Transcript

INTERVIEWER

Jane, my first question is how you got in to this type of teaching and what drew you to the forest school environment as a teacher?

JANE

I think first of all it was when I trained to be a teacher and my main subject was environmental science. So I used the outdoor environment as much as possible when I first started teaching an in inner city school in Liverpool, which was quite difficult because there really wasn’t any green area around, so I had to be imaginative how I could use environmental education.

I then moved on and did other things, worked in other schools. And then I was working at a college in the south west of England. And we’d heard a lot about the early years practice in Denmark and how good it was. So we arranged a study trip for some students and we came over, it must be about 25 years ago now. The first kindergarten I went to with some students was a nature kindergarten. And I was completely bowled over. I just saw these children being so competent and confident, and the pedagogues trusting them so much in what they did.

I was also terrified, The first thing I saw was a child really high up in a tree. And the pedagogues, the educators here weren’t really concerned, didn’t seem to be taking any notice of this child who was high up in the tree. And I was screaming and shouting underneath the tree to the educators, the pedagogues, to make them aware that this child, it looked very dangerous to me. And with their typical Danish humour they said, well they don’t usually fall out of the trees. So, yes, it was a life changing experience I would say.

INTERVIEWER

What is it about taking risks like that? It’s very different to what we call health and safety practices in the UK.

JANE

Very much so. The difference I see here is the word trust. There’s a great deal of trust in the Danish society, you’re trusted to do that job, and that trust seems to filter throughout society here. So the parents trust the pedagogues and the pedagogues trust the children. The children trust the pedagogues. It’s part of that mind set, this trust that there is in society here, and the children learn how to take risks and they learn how to assess risks. What I saw in the UK before moving here was really that we disabled children because we didn’t trust then. It was a case of get down, you’ll fall, don’t do that you’ll cut yourself. Always pre-proposing that they’re incompetent. Whereas here I feel that the children are treated as competent. And those competencies are developed by the pedagogues in the kindergartens.

INTERVIEWER

So, in your view, what are the goals of this type of early years education in Denmark in terms of outcomes of that kind of education?

JANE

Those who work in nature kindergartens are very committed though to the children being outside every day all year round. Not necessarily all day, but a part, a large part of every day all year round. And developing those competencies and skills and self-awareness that actually being outdoor gives more than being indoors.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think the outdoors gives that kind of confidence more than being in the indoors classroom?

JANE

I think one thing I would stress is that there’s a lot of physical work outside, a lot of physical development, a lot of social and emotion development outside where children are being outdoors and walking over uneven terrain and swinging in branches of trees. And this develops their sensory development a lot. And from recent research it looks like that we really need that all-round sensory development if we’re going to be able to learn at school, to read, write, do mathematics, all those sorts of things, it’s really important that we have that sensory development.

INTERVIEWER

Can you talk a bit about how the pedagogue would plan the forest school session or the day in the forest school?

JANE

When they go outside it could be something that’s planned, so rather adult-led in what they’re doing, where the pedagogues have decided, for example, in a kindergarten that’s right by the fjord they might have planned, right this is the time we’re going to get all the waders and safety vests on. And groups of children are going to go into the water to maybe look for shrimps or whatever there is in the water. And that would be a planned thing.

More often than not, it’s child led. They go outside and the children find their own things. They want to swing. They want to slide. They want to run around. They want to dig. And then maybe at lunchtime, it may be a time where they’ve lit the fire outside and they’re cooking outside.

Children are naturally inquisitive and want to find out how things work and what things are and there’s a wealth of things outdoors for children who are inquisitive. Some children like different things. Some children maybe like, not climbing, but they like digging or they like transporting, they like moving things from one area to another. So individual children’s needs can be taken into account in the outdoors as well.

INTERVIEWER

That’s really interesting, thinking about the early years understanding of schemas. How is that observed in the forest school? You talked about climbing, about digging.

JANE

Yes. I mean you see all the schemas in the outdoor environment because everything is there ready for children to develop those schemas and move on and work things out. There’s so much chance for transporting things, for going round things and under things and climbing things. There’s just every possibility I think outdoors.

INTERVIEWER

Can you talk about the difference between a teacher and a pedagogue, because you’ve used that word a few times, and the meaning of the word pedagogue?

JANE

In Denmark there are teachers and they teach in the mainstream schools, which is from six years to 16 years. And the pedagogues work around everything else I would say. They work in early years. They work also in the school supporting the teachers with the younger children. They work in special needs. They work with out-of-school care. They work with teenagers. They work with adults. They work with families. And they also work with the elderly.

Interviewer:

And what kind of knowledge and skills do pedagogues need that is different to what a teacher does?

JANE

I think the main role that a pedagogue has is supporting the child holistically. They’re not just looking at their cognitive development, for example, or what they’re learning as such. They really firstly want to create a safe environment where the children can thrive and develop in creatively stimulating surroundings.

INTERVIEWER

If you’re a forest school or an outdoor kindergarten pedagogue, isn’t it stressful to see children taking risks? You talked about your own shock at seeing a child going up a tree. I would imagine that they have to be very calm about seeing children taking risks.

JANE

The pedagogue training is now three and a half year Bachelor level training. And a lot of the training first of all is about the training pedagogues own self-awareness. So they go away, for example, kayaking or abseiling. They learn about their own risk taking and their own views about risk.

INTERVIEWER

Yes, if you become aware of your own sense of risk then you’re more able to assess a child’s risk-taking behaviour. With children taking these risks in an outdoor environment, in your experience has anything ever really bad happened to a child, anything physically traumatic to a child in these environments?

JANE

Well again talking to the lead pedagogue at the kindergarten that’s right by the fjord was asked what’s the worst accident that’s happened. And he said, well in his 17 years of working there he’s only ever had to take a child to hospital once. And that was because a parent backed their car up and ran over a child’s foot.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think the outdoor environment, the outdoor classroom, is more gender neutral than the indoor school environment?

JANE

Yes, definitely, definitely.

INTERVIEWER

Why is that, do you think?

JANE

I think because the outdoor environment is natural. There are trees. There are pieces of wood. There’s soil. There’s sand. There’s hammocks. There’s all those sorts of things. There’s nothing saying this is boy, this is girl. It’s there for everyone and the children use it in their own way. I think outdoors, it’s neutral.

I think the outdoor environment is so rich in what’s out there for the children to use and they use their imaginations rather than picking up something that’s been designed to be used in a certain way. Outside, the tree trunk could be a tree trunk or it could be an aeroplane or it could be a boat in the middle of the ocean. It can be anything that the child imagines it to be.

INTERVIEWER

So, if one of our students wants to become a forest school pedagogue, you talked about kind of assessing their own sense of risk. But how else would a student prepare to enter this kind of professional area?

JANE

Well obviously you have to like the outdoors, whatever the weather. You have to be playful and creative and imaginative. You have to have many competencies. You have to have knowledge about plants and trees and creepy crawlies and birds. But you don’t have to have a PhD in that. There are many ways that we can find things out. Quite often we find things in the forest with the children and we don’t know what they are. So we have to maybe get our iPad out, or we go back to the kindergarten and get the reference books out. Children love finding out. And the pedagogues help them. They don’t tell them what things are. We discover things together. I would say to practitioners, I’d say take the risk and try it, go outside. Take small steps. Don’t try and become a Danish Nature Kindergarten overnight, it’s not possible. You have to bear in mind the culture and environment that you’re working in. So what’s OK for Denmark maybe isn’t OK in Australia or the UK or America. So you have to think about your own culture and what’s accepted and what’s not accepted.

You also have to work with parents because the parents need to understand that you are also taking their child very seriously and their welfare seriously. You need to have the parents on your side so that they know that you are going to care for them, when they’re outside they’re not going to fall out of a tree or cut their finger off or, yes, be bitten by a snake or whatever it might be in your country. I have many people come from Australia or China or America, the UK, wherever, and when we talk at the end of each day’s session of being out in a kindergarten, I ask them, so what could you get from, what have you got from today? Is there anything there you could take back and develop in your practice? And it’s generally the things of ... like the trust, like the stepping back more often than you step in. So you wait and see if children can do something by themselves before you start doing it for them. The idea of looking at a child holistically and individually and seeing them as unique and competent in their own right.