Nature Versus Culture? Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Resilience in Forest School

• In Event: Researching Ecological Relationality and the Prospect of Cultural Change Within the Public School System

Abstract

“Forest school” is a term coined in the United Kingdom to cover a range of efforts to immerse children in the outdoors on a regular basis as a part of their pre-school or school experience. The growing research literature on forest school suggests that it has less to do with helping children develop a better relationship with the natural world than with building their self-esteem, self-confidence, and independence (e.g. Swarbrick, Eastwood & Tutton, 2004; Maynard, 2007) or, in older students, self-image and self-efficacy (Roe & Aspinall, 2011; Cree, 2011). As noted by Knight (2011) and others, this emphasis differs from the Scandinavian tradition that originally inspired the forest school movement, which now encompasses hundreds of schools and pre-schools throughout England, Scotland and Wales.

Learning in mainstream classrooms is largely coordinated through text, a key feature of what Berstein (1973) called a “collection code” of knowledge practices, characterized by strong boundaries between subjects and relatively little room for negotiation of meaning between teacher and students. Learning in forest school, in contrast, is largely coordinated through activities, which are co-defined and co-ordered primarily through the affordances of the natural environment, the positioning and actions of other people, and through talk – of both adults and children. Knowing how to access the affordances of the environment (e.g. good climbing trees, good places and materials for forts, good twigs for fires), how to move and act quickly and skillfully, how to negotiate one’s role with others, how to explain what one is seeing or hearing or doing – these are some of the crucial ways in which knowledge may be demonstrated in forest school. Learning is conceived of as immediate, sensory, exploratory, perhaps involving the acquisition of certain skills and vocabulary appropriate to the setting, but sheltered, in a sense, from larger social, economic and political processes. Indeed, the importance of this sense of security comes through strongly in many forest school accounts involving older children (Knight, 2011).

Unexpectedly, many features of forest school pedagogy emerged spontaneously in the Maple Ridge Environmental School Project (MRESP), even though the movement was unknown to the teachers and researchers involved in the project. This is particularly striking because this emergent focus of the school on activities and immediate experience runs counter to some of the originally established avowed intentions, for instance engagement with “local and regional sustainability planning and environmental management” or with local community members and organizations. This emergence of an alternative, stable, reproducible cultural configuration is reminiscent of the “tipping point” phenomenon described in the literature on resilience in social-ecological systems (Folke, 2006; Krasny, Lundholm & Plummer, 2011). Drawing lessons from the Maple Ridge case, a resilience perspective is used to argue for greater attention to the influence of culture in the design and implementation of ecological schools.

Author

• Mark Fettes, Simon Fraser University