Post Colonial Approaches to Outdoor Education on Campus in the UK: Reflective Practice and Questioning the ‘Life-Cycle’ of Our Teaching Practice

A reflection on personal practice within outdoor education on a higher education campus in the UK and on why and how outdoor educators can begin to critique their practice with a view to decolonising. Concluding with the idea that it may not only be the activity or practice ‘in the moment’ that affects the outcome, but also consideration of the ‘life-cycle’ of the activity or practice – where will the outputs be taken next and how might this affect future communities/of practice?

In 2022, Staffordshire University completed the build of the new £4.4 m award-winning Woodlands Nursery and Forest School building, designed to contribute to the university's net zero status. The Woodlands Forest School (WFS) and Nature Reserve, separate to the Woodlands Nursery, is an initiative to formally bring outdoor education into the university curriculum, as well as offerings to schools and the local community. To this end, in December 2022 the university hired the author as a Lecturer in Outdoor Learning and Biodiversity to lead the development and activities of the WFS, taught in the Institute of Education.

Outdoor education in the UK has a rich history spanning the last 60 plus years. In the 1940s, the Field Studies Council (est. 1943) established centres with a focus on science-based education in biology and geography. Around the same time, Outward Bound (est. 1941) centres set up to develop self-reliance and leadership skills in the outdoors. A few decades later, in 1993 a group of nursery nurses were inspired by the Danish early years ‘udeskole’ (teaching outside the classroom), resulting in the creation of the ‘Forest School’ model in the UK. As outlined by Cree and McCree in their article ‘A Brief History of Forest School in the UK’, Forest Schools offered a different model for outdoor education, disseminated through training of individuals to deliver outdoor learning sessions within their own settings. The Field Studies Council, Outward Bound and many smaller independent residential and day outdoor centres still exist today, alongside the Forest School model.

Concluding with the idea that it may not only be the activity or practice ‘in the moment’ that affects the outcome, but also consideration of the ‘life-cycle’ of the activity or practice – where will the outputs be taken next and how might this affect future communities/of practice?

From its inception, the WFS was always about ‘next generation education’. When I came in to post, I wanted to interrogate what this concept means, and what it looks like to teach and learn in a ‘next generation education’ environment. Having taught in various settings as a qualified teacher and later as an outdoor educator, I had experienced a range of teaching approaches and styles within differing institutions. My experiences and learning during my years of teaching and research fostered a desire to influence the next generation of young people in a way that might inspire social and environmental change.

I entered teaching immediately after completing my doctorate which explored values and action in relation to the UN's Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) project in Guatemala. Arriving at the start of nine months living in Guatemala City, the president and vice-president were arrested and detained in relation to a UN investigation into corruption, leading to unprecedented mass anti-corruption protests, recounted by WOLA in their ‘Fact Sheet on CICIG's Legacy in Fighting Corruption in Guatemala’. My years teaching in UK formal education settings in London and the South East coincided with the youth climate strikes and the height of Extinction Rebellion's activities in London in 2019, and ended with the onset of the pandemic. While teaching, I witnessed UK headlines regarding my own school that criticised their approaches to teaching key topics such as slavery, as reported in The Guardian in 2017. Yet, when entering the outdoor education field, I was struck by the distinct removal from pressing current, global issues within teaching in the sector.

It may be unsurprising, then that bringing current, critical issues into outdoor education was central to my understanding of next generation education in the sector. Being one of the few university-based lecturers in outdoor learning in the UK and having the unique opportunity to build something from the ground up, I realised that achieving this in practice would be a process of trial by error.

One of the first activities I wanted to do within the Woodlands Forest School was to ask local primary school students on one of their visits to make an art piece that could be hung on the walls of our building to welcome people into the space for an upcoming opening event. As a classic ‘Forest School’ activity, making dreamcatchers instantly sprung to mind, but at the same time sparked other questions about the use or appropriation of this cultural practice in western outdoor education practices and the harm or purpose this might bear.

The long shadows cast by imperialism and colonial activities that led to expansive exploitation and social and political upheaval for many communities, can be considered to blame for many current global issues including global income inequality and natural resource extraction, human rights abuses and corruption. Ways in which historical embedded societal and institutional memories of colonialism may be expressed in modern behaviours can be through the prioritisation of western scientific ways of knowing across sectors and through cultural appropriation of words, activities, or practices. By prioritising the value of western scientific knowledge, we offer implicit acceptance to the idea that other cultures, beings (i.e., plants and animals) and ways of knowing are inferior, a key belief that drove much of the harm caused during the height of colonial activities. Similarly, although it may seem harmless, appropriation of certain cultural practices can continue to cause financial and spiritual harm to the modern communities to whom these practices belong – communities that have already suffered under colonial practices. For example, in their paper on ‘Perceptions of Harm and Benefit Predict Judgments of Cultural Appropriation’, Mosley and colleagues noted how perceptions of source community harm was linked to whether out-group actors received profit from the appropriated product or practice.

Outdoor education, including Forest Schools, has much more recently been critiqued in relation to colonial world views that may be embedded within teaching ethos and practice. For example, in an article published in the Australian Journal of Outdoor Education by Leather and in the Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education by Sharma-Brymer and colleagues, the authors note the distance Forest Schools have moved from its historical and cultural origins, especially in light of the commodification of the approach. In much of our environmental education curriculum in schools and outdoors, we discuss nature as a resource e.g., plants, animals, rocks and minerals and their uses. As Van Groll and Fraser discuss in their paper ‘Watch out for their home! Disrupting extractive forest pedagogies in early childhood education’, viewing nature through an extractivist lens also lends itself to under valuing nature and to the dehumanising world views that perpetuated colonial activities. Deriving from other Romantic and Enlightenment viewpoints, outdoor education can also situate ‘nature as wilderness’, separating and othering more-than-human aspects of the world which doesn’t always translate to attitudes that further the connection between people and nature, like Coetzee and Fraser discuss in their policy focused paper ‘Reimagining the wilderness ethic to include ‘people and nature’’. It is this same concept that underlies debates on access to nature and the countryside and who the countryside is for, as Ho and Chang note in their article ‘To whom does this place belong? Whiteness and diversity in outdoor recreation and education’.

Unlike in the Higher Education (HE) sector, there is limited literature that challenges these narratives in outdoor education in the UK, and where literature can be found that address some of these issues, it may not be explicit. However, this lack of literature may be because the outdoor education sector is unregulated, significantly smaller and less well funded than HE, and unlike some other countries with a strong outdoor education sector, the UK does not have a significant community(ies) who identify as indigenous and/or suffered as a direct result of colonial activities. As such, there is a significant body of literature from those working on decolonising landscape, outdoor and environmental education in contexts where there are indigenous land and peoples directly affected by colonial activities, for example in Canada, as discussed by Riley in the Journal of Experiential Education and Datta in Environmental Education Research. Nxumalo and Cedillo also discuss ‘Decolonizing place in early childhood studies: Thinking with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies’ with reference to North America more broadly. However, this does not mean that countries like Britain that gave rise to significant imperial rule and colonial power should not similarly look to how to challenge potentially harmful narratives in outdoor education teaching and practice and move towards developing a post-colonial approach – one that acknowledges the importance of the entangled nature of human and non-human relationships in a shared world. Especially as a practitioner teaching within the Institute of Education, where we not only influence the next generation of young people, but the next generation of educators, challenging colonial perspectives is important, and according to articles in both the Journal of Education by Simmonds and Ajani and an article looking at the Institute of Education (London) by Unterhalter and Kadiwi, this approach is beginning to emerge in teacher education programmes.

So, before I jumped in and delivered a session involving dreamcatchers, I needed to interrogate my own practice and ask the questions: Will I deliver this activity? Who might it harm and how? If I am to deliver this activity, how should I do it? I understood that if I was to choose to deliver this activity, I would need to recognise and acknowledge the culture/community from whence it came, similar to indigenous land acknowledgement practices now commonly observed across sectors. By understanding where the original practice came from, I would be in a better position to answer the question of who it might harm and how, as well as whether there is a ‘right way’ for someone outside the culture to deliver such an activity.

If we are to challenge culturally appropriative practices, we not only need to think about whether we are acknowledging the cultures from whence they came, but also understanding the harm that might be caused by indiscriminately recreating these practices. This is particularly important when buying items, when consideration should be given to who has made the items and where profits are going. Additionally, some items or practices could be of significant spiritual or cultural importance to a community: something that is not meant to be shared outside of that community, at least without permission. If it is unclear or unknown whether permission has been granted for the use or recreation of items or practices, could this be causing harm?

After considering the questions above, my final decision on whether to make dreamcatchers as an activity was not surrounding the question of how to teach the activity with honour and respect but on how the outputs of the activity would be used after the teaching event. As Hagen notes in their essay ‘On Dreamcatchers’, dreamcatchers were traditionally made by Native American people and were designed to protect children from bad dreams. In valuing and honouring this practice through teaching about the aspects of the process of making and considering harm that might be caused to communities, I realised I needed to think about the subtle forms of harm that could be perpetuated from disseminating information but not adhering to the ultimate purpose of the dreamcatcher. If I was teaching myself or others how to value and honour other cultures, I had to follow this through. Hanging dreamcatchers inside a new building where no one dreams, would not reflect this.

On reflection, I like to think of this as considering the ‘life-cycle’ of the teaching activity, and as a personal reflective practice that is useful to my wider teaching and beyond. Many outdoor and education practitioners consider the questions posed above in their practice, with evidence of this being clear in teaching resources and trainings available. What is not so clear from the available training and literature is thinking through the ‘hidden messages’ our behaviour and resulting actions might send after the lesson is over.

In my experience of teacher training in 2017–18, I recall the focus being on the idea of what progress within a one-hour lesson looked like, and how that translated to educational progress measured by tests and exams, accumulated over an academic year. What wasn’t explored was more subtle aspects of institutional and societal norms, common vocabularies and individual positionality that would all inform not only what was being taught but how it was ‘embodied’ into daily life. Which raises the question about what other commonly accepted activities or practices might we do well to question in outdoor education in the UK, or at the very least spend time exploring their histories?

In the end, after much reading and introspection, I found another activity that would produce my intended outcome without causing harm to communities impacted by colonial activities. I gained knowledge about the Ojibwe tribe that I did not have before, and a new aspect to integrate into my own reflective practice as an educator.

The next challenge is looking to how to integrate some of these lessons into not only outdoor education in HE, but the wider sector. In addition to the primary question of whether the delivery of an activity may cause harm, I would like to offer the following critical reflection questions to other educators:

What is the ‘life-cycle’ of the activity or output? What happens after the delivery of an activity and does that continue to honour the original community/intent of the practice?