do that, this is the range of results that we'd expect. An enacted model: You have to trust teachers. So there's, I think, there's a big questions around trust.
Cathy: Yes, you do. Teachers in turn, have to trust those learners and trust that space to where you're taking them. And if you've got that other layer of risk of going outside and, you know, the risk assessment that I detest that term, I'd rather call it a risk benefit analysis. Linking back to that first comment at the start, what's the risk of never going outside? I think I think it's all about it's all about you've got to you've got to be brave, haven't you? You've got to be you've got to be a bit brave. And that's, that's the conundrum for us. Where do you get that bravery? Can you teach bravery in our student teachers? Can you teach them to be brave? I don't know, but you can demonstrate it. You can take them outside repeatedly. You can build up that reputation of “oh, goodness, we've got Cathy. I better wear me coat.” Great. That's the first step along that road of building that confidence to just go for it.
Shannon: This has been such an insightful conversation, and I can't thank you enough for being here. Liz and Kathy, I appreciate you sharing your expertise today.
Liz: Thank you. Shannon. It's been really fun talking with you, at you.
Cathy: Thank you very much as well. And next time we meet, we will meet outside. Shall we? Yeah.
Shannon: Let’s do it!
Cathy: Yeah.
Shannon: Today, listeners, we learned about the unique benefits of learning outside and how to integrate it into any curriculum. Join us next week as we discuss leadership with Dr Charlaine Simpson. You won't want to miss it. Until next time, keep learning.
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