Balancing Academic Focus and Student Exploration when Learning Outdoors

A recent educational outdoor experience (I’ll call field experience) with a homeschooled family, prompted me to reflect on the balance between academic focus and student-exploration when teaching outdoors. Yes, some balance of the two is necessary. In the extreme case of too explicit of academic focus, why be outdoors at all and not just at school in desks? Why all the logistics and planning to transport kids to some outdoor location then sit them at a picnic table to complete worksheets about some science-based academic standard, when you could do that all at school? In the other extreme, if you ‘let kids run free’ for the entirety of the field experience, they’ll have fun and make discoveries, but they will likely miss the intentional connections to curriculum that made the trip academically justifiable. So, when you take kids to learn outdoors, what is the right balance between academic focus and student-exploration and how can the instructor support such a balance?

In my experience, the way to think about this balance isn’t so much as a mixing of the two, but more of a time sequence. Here’s what I’ve found works well.

1. Prior to the field experience, formal academic focus should be the priority. Students should engage in academic activities that set them up to make explicit academic connections when they go to the field.
2. Then, when in the field, emphasis should be on student-exploration, and priority should be given to fostering children’s wonder, discovery, and inquiry about nature. Importantly, the instructor plays a vital role in in the field in helping refine student-exploration so it leads to academic connections. One major role of the instructor in the field is to arrange an outdoor experience that will likely lead to an encounter with the academic material that was previously focused on. For example, if you had academically focused on animals taking advantage of their habitats to survive, you may want to take children to a specific area that might have downed trees from a gnawing beaver so as to naturally lead kids to make their own nature to academic connections. Another major role of the instructor in the field needs to be expertly observing the kids engaging in the environment and noticing when there is an opportunity to highlight a child’s nature-to-academic connection, or prompt children to make such connections.
3. Finally, after the field experience, attention should shift back to academic focus in the form of documentation, which will help children formally connect their experiences in the outdoors to the academic topic they are learning about.

So, whether you’re a homeschooled family, related to the public- or private-school sector, or even just a parent considering how to make the most of an outdoor opportunity, consider this balance between formal academic focus and student-centered exploration in the wild Utah outdoors.

This is Dr. Joseph Kozlowski and I am Wild about Outdoor Education in Utah!

Credits:

Images: Courtesy & Copyright Joseph Kozlowski, Photographer, Used by Permission
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright © Kevin Colver, https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections/kevin-colver and including contributions from Anderson, Howe and Wakeman
Text:     Joseph Kozlowski, Edith Bowen Laboratory School, Utah State University https://edithbowen.usu.edu/
Additional Reading Links: Joseph Kozlowski & Lyle Bingham

Additional Reading:

Joseph (Joey) Kozlowski’s pieces on Wild About Utah:

Experiential Education Archives, Wild About Utah https://wildaboututah.org/tag/experiential-education/