Title: Understanding educational and wellbeing implications of learning outside the classroom through cross-national collaboration
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: There is intense and gathering interest in the contribution that learning outside the classroom can make to children's wellbeing, creativity and their motivation for lifelong learning, linked to a concern that a narrow focus on cognitive outcomes may be failing to develop flexible, creative and resilient young people who are willing and able to contribute to society and to cope in a rapidly changing world. A desire to (re)connect children and nature to nurture respect and care for a threatened global environment has also struck a chord in our partner countries. For example, the English Learning Outside the Classroom initiative is supported across party political lines. In Singapore, nature corridors are being created to make it a city in a garden and a new Programme for Active Learning is being implemented to address concerns about how far creativity and entrepreneurial spirit can be fostered by prevalent didactic teaching. 'Friluftsliv', the open air life, has long been valued in Scandinavia; grassroots movements in Denmark are augmenting children's curriculum experience through outdoor learning. However, the complexity of the interactions between mainstream educational goals and national cultural traditions relating to the outdoors is difficult to understand and theorise without close attention to how national policies, processes and people construct different opportunities for learning outside the classroom. Australian academics, such as Stewart and Brookes, have cautioned that generalisation of principles from research studies without due regard for cultural situations is misleading, while US studies of community-based education reposition conceptualisations of the 'outdoors.' Although the research field is strengthening and diversifying, there is a lack of coherence and congruence in how this research builds upon existing knowledge and accounts for cultural factors. The reasons for this include a lack of comparative methodologies, limited opportunities for debate and an absence of cross-national collaboration to learn from different cultural and education systems. It is time to explore how our various cultural traditions, particularly regarding the outdoors and nature, and our policy contexts are meeting these educational challenges, which are simultaneously highly situated and of global significance. Through the international networking that we are proposing, we would be supported in addressing issues such as: what we currently know about the way in which learning outside the classroom influences children's education and wellbeing; how we can build upon existing international evidence regarding learning outside the classroom and move the research agenda forward; how place, cultural factors and learning outside the classroom interact; the impact on social cohesion that community-based learning outside the classroom might afford; how outdoor contexts for learning interact with pedagogy, curriculum and didaktik. Our collaboration will help to address the associated research and methodological issues. The countries and scholars have been deliberately selected as network partners to represent a coherent spread of cultural attitudes to the outdoors and range of educational policy frameworks. The core partnership comprises published authors who have ESRC and other externally-funded research project experience and includes practitioners and policy-makers to help realise practical implications of the research. Previous workshops, co-editing international special issues, and a British Educational Research Association 'Meeting of Minds' award have developed working relationships among the core partners; this funding would leverage our existing network to a strong, focused partnership that will produce collaborative papers, establish exchange opportunities for early career researchers, formulate cross-national research programmes and thus have significant impact on policy and practice in our respective countries and beyond.


Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE