With outdoor classes, the school is changing its perspective on environmental issues.
What if we held classes outside? In the aftermath of the first lockdown, as part of the fight against the COVID-19 epidemic, this proposal was taken up by many teachers. Researchers and education professionals took turns in the media to highlight the benefits of this teaching method, both in terms of health and for the well-being of children who are often too sedentary. The previous Minister of Education also recognized its "educational value."
Aurélie Zwang, University of Montpellier
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While the principle of "open-air, open-sky" classrooms originated in educational movements of the19th and20th centuries, it now seems to be emerging from a certain obscurity. Reports show kindergarten and elementary school classes going outside once a week to an area near the school to make observations, do physical activities, or conduct experiments, sometimes with a lot of guidance and sometimes with much more freedom.
This educational and teaching method, which can be implemented in both urban and rural areas, is not currently governed by any specific official legislation. In public perception, it has therefore become commonplace to equate it with education for sustainable development. This association can be found on academic websites and in educational publications.
However, this association is based on a misunderstanding, or rather a lack of knowledge about the general institutional framework for education for sustainable development. This is currently in the spotlight due to climate change and biodiversity issues. But what do the official National Education texts say about it? And how does outdoor learning fit in with other approaches?
Education in nature management
The normative and conceptual framework for education for sustainable development was built around seven circulars, published between 2004 and 2020, and a memorandum in 2013, when education for sustainable development was incorporated into the Education Code.
Education for sustainable development in schools stems from several international recommendations: in 1992, Chapter 36 of Agenda 21; in 1997, the Thessaloniki International Conference; and in 2002, the Johannesburg Summit on the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. These international texts frame education as a means "in the service of sustainable development."
However, with sustainable development, education is subordinated to an economic perspective of growth theorized at the end of the20th century as a solution to the challenges ofthe 21st century:
"What we need today is a new era of economic growth, vigorous growth and, at the same time, socially and environmentally sustainable." Brundtland Report (1987).
In France, this outlook has led to a distancing from nature and educational practices in nature. By explicitly adopting an ethic centered on humans and their economic development, environmental education is now approached through rationality and environmental management, distancing itself from sensitive and naturalistic approaches, often referred to colloquially as paying attention to "little flowers" and "little birds."
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From 2004 onwards, and for more than ten years, the word "nature" – in the sense of environment – was completely absent from official French texts on this type of education. From 2007 onwards, school trips and immersion programs such as "sea classes," "snow classes," and "green classes" were no longer mentioned. The 2015 circular is an exception, introducing "nature corners" and once again recommending "outings in nature." In 2020, outings are mentioned in parentheses, but the text confines nature to an object of diagnosis or a heritage to be valued by students. It is thus subservient to human management.
In other words, in French official texts on education for sustainable development, nature is neither considered for its own sake nor as an educational agent. However, this is not the case for many practices and approaches in outdoor classrooms.
Education with nature
It should be noted that outdoor classroom practices are characterized by a wide variety of objectives. Teachers' intentions can range from strictly covering the curriculum to promoting student well-being and reclaiming children's place in the city.
When the objectives are strictly disciplinary, the content can therefore be very far removed from socio-ecological issues. Using nature as a basis, sometimes with tools brought in situ (books, magnifying glasses, laminated materials, etc.), students work on mathematics, science, English, art, and physical education. Nature is used for formal learning: blades of grass for counting or classifying, a stick and the ground for drawing, the landscape for sketching, inventing a poem or story, logs for creating a trail, etc.
But beyond that, when practice spaces are sufficiently "wild," nature can literally enter into educational relationships. It contributes to learning in two ways: either formally, when its manifestations are presented, explained, and highlighted by the teacher, or informally, simply by being immersed in it.
Initial findings published from the participatory action research project Grandir avec la nature (Growing up with nature ) show that teachers build knowledge
based on unplanned outdoor experiences: a bird flying overhead, a change in season, sounds, etc. They also help to show that nature is a source of learning through the construction, through experience, of identity links and attachment to the environment.
This informal part, called eco-training, places student education in a perspective that is much more oriented toward the future of human beings than toward a predefined economic program.
Education "from the bottom up"
Outdoor learning is therefore not the same as education for sustainable development as prescribed in the French Ministry of Education's circulars. Developed through the mobilization of actors in the field, including environmental education professionals who warned as early as 2008 about the decline in outdoor educational practices, it is able to integrate nature into its methods, objectives, and goals. It is an education built "from the bottom up," from the "field."
In contrast, education for sustainable development is a top-down approach guided by international bodies toward the goal of economic growth. Its alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) confirms this trend.
They are now mandatory for any establishment certification, for example. However, in the SDGs, "life below water" and "life on land" are in fourteenth and fifteenth place, well behind "decent work" (in eighth place) and "innovation" (in ninth place), which clearly reflects the hierarchies at work.
By seeking to fit their practices into existing frameworks, stakeholders adapt to them and constantly invent new ways of doing things. In this case, this allows outdoor learning to be included in sustainable development education, but without any awareness of its essence. This is particularly true given that the educational institution itself contributes to a certain degree of ambiguity.
In the recent "handbook on education for sustainable development," there are a few calls for nature-based education for younger children alongside behavioral and management approaches, which are largely predominant. We could therefore conclude that it takes note of the field and incorporates its developments, and that regardless of the practices, they can all be classified as "education for sustainable development."
Yes, but ultimately, what are the goals and ethical framework for human-nature relations that teachers see guiding their professional practices? Isn't this lack of clarity one of the main obstacles to serious environmental education?
Aurélie Zwang, Senior Lecturer in Education and Training Sciences. Environmental Education. Science Education, University of Montpellier
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