Diffractive ethnography of early childhood-nature relations in Scottish school-based outdoor learning

Abstract

In response to the interconnected ecological and climate emergencies there are increasingly strident calls for a refiguring of dominant human-nature relations in global education and environmental policy. Experiences of nature in early childhood have been identified as potentially influential in how this relationality emerges throughout the life course.

In Scotland, policy and practice frameworks situate outdoor learning and play as central to early childhood education (from birth to 8 years-old) and as pedagogical approaches for delivering a purposeful and holistic curriculum capable of supporting transitions to healthier, more respectful relations with Earth. There is an increasing body of international research investigating children’s experiences with nature in early learning and childcare settings, but there is limited understanding of how this is enacted in the first years of school.

Through multimodal, diffractive ethnography, this study investigated how teachers and children at two schools came to know their outdoor learning environments, and, following further analysis, identified implications for broader human-nature relationality. The guiding research approach drew respectfully and pragmatically on old ontologies, children’s worldings and posthumanist critical theory to incorporate non-human actors into the investigation. It began with a mapping of how child-nature relations are implicated in education and sustainability discourses, which supported the development of a research assemblage capable of working against human-nature dualisms and the romanticisation of child-nature relations. Video and ethnographic observations were used to record the processes of outdoor learning in different contexts with 4–7 year-olds and their teachers, which form the basis of diffractive readings of the phenomenon ‘human-nature relations in school-based outdoor learning’.

Rather than pursue one fixed understanding of key themes, these readings were used to create interference patterns around specific topics. Such patterns expressed the emergence of multiple natures through intra-action between indoor and outdoor learning environments; direct and indirect experience; and communication between teachers, children and non-human agents. Child-teacher commoning, collecting and play were identified as significant pedagogical processes which were all in relation with a spectrum of educational intention/attention. As such, the research shows that outdoor learning has potential as a site for meaningful commoning activity between teachers, children, and non-human nature, which will shape children’s relations with the world. However, the findings also show that human-nature relations can be incoherent across socio-cultural and ecological contexts in schools, which may limit the potential for meaningful learning for sustainability. While practice guidance in Scotland appears to support outdoor learning pedagogies which could have positive impacts on human-nature relations in early childhood, capacity for this potential to emerge in schools is currently limited by structural elements such as class sizes, staff ratios and school design.