ECER Presentation - September 2021

EECER Network 30 paper presentation 9.9.21

Chris Mackie. Relationality in school-based outdoor learning.

Hi, I’m Chris Mackie, PhD student at Moray House School of Education and Sport at the University of Edinburgh.

My doctoral research, which is supported by NatureScot, Scotland’s nature agency, has two main objectives:

• to investigate how young children and teachers come to know the outdoor environments in which they are learning

• to identify potential pathways and barriers to learning for sustainability that emerge during school­-based outdoor learning.

We all know that transformative, systemic change is required to mitigate and adapt to the multi-faceted ecological crises caused by the extractive modes in which dominant colonial societies are rooted, but it’s clear that this is not happening fast enough in most sectors, including education. Even explicitly humanist organisations like UNESCO state that “[e]ducation must be about learning to live on a planet under pressure” (2015, p.3) and that “radical change is needed in the design of education systems, the organization of schools and other educational institutions, and curriculum and pedagogical approaches” (UNESCO, 2021, p.5).

Children’s experiences of nature are perceived to be important in supporting this change. Much of the existing research concentrates on pre-school experiences, or discrete learning facilitated by specialists or in exemplary settings. However, it’s clear that for children to have equitable, regular and progressive experiences of nature within the dominant educational paradigm, at least some of these need to happen at school, with the majority facilitated by teachers through outdoor learning, within the constraints and contexts of the school day and local environments. Schools have been identified as potential sites of normative change (Bai & Romanicaya, 2016), but schooling, the territorialised form of education in societies with exploitative relationships with Earth, is the site of a rhetoric-reality gap, and has so far been largely unsuccessful at meeting the goals of environmental education (Stevenson, 2007) and is unlikely to transform fast enough to make significant differences to socio-ecological crises.

I concentrated my research on early childhood outdoor learning at two schools here in Scotland, spending time with children aged 4-7 (in the first two years of formal schooling) and their teachers in school grounds, gardens and local woods. As part of this, I found that in the complexity of schooling, the ongoing socio-cultural, material and discursive processes in which outdoor learning (and outdoor play) is imbricated don’t always support caring worldly relations as much as they could. Today, I explore this, starting to investigate the tension between intention and attention in educational experience. I do so humbly, acknowledging that my thinking and writing is not yet ‘finished’ and that there are folk in this space with much greater knowledge who I hope to learn from.The first two years of school are a good place to start, because the Early and First levels of the Scottish curriculum, which structure formal Early Childhood Education and Care from age three, can hold space for diverse learning experiences. This should be an open, interdisciplinary, experience-based curriculum, and recent practice guidance figures the developing child as an individual in dynamic relation with surrounding environments and cultures. The Early Level is “intended to support the implementation of a responsive continuous play-based curriculum, for children aged three to six”, through a mix of child- and adult-initiated learning experiences, so there should be rich opportunities for outdoor learning - indeed, much has been made of the fact that in Realising the Ambition, the national practice guidance, ‘outdoors always comes first’ when used alongside the word ‘indoors’. However, while this looks like a holistic approach from 3-6 on paper, there are material differences between ELC settings and when children start school aged 4 or 5 - adult:child ratios change from 1:8 to 1:25, there are mandated break times, lunchtimes, pedagogical approaches often respond accordingly.

Research in environmental psychology also suggests that early childhood is a formative time in the development of environmental identities and attitudes, but the implicit linkage of childhood and nature, and the binary distinction between culture and nature which it rests upon is increasingly disrupted by scholars trying to keep up with the complexity of childhoods lived in the anthropocene (Taylor, & Giugni, 2012; Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Lasczik, Wilks, Logan & Turner, 2020; Common Worlds Research Collective, 2021).

Spending time playing and learning outside has always been a part of formal Early Childhood Education in Scotland, but it can be seen as entangled (and instrumentalised) in multiple social, material and discursive processes:

- in ECE settings, outdoor spaces can increase capacity (and therefore income) in the context of recently expanded funded places

- The pedagogical and environmental affordances of learning outdoors are perceived by learners and teachers to be different (REF), leading to different ways of being in different spaces.

- Schools are places that are expected to perform significant civic functions. The Scottish CfE represents what Mark Priestley and Gert Biesta call “the turn from curriculum as a description of the content of learning, to curriculum as a description of what the student should be and become” (2014, p.42), and is part of a broader axiomatic framework which aims to nurture specific values. This links schools to discourses such as the perceived ‘extinction of experience’ (Soga & Gaston, REF), more sedentary and indoor home-lives (Natural England, 2009) and the need to ‘(re)connect to nature’ in childhoods (Richardson, Sheffield, Harvey & Petronzi, 2015), especially as more and more outcome-focussed and correlational research shows that being outdoors stimulates and supports physical activity and has significant benefits in terms of health and wellbeing, and attention restoration (Bragg, Wood, Barton & Pretty, 2015).

- There are parallel understandings of how time spent in natural environments, might affect so-called ‘pro-environmental behaviours’, ‘nature-connection’ or the development of environmental identities (Chawla & Derr, 2012) which lead to less damaging human ways of being in the world, and with Scottish children in school for nearly 30 hours a week this is another function that we want schools to perform.

It is in this context that outdoor learning in Scotland is positioned as a key strand of Learning for Sustainability, a whole school and community approach, which when used effectively, “weaves together global citizenship, sustainable development education and outdoor learning to create coherent, rewarding and transformative learning experiences” (Education Scotland, 2021)

However, as I’ve just briefly outlined, teachers, children and policy-makers all have varied and ever-growing expectations of what outdoor learning is and what it does. But whatever it is or does, we’re asking a lot of it, and it’s not even a significant part of most children’s experience at school (Mannion, Mattu & Wilson, 2015)!

My doctoral research uses feminist materialist tools to investigate the processes and relations that emerged between human and non-human agents during outdoor learning. After developing my understanding of how humans perceive environments, I decided I needed a research assemblage which didn’t limit my inquiry to active human subjects interacting with static objects in a purely physical environment, such as in research based on Gibsonian ecological psychology, nor focus primarily on the social or phenomenological. I needed to see how non-human actors and socio-cultural contexts affected learning. Thinking with non-human agency, relationality and relational accountability is central to Indigenous research ontologies and methodologies (Wilson, 2008) and has more recently been co-opted by researchers working with posthumanist and new materialist theories, manifesting most visibly in early childhood studies as the more-than-human notion of ‘common worlds’ (Taylor & Giugni, 2012) and approaches which work with assemblages such as ‘childhood-nature’ (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Malone & Barratt-Hacking-Hacking, 2020). I used video, sound recordings and field notes to practice what’s best characterised as diffractive ethnography (Smartt Gullion, 2018). This works with the ontological turn, drawing on Donna Haraway’s proposition of diffraction as an alternative to reflexivity and the ongoing ways it has been taken up by Karen Barad and other feminist materialist researchers. Haraway states that “diffraction is the production of difference patterns in the world, not just of the same reflected-displaced-elsewhere” (Haraway, 1997, p. 268), and according to Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Anna Palmer, a diffractive analysis is an “enactment of flows of differences, where differences get made in the process of reading data into each other, and identifying what diffractive patterns emerge in these readings” (2013, p. 676).

Let’s start here. (Tree Video)

At it’s most simple, children are hitting an oak tree with sticks. This is in a wooded area just beyond the boundary of a small school in a village. They’ve finished the task that they were asked to do by the teacher, who is out of shot, and have now drifted into what could be characterised as free, or open-ended play. They’re moving, physical, outside, feeling, touching, smelling.

In an anthropocentric reading, the actions can be mapped as an interaction pattern which Kahn, Weiss and Harrington call ‘striking wood on wood’. In their analysis of video from a nature kindergarten, this pattern is positioned as perhaps being linked to human evolutionary history, the “ontogenetic origins from our phylogenetic past” (p. 8) - it emerges from a natural instinct, a drive, the need for food or fuel. It appears very satisfying. Does it need to be more than that?

One child calls out, ‘We’re going to cut this tree down!” Sticks become axes - now it’s figurative, imaginative.

In a more posthumanist reading, the children and the tree are in relational physical movement - the solidity of the tree provides an embodied response to the energy of the swinging arm; the tree is moving through time at a different pace, but still sends the stick back towards the child; the ‘thunk’ which emerges is full of satisfaction, echoing through the years of accumulated xylem; the tree-stick-child assemblage allows for peer-to-peer connection and performance - the big hit, the glance to see who saw.

Regardless of how we read it, the form of relationality in which the children are engaged with the tree is not one of care, concern, respect, or reciprocity. Why is this? What sort of relations do exist between tree and children - it appears to be just a surface, a thing, even though I can see their classroom window from where I’m filming. This supports concerns that open-ended play in nature on its own is not enough to nurture learning for sustainability. Some early childhood educators feel that experiences in and about nature are sufficient to develop skills, knowledge, conceptual learning, and even shift attitudes and behaviours, but insights from socio-cultural theories of development and research by folk like Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Susan Edwards, Deborah Moore, and Wendy Boyd, building on that of Julie Davis, Sue Elliot and Tracy Young among others, suggests that this is not the case. Their work shows that different forms of play-based learning do different things, and that the (socio-)material environments in which play takes place can have a significant effect on learning. This tree-clip also highlights that ‘outdoors’ and ‘nature’ are constructed, binary concepts which are easily troubled. Are the children thinking of the tree as alive, as natural? Or is it a thing, a surface? What would change their relation to the tree?

Elliot and Young raise the risk of what they call a nature by default paradigm in early childhood education, where “default thinking is automatic and simplified, and when faced with new problems, ideas or challenges, there is a tendency to leverage solutions from the past” , p. 58). This might manifest as romanticised notions of free-play, or as superficial acts of conservation or pro-environmental behaviours that are carried out uncritically and have little effect. They, and other advocates for common worlds understandings of child-world relationality suggest that we might be better off following how children are entangled with and of nature rather than just in it, and work at the sites of intra-action to foster collective, and maybe more caring relations.

So educators need to closely attend to the contextuality, the ongoing processes of play if it is intended to serve a pedagogical purpose. We can see how this emerges by tracing the play of these children over a few weeks either side of the first video, as well as how it relates to the activities that the class teacher has planned. Play (and learning) does not happen in discrete chunks - it accumulates, it shifts, children step out and back into it (Wood, 2010).

I think it actually starts with water play in the school garden. Water is brought to the bare earth under the apple tree to make flows, pools, puddles. There is turn-taking, emergent understandings of fluid dynamics, collaboration. But over the course of a couple of weeks, the play shifts. With the addition of tools co-opted from gardening, some children begin to dig holes in the softened earth. Excavations are variously framed by the children as archaeological, as traps, or, with the addition of plastic builders’ helmets and hi-vis vests and the guidance of an older child, as industrialised drainage. This digging activity extends over nearly two months, with the children seeming to slip back into place each week or so as if no time has passed, even after the October break. I wonder whether the play pattern would have remained so stable over such a long time indoors (the materials might still be there, but are often tidied up at set times, or put back in different places, or get modified more quickly through the day). Perhaps unexpectedly, there may be more consistency over time for some things in an outdoor space?

Play is a slippery concept with no agreed upon definition. Deeply entrenched ideas about how and why children play and what role adults should perform in relation to that play perpetuate inconsistent approaches to play in educational settings. In parallel with shifting understandings of childhoods, contemporary early childhood literature tends to situate play as taking place in dynamic socio-cultural contexts rather than dictated ‘naturally’ by a child’s position on a linear development pathway. Thus, play can do a lot, including two functions relevant to my analysis: play transmits culture through social interaction and communication (Wood, 2013), and supports the development of ethical identities (Edminston, 2008) - I am interested in how this extends beyond human person-hood. We can see here, for instance, that the spades become active agents in shaping the play, as do the builder’s helmets, the soil, the guttering.

In my research, I’ve found that thinking of things as emergent, as coming-into-being-with, as in relationality, carries a risk of making me think of happenings as events, as one-off, as being there in the moment. It makes me forget about John Dewey, and his continuity of experience, as well as older ways of thinking about learning. Dewey’s philosophy was unabashedly humanist, and his formation of experience is largely transactional, between organism and environment, but his work has been re-read through posthumanist ideas of non-human-agency or thing-power by folk like Jane Bennett, Nathan Snaza and Tim Ingold. For Dewey, experiences can be educative or mis-educative, and it is the principle of continuity of experience which leads to education: “every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after”.

So when free play goes unmediated or emerges in relation with materials which the teacher has limited agency over, or is not themselves in relation with, it becomes harder to ensure that experiences are educative. In the digging, the soil was matter, the spades were tools. When the experimentation extends to using the tools with the apple tree and there is no cultural affect or engagement with the tree as an ethical agent from outside the play pattern, a mode of relating is established which transfers easily to other contexts, such as the oak tree in the wood. Similarly, the activities planned by the teacher for the woods in the weeks running up to the oak tree may have affected the play. The second visit starts off with a visit to a ‘cut-down-tree’ ***Play Video***, and ‘exploring’, whereas other activities share a common intention of ‘collecting’ - gathering leaves to make pictures inspired by the book ‘Leaf Man’, or finding materials to develop descriptive vocabulary: does this extractive framing, which is established in their first visit to the woods as a class, limit the child-tree relation to one of ‘use’?

We see the children’s attention quickly shift from collecting fallen leaves to living moss, without any obvious social or material distinctions or decision making framework.

Perhaps the clear intentionality of these activities contrasts markedly with when the children ‘get to play’, after the ‘work’, pushing the adults out of the experience during those times.

So how might teachers guide the relations that emerge through outdoor play towards forms which foster care for, or at least more reciprocal relations with the world? I don’t have time to go into much detail here at all, but I want to point where I’m trying to go with this.

Following Dewey, Biesta and Ingold argue against education as transmission, directly from one knowing subject to another unknowing subject, where true communication, a commoning of experience is stifled. This has been highlighted as an issue in environmental education for some time . Ingold contests that “the first place to find education is not in pedagogy, but in participatory practice: not in the ways persons and things are symbolically represented in their absence, but in the ways they are made present, and above all, answerable to one another, in the correspondences of social life.”

Instead, contrasting two triads which he identifies: - (volition, agency, intentionality) and (habit, agencement, attentionality) - Ingold argues for education as a process of attention, of being-with. Both Biesta and Ingold argue that this type of commoning creates the possibility of respsonse-ability, of care. When we extend this beyond the teacher-child relation to include the non-human environment, as is traditional in many indigenous ontologies, it is possible to identify potential sites of co-respondence, but also practices which block those pathways, as I have begun to show with these short video clips. Identifying some of these is nen of the next steps in my research.

I think that this is what Jamie McPhie and Dave Clarke mean when they write, “We propose a dissolving of connection = care ideas in environmental education, instead (re)placing both moralistic and connection narratives with a narrative of a relationally underpinned metaphysics of immanence.” (p.246)”

I’ve got so much more that I would like to talk about, including videos from the same sessions, but of child-slug or child-invertebrate intra-actions, which disrupt lots of what I’ve just worked through, but I’ve run out of time.

In some ways, I think that it’s appropriate that there are no neat conclusions here, because we’re working at the intersections of messy fields, but I appreciate you allowing me to share some of my thinking with you, and I would be grateful to hear how you relate to some of the images and ideas that I’ve shared.

References

Bai, H., & Romanycia, S. (2016). Learning From Hermit Crabs, Mycelia, and Banyan. In R. Stevenson, M. Brody, J. Dillon & A.Wals (EdS)International Handbook of Research on Environmental Education, 101–107. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203813331.ch10

Bragg, R., Wood, C., Barton, J. & Pretty, J. (2015). Wellbeing benefits from natural environments rich in wildlife. University of Essex / The Wildlife Trusts.

Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A., Lasczik, A., Wilks, J., Logan, M., & Turner, A. (2020.). Touchstones for Deterritorializing Socioecological Learning Common Worlds as Creative Milieux. Palgrave Macmillan

Cutter-Mackenize-Knowles, A., Edwards, S., Moore, D. & Boyd, W. (2013).

Davis, J. M. (2010). Young children and the environment : early education for sustainability. Cambridge University Press

Education Scotland (2020). Realising the Ambition: Being Me.

Education Scotland (2021). A summary of learning for sustainability resources. https://education.gov.scot/improvement/learning-resources/a-summary-of-learning-for-sustainability-resources/

Elliot, S. (2012) Sustainable outdoor play spaces in early childhood centres: Investigating perceptions, facilitating change and generating theory (Unpublished PhD thesis). University of New England.

Elliot, S., & Young, T. (2015). Nature_by_default_in_early_chi.PDF. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 32(1), 57–64.

Haraway, (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and techno science. Routledge.

Lenz Taguchi, H., & Palmer, A. (2013). A more “livable” school? A diffractive analysis of the performative enactments of girls’ ill-/well-being with(in) school environments. Gender and Education, 25(6), 671–687. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.829909

Mannion, G., Mattu, L. & Wilson, M. (2015) Teaching, learning, and play in the outdoors: a survey of school and pre-school provision in Scotland. Scottish Natural Heritage Commissioned Report No. 779.

Natural England (2009) Childhood and Nature: A Survey On Changing Relationships With Nature Across Generations. Cambridgeshire: England Marketing.

O ’brien, L., Ambrose-Oji, B., Waite, S., Aronsson, J., & Clark, M. (2018). Learning on the move Green exercise for children and young people in J. Barton, C. Bragg., C. Wood and J. Pretty (Eds.), Green Exercise : Linking Nature, Health and Well-Being. Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.

Richardson, M., Sheffield, D., Harvey, C. & Petronzi, D. (2015). The impact of children’s connection to nature. Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Stevenson, R. B. (2007). Editorial. Environmental Education Research, 13(2), 129–138. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620701295668

Taylor, A., & Giugni, M. (2012). Common worlds: Reconceptualising inclusion in early childhood communities. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(2), 108–119. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2012.13.2.108

UNESCO (2015. Rethinking education: towards a global common good? UNESCO Publishing.

UNESCO (2021). International Commission on the Futures of Education Progress Update March 2021. unesco futures of education march 2021 update. https://en.unesco.org/futuresofeducation/

Edmiston, B. (2008). Forming ethical identities in early childhood play. In Forming Ethical Identities in Early Childhood Play. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203934739

Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A., Malone,K., & Barratt Hacking, E. (2020). Research Handbook on Childhoodnature. Springer International Publishing AG.

Wilson, S. (2008). Research is Ceremony. Fernwood Publishing.

Wood, E. (2013). Play, learning and the early childhood curriculum. Sage.

Smartt Gullion, J. (2018). Diffractive ethnography. Routledge

Todd, Z. (2016). An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word For Colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1), 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124

Worlds, C. (2021). Learning to become with the world : Education for future survival. 1–15.