Abstract
With a growing number of primary schools around the globe greening their schoolyards, opportunities arise to realize outdoor learning in natural areas on the school’s premises. Despite their promising potential, green schoolyards as outdoor learning environments remain mostly unintegrated in teachers’ educational practices. In the current study, teachers of five primary schools in Netherlands were followed for two consecutive years during a participatory action research project. Based on their experiences in this project, teachers identified barriers when integrating the green schoolyard as a learning environment and found practice-based solutions to overcome these barriers. Across schools, a total of 20 meetings were organized, with 75 teachers participating in the project. Results revealed four broad themes encompassing barriers and solutions. Teachers feel hindered by outdoor learning having no formal status in their current educational practice, experience barriers related to a lack of confidence in their own outdoor teaching expertise, find it difficult to get started, and experience barriers related to physical constraints. Teachers, professionals, and researchers together found solutions to overcome each specific barrier. These solutions can be translated to general recommendations: just do it, get educated and inspired, engage in real-life experiences, get an outdoor pedagogical mindset, and follow a tailored process. The findings can be used by primary schools and other institutions to develop interventions that support teachers to further integrate the green schoolyard as a learning environment.
Highlights
Outdoor learning in natural areas can be an enrichment for children, enabling them to learn beyond the borders of their classroom, and has the potential to directly and indirectly strengthen primary schools’ educational practice (Rickinson et al, 2004; Blair, 2009; Wistoft, 2013; Goodall, 2016)
The findings presented in this paper were collected in the context of a collaborative action research project
The most mentioned barriers relate to outdoor learning having no formal status in teachers’ educational practice (46.3%), followed by a lack of teachers’ confidence in their own outdoor teaching expertise (32.2%), physical constraints related to a lack of maintenance and weather conditions (13.0%), and finding it difficult to get started (8.5%)
Summary
Outdoor learning in natural areas can be an enrichment for children, enabling them to learn beyond the borders of their classroom, and has the potential to directly and indirectly strengthen primary schools’ educational practice (Rickinson et al, 2004; Blair, 2009; Wistoft, 2013; Goodall, 2016). Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org van Dijk-Wesselius et al. Green Schoolyards as Outdoor Learning Environments outside the school’s premises such as field trips, outdoor adventure activities, forest schools, school gardens, and nature education programs. With a growing number of primary schools re-designing their schoolyards into green schoolyards with natural features such as grass, hills, trees, flowers, bushes, sand, and water, opportunities arise to realize more easy-to-accomplish outdoor learning activities in natural areas on the school’s own premises (Danks, 2010; Van Dijk-Wesselius et al, 2018). Green schoolyards as learning environments remain mostly unintegrated in teachers’ educational practices Amongst other reasons, this may be due to teachers’ unfamiliarity with outdoor learning and lack of hands-on experiences (Dyment, 2005; Maynard and Waters, 2007). As part of a two-year collaborative action research project, the current project examined the barriers teachers experience when they attempt to realize outdoor learning in the schoolyard, and what solutions they find to be supportive in overcoming these barriers
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