“Building Roots”—Developing Agency, Competence, and a Sense of Belonging through Education outside the Classroom

Abstract

This study investigates how Education Outside the Classroom (EOtC) was used to support the students’ basic psychological needs, i.e., their need for competence, autonomy, and relatedness as described in Self-Determination Theory (SDT). The framework of Ecological Psychology (EP) was applied to explicate how the EOtC teaching settings helped the students to become effective, agentic, and connected. The findings show that this process was driven by their active engagement with environmental affordances which facilitated embodied experiences. Moreover, the interplay with place and people specifically reinforced their satisfaction of relatedness and created a deepened sense of belonging to their community. It is concluded that in order to foster the children’s healthy psychological and physiological development in EOtC, teachers should make use of the affordances and invitations of specific places as a starting point for their teaching to support the students to develop agency, competence and sense of belonging.