The children-nature interrelationship in outdoor early childhood education: when children and bamboo co-construct a ‘secret hideaway’

ABSTRACT

The growing interest in outdoor early childhood education, even in countries with a weak environmental tradition such as Portugal, tends to be associated with a concern over the alienation between urban/Western children and nature. While educational projects in nature criticize this separation, they still maintain a bad culture vs good nature dichotomy to which we object. Resorting to such different fields as critical childhood studies, new materialisms, posthumanisms, and ecological epistemologies, we converge on the inseparability of nature/children and the material/discursive world. We then pay attention to the experiences which children and more-than-human beings shared during ethnographic research in a private outdoor kindergarten. Through photos and excerpts from the field notes, we tell stories of children and bamboo playing in a place free of adult interference, a ‘secret hideaway’ in which they co-produced their nature-cultures by being collectively with the world and from which we have much to learn.

KEYWORDS:

• children/nature
• outdoor education
• children’s play
• critical childhood studies
• new materialisms

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge the contribution of the peer reviewers whose careful and constructive feedback helped improve earlier versions of the paper.

This work was partially supported by the Portuguese Government, through the Foundation for Science and Technology, IP (FCT), under the multi-year funding awarded to CIIE [grants no. UIDB/00167/2020 and UIDP/00167/2020].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The fieldwork was conducted by one of the authors as part of an educational sciences master’s program.

2. Forest School is a practice of outdoor education inspired by the Scandinavian philosophy of friluftsliv—free air life—in which children 3 to 8 y/o play, climb trees, manage fire, and spend time in forest settings (Leather, 2018).

3. The use of the plural here indicates that even in the same field we can find a plurality of perspectives.

4. The research followed the university’s Ethical Committee guidelines, guaranteeing the anonymity, confidentiality, and privacy of the data collected from participants and their guardians. Thus, the institution’s and of all participants’ names were changed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Portuguese Government, through the Foundation for Science and Technology, IP (FCT), under the multi-year funding awarded to CIIE [UIDB/00167/2020,UIDP/00167/2020].