Teaching Outdoors
Teaching and learning outside in the natural world as part of everyday school education is not an entirely new concept in Switzerland, but it has only been practiced in a haphazard way up until now. Our project aims to join the dots and launch a long-term effort to establish the practice in the Swiss school system. This amounts to a small paradigm shift in how teaching and learning is practised in Switzerland.
We are convinced that moving part of the schooling outside yields so many benefits – not just for the kids, but also for the teachers and the wider community – that it should be introduced widely in Switzerland. In order to be effective in a systemic way, the project aims to reach out to various stakeholders with appropriate support tools. We support teachers in their professional development and equip them with the necessary competencies to teach all the school subjects outside – with a teaching manual that helps them to teach their normal school curricula outdoors with little effort and with hands-on courses where they get personal experience of how teaching and learning out in nature really works. We coach and advise entire schools that want to integrate learning outside into the cultural DNA of their school. We work together with teacher training institutions to help them acquire the competencies needed to integrate udeskole into their institution’s training curricula. We work with researchers to build the evidence base for learning outside – an important tool to legitimise this highly effective way of learning in the wider community and towards politicians and local authorities (which regulate schools in Switzerland). We work with parents and headmasters to gain their important backing for learning out in nature.