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.