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From East Sussex County Council. Ideas and examples of how some people on the autistic spectrum might experience their environment.

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*  Learning with Nature by Marina Robb, Victoria Mew and Anna Richardson:
* Sharing Nature with Children Parts 1 and 2 - Joseph Cornell
*  Earth Education, a new beginning - Steve Van Matre.

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Resources from the Woodland Trust

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Learn more about how we inspire children to become Nature Detectives and encourage a lifelong love of trees, woods and wildlife.

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Record and support in identification from the online community.

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Home : iSpot Nature - Your place to share nature. iSpot is a website aimed at helping anyone identify anything in nature. Once you've registered, you can add an observation to the website and suggest an identification yourself or see if anyone else can identify it for you.

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Home : iSpot Nature - Your place to share nature. iSpot is a website aimed at helping anyone identify anything in nature. Once you’ve registered, you can add an observation to the website and suggest an identification yourself or see if anyone else can identify it for you.

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Identification charts from the FSC

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Field Studies Council is one of the UK's leading publishers of identification guides, including the fold-out charts and AIDGAP guides

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Resources from Open Air Laboratories

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The Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) network encourages people to get back in touch with nature by enabling them to explore and study their local environments.

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Lots of links to resources, ideas and competitions suitable particularly for secondary age pupils

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Students of all ages are fascinated by taking photos - and, now photography has gone digital, it is easy and cheap to get your students snapping. The Guardian Teacher Network has resources to help schools harness the potential of photography and use it as a really powerful cross-curricular tool.

Thanks to PhotoVoice, a participatory photography charity that runs projects in 23 countries, for sharing its resources. The charity was set up to provide people, especially young people, with a way of expressing themselves through photography.

A great start is PhotoVoice's introduction to composition, which introduces key concepts in composition of photos and will help students to make decisions about how they frame and represent subjects.

This photo treasure hunt is a simple and accessible way to introduce creative exploration of an environment or subject with digital photographs. This handout gives basic tips (known as the "Four Fs") and camera-care guidelines that will instantly allow all ages to take more successful photos on any model of digital camera, and most mobile phone cameras. Also check out this Four Fs video.

Photography is an accessible way to look at a multitude of issues in the classroom. See waiting: exploring homelessness through photography as a fantastic example.

If your students are interested in putting the world to rights through their photography, they can enter Amnesty International's Young Human Rights Photographer of the Year competition, part of the Amnesty Youth awards, which also include categories of reporting, songwriting, campaigning and fundraising.

The competition is a fantastic opportunity to get creative with students and help them to engage with human rights and justice through photography. Some great ideas on how to do that can be found in the Amnesty Young Human Rights Photographer PowerPoint, which includes images and ideas from award-winning photojournalists, including last year's competition winners. This lesson plan gives a step-by-step guide to how to take photographs that capture human rights issues. For more background information, see this set of resource sheets, including a summary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and a photo planning sheet. See this Guardian photo gallery containing the award-winning photographs of last year's Young Human Rights Photographer award. More advice for teachers on covering children's rights through photography in a way children will understand can be found on www.rightscamerasaction.org.uk. Teachers or parents/guardians can submit up to five entries per class to the Amnesty Young Human Rights Photographer competition and the closing date is 17 February 2014.

Picturing news is a resource on photojournalism taken from The English and Media Centre's Doing News pack. It explores six news images shot by photographer Kevin Weaver, including his accounts of how they were shot, and the editorial decisions he made. The resource includes classroom activities on choices of selection and viewpoint, framing and picture editing, plus a practical photography exercise. Guardian readers can buy the entire Doing News pack at a discount if they quote EMCGuardian by emailing emc@education.co.uk or phoning 01634 729835.

This resource on photography was actually created before digital cameras were widely used, but is a really useful history of photography and includes some great activities on going back to basics and making sun pictures, chemograms and creating your own pinhole cameras in class.

The Guardian is home to some of the world's greatest photography and has produced some fascinating guides to prove it. See this resource on the photographer Don McPhee who died in 2007. An audio slideshow of his best pictures makes great viewing. Find a resource on sports photography, plus an audio slide show that advises would-be sports photographers to forget capturing the goals - great sports photography is all about emotion.

This resource looks at the work of photographer Jane Bown, who has taken pictures for the Observer since 1949. Also see this interactive gallery of Jane Bown's work, which spans the decades.

Some Guardian video tutorials make great viewing, especially for A-level photography students. Watch How to take a Jane Bown-style portrait - which includes some great practical advice, from using plain backgrounds to taking photos by a window to achieve light in the eyes - or How to take recession photography.

Students and teachers can share their photographs on Guardian Witness. Assignments include one on autumn colours, which is open until the middle of November. Under-16s need to confirm that they have permission of a parent or guardian before they submit content.

The Photographers' Gallery in London welcomes school groups and is a mine of information and ideas. Thanks to the gallery for sharing some interesting teaching resources on their current and most recent exhibitions, including images and innovative activities. Find notes on the renowned French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2013 (including the work of photographers Cristina De Middel, Chris Killip, Mishka Henner and artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin), and Home Truths: Photography, Motherhood and Identity. The gallery also runs a number of courses and workshops for schools and teachers.

Find out more about a really interesting online digital photography workshop, created by the team at Culture Street. The workshop explores the depiction of movement, expression, and the use of unusual perspective in photography.

Even very young pupils can get involved in photography. Earlyarts has created this simple and engaging photo project which will capture Early Years and Foundation Stage students (EYFS).

And finally, for students of English as a second language (ESL) this resource uses photography to build on English vocabulary.

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Looking for your next role? Take a look at Guardian jobs for schools for thousands of the latest teaching, leadership and support jobs.
Topics

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Students of all ages are fascinated by taking photos - and, now photography has gone digital, it is easy and cheap to get your students snapping. The Guardian Teacher Network has resources to help schools harness the potential of photography and use it as a really powerful cross-curricular tool.

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11 ways to incorporate Outdoor Education into your curriuclum

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11 ways to incorporate Outdoor Education into your curriuclum

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American blog article but tons of links and resources and ideas.

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11 Ways to Incorporate Outdoor Education in your Curriculum

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The benefits of outdoor education are extensive and well-documented. Learning outdoors improves academic performance, health, and childhood development. It can also instill a sense of civic responsibility and empathy and build ties within the community. Finally, getting outside is fun! Students who venture outside during class time cherish these opportunities and remember this part of their education fondly.

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What happens AFTER an outdoor learning experience.  Ongoing benefits:

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What happens AFTER an outdoor learning experience.  Ongoing benefits:

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As any teacher knows, students need to be engaged with learning to absorb lessons in any meaningful way. Otherwise they can become distracted, disrupting everyone in the classroom and taking time away from instruction.

There are many ways to foster engagement, of course. But one may surprise you: holding classes outside. Findings from a new study show that learning outdoors is not just a fun, novel experience for kids, but also helps them focus once they return to the classroom.

In this study, third-grade students from two classrooms were assigned to conduct about half of their biology lessons outside (on a nearby patch of grass) and half inside the classroom during an academic year. The lessons involved things like identifying leaves and understanding the process of decomposition, and were closely matched: The indoor lessons had natural elements (like leaves and soil), while the outdoor lessons were conducted like a regular classroom (without student interaction or free play).

After each lesson, students received a short break and then continued indoors with their regular studies, like math or reading. Their level of engagement during this time was assessed by teacher ratings, independent tallies of "redirects" (how many times teachers needed to redirect students to the task at hand), and ratings of engagement based on classroom photos analyzed by someone blind to the study's purpose.

Results showed that when the students received outdoor biology lessons, they were significantly more engaged in their next instructional period on all measures than if they'd received biology lessons indoors. This held true for different teachers, different times of day, and different times of year.

According to lead researcher Ming Kuo of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, this is an important finding with practical implications.

"Kids can actually pay better attention in class after an outdoor lesson," she says. "This is nice for teachers, because you don't have to stop teaching and you still get that bump in attention."

Not only that, the bump in attention was large-much larger than Kuo had expected. In some cases, teachers only had to redirect half as often and kids paid attention one or two "standard deviations" better-research-speak for much, much better-if they'd had an outdoor lesson rather than an indoor one.

This surprised Kuo, who is used to working on highly controlled studies in a laboratory rather than field studies in a classroom.

"I thought that we would have smaller effects when we had a whole class of squirmy third graders," says Kuo. "But maybe when every kid gets a little bit better at paying attention and at controlling their impulses, and then you put them all in one classroom, there's some kind of synergy happening."

What's powerful in this study is that the children didn't spend time wandering down a forested path. The teachers simply changed the location of their lesson to a greener space-something that virtually any teacher at any school could do without taking away from instruction time.

"We could have taken these kids into capital-n Nature; but the kind of nature that we studied turns out to be pretty common-just a patch of grass with an access road," she says. "The kind of outdoor setting we used is probably available for many, many schools."

The restorative power of nature

Why would being in nature benefit kids at all? Perhaps it reduces stress, restores depleted attention, and improves immune function in children, much like it does in adults. And kids who are healthier, calmer, and less depleted may simply learn better.

"Kids are so starved for nature that...even this pretty small, pathetic dose helps them function remarkably better"

―Dr. Ming Kuo

Kuo's study adds to a growing body of research on learning in nature. Prior studies have found that teaching outdoors increases students' interest in a subject and intrinsic motivation to learn, and may help them to retain information longer than regular indoor classes. In addition, kids like learning outside, says Kuo, and they report liking their school more when lessons are held outdoors.

"Being able to pay more attention, being less stressed, and being happier and more interested in doing the work-this can have real effects on how engaged kids are," she says.

Still, Kuo's study is unique in looking at what happens after an outdoor lesson-the carryover effects. And that's important to teachers who may be reluctant to give up class time for going outside, worried their kids will lose all focus.

Kuo understands that teachers may be skeptical-even one of the teachers in her study was doubtful before the experiment started. But, if a teacher can be open-minded, she says, they should at least try it out and see what happens. Kuo argues that the current educational movement to reduce student outdoor time-or enrichment programs like music, art, and theater-is wrong-headed.

"You can add as much instructional time as you want and keep pouring, but once that cup is full, it's full," she says. "You have to find ways to give kids more capacity to take things in, before it makes sense to spend any more time with instructional teaching."

Being in nature seems to increase that capacity, suggesting yet another way kids benefit from being outside. Kuo's work implies that kids need nature, maybe more than we think. She hopes that future researchers will study whether spending more time in nature produces even greater benefits.

In the meantime, it's pretty clear that it doesn't take much nature to make a difference.

"Kids are so starved for nature that you can take them out into a not-very-natural area, give them a lesson without really engaging much with nature, and even this pretty small, pathetic dose helps them function remarkably better," says Kuo. "That feels like a big 'Wow!' to me."

Greater Good wants to know: Do you think this article will influence your opinions or behavior?

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The Surprising Benefits of Teaching a Class Outside

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As any teacher knows, students need to be engaged with learning to absorb lessons in any meaningful way. Otherwise they can become distracted, disrupting everyone in the classroom and taking time away from instruction. There are many ways to foster engagement, of course. But one may surprise you: holding classes outside.

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Derbyshire Public Health Prevention Fund Project Report:  The impacts of Forest School on Mental Health, Well Being and Physical Activity.

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Derbyshire Public Health Prevention Fund Project Report:  The impacts of Forest School on Mental Health, Well Being and Physical Activity.

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With funding from Derbyshire Public Health this project has supported 48 adults working across Derbyshire to be trained as Level 3 Forest School Leaders. In brief the information gathered clearly indicates that Forest School provides an opportunity to deliver on all 5 of the Governments Five Ways to Well Being

Connecting - with the natural world and each other

Being active - in the outdoors regularly and repeatedly in a different way

Noticing - each other, the changing seasons, our own growth and development, the natural world

Learning - about each other and the natural world, learning new skills

Giving – time and attention to each other as well as giving something back to the natural spaces used through caring, planting, managing and understanding them

And having delivered their first short Forest School programmes trainees reported significant positive impacts within their groups behavior in areas including increased physical activity, engagement, confidence, problem solving and teamwork skills - see the full report below.

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PHPF 2016-18 Forest School Wellbeing Project Impact Report FINAL

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Looked after children and the Natural Environment

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Looked after children and the Natural Environment

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The fostering outside play project report

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LTL looked after children and the natural environment

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Institute for European, Environmental Policy.

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Health and Social Benefits of Nature - Final Report Main sent

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Children and Young People's mental health - the role of education

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Children and Young People's mental health - the role of education

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Ofsted not giving enough focus to personal development and well being.  Mental health and well being should contribute to the overall grade given to a school or college.

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· Educational Visits and Trips
· Forest School

· Training and Workshops

· Projects

Email: environmentalstudies@derbyshire.gov.uk
Tel: 01629 533439
Georgina Greaves
Environmental Studies Service Manager

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Derbyshire Environmental Studies Service | Derbyshire Services for Schools

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We offer a wealth of opportunities for learning outside the classroom for all ages and abilities across Derbyshire - including day fieldwork programmes, trips and visits, forest school and training

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RSPB Measuring Connection to Nature in Children

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RSPB Measuring Connection to Nature in Children

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Dr Ferre Leavers Leuven Scale of Well-Being and Involvement (Early Years)

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Emotional and psychological well-being in children: the development and validation of the Stirling Children’s Well-being Scale

Ian Liddle & Greg F.A. Carter

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New online maps to help Britons experience their local greenspaces 

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New online maps to help Britons experience their local greenspaces 

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Ordnance Survey has released a comprehensive map of greenspaces throughout Great Britain.
Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson said:

Greenspaces are a vital part of our landscape and this new database and online map will make it easier for people across the country to access local parks and lead healthier lives.

With the completion of this mapping project, we have delivered on an important commitment and shown yet again how innovation can improve everyday lives.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-online-maps-to-help-britons-experience-their-local-greenspaces

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How Forest bathing keeps us well

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...another way to benefit from being outdoors

'Forest Bathing': How Microdosing on Nature Can Help With Stress

The practice, long-popular in Japan, is gaining popularity as a way of harnessing the health benefits of being outdoors.

Nowadays it feels like we never have a minute to stop and just relax. We're so busy that there's always something going on; whether it's work, family, emotional, or other aspects of our lives. It can feel like there are always things to do or to worry about.

Being active and getting outdoors regularly is a great way to keep healthy and fit physically. It can also play an important role in your mental wellbeing. Research suggests exercise can enhance the body's ability to respond to stress, and increases norepinephrine levels, which helps moderate the brain's stress-response.

Stress affects us all, and can have an overwhelming effect on our wellbeing, both mentally and physically. Talking to your GP is important if these feelings affect your daily life or have lasted more than a few weeks. There are some ways you can try and manage your stress levels, including getting out into nature and exploring the forests and countryside around you.

Using nature for emotional wellbeing is well known across the globe. The term 'forest bathing' was coined in Japan - even becoming part of the national public health program in 1982. The idea is simple: being around trees for relaxation and recreation can help to reduce stress, increase mental-wellness and boost immune systems. Breathing in the organic compounds that trees emit - phytoncides - as you explore the forest can help improve your immune system.

In 1982, Japan made shinrin-yoku, or "forest bathing," a part of its national health program. The aim was to briefly reconnect people with nature in the simplest way possible. Go to the woods, breathe deeply, be at peace. Forest bathing was Japan's medically sanctioned method of unplugging before there were smartphones to unplug from. Since shinrin-yoku's inception, researchers have spent millions of dollars testing its efficacy; the documented benefits to one's health thus far include lowered blood pressure, blood glucose levels, and stress hormones.

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'Forest Bathing': How Microdosing on Nature Can Help With Stress The practice, long-popular in Japan, is gaining popularity as a way of harnessing the health benefits of being outdoors. Nowadays it feels like we never have a minute to stop and just relax.

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by Tim 'Mac' Macartney

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The Children's Fire by Tim 'Mac' Macartney

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The Children's Fire is part of the Earth teachings of the elders of ancient America. Over time the elders came to understand that all human-created institutions needed to reflect the balance and wisdom observed in nature. The Children's Fire was a reminder of the first promise: "No law, no action of any kind, shall be taken that will harm the children".

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“The latest neuroscience and psychological research suggest most people, unless they are cognitively impaired, can reach standards of performance associated in school with the gifted and talented.  However they must be taught the right attitudes and approaches to their learning and develop the attributes of high performers – curiosity, persistence and hard work for example – an approach Eyre calls “high performance learning”.  Critically, they need the right support in developing those approaches at home as well as at school”  - Learning Outside the classroom is an ideal space and method for developing curiosity, persistence and hard work (particularly through opportunities like Forest School) and might also be a good way to provide links and sharing of techniques between home and school.

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When Maryam Mirzakhani died at the tragically early age of 40 this month, the news stories talked of her as a genius. The only woman to win the Fields Medal - the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize - and a Stanford professor since the age of 31, this Iranian-born academic had been on a roll since she started winning gold medals at maths Olympiads in her teens.

It would be easy to assume that someone as special as Mirzakhani must have been one of those gifted children who excel from babyhood. The ones reading Harry Potter at five or admitted to Mensa not much later. The child that takes maths GCSE while still in single figures, or a rarity such as Ruth Lawrence, who was admitted to Oxford while her contemporaries were still in primary school.

But look closer and a different story emerges. Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, one of three siblings in a middle-class family whose father was an engineer. The only part of her childhood that was out of the ordinary was the Iran-Iraq war, which made life hard for the family in her early years. Thankfully it ended around the time she went to secondary school.

Mirzakhani, did go to a highly selective girls' school but maths wasn't her interest - reading was. She loved novels and would read anything she could lay her hands on; together with her best friend she would prowl the book stores on the way home from school for works to buy and consume.

As for maths, she did rather poorly at it for the first couple of years in her middle school, but became interested when her elder brother told her about what he'd learned. He shared a famous maths problem from a magazine that fascinated her - and she was hooked. The rest is mathematical history.

Is her background unusual? Apparently not. Most Nobel laureates were unexceptional in childhood. Einstein was slow to talk and was dubbed the dopey one by the family maid. He failed the general part of the entry test to Zurich Polytechnic - though they let him in because of high physics and maths scores. He struggled at work initially, failing to get academic post and being passed over for promotion at the Swiss Patent Office because he wasn't good enough at machine technology. But he kept plugging away and eventually rewrote the laws of Newtonian mechanics with his theory of relativity.

Lewis Terman, a pioneering American educational psychologist, set up a study in 1921 following 1,470 Californians, who excelled in the newly available IQ tests, throughout their lives. None ended up as the great thinkers of their age that Terman expected they would. But he did miss two future Nobel prize winners - Luis Alvarez and William Shockley, both physicists - whom he dismissed from the study as their test scores were not high enough.

There is a canon of research on high performance, built over the last century, that suggests it goes way beyond tested intelligence. On top of that, research is clear that brains are malleable, new neural pathways can be forged, and IQ isn't fixed. Just because you can read Harry Potter at five doesn't mean you will still be ahead of your contemporaries in your teens.

According to my colleague, Prof Deborah Eyre, with whom I've collaborated on the book Great Minds and How to Grow Them, the latest neuroscience and psychological research suggests most people, unless they are cognitively impaired, can reach standards of performance associated in school with the gifted and talented. However, they must be taught the right attitudes and approaches to their learning and develop the attributes of high performers - curiosity, persistence and hard work, for example - an approach Eyre calls "high performance learning". Critically, they need the right support in developing those approaches at home as well as at school.

So, is there even such a thing as a gifted child? It is a highly contested area. Prof Anders Ericsson, an eminent education psychologist at Florida State University, is the co-author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. After research going back to 1980 into diverse achievements, from music to memory to sport, he doesn't think unique and innate talents are at the heart of performance. Deliberate practice, that stretches you every step of the way, and around 10,000 hours of it, is what produces the expert. It's not a magic number - the highest performers move on to doing a whole lot more, of course, and, like Mirzakhani, often find their own unique perspective along the way.

Ericsson's memory research is particularly interesting because random students, trained in memory techniques for the study, went on to outperform others thought to have innately superior memories - those you might call gifted.

He got into the idea of researching the effects of deliberate practice because of an incident at school, in which he was beaten at chess by someone who used to lose to him. His opponent had clearly practised.

But it is perhaps the work of Benjamin Bloom, another distinguished American educationist working in the 1980s, that gives the most pause for thought and underscores the idea that family is intrinsically important to the concept of high performance.

Bloom's team looked at a group of extraordinarily high achieving people in disciplines as varied as ballet, swimming, piano, tennis, maths, sculpture and neurology, and interviewed not only the individuals but their parents, too.

He found a pattern of parents encouraging and supporting their children, in particular in areas they enjoyed themselves. Bloom's outstanding adults had worked very hard and consistently at something they had become hooked on young, and their parents all emerged as having strong work ethics themselves.

While the jury is out on giftedness being innate and other factors potentially making the difference, what is certain is that the behaviours associated with high levels of performance are replicable and most can be taught - even traits such as curiosity.

Eyre says we know how high performers learn. From that she has developed a high performing learning approach that brings together in one package what she calls the advanced cognitive characteristics, and the values, attitudes and attributes of high performance. She is working on the package with a group of pioneer schools, both in Britain and abroad.

But the system needs to be adopted by families, too, to ensure widespread success across classes and cultures. Research in Britain shows the difference parents make if they take part in simple activities pre-school in the home, supporting reading for example. That support shows through years later in better A-level results, according to the Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary study, conducted over 15 years by a team from Oxford and London universities.

Eye-opening spin-off research, which looked in detail at 24 of the 3,000 individuals being studied who were succeeding against the odds, found something remarkable about what was going in at home. Half were on free school meals because of poverty, more than half were living with a single parent, and four in five were living in deprived areas.

The interviews uncovered strong evidence of an adult or adults in the child's life who valued and supported education, either in the immediate or extended family or in the child's wider community. Children talked about the need to work hard at school and to listen in class and keep trying. They referenced key adults who had encouraged those attitudes.

Einstein, the epitome of a genius, clearly had curiosity, character and determination. He struggled against rejection in early life but was undeterred. Did he think he was a genius or even gifted? No. He once wrote: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer. Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character."

And what about Mirzakhani? Her published quotations show someone who was curious and excited by what she did and resilient. One comment sums it up. "Of course, the most rewarding part is the 'Aha' moment, the excitement of discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new - the feeling of being on top of a hill and having a clear view. But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight."

The trail took her to the heights of original research into mathematics in a cruelly short life. That sounds like unassailable character. Perhaps that was her gift.
Great Minds and How to Grow Them, by Wendy Berliner & Deborah Eyre. You can order it from the Guardian Bookshop for £14.99, with free P&P. Telephone orders (0330 333 6846) attract minimum p&p of £1.99.

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Why there's no such thing as a gifted child

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When Maryam Mirzakhani died at the tragically early age of 40 this month, the news stories talked of her as a genius. The only woman to win the Fields Medal - the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize - and a Stanford professor since the age of 31, this Iranian-born academic had been on a roll since she started winning gold medals at maths Olympiads in her teens.

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Give them a better outdoor learning environment!

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How To Get Kids To Love Learning | Matluba Khan | TEDxPortobello

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Five ways outdoor education can prepare our students for the future.

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Five ways outdoor education can prepare our students for the future.

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Although largely American in focus with a narrower understanding of outdoor learning than is generally accepted in the UK this article does include some interesting outcomes from outdoor learning backed up with research.

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The vast world outside of school has amazing lessons for us all and that's what outdoor education is all about. Weezie Yancey-Siegel reveals what it has in store for our learners' personal development.
via Open Colleges
Must we always teach our children with books?" naturalist David Polis once asked, and then declared: "Let them look at the mountains and the stars up above. Let them look at the beauty of the waters and the trees and flowers on earth. They will then begin to think, and to think is the beginning of a real education."

While increased emphasis is being placed on the importance of digital learning to prepare for the future of our society and career opportunities, a growing community is advocating for another educational paradigm-one in which students disconnect from technology and immerse themselves in nature. Outdoor Education can be widely defined, but generally is a form of experiential organised learning that occurs in an outdoor setting and typically involves "journey-based experiences in which students participate in a variety of adventurous, memorable challenges." This style of learning has various benefits, from cultivating the relevant emotional intelligence needed for effective leadership, to developing the confidence and competence needed to persevere in stressful situations. Below we delve deeper into five of these benefits and provide examples, accounts, and research to illustrate them.

Increased Motivation to Learn

Although learning within the four walls of traditional classrooms has its uses, students can often become bored and primarily rely on extrinsic motivation to retain the content being delivered to them. When connecting education to the natural environment, students have a context in which to place their learning, and the intrinsic motivation of teamwork and ecological preservation as fuel to increase their desire to study and engage with the curriculum. In their study "The Effects of Environment-Based Education on Students' Achievement Motivation," researchers Julie Athman and Martha Monroe studied 400 9th-and-12th-grade students and found that motivation levels for environment-based education were higher than those in traditional classrooms.

Where does this increased sense of motivation come from? Simon Abramson is the Associate Director for Wild Earth, a non-profit in upstate New York that delivers outdoor education programs to young people and adults. He finds that their programs help to develop confidence and competence in students, which further fuels their learning. "We are using nature as a classroom, and students learn things such as 'which plants can you eat? How do you make a shelter that is dry and warm, using only sticks and leaves?' There is a confidence that comes from gaining those skills and realising 'I can take care of myself and find what I need.'" By making a connection between learning and the real world, students feel an increased drive to understand the content they are studying.

Another example of a program that makes learning relevant via outdoor and environmental education is NYC Outward Bound. In one case study, they have utilised the Gowanus Canal, which is located close to several of the schools where their program operates. In a Salon article titled "Outdoor Learning: Education's Next Revolution?" Carol Carpenter, the Communications Director for the organisation, explains: "Students learn about the canal's water quality in science class, about the sociological effects in the humanities classes, and about the canal's design in art class. We believe in field work, in getting out of the classroom and getting your hands dirty."

Cultivation of Awareness

Author and environmentalist Richard Louv published a book in 2011 titled The Nature Principle, in which he argues that outdoor learning works because it "demands better use of the senses." In an 18-month study of 800 military personnel, Louv describes how researchers determined that the best bomb-spotters were people who lived in rural environments and regularly engaged all of their senses. On the other hand, personnel who "were raised on Game Boys" as children did not have the ability to detect nuances in their environment and were focused on the "screen rather than the whole surrounding." According to Louv, natural environments promote "involuntary attention" or "fascination," which enables us to be more alert.

Simon describes how this value is instilled in the educational approach at Wild Earth: "Awareness is the core of how we teach; it's the how. We are literally getting into our senses out in the woods and teaching skills with awareness-expanding games using peripheral vision, sense of hearing, sense of intuition, etc. Ultimately what our students are learning is how to be in the forest so they can know what's happening on the other side of the hill even if they can't see the other side."

As a society, in order to make the shift towards lasting sustainable development, we will need to change the way we live and work. This will require new ways of thinking and shifts in attitudes, so the more education can lend itself to this imperative the better. It requires us to learn new approaches and attitudes for efficient use of our planet's limited resources and get much better at thinking about, and acting on, the long-term consequences of our actions as well as local, national, and global consequences. As a pathway to develop this grander sense of awareness, Simon says that students "begin to see their own impact on the forest. When they enter the forest, the forest changes. We teach how to account for that and how to shift that by asking "How do you walk into the forest in a way that doesn't change everything in the woods?"

"Direct experience of the complex interdependence of life on Earth enables reinforcement of the link between cognitive and affective learning, providing a bridge to advanced understanding," says a report titled Taking Learning Outdoors published by the Scottish Government. "This gives learners a real context to explore, understand, develop and apply the values of wisdom, compassion, integrity, and justice."

Leadership & Teamwork

An additional value that outdoor education develops through the cultivation of awareness is a higher state of emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman, a psychologist, and author of the book Emotional Intelligence argues that this type of intelligence is a prerequisite for successful leadership. Through interdisciplinary activities used in outdoor education, children and young people can develop and apply their knowledge, understanding, enterprise and organisational skills, creativity, teamwork, and other leadership-based competencies.

Simon has witnessed this development of leadership firsthand, seeing students of their program continually building character, confidence, passion, and perseverance. Alumni of their programs have gone on to become "incredible young adults. They are determined and service-oriented. They know how to improvise and make things happen." He finds that this kind of curriculum "creates really determined, passionate future leaders."

In addition to programs for adolescents and families, Wild Earth runs corporate programs for professionals to build teams and leadership capacities, proving there is no age limit or background that cannot benefit from such programs. Activities such as building fires and shelters and interpreting tracks in the forest create an environment for collaboration, team building, and creative thinking for the teams that participate. In our increasingly digital workforce, Simon reflects that "person to person connection is so important. Out in the woods, we are remembering to make eye contact with each other and speak to each other as other humans."

Resourcefulness

Despite our ancestors' knowing how to hunt for food and build shelters using natural resources, our modern world and urban lives are filled with various apps at our fingertips and the proliferation of supermarkets, and we're losing our intuitive abilities for survival.

Saul Lyons is a 47-year-old artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York who participated in a 21-day Outward Bound program when he was 17 years old, in which he white-water rafted and mountain climbed in Central Oregon. "I gained basic rafting skills, basic mountaineering skills, basic first aid, team building skills (including games and activities to develop trust and find strengths and weaknesses in a team), and the skill of coping with physical hardship for an extended period of time."

"Rafting and Mountaineering were both interesting skills to learn and helped me understand safety and increased my awareness of my environment and how to negotiate it. First Aid was essential and helped me be down-to-earth and not risky or take things for granted on the trail and in my life. The team building exercises helped us quickly figure out who should do what and gave us confidence in our abilities as well as encouraging our acceptance of ourselves if we weren't the best at something. Finally, the constant physical work of being outdoors was incredibly confidence boosting. By repeatedly wanting to quit, but pushing through physical difficulty, I felt I could accomplish anything because I had surpassed what I thought I could do many times."

Though many people may not use these specific skills in their day-to-day lives, the confidence is transferable to many other areas of life in terms of believing in one's self and knowing that you have the skillset to problem-solve when knowledge or resources are limited.

Wellbeing

Wilderness and nature-based educational programs have proven to be transformative when it comes to healing and personal development in students and adults alike. "In today's world with so much complexity and so many crises coming to a head, that connection to more than just ourselves, more than just people, is very important," Simon explains. "Nature is a setting to help us to de-stress and move into a more natural rhythm or pace. There is a perspective that is really valuable. Being in nature, time moves at a different rate, it's much slower and grander. Nature gives us a perspective that is humbling as well as a sense of ease and good quality of life."

This sentiment was reinforced in Saul after his experience with Outdoor Bound: "I developed a very strong sense of humility by being on the water and in the mountains. I got a sense of perspective. Nature was not 'out there.' I think we need programs like this and they should be available to more people in order to encourage appreciation for the environment and also to make people sane.'"

A simple Google search for "Wilderness Therapy Programs" will turn up bountiful results for boarding schools, summer programs, and short-term excursions for young people and adults dealing with various mental disorders and challenges, from autism to depression to ADD. This kind of personal learning-in addition to classroom learning-is essential for leadership in the 21st century, and the great outdoors has things it can teach us in all aspects of living and working.

Beyond adolescence, outdoor education is valuable in the career trajectories of many, even if they don't have plans to work in an environmental field. Jared Daar is an alumnus of Deep Springs College in California. Deep Springs is a two-year program based on a Cattle Ranch in California. The curriculum is made up of academic, self-government, and manual labor. Students spend much of the day between academics doing assigned chores. For example, Jared explained that "in addition to a traditional education 'grounded in the great books,' he worked in the labour program as a dairy farmer and an irrigator, helping to grow the ranch's alfalfa crop."

After graduating from Deep Springs, Jared continued onto Harvard. Since graduating, he has worked at a law firm, far removed from his ranch-hand days. That said, there were "relevant takeaways from this work-most notably, 'the ability to ask questions judiciously' and 'working collaboratively.' Deep Springs, he explained, "'invites you to be self-sufficient in a totally different way.'"

In addition to Wild Earth, Outward Bound, and Deep Springs, there are countless programs that demonstrate the wide-ranging benefits of intentionally and mindfully integrating core elements of outdoor education in future curriculum for all ages in order to instill increased motivation, awareness, leadership, resourcefulness, and wellbeing.
This article originally appeared on Open Colleges. It has been republished here with full permission.

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5 Ways Outdoor Education Can Prepare Our Students For the Future

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via Open Colleges Must we always teach our children with books?" naturalist David Polis once asked, and then declared: "Let them look at the mountains and the stars up above. Let them look at the beauty of the waters and the trees and flowers on earth.

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Work on the Wild Side - Outdoor learning in schools

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Work on the Wild Side - Outdoor learning in schools

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"Work on the Wild Side attempts to debunk the myth that outdoor learning and residentials are not  viable teaching mechanisms. As accountability within schools increases and budgets decrease, it is easy to see how outdoor learning can slip down the agenda. This notdeadfish report compiles the evidence demonstrating how schools across the country are using outdoor learning to improve children’s academic attainment and emotional well-being."

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Environmental and Ecological Benefits - living within and protecting our environment

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Environmental and Ecological Benefits - living within and protecting our environment

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As part of any outdoor learning activity there is opportunity and benefit to help participants to protect, conserve and relate to their natural environment.  Humans are a part of nature not apart from nature.  Opporutnities to contribute something positive to the natural world, protect, support, live alongside and within a biodiverse environment is important benefit and outcome from outdoor learning.  Positive actions for environmental protection and sustainability can also be promoted and incorporated into projects, opporutnities and programes. It is worth investigation Earth Education if you are interested in a more structured taught programmes about relating and connecting with our planet.  http://www.earthed.org.uk/programmes/

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Learning Outside the Classroom Manifesto

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Learning Outside the Classroom Manifesto

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It's not just what you learn that is important but where you learn it.

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Project Wild Thing - Film trailer (the impact of nature and the outdoors)

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Project Wild Thing - Film trailer (the impact of nature and the outdoors)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2s7XSHlw6o

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PROJECT WILD THING SNEAK PREVIEW - The Science of Nature

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Trial shows project based on a fun day out boosts writing skills by nine months

https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/trial-shows-project-based-on-a-fun-day-out-boosts-writing-skills-by-nine-mo/

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The Wild Network
http://www.thewildnetwork.com/
Project Wild Thing - trailer for the film documentary
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/projectwildthing
Wild Time ideas
http://www.thewildnetwork.com/wild_time_ideas

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Final report

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How creativity increases outcomes for learners.
https://education.gov.scot/improvement/Pages/cre24_creativityinfographics.aspx