Comparing conceptual text and documenting photos. Researching Outdoor Education in the Context of Reichwein’s Progressive Teaching and Rousseau’s Émile

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the historic ideas and practice of outdoor education, as developed in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, and realized by Adolf Reichwein's rural teaching practice. We aimed at developing a comprehensive research design, triangulating different qualitative data (text and photos). In the paper, we explore how the idea of place-based outdoor education unfolded in Rousseaús Émile, and how Adolf Reichwein, in rural Tiefensee, enacted the practice of place-based outdoor education. We also investigate how to correlate different types of qualitative data (conceptual text and documentary photos). We show that it is possible to develop a research language, revealing how a philosophy of education can be enacted as educational practice, and our analysis demonstrates that Rousseaús and Reichwein’s works functioned as precursors for outdoor education and educational concepts, that activate the cognitive, affective, and motoric domains.

KEYWORDS:

• Outdoor education
• place-based education
• rural education
• text analysis
• photo analysis
• triangulation
• Rousseau
• Reichwein

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Tobias Christoph Werler http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8922-0274

Notes

1 Reichwein and Hahn were familiar with each other’s work through the Abraham Lincoln Foundation (Abraham Lincoln Stiftung, ALS, 1927–1934) (Richardson 2000). The ALS was a German foundation, financed by the American Rockefeller Foundation, aimed at educational reform and the democratization of the ill-fated Weimar Republic.

2 Rousseau imagined Èmile as a modern Robinson Crusoe, who had to learn to cope with life on his own. Therefore, the book Robinson Crusoe, was the only book that Èmile could read. According to Rousseau, the book ‘furnishes the finest of treatises on education according to nature‘ (EOE, 81).