Teach Secondary 13.8

And yet, at a time when more young people than ever need the mental and physical nourishment that comes from being outdoors, these little city oases come at a premium. A 2021 study of green spaces in Greater London found that just 3 in 10 of the city’s 1.3 million school students have a public park within walking distance of their school. The present situation is far from ideal, then, but it is still possible to find accessible green spaces reasonably close by to most schools in England. The government advisory body, Nature England, runs a ‘Green Infrastructure Mapping Database’ (see tiny.cc/ ts138-FS1), highlighting the proximity of any given location to green space. Teachers can use this online tool to plan local excursions, viewing the extent to which the green area(s) close to themwill allow for different types of activities. Another misconception is that you need to be a trained forest school practitioner to utilise the techniques of forest school. Many of the activities I undertake with my own forest school groups are essentially based around the teaching of fairly simple skills, except in an outdoor environment. That said, it’s not enough to simply hold your class outdoors; there needs to be a specific purpose to your activity, because if nothing else, you’ll otherwise have a riot on your hands, due to the kids having nothing to do! Embrace the ‘strangeness’ One of my fondest memories as a school pupil was sitting in the garden in the grounds of my primary, reading a version of The Iliad with our teacher (though now, whenever I think of the Siege of Troy, I picture a housing estate in the east end of Glasgow). As an English teacher, I find that reading outdoors is both the most straightforward and most powerful activity we can do. A book with an outdoor or forest theme, such as Wolf Brother byMichelle Paver, is ideal. The only resources you need would be a couple of groundsheets, or some waterproof squares for each student to sit on. There’s a huge range of subjects that can be taught outdoors – perhaps even all of them, barring any tasks that specifically require a PC. A food technology lesson in bread making, for example, can be made more dynamic within a forest school environment. Damper bread dough could be mixed in the classroom, before being taken outside and wrapped around a stick for cooking over an open log fire in a local park. Art classes can be enlivened by collecting tree debris for autumn collages and incorporating bark rubbings. D&T classes could put their woodworking skills to use by sawing and chopping found wood from outdoors, while calibrating the density of different wood types and how age and weather exposure might affect their use. The class could then be made to choose which wood they should use for, say, making a mallet compared to a medallion. Even schools in heavily built-up urban areas will surely have at least one small space somewhere in their local vicinity with enough natural life to try out such activities. Taking your class to a derelict site that’s returned to nature, or a green verge, or a grassy bank might draw some strange looks from passers-by (and potentially elicit reluctance frommembers of your class), but each subsequent trip out will become easier. Sometimes, just the very ‘strangeness’ of learning in a different setting will make the teaching points easier to recall. BETTER LEARNING OUTDOORS 1 No matter how small an area might be, researchers have found that simply being in a green space is good for mental health, reducing stress levels and lowering rates of depression and anxiety. Spending 45 minutes in a local parkmight not seem like it’s having any effect at first, but the resulting benefits of repeated exposure to green space will build up over time. 2 Further research has found that being outdoors for a period of time improves the quality and duration of sleep. As such, taking your lesson outdoors might mean that at least some of your students will come to school in the morning better rested and more ready to learn. 3 For neurodiverse young people, being in a space where it’s possible to walk off frustrations and escape the hum of a modern classroom can act as a calming mechanism, reducing anxiety and stress. 4 Outdoor settings can have the effect of letting some some students shine, who might otherwise normally struggle in the classroom. Young people who have previously gone camping with a parent, for instance,might be good at getting a fire going. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gordon Cairns is an English and forest school teacher who works in a unit for secondary pupils with ASD; he also writes about education, society, cycling and football for a number of publications teachwire.net/secondary 25 O U T D O O R L E A R N I N G TEACH SECONDARY SPECIAL OUTDOOR LEARNING