Teaching the primary curriculum outdoors

Abstract

The organisation Learning through Landscapes has a long and illustrious history of supporting schools using outdoor contexts for teaching. They have previously self-published valuable teaching resources as well as offering continuing professional development and advice on the development of school grounds, but this volume published by SAGE with a title that includes ‘teaching the curriculum’ will potentially reach more teachers who are not already familiar with their work. Teachers new to taking learning outside may not have come across the organisation, and many of these may be focused on ‘the curriculum’ rather than ‘the outdoors’. As such, it represents a great contribution to the growing body of work that is looking to support teachers not already engaged with teaching outdoors to take their first steps towards embedding outdoor learning as part of their regular teaching practices. Embedding outdoor learning within school’s regular curricular planning was identified as a key enabler in the Natural Connections Demonstration project (Waite et al., 2016)