Learning about the past: exploring the opportunities and challenges of using an outdoor learning approach

Abstract

This paper examines the potential of outdoor learning for supporting children's understanding of and attitude towards history. A class of primary school children participated in an intensive experiential, residential history programme. A range of data were collected before, during and after the residential programme, and the findings suggest that the experience had a positive impact on the children's attitude towards history, and enabled many of the children to be able to recall easily highly specific factual knowledge. However the children's understanding of history as a provisional construct was not developed, as it was not a strong feature of the programme. Nor was the experiential nature of the experience fully exploited. Overall the study suggests that such a programme has the potential to support children's learning of the past, but a deeper understanding of history, drawing on the benefits of outdoor learning pedagogy needs to be planned for more explicitly.

The Effect of Outdoor Education on the Achievement and Recall Levels of Primary School Students in Social Studies Course

“…In the field of literature, studies have shown that outdoor education positively affects students' ability to remember their knowledge (Achor, Ogbeba and Samuel, 2014;Ahmad, 2014;Falk and Dierking, 1997;Harris and Bilton, 2019). In this study, it can be said that outdoor education has a positive effect on the students ' level of remembering their knowledge and this result parallels the results from similar studies in the literature.…”

Outdoor learning across the early years in Australia: Inconsistencies, challenges, and recommendations

“…Emerging research relating to ECE, and primary school children indicates that OL has convincing cognitive, academic, physical, affective, and social benefits (Harris & Bilton, 2019;Miller et al, 2022;Oberle et al, 2021). Although less researched, there are also convincing benefits for teachers implementing OL (Kuo et al, 2018;Marchant et al, 2019).…”

Foreign student guest lecture and Indonesian EFL students' motivation in cross-culture understanding course

“…The nature of learning is meaningful because students experience real or natural learning situations (Asmara et al, 2016). In contrast, the outdoor learning method's weaknesses include that student Journal of Research on English and Language Learning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License management is complicated and time-consuming (Harris & Bilton, 2019). Thus, an indoor learning strategy can be an alternative to classroom learning.…”