Sensory-ethnographic observations at three nature kindergartens

ABSTRACT

Outdoor, and in particular, nature-based pedagogies are distinctive in that the environments where practice is situated, afford opportunities for pedagogues to encourage children to foreground meaning making through engagement with nature’s sensory and kinesthetic cues. Observational methods, however, have rarely used approaches sympathetic to the dynamism of these pedagogical environments. Limitations in efficacy and practicality of existing methods highlight the potential for an alternative approach responsive to the demands of complex settings, including the under-researched field of nature kindergartens. This paper reports the development of a sensory-ethnographic observation protocol used to document three case studies of nature kindergartens in Denmark, Finland and Scotland during a 16-month, season-round data collection. A methodological innovation that explicitly accounts for habitual, non-verbal and situated dimensions serves as a useful means for a sole researcher to build a multi-layered description of the vitality, verve and flux in each case’s pedagogical relations with their nature environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Sensory ethnography
• observation
• nature kindergarten
• early-childhood education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

C. L. Nugent http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9845-5120

Notes

1. A target child was selected and observed at the Finnish case for one day using scan intervals each of 15 and also 30 min to satisfy my concern that the 30-minute interval compromised comprehensive capture. The method, however, did not support building a holistic picture nor contribute beyond a focused appraisal of one child.

2. Schedules varied in the number of scan windows recorded, dependent on the length of a day’s session as determined by the seasonal context. The shortest day’s session was 2.5 h (4 scans) at the Finnish case in winter; the longest was in the Danish spring when I was outdoors with the group for 6 h (12 scans) (MacQuarrie, Nugent, and Warden 2015).

3. The Eyjafjallajökull eruption and its ash cloud extended the spring visit by 11 days, and while I spent many of these extra days at the nature kindergarten, I did not conduct observation sessions. Had I not been caught in Finland, there would have been 14 days in total spent at the Finnish case.

4. Petrichor is the characteristic odour produced by rainfall on to dusty, dry earth that releases oils from the earth to scent the air (Bear and Thomas 1964).This word’s origins derive from the Greek ‘petra’ meaning stone and ‘ichor’, the ethereal blood of the Gods in Greek mythology. Originally known as the Nature of Argillaceous Odour, the smell was renamed in 1964 by two Australian scientists, Joy Bear and Richard Thomas, following their work on the physical mechanism of this phenomenon.