With the outdoor classroom, the school takes a fresh look at environmental issues
How about an outdoor classroom? In the aftermath of the first confinement, as part of the fight against the Covid-19 epidemic, this proposal was taken up by many teachers. Researchers and education personnel took turns in the media to stress the benefits of this teaching method, both in terms of health and for children who are often too sedentary. The previous Minister of Education also recognized the "pedagogical virtues" of this approach.
Aurélie Zwang, University of Montpellier
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While the principle of the "open-air, open-sky " classroom has its origins in the educational movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, it now seems to be emerging from a certain confidentiality. Reports show kindergarten and primary school classes going outside once a week, close to the school, to carry out observations, physical activities or experiments, sometimes with guidance, sometimes much more freely.
This pedagogical and didactic modality, which can be implemented in both urban and rural environments, is not currently governed by any specific official text. It has therefore become common practice to equate it with education for sustainable development. This association can be found on academic websites and in educational publications.
However, this affiliation is based on a misunderstanding, or rather on a misunderstanding of the general institutional framework of education for sustainable development. It is also in the spotlight with the climate challenge and biodiversity issues. But what do the official texts of the French Ministry of Education have to say about it? And how does the nature classroom fit in with other approaches?
Nature management education
The normative and conceptual framework for education for sustainable development was built around seven circulars, published between 2004 and 2020, and a memo in 2013, when education for sustainable development became part of the Education Code.
Education for sustainable development in schools is the result of 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 "at the service of sustainable development".
With sustainable development, however, education finds itself subordinated to an economic perspective of growth theorized at the end of the 20th century, as a solution to the challenges of the 21st century:
"Today, what we need is a new era of economic growth, growth that is vigorous and, at the same time, socially and environmentally sustainable." Brundtland Report (1987).
In France, this horizon leads to a distancing from nature and educational practices in nature. By explicitly adopting an ethic focused on humans and their economic development, environmental education is now approached through rationality and environmental management, distancing itself from sensitive and naturalistic approaches, often orally described as 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 milieu or environment - was completely absent from official French education texts. As of 2007, school outings and immersion programs such as "classes de mer", "classes de neige" and "classes vertes" are no longer mentioned. The 2015 circular is an exception, introducing "nature corners" and once again recommending "nature outings". In 2020, nature outings are present in a parenthesis, but the text confines nature to an object of diagnosis or a heritage to be enhanced by pupils. Nature is thus subordinated 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 orientations in the classroom.
Education with nature
It should be pointed out that outdoor classroom practices are characterized by a wide range of objectives. Teachers' intentions can range from strict adherence to curricula, to the well-being of pupils, to reclaiming the child's place in the city.
When the objectives are strictly disciplinary, the content can be far removed from socio-ecological issues. Using nature as a starting point, sometimes with tools provided in situ (books, magnifying glasses, laminated material, etc.), pupils work on math, science, French, art, physical education and sport. Nature is used for formal learning: blades of grass for counting or classifying, a stick and the ground for graphic design, the landscape for drawing, inventing a poem or story, logs for creating a path...
But beyond that, when practice spaces are sufficiently "ensauvaged", 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 published work from the participatory action-research project Growing up with nature shows that teachers build knowledge
on unplanned situations experienced outdoors: a passing bird, a change in the season, noises... They also help to show that nature is a source of learning through the construction, through experience, of bonds of identity and attachment to the environment.
This informal part, called eco-training, places the education of students in a perspective that is much more oriented towards the future of the human being than towards a predefined economic program.
Education from below
The outdoor classroom cannot be equated with education for sustainable development as prescribed in the French Ministry of Education's circulars. Built by the mobilization of players in the field, including environmental education professionals who warned as early as 2008 about the decline in outdoor educational practices, it is capable of integrating nature into its methods, objectives and aims. It's an education built from the ground up.
In contrast, education for sustainable development is a "top-down" education oriented by international bodies towards an economic growth objective. Its endorsement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) confirms this trend.
They are now mandatory for any establishment to be awarded a label, for example. However, in the SDGs, "aquatic life" and "terrestrial life" are in fourteenth and fifteenth place, well behind "access to employment" (in eighth place) and "innovation" (in ninth place), which clearly expresses the hierarchies at work.
By trying to fit their practices into existing frameworks, the players adapt to them and perpetually invent new ways of doing things. In this case, this allows the outdoor classroom to be included within the framework of education for sustainable development, but without any awareness of its essence. This is all the more true given that the educational institution itself fuels a certain vagueness.
In the recent "vademecum of education for sustainable development", we can read a few calls for nature-based education for small classes alongside the largely predominant behaviorist and managerial approaches. We might therefore conclude that it takes note of the field and incorporates its evolutions, and that whatever the practices, they can all be classified as "education for sustainable development".
But in the end, for what purposes and within what ethical framework of human-nature relations do teachers see their professional practices oriented? Isn't this vagueness one of the main obstacles to serious environmental education?
Aurélie Zwang, Senior Lecturer in Education and Training. Environmental education. Didactics of sciences, University of Montpellier
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.