Interdisciplinarity in Outdoor Education in England

By Jane Robb, Lecturer in Outdoor Learning and Biodiversity at Staffordshire University

“This session is really broad, it’s unusual as the activities are not all based around a single theme” an education student at the university shared with me at the start of this new term. On hearing this comment from a student, I was shocked and surprised at the implied limitations to their experience of outdoor learning so far. Although outdoor learning has been around for decades and the relevance to social and emotional development is broadly recognised, there are ways in which the field seems stuck in time, including how it can contribute to a varied and exciting interdisciplinary learning experience for learners of all ages and stages.

In starting up the pilot programme for Staffordshire University’s new Woodlands Forest School, I reached out to a number of secondary schools to offer them outdoor learning experiences. In England (and likely to be true from memories of my own Scottish education), secondary schools are under immense pressure to fit everything into the GCSE and A-level curricula and have little time for ‘extra-curricular’ opportunities. But for me, outdoor learning is not just ‘extra-curricular’: it is a key way in which we can contextualise and crystallise our understanding of complex concepts that can rarely hold our attention in 2D.

I remember when I was completing my undergraduate degree in geology, I took the educational outreach module and created a lesson plan based on the collections at the National Museum of Scotland. It took students on a journey from jade artefacts in the archaeology section to the geology department and back. It was truly interdisciplinary, and although I didn’t fully realise it at the time (my director of studies noted that my reflective practitioner skills were leaving much to be desired – luckily something I have improved on since), this was how I wanted to see the subject of geology brought to life: where its relevance and importance in our shared human history was emphasised.

And so came about the recent outdoor learning pilot session I ran with a cohort of Year 9 Key Stage 3 Spanish language students from a local secondary school. The session was inspired by a curious Modern Foreign Languages teacher who was keen to explore ways to bring the subject to life for their students – and willing to work with me in developing something neither of us had done before.

Luckily, I had a decent grasp of the Spanish language from my PhD research in Guatemala. I had also spent time previously wondering about how to integrate language and how this impacts our view of the world into outdoor teaching. With this in mind, I decided to weave in the Latin names of plants that formed the roots of Spanish words to the idea of understanding our place within the wider world through journeying and mapping by naming of places and objects. We closed the session with a story – read in Spanish – and the act of physically making objects from the story in clay. The activity had resonance in terms of embodied learning activities, storytelling as a tool for sharing knowledge and in the history of the local place of Stoke-on-Trent, famous for its potteries.

After the sessions, the teacher shared with me that this had provided students with a truly cross curricular learning opportunity that is so difficult to provide in the classroom. The importance of these sessions was not to teach new information about the Spanish language, but to engage learners in the concept of language and offer new opportunities for connecting with words and phrases that can be truly embodied (the smell of the air, the feel of the clay, the look of the landforms).

In addition to teaching external groups at the Woodlands Forest School, I also teach the next generation of educators as part of the Institute of Education. I work to bring interdisciplinarity into my undergraduate and postgraduate classes mostly as free-form explorations that challenge students to create activities from a random selection of resources found in classrooms and the outdoor spaces we visit. Especially for primary teachers, being able to use a small number of resources and apply these to a wide range of topics is an essential skill. For secondary teachers, finding ways to apply a broad range of experiences that can happen in the outdoors to their own subject area can be a useful way to inspire and help progress their learners.

In my opinion, interdisciplinary (or cross-curricular) learning is not a separate entity that needs to be added to the way we teach. It is a natural and integral part of the learning process that as educators of all ages and stages we can find ways to highlight as part of our teaching practice. The outdoors is a varied and exciting environment that everyone will have access to (whether in the form of local parks, forests, coastal settings, or the built environment). There is no need to limit learning in any context to a specific subject or theme, and encouraging our own creativity as educators will be a natural precursor to encouraging creativity in our learners.