“Imagine a therapy that had no known side effects, was readily available, and could improve your cognitive functioning at zero cost. Such a therapy has been known to philosophers, writers, and laypeople alike: interacting with nature.”

(Berman, Jonides and Kaplan 2008:1207)

In this Learning Cluster, our initial focus was to explore and re-evaluate the importance that early and sustained engagement with nature has both for us as individuals and for society as a whole – and how the budding field of environmental education relates to Soka education. More specifically, we wanted to focus on the way that outdoor learning has been integrated into childhood education in Northern European countries, most notably Sweden and Denmark, with their rich tradition of forest preschools, nature schools and friluftsliv (literally: “free air life”). We wanted to learn from and experience first-hand how children and youth who grew up with the benefits of sustained outdoor education and experience integrate this ecological literacy and environmental awareness into other aspects of their lives. (Is it mere coincidence, for example, that the world’s most prominent young climate activist, Greta Thurnberg, hails from Sweden? And why is the #fridaysforfuture youth climate activism generally more vibrant and engaged in Europe than in the U.S. or elsewhere?) We were keenly interested in the specific pedagogies of outdoor education and how these might differ in different cultural contexts. We applied for an international travel grant to visit and experience several forest preschool and forest garden programs first-hand and to learn from the many experienced educators and academics that have developed, refined and researched the related outdoor education programs in Sweden and Denmark.

How much time did you spend playing in nature as a kid? Did you get to play in mud puddles or sand piles, climb up trees and around giant boulders, make huts and campfires from wood sticks, collect flowers, fruits or mushrooms, get rained or snowed on, counted shooting stars in the sky and skinny dipped in lakes, rivers or the ocean? A frequent critique of most modern national education systems is that they over-emphasize number- and word-“smartness” at the expense of other crucial skills and values that would make up a well-rounded child and person, particularly with regard to what we might call nature smartness or ecological literacy. These days, you hear educators, both here at Soka and elsewhere, wanting to foster different kinds of literacy, ranging from digital, informational, technical, or visual literacy to political, civic and (multi-)cultural literacy. Yet even these more sophisticated pedagogical visions remain limited in that they still largely ignore humanity’s connections and co-existence with nature. Fostering leaders for the creative co-existence of these two, meanwhile, is of course one of the core principles of Soka. The topic is as deeply personal to us as it is a booming new academic field.

There is a rapidly growing literature showing that substantial time spent interacting with outdoor environments promotes overall well-being and positive environmental values along children (Blair (2009); Chawla (1999), O’Brien & Murray (2007); Taylor & Kuo (2006); Waite (2010), White 2004). In a systematic review article in the Journal of Environmental Education, Adams and Savahl (2017) also conclude that childhood experiences in nature foster an intrinsic care for the environment. In an even more recent article in the Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning Hammarsten et al. (2019:2278) report the following:

"Today, cities become more dense, green spaces disappear and children spend less time outdoors. Research suggests that these conditions create health problems and lack of ecological literacy. To reverse such trends, localities are creating urban green spaces for children to visit during school time. […] [The] children aged 7 to 9 … expressed strong positive feelings about the forest garden, the organized and spontaneous activities there, and caring for the organisms living there. We observed three aspects of learning in the data, potentially beneficial for the development of children’s ecological literacy: practical competence, learning how to co-exist and care, and biological knowledge and ecological understanding. "

And it was precisely research teams like Maria Hammarsten and her colleagues at the University of Jönköping who are at the cutting edge of this kind of research that we wanted to learn from. Focusing on the role of teachers, Prince (2016:161) also has argued that role modelling, mentoring and sustainable practice by outdoor educators and using outdoor experiences, can contribute to pro-environmental action by offering an array of possibilities to engender pro-environmental behavior.

We remain keenly interested to investigate some of the longer-term effects of outdoor education on adolescents and young adults and we see outdoor and environmental as a rich and promising field of inquiry with immense relevance for our own learning and pedagogy.

Nature education is still a relatively new field of practice and research and its deepest roots are found in Northern Europe, particularly Denmark and Sweden. Although the UK, Germany and even the US all have growing movements in this area so that it would theoretically be possible to study this topic locally with some success, the practice, pedagogy and research on outdoor education for all ages is clearly much more developed in Northern Europe than in other places. Our group was lucky to have pre-existing relationships with Nature educators in Sweden who in turn had close connections with colleagues in neighboring Denmark. Swedish and Danish nature school educators were also keenly interested in international exchange relationships. Class of 2023 Senate President Kentaro Shintaku grew up in somewhat remote village on Hokkaido, Japan that has a Sister City relationship with a Swedish town. This resulted in a Nature school exchange relationship between the two towns. The connection is still active today so we are lucky to be able to build on this long-term relationship. We thus have Swedish counterparts that are themselves keenly interested in sharing their pedagogy and practices with an eager global audience such as us.

This LC is strongly aligned with Soka’s mission of educating global citizens committed to living a contributive life and Soka’s core values specifically note that “education is an integrating process in which students gain an awareness of the interdependence of themselves, others and the environment.”