Teacher Professional Development in Outdoor and Open Learning Environments: A Research Based Model

Hannu Salmi,Arja Kaasinen,Liisa Suomela

doi:10.4236/ce.2016.710144

Abstract

The trend of utilising open learning environments and informal learning sources has a clear link to outdoor education, which bridges the gap between formal education and informal learning. According to the findings related to informal learning and its relevance to early professional development, the crucial era seems to be the first 3 years as an inexperienced teacher. Despite the long history, outdoor education needs new research methods. In Finland, the new National Curriculum 2016 underlines teaching of this “phenomenon” besides the traditional subject orientated teaching. This challenges teacher professional development at all its levels. In this study, an outdoor education course for teachers and teacher trainees in Finland is evaluated using the theory and research tool of New Educational Models or Paradigms (NEMP). The main research question is to test this new research model: is it suitable when evaluating outdoor education?

Highlights

Learning and education can be defined both narrowly and broadly: they can occur either unconsciously or formally
We describe one outdoor education course where Finnish teacher trainees learned the didactics of biology in the sub-urban environments of the schoolyard, the park, the field, the stream, the forest and the trees
Our study aims to further analyze the findings of Lauer, Christopher, Firpo-Triplett, & Buchting (2014) that are related in the meta-data of 292 studies to the impact of short-term professional development

Summary

Introduction

Learning and education can be defined both narrowly and broadly: they can occur either unconsciously or formally. For the background variables (gender, age, work experience, educational level) and for the further analysis, factor points were calculated for all (N = 194) the subjects. Due to the design of this study, the factors may correlate with each other. This gives the opportunity to use regression as an additional research method. The background variables have been viewed based on these factor points. The size of the sample and number of subjects is large enough, and the number of subjects in the sub-groups is adequate. The sizes of the sub-groups were not homogenous. In the post hoc tests, the Hochbergin GT2 method was utilised to take into account and prohibit the probable effect caused by the different sizes of the sub-groups

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion