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Introduction and guidance

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

This free badged course, Young children, the outdoors and nature, lasts 24 hours and is comprised of eight sessions. You can work through the course at your own pace. The eight sessions are linked to ensure a logical flow through the course. They are:

Taken for granted practices with young children and the outdoors
The missing babies
Friedrich Froebel: a mover and shaker of his day
Challenges, risks and opportunities
Developing outdoor provision for babies and young children
Being outdoors or being in nature
Growing Up Green
Moving forwards and answering the big questions

Each session should take you around 3 hours. There are a number of activities throughout the course where you are asked to note down your response. A text box is provided for you to do this, however if you would prefer to record your answers in another way that is fine.

At the end of each session there is also a quiz to help you check your understanding. And, if you want to receive a formal statement of participation, at the end of Sessions 4 and 8 there is a quiz which you need to pass.

After completing this course, you should be able to:

understand how to develop outdoor opportunities for babies and toddlers
consider how to develop outdoor opportunities in practice
describe and discuss some of the key aspects of Friedrich Froebel’s principles and how they inform ideas about outdoor play
identify the barriers to babies and toddlers engaging with the outdoors and nature and consider how to overcome these barriers.

Moving around the course

In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each session, you will find a link to the next session. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Full course description’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course.

It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.

The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey. Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.

The development of this course has been supported by The Froebel Trust who have funded Dr Joanne Josephidou and Dr Nicola Kemp to carry out their research into babies’ and toddlers’ engagement with the outdoors.

What is a badged course?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

While studying Young children, the outdoors and nature you have the option to work towards gaining a digital badge.

Badged courses are a key part of The Open University’s mission to promote the educational well-being of the community. The courses also provide another way of helping you to progress from informal to formal learning.

Completing a course will require about 24 hours of study time. However, you can study the course at any time and at a pace to suit you.

Badged courses are available on The Open University’s OpenLearn website and do not cost anything to study. They differ from Open University courses because you do not receive support from a tutor, but you do get useful feedback from the interactive quizzes.

What is a badge?

Digital badges are a new way of demonstrating online that you have gained a skill. Colleges and universities are working with employers and other organisations to develop open badges that help learners gain recognition for their skills, and support employers to identify the right candidate for a job.

Badges demonstrate your work and achievement on the course. You can share your achievement with friends, family and employers, and on social media. Badges are a great motivation, helping you to reach the end of the course. Gaining a badge often boosts confidence in the skills and abilities that underpin successful study. So, completing this course could encourage you to think about taking other courses.

How to get a badge

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Getting a badge is straightforward! Here’s what you have to do:

read each session of the course
score 50% or more in the two badge quizzes in Session 4 and Session 8

For all the quizzes, you can have three attempts at most of the questions (for true or false type questions you usually only get one attempt). If you get the answer right first time you will get more marks than for a correct answer the second or third time. Therefore, please be aware that for the two badge quizzes it is possible to get all the questions right but not score 50% and be eligible for the badge on that attempt. If one of your answers is incorrect you will often receive helpful feedback and suggestions about how to work out the correct answer.

For the badge quizzes, if you’re not successful in getting 50% the first time, after 24 hours you can attempt the whole quiz, and come back as many times as you like.

We hope that as many people as possible will gain an Open University badge – so you should see getting a badge as an opportunity to reflect on what you have learned rather than as a test.

If you need more guidance on getting a badge and what you can do with it, take a look at the OpenLearn FAQs. When you gain your badge you will receive an email to notify you and you will be able to view and manage all your badges in My OpenLearn within 24 hours of completing the criteria to gain a badge.

Get started with Session 1.

Introduction

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Do you remember being outside when you were very little? Were you allowed to make mud pies? Perhaps you were fascinated by mini-beasts – or even fearful of them! Maybe you were left outside in your pram to sleep?

Whatever choices your parents and carers made to support your engagement with the outdoors, or nature, will depend very much on how old you are and your cultural and geographical background. Look for example at Figure 1: this is a photo of a baby cage – an invention from the early twentieth century to ensure that babies who lived in homes without gardens were able to access the outdoors. Even Eleanor Roosevelt, who was to become FLOTUS (the First Lady of the United States), revealed in her autobiography that she used one to let her baby get fresh air.

Figure 1 A baby cage

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A black-and-white photograph of a baby in a cage next to a window, with the mother looking on.

Figure 1 A baby cage

Can you imagine these being installed today? And if not – why would that be? You may have been really shocked to see this picture, a reaction which demonstrates how assumptions about what is good and right for young children are informed by the historical and cultural context.

You are going to look more closely at this idea of context in the very first session of this course which focuses particularly on the youngest age group, often called ‘Babies and Toddlers’ (birth to two years old). One of the ways you will do this is by first looking at some important voices from history who spoke about young children’s engagement with the outdoors. Then you will examine cultural differences to approaches with young children such as those in Scandinavia and New Zealand. You will think about what can be discovered in research literature about different practices and about different benefits to young children.

To begin with, take a few minutes to listen to the following audio in which Joanne Josephidou, Session 1 author, introduces the content.

Download this audio clip.Audio player: yon_1_s1_audio.mp3

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Transcript

JOANNE JOSEPHIDOU: Approximately, 385,000 babies are born every single day. Each will have their own trajectory dictated predominantly by where in the world they are born, who their parents are, and what access they have to early childhood education and care.

When a baby is born, there is often a wealth of friends and family who are ready to offer advice and guidance to the new parent on the best way to care for the young child. That advice is informed by family practices and society's expectations.

Once the child enters a more formal care setting, advice continues to abound. It is often dictated by policy, but can still be informed by books, family practices, and cultural expectations. So it's important that we continually challenge our own assumptions about what is best for babies and toddlers, and that we know where our beliefs about best practices come from.

In this very first session, this is what we invite you to do by considering both historical practices concerning very young children and the outdoors and different practices that are happening in diverse, geographical, and cultural contexts. For example, you will be able to hear from Dr Maria Cooper from the University of Auckland, along with Shirlene, an early childhood education leader in New Zealand, discussing some of the cultural practices which inform young children's engagement with the outdoors and nature in their context.

End transcript

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By the end of this session, you should be able to:

list some key voices from the past who spoke about young children’s engagement with the outdoors and nature
briefly outline some cultural practices of young children’s engagement with the outdoors and nature
list some of the messages from research about why being outdoors benefits young children and about current practices with young children in the outdoors.

1 Looking back and looking around

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

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A photograph of a child looking at their reflection in a puddle.

The recognition that children benefit from being outdoors has been around for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years. Jay Griffiths in her book Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape (2013) describes how:

For almost all of human history … This is how childhood thrives, cheek to cheek with the kind and thriving wildness, not in the modified and lustreless indoor life which would sterilize every drop of water and suffocate the air itself.

(Griffiths, 2013, p. 123)

The idea that simply ‘being’ outdoors in a natural environment is good for babies and toddlers has long roots and is recognised in the writing of various early childhood pioneers. The next section includes a timeline of some key thinkers and their ideas about young children’s engagement with nature and the outdoors.

1.1 Voices from the past

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Those who work with, and study, young children often look backwards to think about their practice today. Of course, they are interested in innovation and new ideas, but taken-for-granted ideas in current practice are often informed by views that were thought to be quite revolutionary at the time that they were expressed. Therefore, it is important to examine these ideas and consider how they can support an understanding of present-day pedagogy. The term pedagogy is used here to mean how adults teach, care for and work with young children. The timeline at the link below sets out key voices of the past who had something important to say about young children, the outdoors and nature.

Open the following link in a new tab or window so you can easily find your way back to the course:

Timeline of key thinkers

The voice most important to this course is Friedrich Froebel. You will note his ideas woven throughout each session and then, in Session 3, you will be able to read in more depth about his work, and about its relevance today.

1.2 Voices from the present

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In addition to looking backwards to note perspectives and practices from the past, it is also important to look around and see how practitioners are caring for young children in other cultural contexts. This is exactly what this section intends to do.

First you are going to be introduced to Maria Cooper and Shirlene Murphy who are based in Auckland, New Zealand. As you watch the videos explaining cultural practices in their context, you will note they use some terminology (Māori) that may be unfamiliar to you. Listed in Table 1 below are the ideas they include, along with their definition.

Table _unit2.1.1 Table 1 Māori terminology that informs practice with young children
Māori terminology	Meaning in English
Mana	prestige, power, strength
Kaitiakitanga	guardianship, environmental stewardship
Kaitiaki	guardian, protector
Whenua	land
Papatūānuku	mother earth

Activity _unit2.1.1 Activity 1 Thinking about cultural practices in New Zealand

Timing: Allow about 20 minutes

In the first video Maria is responding to the question: Can you describe some of the cultural practices which inform young children’s engagement with the outdoors and nature in New Zealand?

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_s1_maria_q1.mp4

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Transcript

MARIA COOPER

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

My name is Maria Cooper. I'm a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Before I explain a few Maori concepts that teachers might look to to support infant's and toddler's engagement in the outdoors, I'll just share a little bit about our context so that there is an understanding of where these ideas come from.

So New Zealand itself, is a small island nation. We have about 5 million people now. It's a very multi-ethnic society, so there's a lot of diversity. We have a founding document called the Treaty of Waitangi. And this treaty recognises the Maori people as our Indigenous community and then everyone else as our special partners to this treaty.

So these ideas underpin our national early childhood curriculum, Te Whariki, which we would describe as being bicultural and bilingual in nature. This means that any teaching practices guided by Te Whariki are already informed by both Maori and Western or English concepts, including this big idea that we are all interconnected and interdependent with the people, places, and things in our world. And because of this view, we all have unique responsibilities to each one of these things.

So in terms of some Maori cultural concepts that can support infant's and toddler's engagement with the outdoors and making sense of what's happening out there as well, I'll share a few. And I just want to say that the way that these concepts come together is they're all about nurturing children's wellbeing and really strengthening the power within children.

So the first one that is very important to our Te Whariki early childhood curriculum, it's also a very centralising concept through a Maori worldview is this notion of mana. So mana refers to one's prestige. It's one's spiritual power and this quality of influence that one might have over others. And Maori believe that all children are born with a sense of mana inherited from their ancestors. So it has a very special significance in the Maori world.

And the responsibility of the adult or the teacher and the early childhood service is to nurture this mana, to strengthen it, and to do things that encourage children to see themselves as capable and competent. So the reason why I mentioned this concept of mana, when we talk about the outdoors with infants and toddlers, is because mana can be associated with our relationship with the land. And this is a term we call mana whenua.

So whenua means land. And mana whenua is the identity and sense of belonging that is associated with place. So a traditional example here that illustrates this idea is when Maori babies are born, the umbilical cord and the placenta is buried in the land to reconnect them to their ancestors. And this practice is said to nurture the child's spiritual unity with the land, its people, and the wider universe. So this practice continues today as well.

End transcript

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In the next video, Shirlene was asked: How do you view the role of the adult in this practice?

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_s1_shirlene_q2.mp4

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Transcript

SHIRLEY MURPHY

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

Yes, my name is Shirline Murphy, and I am a early childhood educator, have been for the past 30 years. And particularly, my particular interest and focus is working with infants and toddlers at a community based centre in Auckland city.

So some examples of that-- it does require, I suppose, teachers to really connect to the outdoors themselves. And so that's been needed to be quite a shift in our thinking and what the actual benefits of being outdoors with infants and toddlers can be for teachers, and particularly with that age group where a lot of the focus is on their routines and ensuring that those everyday routines are being met. And those can sometimes get in the way of us seeing the value of that outdoor space.

So we recently, as a team, spent a day of professional learning out in our park as staff where we were encouraged to connect with being outdoors as adults and what this might look and feel like for children. So we wanted to be able to encourage teachers to really see the magic in it themselves and to feel the special-- what might be special for these children while they're outdoors. So we had to really try and put ourselves into that way of thinking.

And so we spent a whole day where we learnt around those Maori concepts that Maria talked about. We did-- so the water is another unique-- something that, in the Maori worldview, the water has real spiritual significance. And so in our park, we found the waters. And we learnt the stories behind the significance of these streams and what they mean for Maori people to the extent where Maori will use water to bless special treasures, pounamu or things like that. And so they have healing powers.

So as staff, we learnt about that. We learnt about the people who-- the tribe-- we call it the Iwi, but it's a tribe that have guardianship on that land. What are their stories? What are their histories that we want to pass on to them? So as staff, we needed to know those so that when we going back out-- when we did go back out after doing that day, it opened up-- it changed the way that we took children out into the park.

One example is there was a particular hill where we learned a story about-- back in the days, it was where people came together to fight. So it was when the land wars were on. And so this particular hill was named Pukekohe, which means it's sour. It doesn't have a good energy to it. And so what we learnt on that day was, please keep bringing the children out here to change that energy and that space.

And so that is our focus now. We want to change the energy and bring happiness to this hill. And so it's just even learning about those things of the power of what we can do out there with the children.

End transcript

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As you listen to their discussion, you may like to make some points of the things you found most interesting.

A Learning journal has been created to accompany this course. If you would like to use it to record your answers to activities, download it now and save it somewhere so you can access it and add to it throughout the course. Anything you write in the Learning journal will only be visible to you.

Learning journal

In case you would rather record your notes in a different way, text boxes have been added to every activity. Again, your notes will only be visible to you.

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Discussion

There may have been many points you found interesting when listening to Maria and Shirlene talking. Perhaps you noted the concept of Kaitiakitanga (guardianship or stewardship).

Very young children are not only seen as competent and capable in this context but it also seems that they have responsibilities towards the outdoor environment from a very young age. For example, they have a responsibility to impact on the ‘sour’ ambience of the hill that Shirlene describes.

1.3 Bad clothing or bad weather?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

This section will consider different cultural contexts – that of Norway and Denmark. First, watch this short video ‘Kindergarten – The Nordic Way’ where a child recounts the sensations, emotions and practices experienced for some young children in one Norwegian kindergarten. As you watch, consider the factors that allow this kind of pedagogy. Would you see this in your own cultural context and if not why not? For example, you may want to consider health and safety rules and whether this kind of practice would be allowed. Others may wonder if children in their care would have appropriate clothing – or indeed if the adults would also.

Kindergarten – The Nordic Way. (The Open University is not responsible for external content.)

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Activity _unit2.1.2 Activity 2 Parenting in Denmark

Timing: Allow about 10 minutes

You are now going to read a description of Elisabeth’s (name anonymised) experiences when she spent some time living in Denmark as a new parent. Her country of origin was England so she was interested to compare parenting practices between the two countries. Read her comments and then have a go at answering the questions below; you can also find them in your Learning journal (which you may have downloaded in Activity 1).

At first I imagined that parenting styles would be very similar to those I was used to, however, there were some key differences, some of which I had difficulty getting used to and there was certainly a pressure to parent in a ‘certain Danish way’. Some of this was around the use of dummies and when to stop breastfeeding but there was also an expectation that young babies would sleep outside during the day even in very cold temperatures. Most apartment blocks in Copenhagen were designed with spaces for prams outside so that babies can sleep there. If I didn’t put my daughter outside, someone would knock on my door to check everything was okay. It really is a whole different approach. My mum and my friend back in England, who was a health visitor, were both very scared that my children would get cold if I left them to sleep outside. But to be honest the Danes all have these lovely big buggies and lovely baby duvets, so they were well set up for their cultural norm in the freezing winters!

Now have a go at answering these questions:

Why do you think that parenting attitudes to letting babies sleep outside may differ in different cultural contexts?
Parents depend on health professionals for advice to help them look after their children in the best way. Why might this professional advice differ if offered by a professional in different cultural contexts?
If you were in Elisabeth’s position what do you think you would do? Why?

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Discussion

You may have responded to these questions in a variety of ways. For example, you may think about air pollution or how practices which are considered safe in one context may not be in another. In some contexts, parents or carers would worry about ‘stranger danger’, or insects and other animals. The professional advice given to parents of new babies will be very much informed by context and it is important to note that practices cannot be easily ‘cut and pasted’ from one context to another. However, it is useful to look at other practices to see what we can learn from them. Elisabeth decided to wrap herself up as warm as her daughter and sit outside with her coffee while her daughter slept. When she moved back to England, she also did this with her subsequent children as she could see the benefits; and you will look at these benefits more closely in the next section.

2 Rich with potential

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Figure _unit2.2.1 A baby lying on their tummy in the grass.

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A baby lying on their tummy in the grass.

This section will consider in more detail the actual benefits for young children of being outdoors. There is evidence that the benefits can be physical, psychological, social and emotional. Bento and Dias (2017), who are writing in the context of Portugal, suggest that the ‘open and constantly changing’ nature of the outdoors is rich with potential for learning and developing. In addition to the impact on children’s cognitive development, they outline other benefits to include:

… being exposed to sunlight, natural elements, and open air, which contributes to bone development, stronger immune system…and higher levels of attention and well-being.

(Bento and Dias, 2017, p. 157)

They offer a contrasting view of the indoor environment which they describe as one where young children ‘spend long periods in closed environments, more exposed to disease contamination and saturated air’ (p. 158). This is an interesting point to bear in mind although alarm in the media about high levels of pollution outdoors impacting negatively on young children’s health cannot be ignored. At the same time, writers like Mendes et al. (2014) remind us that there can often be much higher concentrations of bacteria within an Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) setting than outside and of course world events such as the pandemic caused by COVID-19 has led to a renewed interest in using the outdoors as a protective factor against spreading disease. Research offers evidence in several areas that are worth considering if thinking of the benefits for young children to be outdoors in nature. These include evidence about the positive impact of:

sleeping outdoors
natural light
green spaces.

2.1 Sleeping outdoors

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

The outdoors has long been considered as an ideal environment for babies to sleep in. For example, in Northern Finland, the cultural value families place on being outdoors in nature, means that sleeping outdoors, whether in the home or ECEC setting, is understood to be an important part of good childcare, similar to the narrative heard around breastfeeding elsewhere (Tourula et al., 2013). The practice of babies sleeping outside originated in public health concerns of many countries in the early twentieth century. There was an urgent need to prevent disease and therefore mothers were encouraged to let their babies sleep outside. This was because the outdoors was associated with fresh air, sunlight and good health.

One important proponent of this was Frederic Truby King (1858–1938). Truby King was a doctor and baby care guru, based in New Zealand. He wrote an internationally influential childcare manual called Feeding and Care of Baby (1913). Some of his views around routines and discipline have fallen out of favour and may appear very rigid and unkind to modern day parents. However, his views which encouraged parents (here the mother) to take their young child outdoors is echoed in present-day voices. His writing demonstrates how once this practice was seen as common. He argued that ‘the more a baby is out in the open air, the better he will thrive’ (1913, p. 92) and you can see a relevant page from his famous manual in Figure 2.

Figure _unit2.2.2 Figure 2 A page from Truby King’s childcare manual exhorting the benefits of fresh air and sunshine

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An extract from a book with the following text: General hygiene. Pure air and sunshine. The question as to whether the injury done by living in closed rooms is mainly a physical or a chemical effect does not concern us here. Throughout this section I assume for the sake of simplicity that the damage is toxic. Keep the baby in the open air as much as possible. A sun-bath does not stop at the surface - radiant energy penetrates the body and stimulates the vital processes. When the baby is in the house, let the room (whether bedroom or sitting room) have an ample current of pure cool outside air flowing through it all the time. Keep baby out of direct line of draught, but don’t be frightened of the air being cold. Pure cold air is invigorating and prevents ‘catching cold’. Warm stuffy air is poisonous and devitalising, and makes babies liable to ‘catch cold’ when taken out in the open. There is no danger, but actual safety, in free-flowing night air. N.B. At the Karitane Harris Hospital the babies live out of doors all day, and a broad stream of pure old outside air flows through the sleeping rooms all night long: tiny, delicate babies, after a week or more of gradual habituation, sleep well, grow and flourish in rooms where the temperature may sometimes fall almost to freezing point. Of course the babies are properly clothed and covered …

Figure 2 A page from Truby King’s childcare manual exhorting the benefits of fresh air and sunshine

In a different context, the idea of thriving in the outdoors was also the thinking behind Margaret McMillan’s ‘baby camp’ set up in Deptford, London in 1914 for the youngest children from the London slums because of a ‘recognition that many working class homes were not capable of providing adequately for their young children’ (Read, 2012, p. 17). In present-day practice, Lin Day, the founder of Baby Sensory, argues that ‘Fresh air …can have a positive impact on brain function, mood and well-being’ (2019, p. 1), drawing evidence from research in biology and medicine to make this claim.

2.2 Natural light

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Although many of Truby King’s views have fallen out of favour, his ideas around exposing young children to natural light find evidence in twenty-first-century research. For example, Harrison carried out a study in 2004, discovering that exposure to natural light can impact positively on babies’ sleep patterns, their vision and the development of their young bones.

This study was carried out with 56 babies and their parents in the UK. She recruited the parents in a baby show exhibition and asked them to keep a diary recording their babies’ sleep and to permit the babies, who were only between six and twelve weeks old, to wear an activity and light monitor on their ankle. She found that ‘Babies who slept well at night were exposed to significantly more light in the early afternoon period’ (Harrison, 2004, p. 345).

2.3 Green spaces

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

There is also evidence that being in a ‘green space’ has benefits to young children. The term ‘green space’ is used to describe spaces with natural elements. You will look more closely at definitions of natural environments in Session 6. In a study by Bijnens et al. (2020) they describe green spaces as spaces ‘covered partly by grass, trees, or other vegetation, … includ[ing] city parks, community gardens, sports fields, as well as natural and forested areas in rural environments’ (p. 3).

This team were working on part of a longitudinal birth cohort study of twins in Belgium involving 620 children. Their findings suggest that ‘residential green space may be beneficial for the intellectual and the behavioral development of children living in urban areas’ (p. 14). They recommend that policy makers take these findings into consideration when engaging in urban planning to ‘create an optimal environment for children to develop their full potential’ (p. 14).

3 Key messages

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

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A child enjoying a swing.

The previous section considered what evidence research can offer about the benefits for young children of being outdoors and in nature. Research can also support an understanding of what is happening in practice internationally. Three key messages emerge from this kind of research:

The outdoors can offer possibilities not found indoors.
Knowledgeable adults are needed.
The outdoors is a space for physical activity.

3.1 Message 1: The outdoors can offer possibilities not found indoors

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

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A child reaching for a leaf.

Natural features appear to be very important in encouraging rich opportunities, as does access to diverse local ecosystems (Moore and Cosco, 2014). A natural environment supports children to engage in multisensory ways different to those available indoors. Practitioners in Colorado found that the outdoors presents wonderful opportunities for babies to learn about nature as they ‘used their eyes, hands, feet, mouths and entire bodies to experience the minutiae’ (Hall et al., 2014, p. 198).

3.2 Message 2: Knowledgeable adults are needed

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

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A child learning to walk on the grass.

The role the adult plays when supporting young children outside is critical. It is up to them whether babies and toddlers get to go outside and whether their experiences outdoors are positive and enjoyable. Important, too, is the way adults observe children to note their engagement with the outdoor opportunities. There are some concerns that practitioners choose not to engage actively with the children’s learning outdoors considering instead that if the children are outside, they are benefiting so there is no need to do anything else! Dinkel et al. (2019) noticed this when they carried out research in two settings in the USA. Here the practitioners seldom initiated or intervened in any of the children’s activities. This is not to criticise practitioners but rather to suggest that they need support and training to know how to develop their role in children’s learning when outdoors so that they can provide the best experiences for them (Hall et al., 2014, p. 202). When Bento and Dias (2017) carried out their research in Portugal, mentioned in Section 2, they concluded:

It is fundamental to promote conditions for adults to feel comfortable and motivated during the time spent outside. Adult involvement will influence the type of experiences that children have access to.

(Bento and Dias, 2017, p. 159)

It is also seen as important to engage with parents and develop their understanding of the benefits of the outdoors. A study by Rouse (2015), found that settings had a tendency not to document the learning that happened outdoors and so parents were less engaged with it as they felt it had lower status to what happened indoors.

3.3 Message 3: The outdoors is a space for physical activity

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

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A child kicking a ball through a puddle.

Often the outdoors is seen as predominantly a space for physical development. One reason for this is the important role that early years settings can have in addressing issues about children’s health including obesity prevention (Benjamin Neelon et al., 2015). This emphasis on physical activity, means that both research and practice can assume that the outdoor environment is only appropriate for those children who can already walk. This is an issue that will be explored in more depth in Session 2 but an interesting example is research carried out by Dinkel et al. (2019) in the United States. They researched in settings which took children as young as 6 weeks old. The researchers describe children climbing, running, sitting, squatting, and standing but they ignore what babies are doing. This makes the reader wonder if the babies are all indoors. Or perhaps if they were outdoors, they were not considered to be noteworthy because they were ‘contained’ in a pram or baby seat – thereby having their movements restricted. Lori Grisez, a paediatric expert uses the term ‘Container Baby Syndrome’ to discuss how too much time spent ‘contained’ in ‘equipment [such as] swings, bouncy seats and car seats’ (2018) is not good for a baby’s development.

Activity _unit2.3.1 Activity 3 Thinking about your own experiences and observations

Timing: Allow about 15 minutes

At this point it would be good to think about your own experiences and observations. Have a go at responding to the questions below in your Learning journal or add them in the text box below.

Have you noticed babies being given opportunities to be outside?
Do these opportunities include being ‘contained’ in equipment that might prevent their movement?
Have you noticed babies who have been given the freedom to move around and explore their environment like the young child in Figure 3?

Figure _unit2.3.1 Figure 3 Exploring my environment

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A child sitting in the grass.

Figure 3 Exploring my environment

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Discussion

The opportunities you note for babies to engage with the outdoors may very well depend on your geographical and cultural context. Of course, it is very important the babies are kept safe and ‘contained’ when this is appropriate but it is also important that they have the freedom of movement to explore their surroundings. This freedom will impact positively on both their physical and cognitive (intellectual) development.

4 Reflective activity

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

At the end of each session, you will be asked to reflect on what you have learned. This is a chance for you to consider not just what you now know but also how this knowledge may impact on how you care for young children. Each time you will be asked three questions; the first two will remain the same for each reflective activity but the third will be specifically about that session. Don’t forget you have the option of recording your thoughts in your Learning journal.

Activity _unit2.4.1 Activity 4 Reflecting on Session 1

Timing: Allow about 10 minutes

What did you find helpful about this session’s learning and why?
What are the three main learning points you will take away from this session?
How has considering children’s engagement with the outdoors and nature through a historical and cultural lens helped you understand contemporary practices?

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5 This session’s quiz

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Well done – you have reached the end of Session 1. You can now check what you’ve learned this session by taking the end-of-session quiz.

Session 1 practice quiz

Open the quiz in a new tab or window by holding down Ctrl (or Cmd on a Mac) when you click on the link. Return here when you have finished.

6 Summary of Session 1

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

This brief overview of the historical and cultural perspectives on young children’s engagement with the outdoors highlights that, although it might seem that the issue is a current ‘hot topic’, in fact it has been seen as an important issue for many years in many contexts. It is true that recent world events, including global pandemics and discussions around children’s wellbeing along with a perceived crisis in childhood, have ensured more and more interested parties continue to join in the discussion.

As you reach the end of this session, you should now be able to:

list some key voices from the past who spoke about young children’s engagement with the outdoors and nature
briefly outline some cultural practices of young children’s engagement with the outdoors and nature
list some of the messages from research about why being outdoors benefits young children and about current practices with young children in the outdoors.

In the next session you will explore further why babies are often excluded from research and practice in this area.

You can now go to Session 2.

Introduction

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In the previous session you were introduced to some key messages in the research literature about young children’s engagement with the outdoors and nature. This session will dig deeper into research to find out how policy can impact on practice. In 2019, two authors of this course (Nicola Kemp and Joanne Josephidou) decided to carry out a piece of research with this focus. They were funded by The Froebel Trust; you will find out much more about this charity in Session 3, but you may recall that Friedrich Froebel was one of the important historical voices mentioned in Session 1. Kemp and Josephidou were interested in the seminal work by Goouch and Powell (2013) into practice in Baby Rooms. This is the name often given to a place in English Early Years settings where the youngest children are looked after.

When Goouch and Powell (2013) looked at the needs of children in the Baby Room, they wrote:

We know that babies learn through watching, conversation and experience. Significantly, we also now understand from research that how babies are cared for in their first year of life, the amount and level of their interactions, their physical, social and emotional encounters all contribute to their development, their growing sense of self, of who they are in relation to others and to the growth of their brain.

(Goouch and Powell, 2013, p. 1)

Although Goouch and Powell found out a great deal about what happens inside a Baby Room, they realised they still had many questions about what happened outside – or indeed if the children did have experiences outside. Yet, when owner/managers were asked what the ‘perfect baby room’ would be, many of these spoke about having ‘ease of access to an outside area, preferably a garden, dedicated to the babies’ (2013, p. 68).

Figure 1 A child playing in the Baby Room.

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A child playing with toys.

Figure 1 A child playing in the Baby Room.

Kemp and Josephidou decided to build on Goouch and Powell’s research and find out what happened to young children (birth to two years) when they were in formal daycare settings (England) in terms of their outdoor engagement. Were they taken outdoors? If so how long for? Did it depend on the season? What did they do when they were outside? You can read about some of their findings in the content of this session.

By the end of the session, you should be able to:

describe why young children (birth to two) can be missing from research and practice in this area
outline why the outdoors is seen predominantly as a place for physical development
identify concerns about risk for young children outdoors.

Before you begin the session, listen to this audio introduction by the session author Joanne Josephidou.

Download this audio clip.Audio player: yon_1_s2_audio.mp3

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Transcript

JOANNE JOSEPHIDOU: In the previous session, we thought about different cultural practices with babies. And in this session, we are particularly interested in what happens in the early years setting.

You may remember from the introductory video to this course that the first key finding from our research project was that babies often appear to be missing from international research into young children's engagement with the outdoors. And this finding made us wonder if they were also missing from practice.

For example, researchers observing in early years settings seem to assume that the outdoors is only relevant for children who were walking. Even in studies which claimed to include children as young as six weeks old, physical mobility, such as climbing and running, took priority. And information about babies was not included in any analysis of data.

In research papers that discussed babies physical activity, there seemed to be an implicit assumption that this took place indoors. As we examined the research looking for evidence of under twos in outdoor practice, we were left wondering, where are the babies? And why are they missing from research? Does this also mean they are missing from practice?

These are questions we will explore in this session. You will be able to watch Professor Tina Bruce, a visiting professor of early childhood studies at Roehampton University, sharing some examples of practice that she has observed with babies.

End transcript

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1 Peek-a-boo! Where are you?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

One of the things Kemp and Josephidou found out, when they considered international research, was that it was really hard to find any babies. They read lots of research reports that promised them they would find out about babies in practice but in reality these reports talked about children who were walking, climbing, jumping and running. They couldn’t find any research at all that told them what babies were doing outside. When they went to visit some English early years settings they did see some babies outside but there were lots of differences in the provision they saw. For example, they saw babies who were left to sleep outside in their prams, they saw babies who were taken by pram to visit green spaces away from the setting, they saw babies kept in little pens on artificial grass so that they were safe from the more boisterous older children. They saw one nursery with a collection of yurts and the babies were free to crawl around outside wherever they wanted.

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A child crawling up some stone steps.

1.1 Why are babies missing?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Kemp and Josephidou realised that babies do get the opportunity to go outdoors even if practices may vary. However, they still were puzzled about the issue and in particular about questions such as:

If this practice exists, why are babies missing in the research on young children, outdoors and nature?
Does it matter that they are missing? Why?
Does their absence from research mean that only very few settings offer them this opportunity?

Perhaps practitioners think that children will have plenty of time when they are older for splashing in puddles and playing with mud or maybe babies are seen to be not that interesting! This is a sad thought and one perhaps echoed in Goouch and Powell’s work (2013) which found that the least qualified practitioners were often sent to work with the babies, as the learning of the older children was seen as more important. Compare this with Alison Gopnik’s statement that babies are ‘the most powerful learning machine in the universe’ (Gopnik et al., 1999, p. 1).

Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley and she has done extensive work into exploring babies as learners. She shows through her experiments just how smart they are and how we may have underestimated them. Watch from 0:16 to 3:34 of this video of her discussing some of her work that demonstrates what incredible learners very young children can be.

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_wk2_babies_are_smarter_than_you_think.mp4

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Transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

[APPLAUSE]

ALISON GOPNIK: What is going on in this baby's mind? If you'd asked people this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have said that this baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric, that he couldn't take the perspective of another person, or understand cause and effect. In the last 20 years, developmental science has completely overturned that picture.

So in some ways, we think that this baby's thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists. Let me give you just one example of this. One thing that this baby could be thinking about, that could be going on in his mind, is trying to figure out what's going on in the mind of that other baby.

After all, one of the things that's hardest for all of us to do is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. And maybe the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and feel isn't actually exactly like what we think and feel. Anyone who's followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some people to get.

[LAUGHTER]

We wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really profound thing about other people. Now, the question is how could we ask them. Babies, after all, can't talk, and if you ask a three-year-old to tell you what he thinks, what you'll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies, and birthdays, and things like that. So how could we actually ask them the question?

Well, it turns out that the secret was broccoli. What we did, Betty Repicoli, who was one of my students, and I, was actually to give the babies two bowls of food, one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious Goldfish crackers. Now, all of the babies even in Berkeley liked the crackers and don't like the raw broccoli.

[LAUGHTER]

But then what Betty did was to take a little taste of food from each bowl. And she would act as if she liked it or she didn't. So half the time, she acted as if she liked the crackers and didn't like the broccoli, just like the baby and any other sane person. But half the time what she would do is take a little bit of the broccoli and go, mm, broccoli! I tasted the broccoli! Mm.

And then she would take a little bit of the crackers, and she'd go, oh, yuck! Crackers. I tasted the crackers. Ooh, yuck! So she act as if what she wanted was just the opposite of what the babies wanted.

We did this with 15- and 18-month-old babies. And then she would simply put her hand out and say, can you give me some? So the question is what would the baby give her, what they liked or what she liked.

And the remarkable thing was that 18-month-old babies just barely walking and talking would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers, but they would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli. On the other hand, 15-month-olds would stare at her for a long time if she acted as if she liked the broccoli, like they couldn't figure this out.

[LAUGHTER]

But then after they stared for a long time, they would just give her the crackers, what they thought everybody must like.

[LAUGHTER]

So there are two really remarkable things about this. The first one is that these little 18-month-old babies have already discovered this really profound fact about human nature that we don't always want the same thing. And what's more, they thought that they should actually do things to help other people get what they wanted.

Even more remarkably, though, the fact that the 15-month-old didn't do this suggests that these 18-month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact about human nature in the three months from the time they were 15 months old. So children both know more and learn more than we ever would have thought. And this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that's actually demonstrated this.

The question you might ask, though, is why do children learn so much, and how is it possible for them to learn so much in such a short time. I mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. And actually, in many ways, they're worse than useless because we have to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive.

But if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies, it turns out that there's actually an answer. If we look across many, many different species of animals, not just us primates but also including other mammals, birds, even marsupials like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there's a relationship between how long a childhood a species has, how big their brains are compared to their bodies, and how smart and flexible they are.

And the poster birds for this idea are the birds up there. On one side is a new Caledonian crow. And crows and other corvids, ravens, rooks, and so forth are incredibly smart birds. They're as smart as chimpanzees in some respects. And this is a bird on the cover of "Science" who's learned how to use a tool to get food.

On the other hand, we have our friend the domestic chicken, and chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys are basically as dumb as stumps. So they're very, very good at pecking for grain, and they're not much good at doing anything else. Well, it turns out that the new Caledonian crow babies are fledglings. They depend on their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long as two years, which is a really long time in the life of a bird, whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple of months.

So childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the cover of "Science" and the chickens end up in the soup pot.

[LAUGHTER]

There's something about that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning. Well, what kind of explanation could we have for this? Well, some animals like the chicken seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well. So they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment.

Other creatures like the crows aren't very good at doing anything in particular, but they're extremely good at learning about lots of different environments. And of course, we human beings are way out on the end of the distribution like the crows. We have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than any other animal.

We're smarter. We're more flexible. We can learn more. We survive in more different environments. We've migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space, and our babies and children are dependent on us for much longer than the babies of any other species.

My son is 23, and--

[LAUGHTER]

--at least until they're 23, we're still popping those worms into those little open mouths.

[LAUGHTER]

All right. Why would we see this correlation? Well, an idea is that learning strategy is an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting out in the world. But it has one big disadvantage, and that one big disadvantage is that until you actually do all that learning, you're going to be helpless.

So you don't want to have the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself a slingshot or maybe a spear might work, which would actually be better. You want to know all that before the mastodons actually show up. And the way that evolution seems we've solved that problem is with a kind of division of labor.

So the idea is that we have this early period when we're completely protected. We don't have to do anything. All we have to do is learn, and then as adults we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them to work to do things out there in the world. So one way of thinking about it is that babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species.

[CHUCKLING]

So they're the protected blue sky guys who just have to go out, and learn, and have good ideas. And we're production and marketing. We have to take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually put them to use.

Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking about babies and children as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species-- kind of like caterpillars and butterflies, except that they're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow grownup adult path. If this is true, if these babies are designed to learn, and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning. That's what they're for.

We might expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms. And in fact, the baby's brain seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet, but real computers are actually getting to be a lot better. And there's been a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently, and it all depends on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century.

And essentially, what Bayes did was to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, to describe the way that scientists find out about the world. So what scientists do is they have a hypothesis that they think might be likely to start with. They go out and test it against the evidence. The evidence makes them change that hypothesis, then they test that new hypothesis, and so on and so forth.

And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could do that. And that mathematics is at the core of the best machine learning programs that we have now. And some 10 years ago, I suggested that babies might be doing the same thing. So if you want to know what's going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I think it actually looks something like this.

This is Reverend Bayes' notebook so I think those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they're revising to figure out how the world works. All right. Now, that might seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate because after all, if you ask even grownups about statistics, they look extremely stupid. How could it be that children are doing statistics?

So to test this, we used a machine that we have called the blicket detector. This is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some things on it and not others. And using this very simple machine, my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at learning about the world.

Let me mention just one that we did with Tamar Kushnir, my student. If I showed you this detector, you would be likely to think to begin with that the way to make the detector go would be to put a block on top of the detector. But actually this detector works in a bit of a strange way because if you wave a block over the top of the detector, something you wouldn't ever think of to begin with, the detector will actually activate two out of three times, whereas if you do the likely thing, put the block on the detector, it will only activate two out of six times.

So the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence. It looks as if the waving is a more effective strategy than the other strategy, so we did just this, we gave four-year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we just asked them to make it go. And sure enough, the four-year-olds use the evidence to wave the object on top of the detector.

Now, there are two things that are really interesting about this. The first one is, again, remember these are four-year-olds. They're just learning how to count, but unconsciously they're doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure.

And the other interesting thing is that they're using that evidence to get to an idea, get to a hypothesis about the world that seems very unlikely to begin with. And in studies, we've just been doing in my lab, similar studies, we've shown that four-year-olds are actually better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly the same task.

So in these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find out about the world. But after, all scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to see if children are doing experiments. When children do experiments, we call it getting into everything or else playing. And there's been a bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown that this playing around is really a kind of experimental research program.

Here's one from Cristine Le Gare's lab. What Cristine did was use our blicket detectors. And what she did was show children that yellow ones made it go and red ones didn't. And then she showed them an anomaly.

And what you'll see is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses in the space of two minutes.

SPEAKER 1: Mhm.

SPEAKER 2: How about this? I made the other side.

ALISON GOPNIK: OK. So his first hypothesis has just been falsified.

SPEAKER 2: Nothing.

[LAUGHTER]

This one's light up, and this one's not.

ALISON GOPNIK: OK. He's got his experimental notebook out.

SPEAKER 2: Hmm. How can I get this to light up?

SPEAKER 1: Hmm.

[LAUGHTER]

SPEAKER 2: I don't know.

ALISON GOPNIK: Every scientist will recognize that expression of despair, right?

[LAUGHTER]

SPEAKER 2: Oh, it's because that this needs to be like this. And this needs to be like that.

ALISON GOPNIK: OK. Hypothesis two.

SPEAKER 2: That's why. Hmm.

[LAUGHTER]

I put them the wrong way.

ALISON GOPNIK: Now, this is his next idea. He tells the experimenter to do this, to try putting it out over onto the other location.

SPEAKER 1: We'll put that up.

ALISON GOPNIK: Not working either.

SPEAKER 1: What should you do now?

SPEAKER 2: Oh, because the light goes only to here, not here.

[CHUCKLING]

Oh. The bottom of this box has electricity in here, but this doesn't have electricity.

ALISON GOPNIK: OK. That's the fourth hypothesis.

SPEAKER 2: It's that-- it's lighting up!

[CHUCKLING]

So we need to put four.

[CHUCKLING]

So we need to put four on this one to make it light up and two on this one can make it light up.

ALISON GOPNIK: OK. There's a fifth hypothesis. Now, that is a particularly--

[APPLAUSE]

That is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical. If you look at the way children play, when you ask them to explain something, what they really do is do a series of experiments. This is actually pretty typical of four-year-olds.

Well, what's it like to be this kind of creature? What's it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes? Well, if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them had said that babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all. And I think just the opposite is true.

I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults. Now, here's what we know about how adult consciousness works. And adult attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight.

So what happens for adults is we decide that something's relevant or important, we should pay attention to it. Our consciousness of that thing that we're attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else goes dark. And we even know something about the way the brain does this. So what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brain, sends a signal that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains. So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention.

If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different. I think babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. So babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing, but they're very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once.

And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven't come on yet. So when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention. So they're bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell them something and just looking at the thing that's important.

That's the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness that we might expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn. Well, if we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think about cases where we're put in a new situation that we've never been in before-- when we fall in love with someone new, or when we're in a new city for the first time.

And what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts. It expands so that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty-meeting-attending zombie back home.

[CHUCKLING]

And by the way, that wonderful coffee you've been drinking downstairs actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters. So what's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos--

[LAUGHTER]

--which that's a fantastic way to be. But it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o'clock in the morning.

[LAUGHTER]

Now, it's good to be a grown up. I don't want to say too much about how wonderful babies are. It's good to be a grown up. We can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. And it makes sense that we put a lot of effort into actually making babies think like adults do.

But if what we want is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more like children.

[APPLAUSE, CHEERING]

[AUDIO LOGO]

End transcript

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You may be able to think of other occasions in your day-to-day contact with young children, either through work or family, when they have shown you how smart they really are and surprised you and challenged your assumptions about what very young children can do. Babies are constantly surprising because their learning is so rapid in the first months of their life. And their thinking is not constrained by any of the rules that older children and adults may have been socialised into accepting. If you want to return and watch more of Alison Gopnik’s talk (18 minutes long) you will hear her explain how babies are ‘blue sky thinkers’ and like the ‘research and development department’ of an organisation. This is very powerful vocabulary to describe these very young children who are often seen as just vulnerable or cute. You can see that Gopnik’s ideas align with the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (2005). This sets out that babies are ‘not passive recipients of care, direction and guidance. They are active social agents, who seek protection, nurturance and understanding from parents or other caregivers’ (p. 8).

1.2 Forgetting babies’ learning needs

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

For babies to be able to grow and develop as the incredible learners that they are, they need to be in rich learning environments. If it is difficult to spot these marvels outside, what are they doing while they are attending formal daycare? The answer would be it depends where they are. Goouch and Powell in their baby room project, described how ‘shocked’ they were ‘to realise the extent to which the earliest years in children’s lives had been neglected by education and early years researchers’ (Goouch and Powell, 2013, p. ix).

Sadly, they found that practitioners who work in the Baby Room often saw themselves portrayed by others as ‘glorified babysitters’ (p. 76). These practitioners worked in environments where little consideration had been given to the impact of the physical environment on the young children, or indeed on the adults who work with them. Goouch and Powell recognise the highly complex, involved and skilled work that these practitioners engage in with young children.

This work was published in 2013 but a more recent paper (Cooper et al., 2022) cites Powell (and Maria Cooper from Session 1) as authors; here they set out the continued complexity of the practitioner role. In this later paper, the authors look at practice across four different cultural contexts (England, United States, New Zealand and Hong Kong) and demonstrate the importance of attuned relationships and highly skilled adults. Yet even today, babies are often forgotten about; an issue that was more than apparent when countries emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

Countries such as England looked at where funding was needed to minimise the negative impact of this time on children – but once again, the very youngest were not included in this consideration. Even though: ‘in a national survey of professionals who work with babies and toddlers, 98% of respondents reported that those they support had been affected by parental anxiety or stress and by depression affecting bonding and responsive care during and after the first national lockdown’ (The Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood, 2021, p. 35). It could be argued that the holistic needs of babies as a group in society need to be taken seriously before people will begin to think more seriously of specific learning environments in which babies can participate – such as in outdoor engagement. Once more it is a question of babies’ rights with the United Nations stating as a point of principle that ‘States parties are urged to take all possible measures to…create conditions that promote the well-being of all young children during this critical phase of their lives’ (2005, p. 4).

1.3 Three hundred and sixty-five days with nature

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Ann Pelo is an American educator who took a year out of her teaching career to look after Dylan, the one-year-old daughter of a friend. She decided that she would spend time outside every single day with the young child and recorded their experiences in her diary. This writing was then subsequently written up into a book called The Goodness of Rain (2013). This book gives a wonderful insight into how young children might experience being outdoors including all the learning that it supports them in engaging with.

Activity _unit3.1.1 Activity 1 Touching the apple tree

Timing: Allow about 10 minutes

Read the extract below in which Pelo describes how she lifts Dylan up so she can experience an apple tree and then see if you can answer the questions below:

The light, sweet breath of apples scents the air, and the warm autumn sun makes for easy lingering. Dylan reaches into the tree, flips a leaf, and laughs. Another leaf, another flip, more laughter. Her hand moves from leaf to branch, and she runs her fingers along the ridges and roughs of the bark. The branch leads her to an apple. She touches her fingertips to its red curve, then cups the apple in her hand, tightens her fingers around it, and leaning close, bites into the apple as it hangs from the branch. Mouth full of juice and autumn flesh, she grins at me. ‘Appa,’ she says, a full confirmation.

(Pelo, 2013, p. 58)

Now try to answer the following questions. Note your response in your Learning journal (which you may have downloaded in Session 1) or in the text box below.

What do you think Dylan is learning about herself and her world?
Why do you think that she is so receptive to learning?
If you were the adult looking after Dylan, what do you think you would do to help her learn?

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Discussion

You may have made a note of all the sensory ways that Dylan was learning. That she could smell the apples and their leaves; that she could feel all the different textures – rough, smooth, prickly, silky; she could feel the warm sun on her back and the apple juice trickling down her chin. You may have thought about the different colours she could see – the red and green and browns of the apple tree, the yellow sun, the white flesh of the apple. Pelo paints a picture of wellbeing and peace and a child who feels comfortable and safe so that she is open to the new experiences and sensations that this particular trip in the outdoors is offering her. You may have been inclined as an adult to adopt the role of teacher here and do some counting or name some colours, but in her book Pelo stresses the importance of ‘practising silence’ and knowing when to let the child absorb and investigate without the adult feeling the need to adopt ‘teaching behaviours’ but rather that the adult and child are taking part in the experience together.

2 Puff and Pant

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Anne Pelo’s work illustrates beautifully how being outdoors can be a wonderful sensory learning experience for very young children; in fact, it is the ideal environment. It is well documented that multi-sensory experiences are optimal for young children’s learning. It is surprising therefore to find that the potential of the outdoor environment is often not considered in this way. In this section, you are going to consider some of the reasons why. This will include thinking about how the indoor environment and the outdoor environment are positioned in slightly different ways, and in particular how the outdoors has come to be seen as a place to think specifically about children’s health and their physical development.

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A toddler smiling and running along a path.

2.1 A place to be healthy

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

If you ask early years practitioners, and probably also parents, why young children should be outdoors they will often talk in terms of being healthy, getting exercise, letting off steam and fresh air mirroring some of the conversations discussed in Session 1. This positioning of the outdoors reflects what happens once children start school; they do their work inside and then they go out to play to get a break from work. In this respect, a binary discussion has developed where the outdoors and the indoors are seen as having two very different purposes with the indoors most often seen as the default place for learning. You’ll look first at this idea of keeping healthy outdoors.

Internationally, the early years setting has come to be seen as a place for addressing public health concerns; one of these is the duty to help prevent and tackle obesity. This kind of positioning of the setting means that a great emphasis has been given to children being physically active and less emphasis given to the different ways of being outside, including those that are suitable for young children. Perhaps also there is something going on that relates to managing and controlling children and what they do (and don’t do). It could be that some practices have become the norm because they are the ‘taken-for-granteds’ that were discussed in Session 1 of ‘good’ early years practice, including health promotion. Such practices raise pedagogical questions about how to provide an outdoor environment for under twos which can support more diverse ‘ways of being’; it also raises questions about the role of the practitioner in such an environment. A role where they are encouraged to see the young child as more than the physically active child which Ulla (2017) identifies is the ‘ideal child’ in relation to early years practice. If a practitioner, or parent, is able to view the young child in a more holistic way then potentially the outdoor area would be looked at in a more holistic way also i.e., not just as a place for physical development and keeping healthy and not as somewhere separate, different and less important.

The focus on eliminating obesity has meant that the early years setting has had to take this responsibility seriously and look for ways, and more specifically places, to do this. There are bigger questions here as to whether the setting has become ‘zoned’ in accordance with what are described as more ‘performative’ agendas (things that can be measured and used to make judgements). So, for example, the indoors has become a place for learning targets and the outdoors for physical targets. Some settings use the sort of terminology with children which emphasises this separation of zones i.e., they say ‘do your work and then you can go and run around outside’ or they may look for a break in the clouds on a rainy day so that the children can get outside to be active; some settings call time spent outdoors as ‘puff and pant time’ stressing that it is a time to run and get out of breath before you come back inside to settle down and be calmer and quieter. This kind of thinking can then trickle down to those who care for babies so that the outside environment and the inside environment are seen as two distinct places with distinct purposes.

Physical exercise is very important as is a focus on physical development; this importance is not being questioned for one moment and there is often more space outside if children want to run and jump, which of course they must be given opportunity to do. At the same time, all children need to have opportunities to ‘just be’ outside no matter what their age.

2.2 Baby camps

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

The zoning of early years areas into indoor and outdoor with distinct activities has not always been common practice. For example, the work of Margaret and Rachel McMillan (introduced in Session 1) demonstrates that even in the early twentieth century, they were advocating for outdoor nursery provision for holistic learning through ‘baby camps’. In The Camp School (1917), written by Margaret, she discusses her ‘Baby Camps’ and describes how the youngest child was just 3 months old; she details how the children slept outside ‘like birds in a wet tree and began to crow as the storm past by’ (p. 53), how impoverished children put on weight and became healthier, how they ‘do use outdoor buildings in winter which are heated with a stove’. She details the way that all children are able to learn and develop outside, how they benefit from the wide open spaces and that it is as if the ‘love of their parents has filled the whole world’ when they are outside. Some of the practices introduced by the McMillan sisters can still be seen today, for example in the Chelsea Open Air Nursery School or the Rachel McMillan Nursery School. You can see information from their websites in Figures 2 and 3; however, neither of these schools have provision for children under the age of two.

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Figure _unit3.2.1 Figure 2 Information from the Rachel McMillan Nursery School website in 2022

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There is a photograph of a grassy area with a tree and sticks made into a den. The text underneath reads: Headteacher’s Welcome. Welcome to Rachel McMillan Nursery School and Children’s Centre. We are a Local Authority Maintained School. Opened in 1914 we are thought to be the fist ‘Open Air’ Nursery School in England. Our founders, Margaret and Rachel McMillan believed children learn best if they are healthy and active. They encouraged the children to be out in the fresh air for most of the day. The children at Rachel McMillan still do most of their learning outside, no matter the weather! The McMillan sister’s ideas about early childhood education continued to be followed and talk about across the world. Our atmospheric classrooms (know as ‘Shelters’) were built to create a village feeling and are located in a large, lovely, semi-wild garden, known to many of our families and visitors as the secret garden of Deptford! It is a wonderful space to be a child, encouraging curiosity, exploration and wonder.

Figure 2 Information from the Rachel McMillan Nursery School website in 2022

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Figure _unit3.2.2 Figure 3 Information from the Chelsea Open Air Nursery School website in 2022

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There is a black-and-white photograph of Dr Susan Isaacs. The text next to and underneath it reads: Our history. The School was set up in 1928 by Dr Susan Isaacs and Natalie Davies. The name ‘Open Air’ dates from that period and was part of a countrywide educational movement. The ‘Open Air’ philosophy is still important today when our children seem to lack safe but challenging space to play in. In the 1920s it was first recognised educationally that outdoors is as valuable a learning environment as indoors. The Open Air philosophy also recognised that many city children did not have enough access to fresh air, sunlight and exercise for healthy development. In the twenty-first century the garden is still central to our philosophy and combines with our indoor areas to provide a complete and balanced learning environment. In 1978 the school became part of the Inner London Education Authority and is now state funded. In 2006 it became on of the first children’s centres in the Borough proving a ‘one stop shop’ for local families, babies and young children. The School became a ‘linked’ site to the Children’s Centre Services in the South Locality and in 2016 we established our own thriving Community Programme. The School is housed in a timber framed building dating from 1587 and a seventeenth workman’s cottage which along with other houses in the street became artists’ studios, in our case for the painter Benjamin Haydon. The school garden dates from the beginning of this.

Figure 3 Information from the Chelsea Open Air Nursery School website in 2022

3 A risky business

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Figure _unit3.3.1 Figure 4 Experiencing the outdoors from a pram

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Three babies in a pram.

Figure 4 Experiencing the outdoors from a pram

Illustrations from practice show that babies are often taken outside in a pram as in Figure 4, alternatively they can be put in a play pen outdoors to keep them safe from older children tripping over them. ‘Keeping them safe’ is the important phrase here; practitioners may worry that if young children are not contained in a pram or a pen then they are at risk of harm. In this section you will look at how practitioners assess for risk, considering how this may sometimes be problematic. You will also examine why appropriate risk taking is seen as something to be welcomed, even for very young children.

3.1 (Non)Risky resources

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Concerns about risk are reflected in the resources used in the outdoor areas that babies and toddlers have access to. Often, such outdoor environments can be described as artificial and safe, offering very little challenge for the children. Some writers have suggested that one culprit in allowing such environments to emerge are quality guidelines such as Infant and Toddler Environment Rating Scale-Revised (ITERS-R14) (Harms et al., 2006). This guidance is used widely, in different cultural contexts and it is argued that such guidance emphasises structural and safety issues.

This emphasis has in turn led to the practice of providing outdoor environments that are not particularly inspiring. However, not all countries use these guidelines; for example, Norway seems to have different interpretations of risk and safety. Here, children are not separated outdoors by age group, which is suggested as a mark of quality according to ITERS. One study of Norwegian practice by Kleppe (2018) explored the extent to which settings encourage risky play for young children (under three). Surprisingly, they found that the youngest children engaged in more risky play indoors! Risk-taking is important for young children; as Kleppe argues:

First, because the play experience itself is intrinsically valuable, including experiences of exploration and autonomy, which may allow children to experience emotions such as hesitation, fear, excitement, pleasurable arousal and mastering. Second, several researchers have argued that risky play is essential for developing realistic risk assessment skills.

(Kleppe, 2018, p. 5)

3.2 Thinking about risk

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

You will be looking in more detail in Session 4 about risk, but it would be good here to record some of your thoughts so far.

Activity _unit3.3.1 Activity 2 Thinking about risk

Timing: Allow about 10 minutes

Think how you would respond to the following questions and make some notes in your Learning journal or the text box below.

Babies need to be kept safe, but can you see any disadvantages in keeping babies apart from older children?
What other considerations would practitioners have to make to keep babies safe outdoors? Why do you think this?
What are the implications of putting too strong an emphasis on particular safety measures?

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Discussion

You can read this extract from Kemp and Josephidou’s report ‘Where are the babies?’ where they consider some of these questions:

The idea that the outdoors is a risky space for babies is revealed in their absence from the research literature. Throughout this review, we read papers which promised a focus on under twos or birth to threes but found a sustained focus on toddlers leading us to ask, ‘where are the babies?’. One reason for this suggested in some papers were practitioner concerns about being able to keep the very youngest children safe outside. For example, if older children were playing on equipment such as bikes it was important to keep the babies apart so that they would not be in any danger. This was apparent in one paper in the Australian context where children of different ages shared one outdoor learning environment. When interviewed, practitioners revealed that although they saw many benefits to this vertical grouping of children, they had concerns around keeping the youngest children safe whilst supervising the older children. In practice then, out of necessity, the babies became ‘isolated in a small play space to keep them safe’ (Rouse, 2015, p. 748). In this way we see a clear connection between risk management concerns and the invisibility of the youngest children in the outdoor environment’.

(Kemp and Josephidou, 2020, p. 7)

4 Reflective activity

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Now you have reached the end of Session 2, it’s a good time to reflect on what you have learned so far. In particular, you might like to consider if you have noticed how the outdoor environment is perceived in a certain way for very young children. Remember we are thinking specifically about those children aged birth to two years old. Once again there are some questions below that may help you in your thinking. You can record your thoughts in your Learning journal or in the text box in the activity.

Before you have a go at answering the questions, watch this short video of Tina Bruce describing an observation of a young child outside.

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Transcript

TINA BRUCE: One of my favourite moments with a little boy who was just learning to walk, so he was crawling across grass. And he stood up and he did his little tottery walk because he was just learning to walk. And as happens, flopped down, and he went right down and his little face was right near the grass and he just-- he gradually picked his head up a bit and he was still looking intently at the grass. And I thought, I wonder what's happening there.

So I bent over and we both had a jolly long look, and there was a worm just coming out of the grass. And he was absolutely fascinated. So those little songs that I--

(SINGING) There's a worm at the bottom of my garden, there's a worm at the bottom of my garden, there's a worm at the bottom of my garden, and he goes, wiggly, wiggly, wiggle!

Those sort of songs. Now, what Froebel did with these songs was to really build on real experience.

So he did not want things like blue cats or sparkly dogs in pictures. He's going for what's real because little children need to know what's real in order to start to imagine things that are not real and to pretend them. So that's a very big difference between Froebel and lots of other people. And he would agree with people like Montessori and Steiner.

We all agree. Real experience is what sets you up and actually allows you to be much more imaginative later on. So the creativity comes out of the real experience. So that worm was very, very important for him.

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Activity _unit3.4.1 Activity 3 Reflecting on Session 2

Timing: Allow about 10 minutes

What did you find helpful about this session’s learning and why?
What are the three main learning points you will take away from this session?
What about your practice? Is there anything you are now going to change about your practice with young children if you are a parent, carer or practitioner?

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5 This session’s quiz

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Well done – you have reached the end of Session 2. You can now check what you’ve learned this session by taking the end-of-session quiz.

Session 2 practice quiz

Open the quiz in a new tab or window by holding down Ctrl (or Cmd on a Mac) when you click on the link. Return here when you have finished.

6 Summary of Session 2

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

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A sign saying ‘No babies allowed’.

Now that you have completed Session 2, you will have gained an overview of why babies are often missing when we consider the outdoor environment and why it may not be considered an appropriate environment for them. One of the issues you have explored is how and why the outdoors is mostly connected to ideas about physical fitness and health. Some ideas around safety and risk have also been considered and will be explored further in Session 4. You may have thought about your own practice either as a parent or carer of young children. Perhaps you wondered how to keep babies warm and dry outside. Or perhaps you notice how very young children have to be kept apart from slightly older ones for their own safety. However now you have noted how safety concerns can impact negatively on provision for very young children, you may have begun to think about how you could introduce changes into your practice.

You should now be able to:

describe why young children (birth to two) can be missing from research and practice in this area
outline why the outdoors is seen predominantly as a place for physical development
identify concerns about risk for young children outdoors.

In the following session you will look more closely at the work of one of the Early Childhood pioneers mentioned in Session 1, Friedrich Froebel. As already hinted at in Session 1, Froebel had some important things to say about very young children outdoors and you will be able to find out how practitioners still draw on his work today to inform their provision.

You can now go to Session 3.

Introduction

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In the previous session you explored some ideas regarding present day practices with very young children and the outdoors. In this session you are going to take a trip back in time to meet one early childhood pioneer named Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), introduced to you briefly in Session 1. But why is it important to look backwards? Is it not much more important to look forwards to the future and the development of new ideas? In response to such questions, Jonathan Doherty writing in the foreword to the book Early Years Pioneers in Context (Jarvis et al., 2016) writes:

Without a detailed investigation into the lives of the great leaders in early education of the past, their lives, their motivations and inspirations, we would not have the high-quality frameworks for education… that we proudly possess today…. our current frameworks and the curricula for our youngest children are based upon sound foundations that have more than stood the test of time… The word ‘pioneers’…implies individuals who are the ‘movers and shakers’ of their day. True leaders whose wisdom as well as their drive and outstanding resilience in the face of adversity inspire us through their charting of new territories and new ideas.

(Jarvis et al., 2016, p. xii)

Froebel is particularly relevant to our discussion, not only because, according to Weston (1998), he is ‘probably the most influential educationalist of the nineteenth century’ (p. 1), but also because he has had a significant impact on our thinking about young children, the outdoors and nature. He is probably best known for setting up the first early year’s educational setting outside the home in rural Germany in 1837. He later coined the term ‘kindergarten’ (1840) – literally a garden for children – to describe this setting, designed to support young children’s growth and development in harmony with the natural world ‘through doing, feeling, and thinking’ (Wasmuth, 2020, p. 62).

In this work, he was particularly influenced by the Swiss educator Pestalozzi who advocated for ‘learning by head, hand and heart’. At the time, Froebel’s ideas were seen as revolutionary but over time much of his thinking has been incorporated into mainstream practice.

Figure 1 Friedrich Froebel

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An illustration of Friedrich Froebel.

Figure 1 Friedrich Froebel

In this session you are going to start by exploring Froebel’s original writing and thinking about how he understood the relationship between the youngest children, the adults who care for them and the natural world. You will then consider how Froebelian thinking has influenced current practice in ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care). Finally, you will reflect on what Froebel can offer in terms of developing practice to support the youngest children.

By the end of this session, you should be able to:

describe key aspects of Froebelian thinking regarding young children and the outdoors
identify how Froebel’s thinking influences current practice
outline how Froebel’s principles are relevant when caring for the youngest children in the twenty-first century.

Before you begin the session, listen to the author Nicola Kemp introducing its content.

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Transcript

NICOLA KEMP: Welcome to Session 3. You might be wondering why we have dedicated a whole session to Froebel who, as we outlined in Session 1, is one of many early childhood educators to recognise the importance of time spent outdoors for young children. There are many different answers to this question. And throughout this session, you will be introduced to some possible responses from the perspectives of all contributing experts. These interviews, many conducted on location at the Froebel archive at the University of Roehampton, one of the highlights as we develop this course and gave us new insights and understanding about the enduring relevance of Froebel's philosophy and practice.

Archivist Kornelia Cepok picks out some of her favourite resources in the archive and discusses what they mean to her. Dr Sasha Powell, chief executive of the Froebel Trust, discusses the relevance of Froebelian principles to practice in the 21st century and how the Trust supports practitioners to develop their practice with babies and toddlers outdoors. Dr Maria Cooper and practitioner Shirlene discuss what Froebelian principles look like in the bicultural context of New Zealand. Dr Fengling Tang discusses Froebel's ideas about play, including resources called the gifts that he developed.

Finally, Froebelian practitioner and scholar Professor Tina Bruce reminds us that Froebel was the first early childhood educator to really focus on babies and toddlers and their learning and development needs. Using resources gathered during her many years of practice, she illustrates practically how adults can engage the youngest children with the natural world. We hope that by the end of this session you will have developed your own understanding and ideas about the contemporary relevance of Froebel. We also hope that you'll be inspired to find out more and read some of his work directly by visiting the online archive hosted by the University of Roehampton.

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1 Froebel’s thoughts on young children and the outdoors

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Figure _unit4.1.1 Figure 2 Froebel’s seminal work The Education of Man

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The front cover of The Education of Man.

Figure 2 Froebel’s seminal work The Education of Man

Figure 2 shows a key text written by Froebel; it is often called his seminal work, seminal meaning here influential, pioneering and important. The title The Education of Man translated from the original German in which it was written, may be confusing; if it was translated today, it might be more accurately translated as ‘Educating children’. This is not an easy text to read because Froebel does not necessarily explain his ideas in an accessible way; however, this fact has not diminished its importance. Furthermore, there is a wealth of much more accessible material written by important Froebelian scholars, such as Professor Tina Bruce, which has helped both practitioners and researchers engage more readily with his important ideas.

1.1 Finding out about Froebel

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

As Froebel was born more than 200 years ago, in an area of Europe we now call Germany, writing in his first language of German, some historical detective work is needed to uncover his educational ideas. Froebel’s most famous book, The Education of Man, was originally published in 1826 and it focused on how young children should be taught and supported in their development. It was more than sixty years before the work was translated into English which then enabled his ideas to spread to a much wider audience. This book is important as it sets out Froebel’s ideas about human development and how he thought this thinking should influence educational practice from the earliest years. In addition to this text and other books about young children’s learning, he also wrote many letters discussing his ideas. It is fortunate that this correspondence is still accessible today through the Froebel Archive. This important source of information on Froebel is held at the library of The University of Roehampton and it is also possible to access it online (a link is given in Activity 1 in the next section).

The Froebel Archive is looked after, and curated, by the archivist Kornelia Cepok. It consists of a range of books, photographs and objects all linked to Froebel’s educational legacy. It was established in 1977 and is an important resource centre for Froebelian scholars and students alike. In the following video, Kornelia introduces the archive and talks about some of the things it contains.

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KORNELIA CEPOK

The Froebel Archive was established in 1977 and has been based here ever since. My work here consists of looking after the archive, looking after the material, preserving and conserving it, but also working with the students, with the academic department, making sure they are using the materials and they know what the archive consists of, and bringing the work of Froebel close to the students and to the academic department.

Further, I facilitate research of many national and international researchers, helping with the publications and with the work overall. Froebel really defines the meaning of what we think of childhood, of being a child means today. He thought that children and learning begins from birth, and that we need to facilitate this learning and this development. And this is what he provided with the kindergarten and with the Froebel gifts.

He believed in a holistic approach to learning and to development. And he put play in the centre of it. And that was the first time that play really became a focus of the children's development. So with the establishment of the kindergarten, he provided a platform for learning, and for growing, and for being. And with the kindergarten as well, he puts nature as the fundamental focus and approach to facilitate this learning.

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1.2 Visiting the archive

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

You will now have the opportunity to take some time to be a visitor to the archive yourself.

Activity _unit4.1.1 Activity 1 Exploring the Froebel Archive

Timing: Allow about 20 minutes

Explore the resources in the Froebel Archive and find one that interests you. If you are not sure where to start, you may like to choose either ‘Froebel’s Letters on the Kindergarten’ or ‘Pamphlets on Froebel’s principles’. As you search, respond to the questions below. You can record your responses in your Learning journal or the text box below.

Why did you choose it?
What did it make you think?
What did you learn?

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Discussion

Here is an example answer.

Table _unit4.1.1
Chosen resource	Pamphlets on Froebel’s Principles >THE KINDERGARTEN and Its Influence on Industrial Activity in After Life.
Why did you choose it?	I thought it had an interesting and intriguing title and the word ‘pamphlet’ made me think it might involve a more practical and concise discussion of Froebel’s ideas.
What did it make you think?	It made me think about the contexts in which Froebel’s ideas were being introduced and how ground breaking these ideas were, particularly in terms of what it meant to be a child. For example, in the context of the kindergartens being opened in the poor areas of San Francisco, the children are described as ‘little bandits…whose only occupation till then had been to rob and steal and destroy’ (p. 2).
What did you learn?	I learned more about Froebel’s thinking on the purpose of education and why it is as important to engage the hands, through active learning, as it is to engage the head. It also showed how Froebel’s ideas reflected current day thinking about links between the setting and home.

To finish this section, you might like to listen to Kornelia talking about her favourite objects in the archive.

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Transcript

KORNELIA CEPOK

I do have a few favourite objects here in the Froebel Archive. And both of them that I would like to introduce today have to do with what I talked about in relation to Froebel's ideas. One is about play, the importance of play and the relationship between the teacher or the parents. And the other one talks about the importance of nature and the learning through nature.

So the first one is a notebook by Fanny Poole. Fanny Poole studied the Froebel education in the 1890s, 1891-92. And we are fortunate to have quite a few of her notebooks, her lecture books, and other resources. So this one here talks among others about the kindergarten rules. And it sets out a whole set of rules within the kindergarten setting, but it's the first one that for me, really epitomises the importance of Froebel.

And it reads, "No punishment is allowed if a child is unmanageable appealed to the kindergarten mistress, but try the power of love and firmness first." And it's the power of love, that for me really stresses it. And we're talking here Victorian England, and the power of love in schools.

And the other section here talks about the importance of play. And it is actually really quite long, which I think in my view, again, emphasises its importance. It's an introduction to the Froebel gifts. And here in this introduction it really puts the play in the centre of children's learning, of children's development, really makes it a focus.

The other resource that I wanted to talk about is a slightly later one compiled by students who was here between 1922 and 1924. And 1922 is when the Froebel Education Institute moved to the grounds here, to Grove House. And I think it is in a way celebrating the grounds, celebrating the freedom to move around freely, and to really make use of the grounds and these facilities here in a much greener environment, coming back from or coming over from what is now Hammersmith area.

So this notebook was compiled by a student called Hilda Miller. It describes every aspect and every tiny detail that she observed together with other students within the grounds. She talks about all insects, about every creature she observed and found in the grounds. And she puts it down with some sort of sense of humour as well, which is really nice. And it's illustrated beautifully, like all the other nature notebooks.

So she talks here about the bird seen in May 22 and how many, so for example, a head sparrow. On the 6th of May, there were two eggs. And on the 19th, there were nine, some deserted. The black bird discovered on the 6th of May, two naked nestlings, on the 10th, leg chicks, feathers, and so on. So it goes into this detail of observation.

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1.3 Froebel’s key ideas

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Froebel’s writing offers real insights into his life and the context he was working in. It is worth thinking about what has changed and what has stayed the same since then. For example, babies and toddlers would not have attended a kindergarten – these were for children aged three and over – so when Froebel was writing about the youngest children, he was addressing parents not practitioners. His book Mother Play and Nursery Songs (1844) gives direction to mothers on how to engage with their children in play. However, his understanding of child development and what young children need to flourish may still be relevant. As you go through this session, you might want to think about context and the extent to which you think Froebel has relevance to current and future practice. What follows are three key points about the youngest children and their relationship to the natural environment that are based on Froebelian thinking as expressed in The Education of Man.

Figure _unit4.1.2 Figure 3 Three key points in Froebel’s thinking

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A pie chart with three slices: the first says ‘The importance of outdoor learning’. The second says ‘The importance of spending time in nature’. The third says ‘Nature can teach us about practice’.

Figure 3 Three key points in Froebel’s thinking

Key point 1: The importance of outdoor learning

Froebel prioritised outdoor experiences from birth. Although most often associated with the kindergarten, Froebel recognised the significance of the earliest period of childhood. He particularly emphasised the importance of the environment in which the youngest children (he called them ‘sucklings’) spend time. He argued that during this time, babies experience the world through their senses so there is a need to think about the sensory qualities of the spaces and places that they spend time in:

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The quote reads: ‘the surroundings, however inadequate they might otherwise be, should be pure and clear - pure air, clear light, clear space’.

Key point 2: The importance of spending time in nature

Froebel believed nature contact, and a sense of unity, was fundamental to human health and wellbeing. Froebel particularly emphasised the importance of time spent from birth in natural outdoor environments. Indeed, nature is identified as ‘the chief point of reference’ for human development:

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The quote reads: ‘Life in and with nature, and with the clear, still objects of nature must be fostered at this time by the parents and members of the family as the chief point of reference of the whole child-life.’

Key point 3: Nature can teach us about practice

For Froebel, nature offers a model for practice. Froebel also viewed children ‘as nature’, comparing their development to that of the young plants and animals within their environment. He notes the basic requirement for plants and animals to be given ‘space and time’ to develop properly ‘in accordance with the laws that live in them’ and calls us to apply this understanding to young children. Froebel promotes a gentle pedagogy based on close observation of the child and their interests arguing:

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The quote reads: ‘nothing, therefore, is left for us to do with to bring him [sic] into relations and surroundings’.

2 Finding traces of Froebel in current practice

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Although Froebel lived and wrote in a very different context, many of his ideas continue to influence early childhood pedagogy and practice all over the world including the three key ideas discussed in the last section. In this section you are going to look at some of his pedagogical tools. However, it is important to bear in mind that practice has continued to re-interpret these tools rather than slavishly follow concrete ideas he laid down. Julian Grenier (2016) reflects on this theme as he describes a visit to the first Froebelian kindergarten in Keilhau:

I was left thinking that on the one hand, it is a great strength of the Froebelian tradition that it has developed and renewed itself over the years. Different educators can bring different aspects to the fore… some materials…have been updated, and others… made less prominent. But on the other hand, perhaps this modern practice is not really Froebelian at all, rather like the antique axe that’s been renewed over the years with three new handles and two new blades.

(Grenier, 2016)

Grenier illustrates here what may happen if Froebelian practice is disconnected from some key Froebelian principles. However, if these principles sit at the heart of the practice, then this practice becomes an iteration of ideas that remain faithful to particular core values. These core values focus on a way of being with children. It is a focus that cannot be accused of being stale or obsolete because it responds to each child’s uniqueness in their contemporary context. Present-day Froebelian scholars, led by the Froebel Trust, recognise and agree on the interpretation of some key pedagogical ideas.

This section will examine some of these ideas including:

Froebelian principles
Froebel’s gifts
Mother songs

2.1 Froebelian principles

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In Froebelian pedagogy, there are not rigid rules to be followed or content that must be learned; rather, Froebelian principles are key ideas and values that should be considered when working with young children. One of the reasons for this was Froebel’s reluctance to set down in print ideas that may then be misinterpreted, even though Wasmuth, who published a book in 2020 which outlined how Froebelian pedagogy had developed in both Germany and the United States, states that Froebel’s contemporaries would have appreciated a comprehensive setting out of his pedagogy because his ideas around the kindergarten were difficult to understand.

Nevertheless, there are some key texts where Froebel’s ideas have been set out such as ‘Education by development: the second part of the Pedagogics of the kindergarten’ (Froebel, 1899) and ‘Froebel’s chief writings on education’ (1920) which are both stored in the Froebel Archive. As it stands, present-day Froebelian pedagogy is predominantly informed by underpinning principles which are interpreted differently in diverse contexts. A useful theory to consider as you learn about these principles is ‘transitology theory’. Nishida (2022), in a paper where she explores how Froebelian ideas came to be developed in Japan, attributes this theory to Robert Cowen. She describes how Cowen explains that when ideas ‘move’ then they ‘morph’ so that their shape changes (p. 2).

The Froebel Trust is a charity which was established in 2012. It emerged from The Incorporated Froebel Educational Institute which began in 1892. An important part of its role is to ensure Froebel’s thinking is ‘recognised, understood, valued and practised across the early childhood sector for the benefit of young children in the UK and internationally’. As part of this work, they run courses and offer grants for developing both research and practice. Most importantly they promote Froebel’s ideas demonstrating how they are not just interesting from an historical point of view but that they have relevance to practice today. The Trust identifies several key principles that are all relevant to outdoor practice for the youngest children. You can see these principles outlined on the poster below.

Figure _unit4.2.1 Figure 4 A Froebel Trust poster showing Froebelian principles

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A poster with the following headings: unity and connectedness; creativity and the power of symbols; the central importance of play; engaging with nature; knowledgeable, nurturing educators; autonomous learners; the value of childhood in its own right; relationships matter.

Figure 4 A Froebel Trust poster showing Froebelian principles

See the poster in its full size here

Watch this video where Dr Sacha Powell, Chief executive Officer of The Froebel Trust, as she talks to Nicola about the importance of these principles.

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SACHA POWELL: Principles are really important. The principles guide everything that we do and everything that Froebel-trained practitioners do. And it's not about having a strict method that everybody does in the same way in the same place.

The idea about starting from principles, of things like starting where a child is rather than where you want them to be, means that that's adaptable to different families or early childhood centres and contexts to schools, different cultural settings.

And so they're very adaptable. And they're also adaptable to whatever curriculum framework somebody might be working with. So we know that Froebelian approaches are used all over the world. There's a very long tradition in Finland, in New Zealand. There is a huge amount of Froebelian practice in Scotland at the moment.

And, of course, all those places have very different curricular approaches and different cultural contexts too. So I think what I'm trying to say is that a principled approach starting with principles is a very flexible way of working. And there's more information about the principles on our website. And those principles apply just as much to a baby who's a month old as to a 7-year-old child in a school context.

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The website mentioned by Sacha in the video is the Froebel Trust website.

Next, you will be able to watch Dr Maria Cooper and Shirlene Murphy who you met in Session 1. Here they are discussing what Froebelian principles look like in the bi-cultural context of New Zealand.

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MARIA COOPER: The idea of Froebelian principles in the New Zealand ECE context is an interesting one because as I've been developing my understandings of Froebel's work over the last few years, I've realised there are so many synergies between Froebelian principles and Te Whariki emphasis on certain things, when we think about Te Whariki emphasis on play as a medium for both learning and teaching, there is a link there. When we think about Te Whariki emphasis on autonomous learning, we see an automatic link there.

Te Whariki is very much about children's connectedness with people, places, and things, including in the outdoors. So there's so many synergies and a lot of our ideas are inspired by Maori philosophy. But we also had Froebelian scholar Helen May, Professor Helen May in formal Te Whariki, the development of Te Whariki. So there's likely to have been some influence from her as well from that lens.

In practice, many of our centres support the idea of infants being outside of the four walls, so to speak, the institution, and just feeling or knowing that they are part of a much broader community. So there is a lot of effort made to get infants and toddlers out on excursions to local parks and, what Shirleen was talking about, to domains that might be nearby and to really appreciate just being in that space with babies.

It could be something as simple as lying a baby on their back under a shady tree and for the baby to witness the waving branches and shifting clouds. There's so much to engage with there without that sense of needing to entertain them with other things.

SHIRLENE MURPHY: I'm just thinking of today. It is a wet, it has been a wet and wild day. And I was just thinking just to further on from what Maria is just talking about is that the importance of that sensory that children holistically they get-- they're able to be outdoors, so all of their senses can be fulfilled.

And so one example today was dressing, putting our wet weather gears on, gumboots and everything, to take them outside. But we could clearly see that the gumboots were restricting this one baby. She didn't want to be in gumboots. She wanted her feet to be in the mud. And so just by us seeing that and allowing that, just the sheer joy of mud between her toes. And it got to the point where it was puddles. It was her face was covered in it. And for that to just unfold outdoors, just right outside our door, this moment of her just being fully fulfilled, I suppose, in that outdoor space.

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2.2 Froebel’s gifts

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

You will notice that one principle is ‘The central importance of play’. Today it is seen as normal practice that young children should learn through play, but this was not at all the case in Froebel’s day as Miriam LeBlanc (2012) explains:

He observed that play was a necessary developmental phase in educating the ‘whole’ child, enlisting all his imaginative powers and physical movements in exploring his interests. Though widespread today, this insight was revolutionary in the early nineteenth century, when play was viewed as idle, and children as miniature adults to be moulded as rapidly as possible into economically productive members of society.

(LeBlanc, 2012)

Figure _unit4.2.2 Figure 5 Examples of ‘Gifts’ from the Froebel Archive

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Some wooden toys.

Figure 5 Examples of ‘Gifts’ from the Froebel Archive

Froebel believed that children needed open ended objects when they were playing. Prompted by this idea, he went on to produce a collection of resources which have been translated into English as ‘the Gifts’. In fact, the very first kindergartens were set up to be ‘distribution and production facilities for the gifts’ (Wasmuth, 2020, p. 45). The ‘Gifts’ included six sets of cubes, spheres and cylinders for young children to explore, create and play with. Wasmuth tells us that the idea of play and these gifts were so important to Froebel that ‘he devoted himself to… [them], and until the end of his life, he tirelessly thought about [them]’ publishing advertisements and explaining his ideas (p. 44).

Dr Fengling Tang is another Froebelian scholar. Watch the video below as she explains both the importance of Froebel’s gifts and their relevance today.

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FENGLING TANG: To me, if you can see the screen, the photos behind me on the shelf, yeah, that's the four sets of Froebel Gifts. And the first one on the right-- or the left side, yeah, yeah, that one is the Froebel gift number one. I opened the box already. And then the second one up there as well, that's the gift number two, and then we've got to three and four on the shelf, yeah, four. Hopefully, yeah, this give you the visual image of those gifts, very much addressed and explained by Froebel himself and Froebelian scholars.

So they are very innovative and educational learning resources for the young children, especially today we talk about babies and toddlers, the very young children by seeing innovative resources. What we meant, actually, yeah, because the very young children in a historical period of time, let's say, nearly 200 years ago. The children normally were seen as mini adults.

But Froebel designed those series of gifts with educational purpose and for the parents, caretakers, and also kindergarten teachers to engage children with those learning resources by playing, by exploring. So that what we meant, the innovative learning resources for the younger children. And that's the deal, early effective, very much using similar resources, if not the original gifts designed by Froebel.

One of the things we all know, block play, is another modern version of Froebel's Gifts, especially when I talk about gift number three and number four on the shelf, yeah, the little cubes. Yeah, there are a lot of possibilities for the very young children to play with it, to build up things. And to imagine with these learning materials with them. So that's one thing I'm thinking about Froebel Gifts.

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Next, Fengling talks about their significance for babies and toddlers.

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FENGLING TANG: I think Froebel's emphasis on the importance of outdoor and engagement with nature is also important. And that importance of nature, being part of the Froebelian, if we see catch phrase or the flexi term, which is unity, and unity is really means the connection between the child, the community, nature, humanity, and a wide, wide world around them, which more than $3 billion.

Like Liebschner, Read, Brehony, Whinnett, they all recognised the unity, the importance of that in the truth of life through the engagement with nature, through the learning resources we just described, which is Froebel gifts and some other resources as well.

So that's the Froebelian unity, I think, is the key sort of theoretical underpinning of the Froebelian faith, which connects-- which clearly connects with the importance of nature. That's one thing, because we need to-- Froebelian scholars the need to highlight the importance of unity, as a thread for training purpose, and for supporting young children learning. So that's one thing.

The other thing I would like to see if we consider the Froebel gifts over there, they're made of natural materials. So itself, is children playing with natural material, and if children engage with those natural materials. For example, I made the-- did the little demo about children through playing those little blocks, and they are symbolic, through what they are doing. This is the forms of life, with these little bricks. This is a little bed, and this is you know, a sunflower, and then they can combine playing with those little gifts with the natural materials.

So in a way, they are playing with natural materials, and they're engaging with nature already but, of course, in a different way from when they are playing in the natural world. But to me, playing with the gifts, with those natural materials, children actually engaging and experiencing with nature in a different way.

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Did you note how Fengling explained how, although you may not see the Gifts often in practice today, their influence can be seen through open ended resources such as blocks and treasure baskets.

2.3 ‘Mother songs’

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

‘Mother songs’, now often translated as ‘family songs’, were finger rhymes and songs sung to young children by a parent or carer for a host of benefits. These songs were written by Froebel and accompanied by a music score and detailed illustrations. They were based on everyday life activities that children might be involved in or observe including the cycles of nature around them. Froebel’s rationale for the importance of these songs was not only that they supported the young child’s intellectual development but that they supported a warm loving relationship developing between the child and the adult. Tina Bruce observes how, in interacting with songs and rhymes, babies ‘enthusiastically take up the intellectual life, providing they are wrapped in an atmosphere of affection and nurture’ (Bruce, 2021, p. 73). The original songs and rhymes may sound inaccessible to the twenty-first century ear but it would be incorrect to assume that their influence has disappeared from current practice.

Powell and Goouch (2015) carried out research in 2013–2014 to find out if singing remained an important part of pedagogy with young children. They worked with 29 practitioners in England, asking them about their singing practices and observing them to find out what this might look like. They concluded that ‘Friedrich Froebel’s influence on practice appears to be timeless as singing continues to be promoted as an educational activity for the nursery, and songs and finger rhymes are tools to enhance children’s learning experiences’ (Powell and Goouch, 2015, p. 2). In Tina Bruce’s book Early Childhood Practice; Froebel today (2012), Maureen Baker also illustrates how this influence pervades in the home environment as she describes how baby Sylvie has ‘positive, supportive relationships … nurtured through [the] sharing of music, songs and rhymes’ (p. 92).

Of course, these will be very different songs to those in Froebel’s day; Powell and Goouch (2015) describe how practitioners recall that they might sing as they are sweeping up or washing their hands (p. 3) and Sylvie plays with plastic ducks in the bath whilst her mother sings ‘Five little ducks to her’. These are both very different contexts to Froebel’s song about The Charcoal Burner described by Bruce (2021, p. 81). Yet the idea is the same; the young children are introduced to rhymes and songs that are meaningful to them because they are describing their experiences.

At this point you may like to watch this short video of Professor Tina Bruce describing further the importance of the Mother songs and how they link to young children’s everyday experiences.

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TINA BRUCE: And what he began to do was to develop some lovely songs that he called the "mother songs." We'd probably call them "family songs" now because actually the whole family used to sing them with the children. And he also developed wonderful things for children to play with from a very early age.

But part of his concept of unity was about not just the wider world and the people in it, but also the wider world and nature. He wanted children to engage with nature.

Now, his favourite flower was the lily. And he loved the lily because he said, in a garden, a lily will grow where it's very dark and very damp. And you don't think anything will be able to grow, but lilies can grow there.

And he said that's like children. Children can grow in dark places, where their lives are not necessarily easy. But if we can help them to grow, that is what adults need to do.

So the lily for him was like a metaphor, where you help children to grow and flourish, even if they're in a dark place. So he did a lot of work with children, who are not privileged children, who are growing up perhaps in poverty.

Now, first-hand experiences lead children to know themselves. We're going to look at that in a minute. But it also leads children to move from what's literal and real to things that are imaginary and pretend ideas.

So if I just show you some of the things about that, you see, one of the things would be picking up daisies. Children-- you know, we love to do that with little babies. From a very early age, they love to try and pick daisies and things when you sit them on the grass. And so his self-activity needed real experiences because, otherwise, the songs, the family songs, wouldn't mean anything to the children.

So you might go with your baby-- and what we now call "proprioception," having a relationship with the ground. If babies don't sit on grass, they don't discover that that's different from sitting on a gravel path or it's different from being on a brick path. Babies need to do these things when they sit. And when they crawl, they're absolutely fascinated by these things.

So, he's got lovely songs about cuddling children and hiding because babies love to do peekaboo.

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This section has described how ‘Mother songs’ were an important feature of practice with young children, whether that be in parents’ interactions or those in the setting. Although this practice remains today, and is attributed to Froebel, the ways in which children access these songs and finger rhymes may have completely changed. For example, streaming music during ‘tidy up time’ in the setting, in car journeys with parents, or accessing visually songs and rhymes through video clips for a ‘sitting quietly time’ all remove the relationship with the adult, the key feature of these songs according to Froebel – and instead develops a relationship with technology.

Activity _unit4.2.1 Activity 2 Mother songs

Timing: Allow about 20 minutes

Did the section on ‘Mother songs’ make you think of songs you share with children or perhaps even songs that were sung to you as a child. Make a list of three such songs and note why you think the children enjoy them. You can record this in your Learning journal or the text box below.

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3 But is he still relevant?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Professor Tina Bruce has already been mentioned several times in this session. She is an honorary visiting professor of Early Childhood Studies at The University of Roehampton and has written a great deal about Froebel’s ideas; you will see some of her publications referenced throughout this course. As she is such an important scholar when it comes to Froebel’s work, it seems appropriate to begin this section by listening to her speak about the relevance of his ideas today.

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TINA BRUCE: I'd love to talk about why Froebelian ideas are so important, especially for babies and toddlers. Actually, looking at the babies and toddlers was Froebel's last piece of work. He didn't develop that until towards the end of his life. And Froebel did watch a lot of great educators have done. He began to realise how very important the babies were. He started with middle childhood.

Then he moved to the children we now call kindergarten children, from about two or three years old til seven. And then he really embraced babies and toddlers and working very closely to encourage their parents. So Froebel is important because he believes that we can help children to have fulfillment, to have wonderful intellectual lives if we can help them in a nurturing, loving environment.

And for the babies and toddlers, that begins in their home with their parents, their family. Froebel was one of the first great educators to really begin to understand how important babies and toddlers are, that these tiny little children, from the start, are learning things, developing all the time. And he believed that children could be very intellectual and very fulfilled, but they needed a lot of loving nurture in their families so that this would help their thinking to develop very deeply.

And he believed in something that he called unity. And that meant that he was thinking about how everything connects. So the first thing is that we help babies to understand themselves, who they are. Who am I? Those understandings that are so important for the whole of your life. But this is where Froebel is very special. From the start, he's putting a big emphasis on how children connect with other people. And so the wider world, the community is there from the start.

And he began to realise that children need to be cuddled and that their experiences are coming from their firsthand senses. So we talk about firsthand experience. He called it self-activity.

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In the following sections you will focus more closely on some of the ideas that Tina Bruce discusses.

3.1 Environments matter

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

While the value of time spent outdoors is generally recognised, there has perhaps been a lack of attention to the quality of these environments. Froebel’s vivid description of babies as an ‘appropriating eye’ reminds us of the need to consider the sensory qualities of outdoor spaces. Session 2 highlighted the tendency to create safe, artificial spaces for the youngest children, but there are concerns that these may offer little sensory stimulation. Contrasted to Froebelian understanding of the importance of time spent from birth ‘with the clear, still objects of nature’ contemporary outdoor provision can be both limited and limiting. There is a need to consider how natural elements can be built into spaces for the youngest children.

Listen to Tina Bruce discussing what ‘a life in and with nature’ looks like in present day practice.

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TINA BRUCE: I think it's very interesting to think about the difference between being in and engaged with nature. It's very easy, isn't it, to just go for a walk and just thoroughly enjoy a walk in a park or maybe a walk out in the countryside. And you just really enjoy the walk.

But you don't really look at what's around you. And so a big difference. You've got a lovely-- one of these family songs about the pigeon house. And with the pigeon house, and the child goes for a walk with their-- I think it's probably the mother. And they look at the birds.

But the child is leading it. So the child is looking at things at their height, partly. It might be a little field mouse or something that they see. It might be a robin hopping on the ground. They might see a worm. They might see a beetle-- all sorts of things.

And it's just go-- it's so that children are actually noticing what's there. It's not about being put in a pram and pushed through the park and then going home. So, it's lovely things like, when you get to the edge of the lake and you want to see the fish that are in there, a toddler would be very good at lying on their stomach, peeping over, and then quite often the goldfish or whatever would come if you were in the park.

I've done this so many times with toddlers. And they're terribly, terribly sensible about it. And they're thrilled at being allowed to be so near to the water. And they really are looking at the fish. They are engaging with nature. It's very different to being in nature where you just walk around and you don't really engage with it. So it's a very big difference.

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3.2 Adults matter

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Froebel’s pedagogic approach provides a potential model for practitioners to be ‘attentive and responsive’ adults who closely observe children in outdoor environments and follow their lead. However, his approach assumes that adults will have developed a strong connection with the natural world, so they are able to fulfil this role:

And very, very little is needed from those around the child, to give it what the years of childhood require. We need only to designate, to name, to give words to what the child does, perceives and finds.

(Froebel, 1887, p. 41)

Being knowledgeable about the natural world and being able to name elements that attract a child’s interest can feel like a barrier but is easily supported in contemporary practice by identification books or apps. Froebel’s thinking is unique in highlighting the two-way learning that observational and attentive practice can facilitate – in both adult and child. Rather radically, he suggests that adults can (re)learn to take delight in the natural world by observing young children – this turns conventional ways of thinking about the learning relationship upside down. Importantly, it suggests that both adults and children need to feel comfortable and have opportunities to engage with things that interest them during the time spent outside.

Listen further to Sacha Powell as she describes how Froebel’s ideas can help you to understand how best to support young children:

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NICOLA KEMP: So thinking particularly about babies and toddlers, how does Froebel contribute to our understanding of how to support them outdoors, making nature connections through our practice?

SACHA POWELL: Well, Froebel always stressed that babies are learning from birth and that they're learning holistically, in lots of different ways. And I think that what he would have or would continue to argue is that the outdoor, the natural environment in particular, and outdoor spaces, offer those multisensory holistic affordances that are so important for babies and toddlers.

They offer the opportunity for movement, whether that's gross or fine motor movement, and exploration, imagination, stimulation, and active learning using all senses. Because what Froebel recognised is that babies are thinking, feeling beings, and that the outdoor environment is a great place to express one's inner feelings outwardly and to do that in ever more sophisticated ways.

And of course, what the outdoor offers is open-ended opportunities for testing out ideas, saying, well, what does this do then? And what can I do with it? And what might I do with it? And how might I represent it in other ways? Or how might I make it represent something else, whether that's a stick or a stone or a blade of grass or a beetle or--

So I think that the outdoor is a never ending source of resource, opportunity, stimulation, but also relaxation, too, of course, because it can create a relaxing-- a more relaxing environment for some babies and toddlers. But the important thing to remember is who they're with.

And I think what Froebel talks about is how starting with the child-- in this case, a baby or toddler-- is really important. Look at what preoccupies them, what they're fascinated in, and we might learn new things ourselves and learn alongside a baby. But also work out how to support and extend what they're doing and learning and exploring, and in so doing, perhaps enable us to feel like we know more and feel more confident about being outdoors with babies and toddlers by revelling in their awe and wonder and exploration and imagination.

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3.3 Relationships matter

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Froebel recognised that humans are part of nature and there is a deep interconnection between human health and the health of the natural world. Importantly, he calls us to think about what we can offer as well as what we can receive from the natural environment. In his words, it is not just what one can ‘receive and absorb from without’ but, ‘much more … what he puts out and unfolds from himself’.

This understanding stands in stark contrast with our humancentric contemporary thinking which focuses on human benefits from engaging with nature rather than asking ‘What is my responsibility towards it?’ As Froebelian scholar, Helen Tovey argues, Froebel can help us rethink our relationship with the natural world as she sets out in this extract from the Froebel Trust document ‘An introduction to Froebel, children and nature’ below:

Today, Froebel’s ideas have renewed importance and urgency. Our task is not to give lessons in conservation or overwhelm children with anxiety about the planet. Instead, we need to cultivate a love for nature, wonder at its beauty, respect for its laws, and an emerging understanding of its complex web of interconnections. Educators can empower children to play their part in protecting and nurturing nature, creating rich habitats for wildlife. They can connect with the ‘big ideas’ of sustainability, climate change and biodiversity in direct and meaningful ways. Crucially we can use Froebel’s ideas to rethink our relationship with nature, create ecologically rich learning environments and help a generation of children to grow in harmony with the natural world.

(Tovey, 2022, p. 6)

Did you note the phrase that Froebel’s ideas ‘have renewed importance and urgency’? This is because of the global environmental crisis fuelled by a perspective of the natural world that sees it only as a resource to support human life. Froebel brings a different perspective; he is considered to be a holistic thinker, who emphasises connection and connectivity rather than separation. For this reason, his perspective offers a challenge to current thinking. It is interesting to consider what his thoughts would be if he was alive and writing today. The ideas around respect for the planet will be explored in more depth in Session 7.

4 Reflective activity

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Take some time now to reflect on the learning you have just completed and how it has helped you to understand more about Froebel’s ideas and how they can support an understanding of young children’s engagement with the outdoors and nature. Before you respond to the reflective questions, watch the video of Sacha reminding you why Froebel’s ideas are considered to be relevant today:

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NICOLA KEMP: Why are Froebel's ideas relevant today?

SACHA POWELL: Good question. I think the first thing to say is that Froebel's ideas have never stopped being relevant, but I think they're especially relevant today because we're facing so many crises. Froebel has always promoted unity within connectedness with our natural environment, and our important relationships with the natural world, starting from birth.

And of course, with the climate crisis and our need to focus on preserving and protecting biodiversity, Froebel's ideas are highly relevant, and those ideas need to begin in the early years. I think also that we've got quite fragmented societies and we've got very unequal societies. And Froebel very much promoted equality and diversity within his broad concept of unity. And so more than ever, I think Froebel's ideas matter for 21st century early childhood education.

Families are becoming more disperate. And particularly, when we see migration and families travelling from areas of conflict, it's important to think about children's relationships which Froebel always stressed. And their prior experiences starting with the child. They know what matters to them, and often, that's family, culture, heritage, genealogy, and all those things are part of Froebel's philosophy.

I think one other thing that's hugely important is play. Of course, Froebel stressed play and play in nature as well. And I think that we now have so much research that tells us from all different fields about the value of play. And early childhood educators have always known about the value of play.

But there is categorical evidence about its importance and its value for children, which really supports Froebel's original ideas at a time where there wasn't the same kind of research that we have now or the kinds of evidence. So it confirms what Froebel believed about play being a central integrating mechanism in children's lives and learning.

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Now have a go at answering the questions below in your Learning journal or the text box in the activity.

Activity _unit4.4.1 Activity 3 Reflecting on Session 3

Timing: Allow about 10 minutes

What did you find helpful about this session’s learning and why?
What are the three main learning points you will take away from this session?
How might you take on board some of Froebel’s ideas and change your practice with young children if you are a parent or carer?

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5 This session’s quiz

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Well done – you have reached the end of Session 3. You can now check what you’ve learned this session by taking the end-of-session quiz.

Session 3 practice quiz

Open the quiz in a new tab or window by holding down Ctrl (or Cmd on a Mac) when you click on the link. Return here when you have finished.

6 Summary of Session 3

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Now that you have completed this session, you will have engaged with some of Froebel’s original writing and thinking and know how to access this for future reference. You will have identified some of the ways in which his ideas have influenced early years practice. Finally, you will have started to think about why Froebel matters in the twenty-first century. You will continue to explore these ideas as the course continues.

You should now be able to:

describe key aspects of Froebelian thinking regarding young children and the outdoors
identify how Froebel’s thinking influences current practice
outline how Froebel’s principles are relevant when caring for the youngest children in the twenty-first century.

In the next session you will examine more closely the key point that Froebel prioritised outdoor experiences from birth, considering what the challenges might be in practice.

You can now go to Session 4.

Introduction

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Imagine you want to take a group of children from a baby room outdoors for the morning. All the children are aged under 18 months. Some are confident walkers, others still finding their feet. Some are able to navigate transitions from one space to another smoothly, others approach them with more uncertainty. None are yet fully capable of putting on coats, wellies, sun cream or puddle suits (though they can manage a hat) and a few fiercely resist adults’ attempts to assist them. These are just some of the challenges practitioners may face, before the children have even reached the door to the outside space. Once the children are outside, the difficulties continue – can you think of what some of these might be? Figure 1 illustrates some of the challenges that practitioners can encounter once the children reach the outside space: the environment may lead to children getting wet, muddy, or cold; adverse weather may make time outdoors seem unappealing. Meanwhile, unsuitable clothing may cause children discomfort and getting changed may cause distress.

Figure 1 A toddler walking in a puddle.

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A toddler playing in the rain.

Figure 1 A toddler walking in a puddle.

This all may seem quite a negative picture. However, in this session you are not only going to consider some of these challenges, but you are also going to look at how imaginative practitioners overcome them. Before you go any further, listen to the following audio in which Polly Bolshaw, Session 4 author, introduces the content.

Download this audio clip.Audio player: yon_1_s4_audio.mp3

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Transcript

POLLY BOLSHAW: In this session, you're going to be thinking about what happens in early years settings and what some of the challenges and some of the risks are in giving babies and toddlers opportunities to engage with the outdoors. In terms of the challenges, you will look at three of the most common issues facing early years settings.

Firstly, the difficulties in supporting young children's routines in the outside environment. Secondly, the challenge that a lack of direct access to the outdoor space can provide. And thirdly, how some practitioners can have a reluctance to change, which can mean that children do not have as many outdoor opportunities as they could have.

As well as challenges associated with giving babies and young children opportunities to spend time outside, there are also risks associated with them being in the outdoor environment. You will look at two of these-- risks from weather conditions and risks from the setting's outdoor space. Then at the end of this session, Sandra Roles and Charlotte Roles, from Dimples Day nursery in Kent, talk about some of the challenges that they faced when thinking about outdoor provision for under twos, how they've managed to overcome these, and what tips they'd offer to other practitioners to do the same.

End transcript

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By the end of this session, you should be able to:

identify the challenges when considering opportunities for babies and toddlers to engage with the outdoors
outline risks such as problematic weather and health and safety issues
describe some of the ways to overcome those challenges and risks.

1 What are the challenges?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

If you are already conscious of the challenges you are facing when taking young children outdoors, then you are not alone. Bilton et al. (2005) identify twelve common challenges surrounding outdoor provision. Not all of them will be an issue in all settings, or to all practitioners in a setting, and some may be more of a barrier than others.

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1 Vandalism 2 Shared space 3 Reluctance to change 4 Management 5 Storage 6 Lack of direct access 7 Restricted outdoor area 8 Weather 9 Foxes 10 Financial considerations 11 Parents and carers 12 Risk management

Depending on where your setting is located, some of these barriers may strike a chord with you, while others you may not have considered. In some urban areas, the problem of brave foxes making dens in a nursery’s outdoor space is not unheard of. In other areas, vandalism and litter left overnight is a bigger concern.

Alongside these barriers, one common challenge for settings in facilitating babies and young children spending time outdoors is supporting young children’s routines (Josephidou et al., 2021). This challenge, alongside the other common barriers for practitioners of a lack of direct access to the outdoor space (freeflow) and a reluctance to change, will be considered in the following sections.

1.1 Young children’s routines

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

One of the challenges of taking young children outdoors is supporting their routines in a different environment. Routine activities are those that need to be carried out on a daily basis, often at set or predictable times. Generally, they ensure that children’s basic needs are met. Malenfant (2006, pp. 7–8) breaks down young children’s routines into four types:

Hygiene: hand washing, tooth brushing, toilet routines and nose wiping
Snacks and meals
Nap or relaxation time
Dressing and undressing

You might be able to think of additional routine activities, which might be seasonal, such as applying sun cream, or for only particular children, like administering medication. Routines, Malenfant (2006) argues, not only meet children’s physiological needs but also support children’s emotional wellbeing. They help children to anticipate what is coming next, which makes them feel safe and secure. In addition, when adults respond to children’s indication of their needs, children feel secure. This supports a more personalised, child-centred approach to the importance of following young children’s routines.

In research conducted by Josephidou et al. (2021), settings identified that routines were a factor which impacted on how often babies and young children have access to an outdoor environment, and for how long. For instance, while the indoor space will be naturally set up to accommodate a space for children to sleep, eat and have their personal care needs met, in the outdoor environment practitioners need to think more carefully about nap time, meal and snack times and the logistics of nappy changing. Although all these activities could take place outdoors, usually as tasks they are associated with the indoor environment. If you think back to Session 2, you’ll remember how a binary discussion has developed where the outdoors and the indoors are seen as having two very different purposes – the idea that routine tasks are associated with the indoor space rather than the outdoor space supports this trail of thought, too.

Pirie et al also found that ECEC practitioners identified difficulties in facilitating opportunities for babies to spend time outdoors in their exploration of settings in Bristol. They said that one of the difficulties that practitioners had was that ‘set outdoor times for babies did not match the routines of individuals’ (2017, p. 25). For instance, this may be that ‘outdoor time’ clashed with a particular baby’s need to sleep or have a bottle. They also found that practitioners suggested that staff ratios were another difficulty in facilitating babies to spend time outdoors. This was echoed in Josephidou et al.’s (2021) study, who found that settings related the obstacles in supporting young children’s routines outdoors with difficulties in staffing and maintaining ratios. Some of these staffing concerns may relate to the additional supervision it is felt is necessary outdoors, for instance because of additional health and safety concerns about supervising children outside so that they don’t, for example, put things in their mouth.

1.2 To free flow or not to free flow?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Figure _unit5.1.1 Figure 2 A baby climbing the steps to get back inside.

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A baby climbing up some steps.

Figure 2 A baby climbing the steps to get back inside.

The way that space is used inside the setting could also present a challenge as it can limit opportunities to free flow access to the outdoors. The concept of free flow play between the indoors and outdoors is that children have the freedom to come and go as they please between the indoor and outdoor environments. Tina Bruce uses the term ‘freeflow’ to describe Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) ideas about being engrossed in play. She says it is important because ‘during their free flowing play children use the technical prowess, mastery and competence they have developed to date. They are confident and in control’ (Bruce, 2020). Some of this description could equally apply to being able to free flow between indoors and outdoors such as having ‘mastery and competence’ and being ‘confident and in control’ (Bruce, 2020).

Yet early years settings often inherit buildings that are not necessarily designed for the care and education of young children; they are sometimes converted old houses, schools, village halls or community centres. Childminders, meanwhile, are caring for children in their own homes. This means that the setting layout could make it difficult for the children to have free flow access to outdoors even if practitioners believe that this kind of pedagogy is important to provide. An even greater challenge is when the baby room is on the first floor of the building. This means stairs must be navigated, and children carried, if the whole group is to be taken outside.

Ouvry and Furtado (2019, p. 69) suggest that ‘imaginative practitioners have always found ways of overcoming obstacles that are thrown up by unsuitable premises’ and give some suggestions to solve the problem of a lack of direct access to the outdoor space. For instance, changing the mindset of practitioners about what ‘no direct access’ means, for instance if a corridor leading from a baby room to the outdoor space can be made secure so that children are able to use it freely. You may remember in Session 2, you learned about some of the imaginative practices that Josephidou and Kemp observed including:

young babies who spent most of the day outside and whose indoor environment was a yurt
babies who were taken by buggy to a meadow where they were allowed to run or crawl free
children who could crawl in and out at will from the indoor to outdoor environment, even on a rainy January day dressed in custom made clothing designed by the setting.

Although free flow is of course an important pedagogy in early years practice, in reality it can be hard to achieve owing to the complexities of building design. There are also questions around whether free flow is always the best way to allow very young children to access the outdoors. Setting owners and managers need to find the best solution for their own setting, their children, their parents, and their practitioners. Just because children have constant access to the outdoors through free flow provision, does not necessarily mean they are experiencing the best practice.

1.3 A reluctance to change

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In some cases, practitioners may themselves not want to spend time outdoors. Bilton et al. (2005) refer to this as a ‘reluctance to change’ and suggests that this barrier may be overcome by organising staff training about the importance of the outdoor environment and by considering what questions job applicants are asked to ensure successful candidates are those that value outdoor experiences. Alternatively, some practitioners may have a reluctance to change because of a fear of ‘getting it wrong’ or a lack of confidence in what to do outdoors. To help practitioners in this situation, regular mentoring, training, encouragement and perhaps supervision may allay their reluctance to change their practice.

Some of this reluctance may come about if practitioners don’t fully understand the opportunities that the outdoor environment can offer for babies and young children. Ouvry and Furtado (2019) have identified some assumptions that practitioners may make about outdoor play. They are not talking specifically about outdoor play for under twos, but rather under-fives. However, all the assumptions may be applicable to practitioners working in baby and toddler rooms. The assumptions are outlined in the following image.

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The assumptions are: outside is dangerous; higher adult: child ratios are needed outside; educators are merely supervisors outdoors; no learning happens outside; we would go outside more if the weather was better; it’s more healthy to be inside than out; parents don’t like the children being outside; getting out is such an upheaval, we can only do it on sunny days.

Activity _unit5.1.1 Activity 1 A reluctance to change

Timing: Allow 10 minutes

Imagine you were talking to a colleague, parent, or carer about the assumptions that might be made about outdoor play. Reflect on Ouvry and Furtado’s (2019) list of assumptions and make some notes on the following questions:

Have you, your colleagues, parents or carers you’ve worked with ever assumed any of those statements are true?
Why did you think this?
How could you encourage your colleagues, parents or carers to think beyond these assumptions so that they are encouraged to spend more time with children in the outdoor environment?

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Discussion

Hopefully, if you had previously believed the assumption highlighted by Ouvry and Furtado’s (2019) ‘no learning happens outside’ then this course is introducing you to evidence on the contrary, which you could consider sharing with others. You might have experiences of parents who don’t like their children being outside; for instance, Gould (2012) notes that sometimes it is hard to persuade parents of the value of being outdoors, they can feel anxious about their children’s safety or may not want children going out in cold or rainy weather. You might then have considered how practitioners might be able to change parents’ attitudes, for instance by sharing with them the huge benefits in children’s learning and development of spending time outdoors. Or if you looked at the assumption ‘we would go outside more if the weather were better’, perhaps you could share the short video ‘Kindergarten - The Nordic Way’ which you watched in Session 1, which suggests that it is perfectly possible to provide outdoor experiences for babies and young children in all kinds of cold and inclement weather conditions.

Section 1 has raised lots of problems and issues. It can be all too easy to focus on the challenges to taking young children outdoors and develop a ‘can’t do’ attitude. In Section 3 of this session, you will think about the importance of imaginative, solutions-focused practitioners and meet two who show what is possible with a ‘can-do’ attitude.

2 What are the risks?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

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A child with an umbrella in the rain.

As well as challenges in having opportunities to take babies and young children outside, there are also risks associated with them being in the outdoor environment. You thought about this in Session 2 when you considered how ‘keeping them safe’ is a key consideration for practitioners and has an impact when practitioners assess for risk. Two of the key risks that practitioners may worry about are weather conditions and the design of the setting’s outdoor space. Now you will consider these two areas.

2.1 Weather conditions

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In their study exploring how settings in England provide opportunities for babies and toddlers to engage with the outdoor environment, Josephidou et al. (2021) found that the weather was the main limitation to babies spending time outdoors. Respondents identified that when the weather was too hot, too cold or too wet this created difficulties. However, they did also acknowledge that the barrier of poor weather could be reduced by, for instance, adapting the outdoor area so it had shade from the sun and cover from the rain. They also talked about how they ensured children were equipped with the right clothes (and spare clothes) for the weather conditions.

Figure _unit5.2.1 Figure 3 A baby sleeping in a pushchair outside

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A baby sleeping in a pushchair outside

Figure 3 A baby sleeping in a pushchair outside

In Session 1, you were introduced to the tension between bad clothing and bad weather, and now you are going to consider this idea in a little more depth. If you live in the UK, you may have come across the phrase ‘there’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing’, which is attributed to Wainwright (1973), a British walking guidebook author. Similarly, if you live in Norway you might be familiar with ‘Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlige klær’. It translates as ‘There is no bad weather, only bad clothing’ and is both a common saying and a mentality – Norway is known for its long, freezing winters and abundant snowfall. Yet despite this, Norwegian children are encouraged to spend time outside, similar to the practice that Elisabeth described in Denmark in Session 1. Abels et al. (2021) suggest that it is the general rule of thumb in Norway that ‘it is ok to let your child sleep outside when the temperature is above −10 °C (14 °F)’.

Figure _unit5.2.2 Figure 4 A toddler wrapped up warm sitting on a slide

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A toddler wrapped up warm sitting on a slide

Figure 4 A toddler wrapped up warm sitting on a slide

Children sleeping outside isn’t a phenomenon unique to Norway, but common across the rest of Scandinavia as well. A Swedish mother called Linda Åkeson McGurk has written a book with that common quotation mentioned above in its title: There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids (from Friluftsliv to Hygge). She explores how the Scandinavian concept of ‘friluftsliv’ which she describes as ‘open-air life’ plays a part in raising children. She writes about how when taking her children out in cold conditions in America, the playgrounds are deserted, demonstrating the difference in parental attitudes towards weather between US and Scandinavian perspectives. This is something echoed in Josephidou et al.’s (2021) research too; with one participant stating that ‘Parents do not want the children to go outside in colder weathers’.

2.2 The design of the outdoor space

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Those with little experience of working with the younger age group of babies and toddlers may imagine them as a homogenous group with similar care, learning and developmental needs. However, in practice this is certainly not the case especially if we take into consideration the rapid learning and development that takes place between birth to two years old. This presents challenges in designing and providing appropriate spaces because of their diverse needs as learners. For example, Thigpen (2007) notes that such spaces ‘need to accommodate the needs of young babies, crawling infants, new walkers and active climbers’ (p. 20). You will now think about these different stages.

Young babies

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A baby lying on a lawn.

Need:

the physical environment to emulate the comfort and security of the indoors
opportunities to gaze at moving objects such as leaves and branches from under a tree
to experience the world using their senses
closeness
opportunities to observe from different heights and angles
opportunities for movement even if they are not rolling or crawling.

Crawling infants

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A baby crawling on a lawn.

Need:

spaces for crawling
protection from any rough, prickly or abrasive surfaces
opportunities to explore grassy or muddy areas, rather than concrete or tarmacked spaces
appropriate durable outdoor clothing to cushion their knees and prevent children from getting too soggy or uncomfortable
opportunities to experience a range of surface textures.

New walkers

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A toddler walking on a lawn.

Need:

the freedom to walk barefoot
practitioners who understand that walkers are growing in confidence and may encounter more stumbles and trips when outdoors
opportunities to walk in unfamiliar outdoor footwear.

Active climbers

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A toddler leaning against a tree.

Need:

natural features such as low branches, tree stumps, exposed roots and a variety of gradients
supportive practitioners who model safe climbing practices.

2.3 Auditing your outdoor experiences

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Jan White (cited in Early Education, 2022) suggests that settings can ask themselves a range of questions to help them develop how babies and young children access and experience the outdoor environment. These questions act as an audit to help a setting reflect on what the challenges and risks are with regards to supporting young children in spending time outside. White then shares tips and strategies about how these challenges and risks can be minimised. The questions fall within three themes – how the outdoor space is used, what the difficulties might be with regards to the design of the outdoor space and what challenges may emerge from management. White’s questions have been adapted here so that they can apply to both the home environment and the Early Years setting.

Activity _unit5.2.1 Activity 2 Auditing your outdoor experiences

Timing: Allow 15 minutes

Have a look at the questions in the table below. Spend some time considering your responses and then write your answers in your Learning journal or text box below.

Table _unit5.2.1 Table 1
Use	What are your feelings about very young children being outdoors? What do you believe babies, toddlers and two-year-olds get from outdoor play? How much time do babies and toddlers in your care actually spend outside (including walks in the locality/community) each day, across the whole year?
Design	How easy is it to move between indoors and outdoors? How do you feel about being outside in your space, throughout the year? What do children like about being outside and being in this outdoor space?
Management	What gets in the way of going outdoors? Do routines limit time spent outdoors or the flexibility to go outdoors whenever children express interest or need? Are there some issues that change across the year?

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Discussion

Having considered these questions, you might be feeling more aware of the particular challenges in providing outdoor opportunities for babies and toddlers. Perhaps you’ve realised that the children do not spend enough time outside, particularly at certain points of the year. You might have considered issues around easy access to the outdoor environment, or that there are particular features that do not work well outdoors for your youngest children. Maybe you have recognised that there are constraints with respect to practical issues like staffing or maintaining children’s routines.

White gives some suggestions to help think about how to facilitate higher quality outdoor experiences. For instance, she suggests that in terms of design, it is important that ‘the outdoor environment has plenty of flexibility for use and change, and is usable all year round’. In terms of management, it is key to ‘consider how to develop routines and planning systems so that the outdoors can be used more flexibly and spontaneously to respond to children and opportunity’. Time must be taken to ‘discover what is really limiting the use of outdoor environments beyond the setting and work to solve these issues’. These issues will be specific to individual settings, as will the solutions.

3 ‘Imaginative practitioners overcoming obstacles’

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Figure _unit5.3.1 Figure 5 A toddler exploring the fire pit at Dimples Day Nursery

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A toddler being supervised while exploring a fire pit.

Figure 5 A toddler exploring the fire pit at Dimples Day Nursery

Sandra Roles is the owner and manager of Dimples Day Nursery in Kent, which has 174 places for children aged between three months and five. Charlotte Roles is a practitioner there. The setting is on an eight-acre site, which means that the children have lots of space to explore the outdoor environment and the opportunities it has to offer (Stow, 2013). You can see a photo from the setting in Figure 5. All the rooms have their own garden, with all but one for the youngest children operating a free flow system between the indoor and outdoor space. In addition, there are communal gardens which offer extra opportunities for children to play, climb, learn and explore. In this section, we hear what challenges and risks Sandra has had to overcome to ensure that children of all ages have quality outdoor experiences in her setting.

3.1 Challenges faced at Dimples Day Nursery

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Watch this video where Sandra Roles and Charlotte Roles talk to Polly about the challenges when considering opportunities for babies and toddlers to engage with the outdoors.

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_s4_sandra-charlotte_q1.mp4

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Transcript

POLLY BOLSHAW: Hello, Sandra and Charlotte. It's lovely to meet you. First and foremost, could you introduce yourselves to me please?

SANDRA ROLES: I'm Sandra Roles. I own and manage Dimples Day Nursery in Dartford, Kent. And this year is our 20th anniversary.

CHARLOTTE ROLES: And I'm Charlotte Mare or Roles. And I'm Sandra's daughter. So I'm one of the deputy managers. And so I've been involved in the nursery since when I very first started secondary school when mum was opening the nursery and then decided to do my degree in early years and become part of management, etc so.

POLLY BOLSHAW: Thank you. That's wonderful. And I've got some questions for you today about the challenges that you face taking babies outside in your setting. And my first question for you is, what challenges and risks have you faced when considering opportunities for babies and toddlers to engage with the outdoors?

SANDRA ROLES: We have always valued the outdoors. My children grew up on a farm. So we're set in 8 acres, so it was a natural thing for us to do. And I retrained and did additional training as a Forest School leader with several other staff quite some years ago now. So we initially did that with our preschool children.

But didn't even consider to do anything as extensively with our babies. And it was one of the practitioners that suggested that it's not fair, and they should be able to go outside. And they should be able to do more things. And I just pooh-poohed it and said parents will never consent. And they did.

So that actually was never really a challenge, was it? That was something that the staff said we think we should do it. I said no, I don't think so, but you can try. And it worked. I think the challenge was some of the older staff did not want to free flow. They didn't want to go outside. They didn't see the value in it.

And occasionally, we have a parent that doesn't want to. But we are very mindful that we are a Forest School. So we just told them don't start with us then. So we're very strict on that. So we actually say, this is what we do. If you don't want to do it, we're not the right nursery for you.

CHARLOTTE ROLES: We are actually about to just change our consents and our terms and conditions to reflect everything that mum's just said, because we-- so that it's just built into our ethos completely right from when a parent looks around and signs up, so that they just know that it's--

SANDRA ROLES: They don't have an option to say they can't go offsite. It is-- the nursery itself we do so much outside anyway. The free flow happens anyway. But because offsite is very important to us as well, we've got a really good woodland near us, so we take the babies there. We take them to a park.

We go to Bluewater, which is an hour's walk, in buggies. And then they go and feed the ducks. We value that really, really greatly. So we don't want parents to say no. But we now say if you don't sign up to it, then obviously this isn't the right nursery for you.

End transcript

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3.2 Overcoming challenges at Dimples Day Nursery

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In this next video, Sandra and Charlotte describe how they are solutions-focused in terms of working with any challenges.

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_s4_sandra-charlotte_q2.mp4

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Transcript

POLLY BOLSHAW: Is there anything else that you've done to be able to overcome some of the risks and challenges that you faced in taking babies and young children outside?

SANDRA ROLES: I think quite a lot of the outdoor space, we have concrete areas because you need hard standing on places so that you can do certain activities and to prevent the mud. Two of our baby rooms have Astroturf, and I don't like Astroturf. It's never an alternative to grass, but we found that, because we do so much outside, they wore the grass away. And then it becomes dangerous because it's slippy and really wet.

So they have Astroturf for practicality rather than because we think it's a safer option. But we really stress with staff that they have to take them out on the grass.

CHARLOTTE ROLES: And we are lucky because we are set in the eight acres, so they have their immediate outdoor space might be the concrete and the Astroturf. But right next to them, they have two gardens immediately next to them that are grass. And then they can also take them into the Forest School field and our other fields out the back. Whereas, again, that was I guess to overcome for another setting that didn't have that. It would be something maybe if they still kept a patch of grass at the back if they weren't able to have other access.

SANDRA ROLES: And I think some parents-- going back to the challenges-- some parents don't like concrete in the garden. Not our parents now, but in the past, they would say, oh, why haven't you got soft core or why haven't you got Astroturf? And it's really important that children learn to negotiate hard surfaces. And if they fall over and grate their knees, that they learn that it hurts. So they're more careful.

So actually, all of our parents are really good with that now. And you can't really ride a bike on Astroturf. Even a baby can't scoot along. Charlotte's got a 13-month-old, and it's hard to scoot along on a scooter, a sitting scooter on Astroturf. It's much easier. So they need that.

They also need different surfaces. So we've got hills. We've actually deliberately-- when we dig something out, we deliberately make a hill and then cover it with grass. So all of those things are really important. And it's good because it saves money taking the muck away. So that's an added bonus. But then they also get other surfaces to climb.

It is expensive. We're very lucky that we've got my partner Gary who makes us so much stuff because we have multiple sand pits. We've got bridges for them to climb up. We've got climbing frames with the whole-- even the baby rooms have them. He tends to make something for one room, maybe the preschool rooms, and then the whole nursery wants one. So he has to then gradually start making a smaller version of it from the baby rooms.

SPEAKER 3: [INAUDIBLE].

SPEAKER 2: , Yeah reading nooks. They've got dens. They've got cubbies that they can go and climb into. We've got willow structures. But it didn't happen overnight. It's been a real long process.

End transcript

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3.3 Advice and tips

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Finally, watch this final video where Sandra and Charlotte offer advice to other practitioners.

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_s4_sandra-charlotte_q3.mp4

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Transcript

POLLY BOLSHAW: What tips would you offer to other practitioners to minimise some of the challenges that they might be facing?

SANDRA ROLES: I think if you're looking at staffing, when you initially interview, make sure you really stress about the-- ask the question--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SANDRA ROLES: --value outdoor play. What would you do if it was raining? What would you do if it was cold? Because even when you do that, when they come to the second interview-- so we have a second-- we have a working interview where they're unpaid, they come in. And we think that's really valuable because that's usually when you see that, actually, they don't really like the outdoor play. And they stand around and they don't really know what to do, or if it's cold they stand hugging themselves.

And our team wouldn't tolerate it anyway because they're involved in the interview process. So I think that's really important because people need to know what they're signing up for. We really-- when we say outdoor play, it's not lip service. We don't just say it and then do it occasionally. We're outside sometimes all day.

So I think that's really, really important. Find the right staff for the setting and somebody that wants to be out there, that wants the children to just experience everything outside.

CHARLOTTE ROLES: Show arounds with parents.

SANDRA ROLES: Make sure you show parents around. Don't let them just sign up. Bring them in and show them because occasionally-- we had somebody a couple of weeks ago. One of our-- we have a head of baby room. She's the head of the one- to two-year-old room, but she manages all four baby rooms.

And she came back and she said, these parents, they're not going to fit here. So she went back and she said, look, I've had the chat. She said you're worried about going outside. You said, what about the cold? You don't want her going out in the cold, and you don't want this and you don't want that. We really, really don't think this is the right nursery for you.

And it's having that strength--

CHARLOTTE ROLES: Confidence.

SANDRA ROLES: Yeah, and not in a derogatory way. We were obviously really nice to them and just said, if you change your mind, you can come back and have a look. But this is what we do. We're trained in lollipop as well, so we're one of the only nurseries that can cross with the lollipop.

And some of the parents that show around say, oh, I don't want them crossing that main road. And we've done everything we can to make it safe, and the experiences that they have are incredible. So it's really important that they can go offsite. And some parents say no, so it's having that--

CHARLOTTE ROLES: We'd rather them know at that stage before signing up rather than starting with us and then not liking it, whereas if we can just be honest from the beginning, they get to actually see us. And we say to them, look, we don't change anything when they come to look around so that they really see a real true reflection of exactly what we're like on a day-to-day basis.

And before COVID, sometimes we'd get show arounds turn up and there wouldn't actually be any children here because they'd all be offsite. So then we'd be like that's a real, true reflection of what we're like.

SANDRA ROLES: Going off-site, having mobile phones. And we have nursery mobile phones so that they tell us where they're going so that we can track them down if we need to bring them back as a parent collecting early or something because we don't tell parents when we're going off-site. We just go off-site.

End transcript

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Activity _unit5.3.1 Activity 3 Advice and tips

Timing: Allow 10 minutes

Now make a list in your Learning journal or text box below of what you feel are the three key points that Sandra and Charlotte make about overcoming challenges.

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Discussion

The challenges you chose to focus on might be those pertinent to you and the outdoor environments you access with young children. However, a positive can-do attitude can go a long way in tackling challenges and thinking about what possible solutions there may be. One of the wonderful things about early years practitioners is how creative they can be in solving problems and thinking outside the box, so most challenges and barriers to taking children outside should not be insurmountable.

4 Reflective activity

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Reflect on your learning in this session, using the questions below to help you, and record your thoughts in the Learning journal or text box in the activity.

Activity _unit5.4.1 Activity 4 Reflecting on Session 4

Timing: Allow 10 minutes

What did you find helpful about this session’s learning and why?
What are the three main learning points you will take away from this session?
What do you think might be holding you back in taking young children outside? How do you feel you might be able to overcome some of your challenges?

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5 This session’s quiz

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Now it’s time to complete the Session 4 badged quiz. It’s similar to previous quizzes, but this time instead of answering five questions there will be fifteen, covering material from the first four sessions of the course.

Session 4 compulsory badge quiz

Remember, this quiz counts towards your badge. If you’re not successful the first time, you can attempt the quiz again in 24 hours.

Open the quiz in a new window or tab then come back here when you’ve finished.

6 Summary of Session 4

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

As you come to the end of Session 4, it’s a good time to reflect on what you’ve learned about the barriers and risks to outdoor practices with babies and toddlers. Some of these challenges are around areas like maintaining children’s routines and navigating the setting’s layout. Others are around areas that may pose a risk to children like the weather or the outdoor space.

You should now be able to:

identify the challenges when considering opportunities for babies and toddlers to engage with the outdoors
outline risks such as problematic weather and health and safety issues
describe some of the ways to overcome those challenges and risks.

You are now halfway through the course. The Open University would really appreciate your feedback and suggestions for future improvement in our optional end-of-course survey, which you will also have an opportunity to complete at the end of Session 8. Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.

In the next session, you will move on to thinking about how outdoor provision for babies and toddlers can be developed, by considering the provision, people and places that you provide.

You can now go to Session 5.

Introduction

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In the last session you thought about the difficulties and challenges in giving young children outdoor experiences. You also considered some of the ways that these barriers can be overcome. You might now be wondering how, if you are undeterred by poor weather, you have negotiated challenges in gaining access to outdoor space and promoted the importance of outdoor opportunities, you can now ensure that your outdoor provision is as good as it can be for under twos.

This session is going to consider three aspects that will help you develop your outdoor practice. The first section will provide information about the principles of outdoor provision, focusing on criteria outlined by Gould (2012) and Bilton et al. (2005). Then in the second section, you will move on to think about two of Gould’s criteria in more detail, those of surfaces and stimuli. Finally, you will think about what adults can do in the outdoor space to foster the learning and development of babies and toddlers.

Before you go any further, listen to the following audio in which author Polly Bolshaw introduces the session.

Download this audio clip.Audio player: yon_1_s5_audio.mp3

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Transcript

POLLY BOLSHAW: In the last session, you considered what the risks and challenges are when considering opportunities for babies and toddlers to engage with the outdoors. In this session, you're going to move on to thinking about how you can develop your outdoor practice with under twos. You're going to consider three aspects that will help you develop your outdoor provision for babies and toddlers.

Firstly, you'll be thinking about some of the principles of outdoor provision, such as surfaces, stimulus, staffing, shade, and shelter. To do this, you'll consider criteria outlined by early years consultant Terry Gould, as well as Professor Helen Bilton and her colleague. After that, you will then move on to thinking about two of Terry Gould's criteria in more detail by considering in particular what effective outdoor services are for under twos and what stimuli can be introduced to outdoor environments to provoke and pique young children's interest.

And then, finally, you'll be thinking about people and places. You will look at what both practitioners and parents can be doing in the outdoor space to foster the learning and development of babies and toddlers. Then, you will look at how developing effective practice for babies and toddlers means taking them on off site visits too.

At the end of this session, childminder Sharon Powell will share details of the outdoor opportunities that she offers to the under twos in her setting and her tips on how others can develop their outdoor provision for young children.

End transcript

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By the end of this session, you will be able to:

describe the principles of engaging outdoor provision for babies and toddlers
outline what effective outdoor spaces may look like in relation to their surfaces and stimuli
describe the role of the adult in engaging outdoor provision for babies and young children.

1 Principles

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Start to reflect on what you consider the principles of effective outdoor provision for young children to be. Imagine you have been asked what the perfect outdoor space for babies and toddlers might be. What would it look like? Now think about the actual outdoor space that you have access to. What are your first thoughts on what principles you would keep in mind when developing this space? How did the audit of your outdoor experiences that you completed in Session 4 help you to think about how you might want to develop your provision?

In the following sections you will be thinking about some of the principles for effective outdoor provision for under twos.

1.1 The S Factor

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

When thinking about what an outdoor space should look like for young children, educational consultant Terry Gould (2012) has developed a set of criteria that settings should bear in mind. As they all begin with the letter ‘S’, he has named them ‘The S Factor’. Gould wasn’t thinking specifically about under twos when he came up with this list, but they certainly are all areas that need consideration. They are outlined in the following image.

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Surfaces; Stimulus; Staffing and supervision; Storage; Seating; Shade and shelter; Sustainability; Safety and security; Space.

Table 1 illustrates what these criteria could look like in practice.

Table _unit6.1.1 Table 1
Criteria	Key considerations
Surfaces	A range of surfaces offering a range of different movement opportunities for crawling, toddling and walking. May include tarmac, rubber, concrete, bark, grass or surface markings.
Stimulus	Some stimuli will be a constant feature by design, some seasonal (such as snow or puddles). Some will change as different resources are provided to cater to baby and toddlers’ individual needs and interests.
Staffing and supervision	Adequate staffing. All adults involved in planning for outside area and all adults aware of their roles and responsibilities.
Storage	Storage solutions like sheds and purpose-built resource trolleys ensure that resources can be stored safely and securely.
Seating	Seating to provide a space for sharing books and engaging in quality interactions. It may be fixed or portable. Chairs or benches can be used, as can repurposed resources like tyres, logs or milk crates. For very young children, rugs and mats to lie on may be more appropriate.
Shade and shelter	Shade and shelters may be natural, for instance provided by trees or willow tunnels, or man-made, such as gazebos, verandas or canopies. These can provide provocative stimuli for very young babies to gaze up at.
Sustainability	The resources used need to be fit for purpose, so low maintenance designs are desirable, as are keeping existing features like trees and slopes.
Safety and security	Risk assessments can help practitioners ensure the outdoor area is safe from dangerous materials, broken equipment and hazardous plants and that boundaries are secured. Children should be taught how to keep themselves safe, too.
Space	Some outdoor activities will need more space than others and the placement of particular resources (like taps) should be considered carefully. The outdoor space should be easily accessible from the indoor environment, so that provision can be free-flow.

Some of these criteria you may not be able to change – for instance there will be physical constraints on the outdoor space available. There will be financial constraints, too, on how able you are to invest in resources like new storage or make groundwork changes like new surfaces. But as Gould (2012) says, there are low-cost ways that outdoor provision can be developed, such as seating using tyres, logs or milk crates. This repurposing approach can be extended to the other criteria too.

Thinking specifically about babies and toddlers, a tenth ‘S’ could be added to support an understanding of the specific experiences of this age group. ‘S for Subjectivity’ suggests all the sights, sounds, smells and sensations from their perspective which will be very different from the experiences of spaces that older children have. For example, it is helpful for an adult to think about what a baby’s eye view might be, what their experience of lying in, on or under certain objects might be. It supports an adult’s understanding of what a surface may feel like under hand or under knee when a child is crawling.

1.2 Learning bays

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Bilton et al. (2005) advise an approach which focuses on ‘resource-based learning bays’ (p. 25). It is useful to consider whether they can be adapted for babies and toddlers while bearing in mind that organising resources in this way can potentially prevent children from taking things from one place to another and so interrupt the important ‘freeflow’ which was discussed in Session 4. The bays they suggest are:

A creative area: for instance, including painting, sand, water, mark-making and music making.
A quiet area: for books and a ‘space to be’. This could also include a space for babies and toddlers to nap.
An imaginative play area: for instance, including construction and building materials.
An environmental area: for example, a ‘wild area’ and space for digging and growing for babies and toddlers to explore.
An open space: which can be used flexibly for things like small equipment like balls, for children to crawl, toddle, climb or balance.

Although Bilton et al. (2005) were not thinking specifically about under twos when they compiled this list, the principles still stand that these are types of outdoor provision that babies and young children will benefit from. You might think that some of these are more important for young children than others.

1.3 Exploring principles of outdoor provision

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Mark Dudek is an architect who has designed schools, children’s centres and nurseries and is author of the book Nurseries: A Design Guide. In his book he recognises that when planning for a nursery environment, attention needs to be given to the fact that the children have ‘a need to learn the dimensions of space’ while the space itself needs to provide ‘delicate balance: exuberance and quiet; collaborative and social activities balanced against those occasions for focused and individual play’ (2013, p.13).

Activity _unit6.1.1 Activity 1 Exploring principles of outdoor provision

Timing: Allow 10 minutes

Have a look at how that ‘delicate balance’ of what an outdoor space needs to offer is managed at Top of the Hill Preschool in Rochester, Kent. Spend 10 minutes examining the images in the following slideshow carefully.

Slideshow (open the link in a new tab or window so you can easily find your way back to the course).

What evidence can you find for Gould’s (2012) S Factor criteria or Bilton et al.’s (2005) resource-based learning bays? In what ways do you think the provision could be developed? You may find it useful to complete a table like the one below.

Table _unit6.1.2
		What evidence can you see for this?	How could the outdoor provision be developed in relation to this?
Gould’s (2012) S Factor criteria	Surfaces	1, Your response 1	2, Your response 2
	Stimulus	3, Your response 3	4, Your response 4
	Staffing and supervision	5, Your response 5	6, Your response 6
	Storage	7, Your response 7	8, Your response 8
	Seating	9, Your response 9	10, Your response 10
	Shade and shelter	11, Your response 11	12, Your response 12
	Sustainability	13, Your response 13	14, Your response 14
	Safety and security	15, Your response 15	16, Your response 16
	Space	17, Your response 17	18, Your response 18
Bilton et al.’s (2005) resource-based learning bays	Creative area	19, Your response 19	20, Your response 20
	Quiet area	21, Your response 21	22, Your response 22
	Imaginative play area	23, Your response 23	24, Your response 24
	Environmental area	25, Your response 25	26, Your response 26
	An open space	27, Your response 27	28, Your response 28

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Discussion

Don’t worry if you haven’t managed to find evidence for all of the S Factor criteria in the table. You might have noticed how many different surfaces are available to children, such as green Astroturf, rubber flooring, shingle and wood. You might have noticed the opportunities for shade and shelter offered by the reading den and the role play cabin. You have probably spotted the range of stimuli, such as the climbing frame, sand pit, mud kitchen and water funnels. You are probably able to find examples for all of Bilton et al.’s (2005) areas, perhaps noting how explicit the creative area is with the shed of mark-making resources. Did you spot some spaces where children might be able to have some quiet time, perhaps in the reading den foreground or perched on a toadstool. You might have noticed evidence of an environmental area too, in which children could explore the plants growing in the soil.

2 Surfaces and stimuli

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Two of the key criteria that Gould (2012) identifies for effective outdoor provision as part of his S Factor are surfaces and stimuli. For babies and young children, appropriate surfaces are those that are multi-textured, multi-layered and multi-level. Effective stimuli take into account that babies and young children are developing their knowledge about the world by using their senses, and thus effective provisions are those that offer rich sensory experiences. The following sections will explore what outdoor surfaces and stimuli may look like specifically for children aged under two.

2.1 Surfaces

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

At first, surfaces might not be the first thing that you think of when considering an outdoor environment – you might instead consider the resources or other aspects of the environment. But think about the outdoor surfaces and the opportunities they offer as a ‘provocation’. You might already be familiar with the concept of provocations and their role in supporting young children’s learning and development. Strong-Wilson and Ellis (2007) describe them as a pedagogic approach that ‘advocates that teachers pay close attention to the myriad of ways that space can be made to “speak” and invite interaction’. A provocation can be any open-ended resource that provokes children’s thinking and encourages their imagination.

Figure _unit6.2.1 Figure 1 A toddler exploring soil in the outside environment.

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A toddler playing with soil.

Figure 1 A toddler exploring soil in the outside environment.

Think about the surface of artificial grass. You might think that it’s the perfect surface for babies and young children; Kemp and Josephidou (2020) note that in their research they saw artificial grass being used. Common sense thinking might tell you that it’s ideal – it is less problematic for babies to crawl on than a muddy lawn, it is more forgiving than a concrete or tarmac surface if a baby falls over, and there is no worry about babies putting it in their mouth like a bark surface or soil. But in terms of sensory stimulation and provocation, the plastic texture offers very little. This means that there are limitations in the benefits it can provide for cognitive and physical development.

Having a mixture of surfaces such as grass, sand, bark, tarmac, rubber, concrete and soil offer provocations to young children. They allow children the opportunity to investigate and to extend their learning. These are surfaces that can be explored by both little hands and little feet. Although practitioners may have concerns that some of these surfaces, particularly bark or sand, may end up in children’s mouths, this can be avoided with close adult observation and support.

Research literature has also noted examples of how important edging is as a feature in the outdoor area; this is something that Kemp and Josephidou (2020) noticed in their observations of settings. Another word for edging may be ‘borders’, such as paving or wooden low-level logs. Morrissey et al. (2015) carried out research in the Australian context focusing on a setting which decided to revitalise their outdoor area. The researchers found through their observations that ‘the introduction of features such as edging, levels and inclines appeared to increase the level and variety of children’s physical activity, and lead to greater utilization of the space’ (p. 29).

It is important to remember to consider what the children find most provocative and what fascinates them the most. And provocative surfaces may not necessarily just be horizontal. Robertson (2017) shares the importance of thinking about vertical surfaces as well, such as ‘latticing, wall, fences and hedges to look through’ (p. 216). These allow young children the opportunity to play peekaboo, to poke items through, to have privacy and to stretch up to. The adult should observe closely to notice what young children find most provocative. These would be good indications of what fascinates them and could be incorporated and contrasted with other things (opposites like rough and smooth; reflective and opaque, for example).

2.2 Stimulus

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Figure _unit6.2.2 Figure 2 Weather conditions as a stimulus for learning.

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A toddler sitting on a blanket on a snowy lawn.

Figure 2 Weather conditions as a stimulus for learning.

Gould (2012) also identifies the importance of stimuli. These could be a constant feature by design, seasonal (such as snow or puddles) and some will change as different resources are provided to cater to children’s individual needs and interests. Some may be natural; others may be manufactured. One issue to bear in mind, and that you will think about in more depth in Session 7, is that sometimes engagement with nature, such as trees, plants and animals, for babies and young children can be limited.

Two other important natural elements of a sensory outdoor environment are sand and water. White (2010) argues that sand and water are ‘among the very best materials for children of all ages outdoors, being two of the key ingredients of a successful outdoor environment for under-threes’. Water may come in the form of puddles, water tables, watering cans or taps. Sand may be placed in sandpits on ground level or in trays at table height, which may be particularly beneficial for children who want to experience the sensation of sand in small doses, or use tools like brushes or spades to manipulate it, rather than their body.

Figure _unit6.2.3 Figure 3 A toddler looking in a mirror outside.

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A toddler looking in a mirror outside.

Figure 3 A toddler looking in a mirror outside.

One resource that acts as a successful provocation in the outdoor space is a mirror; mirrors can help children learn about their physical self and body awareness. In terms of mathematics, mirrors support an understanding of the concept of reflection and symmetry. Robertson (2017) gives several suggestions of where mirrors could be placed in an outdoor environment:

Underneath a bench so the children have to crawl beneath it to look up.
Behind a bush or inside a den to create the feeling of more space.
Under a light log which the children have to lift up and look under.
In a bucket of water which the children have to look into.
As part of a pond or pool in a miniature world play area.
In natural areas such as amongst trees and shrubs. It can be surprisingly hard to see them.
Convex mirrors can be situated on corners for looking around.

(Robertson, 2017, p. 223)

2.3 The young explorer

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In this section you are going to look more closely at a young child, Liam, exploring his outdoor environment.

Activity _unit6.2.1 Activity 2 The young explorer

Timing: Allow 15 minutes

Read the quotation below from Watts (2011) about what constitutes effective surfaces and stimuli for babies and young children.

… younger babies are often calmed by the movement of leaves and trees and will respond to different textures of plants around them. As they become more mobile, consider whether you can present changes in floor levels, a small slope, stepping stones sunk into the ground or low-level steps. Different floor textures could be used for different parts of a ‘baby space’. Toddlers enjoy moving things around and will become totally absorbed by a muddy puddle or some large pebbles. Long grass provides a different experience and also an area of moss gives another interesting texture. Raised grassy banks, logs or sunken tyres can give opportunities for babies to pull themselves up. They need to be able to explore, to walk or crawl into small spaces. Think about bamboo screens or bushes that give this hideaway feel.

(Watts, 2011, p. 18)

Now watch this video. Liam, a 13-month-old boy, explores his local outdoor space as the commentator highlights Liam’s learning. As you watch focus on how Liam is exploring and using his environment. What evidence do you see that fits with Watts’ quotation about what outdoor spaces for children should contain? What do you think could enhance Liam’s outdoor environment even more? Don’t forget to record your responses in your Learning journal or text box below.

Download this video clip.Video player: schemas_in_and_out.mp4

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Transcript

SPEAKER 1: Development of the brain and body are completely inseparable. It's through their actions that toddlers build up their patterns of thought. Liam likes filling containers with gravel and emptying them out again. He does it over and over again.

He's beginning to understand that containers are fillable. They have openings at the top where you can put things in. It's a concept he's noticed, and he's testing it out in different contexts. He could put big stones and his whole body in the washing up bowl.

SPEAKER 2: [INAUDIBLE] nice.

SPEAKER 1: He's interested in the little holes where he can fit his fingers in. Through these repetitive actions putting objects or himself in and out, he's testing how the world works. Is it the same if I do it over here? Is it the same if I put my whole body in? These patterns of thought are often referred to as schemas.

At this age, these schemas are embedded in their movements and actions. Liam's movements are vital for developing his intellectual skills, and this is how his thinking develops.

Adults might look at this potholed back lane and want to cover it with a new layer of smooth tarmac, cut back the bushes, neaten and organise everything, make it safe. But for Liam, this unstructured diverse space is full of potential discoveries to be made.

Like most toddlers, he seems to have an inbuilt drive to want to find out everything he can about what things are like and what they can do. He needs to continue with his current interest, and straight away spots a drain that's just right for posting stones through the holes. It's often little things that adults don't notice anymore that interest toddlers the most.

Just like in the front garden, he repeats the same actions over and over again. He prefers to explore things that can be moved and transformed, things he can have an effect on.

SPEAKER 2: Pick smaller.

SPEAKER 1: Mum encourages his exploration, helping him choose some stones that will fit down the holes.

SPEAKER 2: Thank you.

SPEAKER 1: He's discovered his own shape sorter. He's learning so much about sizes, shapes, materials, and gravity. He's slowly creating a feeling for some of the laws about the world.

Objects fall to the ground. Stones are hard. They can't be squeezed into a space which is smaller than they are. This is big and that smaller. He's got a real purpose. For Liam, this is important work. Moving down the street, he spots another hole. Look at this, Mum. He's curious and observant, keen to notice the similarities between certain things.

End transcript

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Discussion

You might have noticed that, just as Watts (2011) suggested, Liam explores different floor textures like gravel and cracked tarmac which offers opportunities for exploration and changes in floor levels. Watts argued that toddlers enjoy moving things around; you might have spotted how Liam is enthralled in moving the pieces of gravel and tarmac around and becomes absorbed by the iron grate in the alleyway. She also suggests that they like to explore small spaces; Liam explores the small space of the washing up bowl by getting inside, and shows curiosity in the water gully too by dropping pebbles into it. To enhance Liam’s outdoor experience, he could be guided to explore the bushes in the back lane to give him the opportunity to hideaway, too.

3 People and places

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In order to think about how effective outdoor provision can be developed for babies and young children, you can also consider the role that people and places play. Do you remember how in Session 1 the research literature stressed the importance of knowledgeable adults; these adults include practitioners, parents and carers. For places, you will now be thinking outside of the setting or home environment to ‘what lies beyond the gates’.

3.1 People: practitioners, parents and carers

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Adults play a vital role in children’s development. They respond to the children’s learning and development needs by providing an effective, responsive environment. This links to one of the Froebelian principles you explored in Session 3 about how knowledgeable and nurturing educators are important. Kemp and Josephidou (in their forthcoming paper) found that settings with successful outdoor learning for babies and toddlers were those where:

the managers and owners of those settings had a good understanding of relevant research which they used to develop the practice of the setting
there was an openness to risk-taking and sharing of practice with others
high levels of trust were placed in the practitioners who worked in their settings, valuing their work with babies and toddlers outdoors and recognising the challenges
they understood the importance of getting parents onboard, and so played a particularly significant role in determining the nature and extent of outdoor provision for these very young children.

Working with parents to develop their understanding of outdoor opportunities for under twos is important to ensure that children’s outside experiences are not just limited to their time in the early years setting, but while they are at home too. In research by Kemp and Josephidou (2020), some practitioners mentioned that parental perspectives could be a barrier to the youngest children going outside. They reported that parents did not always see the value in their children being outdoors and were also concerned about some health and safety aspects. Some parents even requested that their child was not taken outdoors particularly if they felt it was too cold. It is for this reason that practitioners should work with parents to share information about the importance of outdoor experiences, and information on what type of effective opportunities parents can provide for their children. Equally, practitioners should listen and learn from parents about what they do outdoors with their children, to build on children’s experiences beyond the settings’ gates.

3.2 Places: beyond the settings’ gates

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Kemp and Josephidou’s (2020) research suggests that developing effective practice for babies and toddlers means taking them on off-site visits too. This ‘beyond the gate approach’ may include opportunities for babies and toddlers to access parks, fields and other outdoor environments in their local community. This enhances how much geographical space children have access to, and may also mean that there is the potential for more varied environments to explore. For younger children, settings may utilise prams, pushchairs or trailers which more than one child can travel in.

Figure _unit6.3.1 Figure 4 A stroller for 3 children.

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Three children in a buggy.

Figure 4 A stroller for 3 children.

3.3 How have others developed their practice?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Sharon Powell is a childminder in Kent with a provision called Little Willows ECEC. Little Willows ECEC has a strong outdoor play-based philosophy so that the children spend a lot of time in the garden or the local woodlands. Sharon’s intention is to provide an environment that meets the needs, curiosity and stages of development of each child in her care. She believes the type of environment she provides helps the children to grow in confidence so that they become independent in their learning.

Activity _unit6.3.1 Activity 3 How have others developed their practice?

Timing: Allow 20 minutes

In the following video clips, Sharon shares strategies she would offer to others to develop their provision.

In the first clip, Sharon talks about what opportunities the babies she looks after have to spend time outdoors.

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_s5_sharon_q1.mp4

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Transcript

POLLY BOLSHAW: Hello. Hi, Sharon. Could you tell us a little bit about who you are?

SHARON POWELL: Oh, good morning. My name is Sharon Powell, and I'm an outstanding childminder. And I have a child-centred stroll outdoor play-based pedagogy within the early years.

POLLY BOLSHAW: Fantastic. Thank you very much. My first question for you is, what opportunities do babies have to spend time outdoors with you?

SHARON POWELL: Well, we have, first and foremost, all of the resources that I provide outside are all inclusive. So regardless to whether they're tiny babies up to four years, they all have the same opportunities.

I provide appropriate clothing for children so that they can go out in all weathers-- obviously weather permitting if it's a storm. So the setting, I have lots of areas for the children to investigate. I provide natural opportunities at ground level for babies or a manageable height. So I might have to help support them, hold their hand, lift them up to get to the resources.

And there's lots of loose parts play for physical development, critical thinking, and also for teamwork. Because quite often, the older children support the babies as well. So it's a bit of the Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development thrown in there. It's just in our everyday.

There's lots of loose parts play. For instance, small and large size cooking utensils for the mud kitchen. Real mud. Real food. Real fruit and vegetables. Wood and leaves. Lots of mixing going on. Lots of swirling and mark making. Fresh herbs and citrus fruit and water, for example. Large pebbles and seashells and a sandpit just to make it a little bit more natural.

The children-- we also have bird feeders. You may remember my wormery. So the worms are still alive. They're still doing really well. We also grow our own fruit and vegetables. And the children-- we also plant pollinating plants for insects as well. Which also encourages our mini-beasts. And we've also got a bee house as well, which is lovely.

Each day, we also just sit and listen and watch the environment. So it could be something like, oh, we saw a bird. Or how many birds are on the wire? Or oh, look at that tall tree. Can you see something on that tree? And it could be a butterfly or it could be a bird.

And looking at the sky as well, at the clouds, and the aeroplanes. And sometimes a helicopter might come by and we'll stand and watch and imagine where it's going or where it's been.

Also, with the outdoor learning, we might decide to draw or paint what we see as well. Which is always great fun. And I also have books that also support what we do as well. So there will be the birds with the bird sounds, how we grow things.

Another great opportunity is the children, when they grow their own seeds-- plant their own seeds for the vegetables, they do their own sunflowers every year. And the children then send photographs throughout the summer as their sunflowers get bigger. So we do the giant ones.

And there's definitely a competition to see who gets the tallest sunflower. So yeah, lots of things to do, and regardless as to whether they're babies or a four-year-old. So yeah.

POLLY BOLSHAW: Thank you very much. That's absolutely great. It sounds like the babies and young children in your provision have an absolutely fantastic time.

End transcript

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Sharon spoke about the wide range of experiences that young children have outside. Were there any in particular that resonated with you? Make a note in your Learning journal or the text box below.

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Discussion

You might have noticed that some of them are:

Spontaneous: It can be hard to predict what is going to happen outside. For instance, a bird or a bug may appear, or an aeroplane may fly overhead. Make the most of these unplanned encounters. At the same time, follow the babies’ lead. If they show a particular interest in something spontaneously, take time to support these.

Resource-free: Sharon spoke about taking opportunities to do things like simply watch the clouds in the sky, notice trees moving in the wind or spotting wildlife. These things do not require any resources or equipment, but just time outside. It may be tempting to think that these are activities that can only take place in fine weather, but remember that this is not the case.

Developing knowledge of the natural world: Some of the activities that Sharon provides at her setting, like planting seeds, growing fruit and managing a wormery will support children’s knowledge of the natural world. It may be overwhelming to think that you have to do all of these things in your provision but you can start small, for instance encouraging each child to plant a sunflower seed in spring time.

In the next clip, Sharon was asked what she thinks that babies and young children get from their outdoor experiences with her.

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_s5_sharon_q2.mp4

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Transcript

POLLY BOLSHAW: I'm interested to know, what do you think that the babies and young children get out of being outdoors in their outdoor experiences with you?

SHARON POWELL: To be honest with you, I think from a family perspective, the parents quite often like the idea that they come to me to get messy. I'm not saying all parents. I know that's not the right term, but a lot of parents don't like the messy play, whereas they can do that here because I've got the facilities to do it.

I feel that with these experiences, it supports the next generation to become naturally connected with nature and to experiment with the wonderment of going beyond the walls of the setting and provides children with enabling environments in which to learn.

Learning outdoors encourages a lifelong activity style and enhances the development of fine and gross motor skills, and the children usually demonstrate high levels of busyness and fun whilst engaging with their peers and myself when outdoors. It's just a wonderful experience for them, really. And they can't wait to get outside.

So that's usually after snack time, when are we going, where do we go? So yeah. And every day, I might put like subtle little differences in, just to grab their interest. And they're really good, actually, of making suggestions too, can we add, can we have-- and yeah.

End transcript

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Did you make a note of the benefits she spoke about; which do you think are the most important – and why?

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Discussion

Sharon spoke about several benefits for babies and young children to be outdoors, including:

supporting them to become naturally connected with nature
encouraging them to have a lifelong active lifestyle
enhancing the development of their fine and gross motor skills
demonstrating high levels of busyness and fun.

In the final clip, Sharon talks about what tips she would offer other practitioners to help develop their outdoor provision for babies.

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_s5_sharon_q3.mp4

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Transcript

POLLY BOLSHAW: And finally, my last question for you is, what tips would you offer to other practitioners to help develop their outdoor provision for babies?

SHARON POWELL: So really and truly, the first thing is not to be scared to engage. With little ones being - getting dirty and putting the odd bit of grass, or even picking up an insect or something, or a stone, let the children explore those things. Obviously, you do have to be mindful of supervising that age group closely, because babies, obviously, their sensory are so high that most things go in their mouth anyway. So we do have to be mindful of that.

But I feel that it's a significant meaningful experience for children to explore outdoors, for yourself as well. Because by being led by the child and also what nature has to offer in the moment as well, so people quite often be out there and think, oh, I wasn't expecting that to happen today. And there's new things that come along, especially when children are learning for the first time. And outdoor experiences support the development of wellbeing through really high-quality play.

That is provided by highly skilled practitioners that aren't afraid to experiment alongside the children and ensure regular opportunities for outdoors and ideally in the every day. And obviously, not during-- as I said before, with the weather conditions being bad, and also to be sure to connect with other outdoor people that are passionate about the outdoors. Because I'm part of an outdoor learning collaboration. And we share best practice and ideas. And that is just so valuable. And yeah, that would be my best advice really.

And obviously, research, research should never go away. When you stop your studies, just keep going. I finished my masters four years ago, and I was hooked. And I will carry on. If I find-- if I'm puzzled by something, I will go and find it out. Or if I need advice or something or need new learning, I will go and explore it.

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What stood out to you about the tips Sharon offers?

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Discussion

You might have noticed how Sharon recommended doing these two things:

Be part of a community: Finding and talking to other practitioners who are keen to develop their outdoor provision can help give you ideas for your own setting and encourage you to share your knowledge with others.
Continue to find things out: Never fall into the trap of thinking that you know everything already. Talking to others, reading and embarking on study can help you learn more about how to develop your outdoor provision and work out what is going to work best for you and your setting.

4 Reflective activity

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Now is your opportunity to reflect on your learning from this session.

Spend some time thinking about your learning in this session and responding to the following questions in your Learning journal or text box in the activity.

Activity _unit6.4.1 Activity 4 Reflecting on Session 5

Timing: Allow 10 minutes

What did you find helpful about this session’s learning and why?
What are the three main learning points you will take away from this session?
Which key criteria for effective outdoor provision stand out to you the most? Which do you think you will be able to develop in your own provision?

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5 This session’s quiz

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Well done – you have reached the end of Session 5. You can now check what you’ve learned this session by taking the end-of-session quiz.

Session 5 practice quiz

Open the quiz in a new tab or window by holding down Ctrl (or Cmd on a Mac) when you click on the link. Return here when you have finished.

6 Summary of Session 5

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

As you come to the end of Session 5, it’s a good time to reflect on what you’ve learned about the ways outdoor provision for babies and young children can be developed. Key criteria to bear in mind are a setting’s surfaces, stimulus, staffing and supervision, storage, seating, shade and shelter, sustainability, safety and security, and space. As part of surfaces, you may consider materials such as grass, sand, bark, tarmac, rubber, concrete and soil, all of which offer provocations to young children. In terms of stimuli, some of these may be natural, such as puddles, water and sand, and some of these may be manufactured, such as provocations like mirrors. And you should also think about the role that adults can play in developing provision, both practitioners and parents.

You should now be able to:

describe the principles of engaging outdoor provision for babies and toddlers
outline what effective outdoor spaces may look like in relation to their surfaces and stimuli
describe the role of the adult in engaging outdoor provision for babies and young children.

In the next session, you will be moving on to consider the difference between being outdoors and being in nature as you explore definitions of natural environments.

You can now go to Session 6.

Introduction

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Does it matter what kind of outdoor environment very young children are given access to? This is the key question you are going to be thinking about in this session. People may mean different things when they talk about being outdoors. You may have come across some of the different phrases used: outdoor learning, outdoor education, learning in natural environments. Is the ‘outdoors’ anywhere that is not indoors? Does it include artificial or only natural environments? Is it an everyday environment (familiar) or special (unfamiliar)? Does it need to be large, or can it include very small spaces?

As you think about responses to some of these questions, remember there are no right or wrong answers – you might have a very specific place in your mind or be able to identify features or elements that you think are important. The important thing to recognise is that we are all influenced by our own experiences of the outdoors, and it can be helpful to reflect on what these are. If you picture a baby or toddler in a natural environment perhaps you imagine them crawling on the grass, picking daises or lifting up stones to find worms.

In this session you are going to be introduced to ideas about the value of different kinds of outdoor environments. You will explore a concept called ‘affordances’ which will help you think about the ways in which humans (and specifically babies and toddlers) interact with their environment. This will help you think about the particular benefits of time spent in natural environments for very young children and their learning and development. You may remember from Session 3, that Friedrich Froebel thought the environment in which the youngest children spent time was of vital importance.

The senses, through which the child experiences the world, led him to think that ‘the surroundings, however inadequate they might otherwise be, should be pure and clear – pure air, clear light, clear space’. Remember his emphasis on the importance of time spent from birth ‘in and with the clear, still objects of nature’; this quotation is key to the learning in this session. Notice Froebel didn’t just say ‘in nature’ he also said ‘with nature’. Time spent ‘in nature’, although desirable does not suffice. It is how the child engages with nature that is important. Sitting in a pram watching adults feed ducks is not the same as lying on your tummy by a pond, held gently and throwing food into the water for the ducks or seeing the fish swimming below.

By the end of this session, you should be able to:

describe the concept of affordances and how it is helpful to thinking about engaging young children outdoors
outline some learning and development needs of babies and toddlers in relation to outdoor environments including engaging with nature
explain why natural environments are particularly appropriate for young children.

To begin with take a few minutes to listen to the following audio in which Nicola Kemp introduces the session.

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Transcript

NICOLA KEMP: Welcome to Session 6. In this session, we're going to focus on the question-- does it matter what kind of outdoor environment very young children are given access to? It's a question early childhood pioneers, including Friedrich Froebel and Rudolf Steiner, thought was of great significance. Both believed in the importance of babies and toddlers spending time in natural environments.

In this session, you will have the opportunity to hear Dr Tansy Watts, a Steiner-trained practitioner and early childhood researcher, talk about Steiner's concept of sensory nutrition and how time engaged with the natural world supports this.

There is now an established body of theory and research that helps us to understand why nature engagement is fundamental to our health and wellbeing from birth. Despite this, levels of engagement with the natural environment are declining in the UK.

Early childhood settings have a role to play in supporting nature engagement, but our research has shown that the spaces provided for the youngest children often lack natural features due to safety concerns. Environmental conservation organisations can provide vital support and resources for families and practitioners interested in developing nature engagement opportunities.

We hear from Diane Gould, who leads Derbyshire Wildlife Trust Nature Tots programme, about how they involve the youngest children and the benefits they observe.

End transcript

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1 What can I do here?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In Session 1 you considered some of the benefits of being outdoors for young children. This session begins by inviting you to think about the significance of the type of outdoor environment as considered alongside the concept of affordances. But before you begin to read about affordances, watch this short video of Kornelia, the archivist that you met in Session 3. Here she has turned her attention to the grounds of Froebel College to explain the significance of this particular outdoor environment.

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KORNELIA CEPOK

So we're standing here in the beautiful grounds here of Grove House. This is where the Froebel Educational Institute moved in 1922, coming from West Kensington on Talgarth Road, very urban surroundings, coming here to this greenery, a pond, lots of trees, lots of nature, all the birds, and taking really advantage of it. The house was purchased in 1921 with funding from Claude Montefiore. And the institute was really looking to expand, to provide better learning environment and better residential areas and learning areas for a growing institute, something which became really very popular and very successful.

The house behind us, Grove House, the white building, was built in its current form in 1790s, built on a much older building. Grove House in its current form was built in the 1790s but built on the foundations of a much older building which can be still found in the cellars of this building. It was bought with the help of Claude Montefiore and provided a much larger environment for learning for the students and for the institute, as such.

So the grounds really provided the opportunity to spread out, to let the nature department grow, and to take advantage of it, to take advantage of all the surroundings, of all the plants, of the birds and of the moorhens etc, everything that is living here on the grounds as well. And the students really took advantage of it.

So the Froebel Education Institute moved here in 1922, which is exactly 100 years. And it is also exactly 100 years since this One Nature Diary was produced. And if we look through the diary, we can actually see that not much has changed. We can still see the same species here. We can still see the same surroundings, and we can really sympathise with the space and the surroundings they've been using for learning.

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1.1 The child in nature

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

If you look closely at Figure 1 you will see a young child totally immersed in nature.

Figure _unit7.1.1 Figure 1 The child in nature

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A toddler laying on some leaves.

Figure 1 The child in nature

You might notice the way she is gazing intently at the ground in front of her or notice her grasping a twig in each hand. You might be wondering about when the photo was taken, noting her warm clothing and the fallen leaves all around her that make a soft, dry surface to lie on. You will see how she is observing very closely the fallen leaves; perhaps she has also noticed some insects crawling under them. No doubt she can smell the damp, woody scent of the woodland floor and she clutches in one hand a thin, perhaps smooth twig, and in the other a rougher, thicker stick. You cannot know what the child is feeling but she appears to be calm, absorbed and content. She is certainly interested in her world; you can see how significant the environment is for her multi-sensory learning.

1.2 The child with nature: affordances

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

The concept of ‘affordances’ is useful if you want to think about the best type of environments for young children. Researchers often use this concept to describe the relationship between the characteristics of a particular environment and the way in which people (here children) might engage with it. The concept was first used by Gibson (1979) to describe the characteristics of an environment in relation to an individual. Affordances are unique to each individual depending on their body size, skills, experience and motivation.

It is an important idea when thinking about children spending time outdoors and is well illustrated in Figure 1. Think about how the affordances of this environment might change with the seasons, the time of day and the age and interests of the child. A slightly older child would engage differently with the environment in Figure 1. They might find a nearby log to sit on or climb on a tree stump. They might use the twigs in a more imaginative, symbolic way such as pretending they are food or a sword.

1.3 Ko plays in the park

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In the following video, a different child (Ko) is in a different environment. Ko is 9 months old and has been taken to the park by his mum.

Activity _unit7.1.1 Activity 1 Playing in the park

Timing: Allow about 10 minutes

Watch the video and then answer the questions which follow. Add notes to your Learning journey or the text box below.

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Transcript

[LAUGHTER]

SPEAKER 1: Hello. How are you, baby?

SPEAKER 2: This is Ko. His mum's home language is Japanese. And she also speaks English. They don't have a garden, but mum takes him out every day. And today, they go to the park. It's a nice day, and he sleeps soundly outside. Mum makes sure he doesn't get too much sun. Waking up gently, there's lots to see. He sits quietly, taking in his surroundings.

SPEAKER 1: [SPEAKING JAPANESE]

SPEAKER 2: It's time to act, and he feels the grass, and looks from his hand and the close-up details, then to the distance. His vision and focusing is now nearly as clear as an adult's. And because of the varied visual experience he's had, he has a rich 3D view of the world.

SPEAKER 1: [SPEAKING JAPANESE]

SPEAKER 2: Mum turns his activity into a physical game.

SPEAKER 1: (SINGING) Row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

SPEAKER 2: Babies have an innate interest in rhythm and musicality. And Ko loves this song and is familiar with it.

SPEAKER 1: (SINGING) Gently down the stream.

SPEAKER 2: Mum builds up the suspense, and Ko knows what will happen next. He laughs before it happens, [BABY LAUGHS] really enjoying the suspense.

SPEAKER 1: [SPEAKING JAPANESE]

SPEAKER 2: Ko loves this more boisterous play. These kinds of physical movements have far-reaching effects on the brain. It's this kind of play that really stimulates his vestibular sense, his sense of motion and position, and his proprioceptive sense, his sense of body awareness. To develop his proprioceptive sense, stretches out, he feels the position and pressure of his limbs on the grass, experiencing how his muscles feel when they're active.

SPEAKER 1: [SPEAKING JAPANESE]

SPEAKER 2: Ko has recently learned to crawl. He's very pleased. It's a big development for him. His proprioceptive and vestibular sensors are both stimulated as well as his ability to focus quickly from his hands to the distance.

End transcript

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How would you describe the ‘affordances’ for Ko in the park environment?
Which of the activities he spends time doing in this video could happen in any outdoor environment?
How important do you think the natural features are within the environment (grass, trees, wildlife) to his learning and development?

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Discussion

Parks are a commonly used resource for families and settings. While any outdoor environment (including a shopping street for example) might offer exposure to the weather and a connection to the wider world, this video illustrates how the natural features of a park environment can offer particular affordances for a young child.

The grass is comfortable to sit on and explore. There are trees that offer shade and move in the wind. There are birds, plants, and animals to fascinate.

The concept of affordances helps the adult to understand the characteristics of an environment AND those of the child. Probably, he could engage in the same activities elsewhere but the park perhaps offers a greater variety of plants, animals and birds; it certainly provides a sense of space and horizons that may not be so evident elsewhere.

2 What do I need here?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In Session 2, you were introduced to the idea that the outdoors can often be viewed as a specific space for physical development. The argument was made that, although physical activity is very important, ‘all children need to have opportunities to “just be” outside no matter what their age’. It can be helpful to think about the ways in which the youngest children might ‘just be’ when they are outdoors, to better understand the types of environment that can support their learning and development needs. Most simply this idea can be considered in terms of opportunities for:

moving freely
sensory engagement
sleeping, resting and being quiet.

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Three cartoons with the text Moving freely, Sensory engagement and Sleeping, resting and being quiet.

2.1 Opportunities to move freely

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Even very young children need opportunities to be able to move freely when outdoors, and for gross and fine motor skill development. Remember the discussion of ‘Container Syndrome’ in Session 1. This might mean providing rugs for babies to lie on outdoors and ensuring there is appropriate shade and/or shelter through trees or canopies. Logs provide an excellent structure for very young children to pull themselves up on, sit on or climb on. Figures 2 and 3 are taken from the outdoor area of an English setting and illustrate what such an environment might look like.

Figure _unit7.2.1 Figures 2 and 3 An outdoor area of a setting

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Two photographs of outdoor play areas.

Figures 2 and 3 An outdoor area of a setting

2.2 Opportunities for sensory engagement

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

To better understand the sensory needs of babies and toddlers, it is helpful to draw on the thinking of another early childhood pioneer – Rudolph Steiner. He influenced the thinking of the McMillan sisters (see Session 1). He argued that just as babies and toddlers need appropriate physical nutrition to thrive and flourish, they also need appropriate sensory stimulation. He extended the concept of the senses beyond the five senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight. Figure 4 shows Steiner’s concept of the twelve senses – adding balance, movement, life, ego, thought, speech and warmth.

Maximise

Figure _unit7.2.2 Figure 4 Man’s Twelve Senses in Their Relation to Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition

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The twelve senses outlined in the image are 1. Sense of ego. 2. Sense of thought. 3. Sense of speech. 4. Sense of hearing. 5. Sense of warmth. 6. Sense of sight. 7. Sense of taste. 8. Sense of smell. 9. Sense of touch. 10. Sense of balance. 11. Sense of movement. 12. Sense of life.

Figure 4 Man’s Twelve Senses in Their Relation to Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition

Activity _unit7.2.1 Activity 2 Opportunities for sensory engagement

Timing: Allow 10 minutes

In Steiner practice, the outdoors offers the potential for what is referred to as ‘sensory nutrition’. Watch this series of videos in which Dr Tansy Watts talks from her perspective as a Steiner practitioner and early childhood researcher about sensory nutrition.

In the first video, Tansy talks about why it is important for the youngest children to spend time outdoors.

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NICOLA KEMP: I'd like to start off with a question about why you think it's important for the youngest children to spend time outdoors.

TANSY WATTS: Having spent some time in Steiner education and start-up practice, I'd been strongly influenced by its approach and they talk about the youngest children being sensorially open and so the experiences that they absorb in are very important for their formation and development at that stage. And so through practice there's this orientation to what's called sensory nutrition.

So there's this idea that our experiences build the development of us as individuals as much as I might think about in terms of food as a nutrition that all of our sensory experiences are equally important in forming ourselves as individuals. So that's physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and yeah-- as this orientation to sensory nutrition. And that's why being in natural environment is important in terms of the sensory information that it offers.

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In the second video, Tansy is asked how we can we develop practice that leads children towards nature.

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NICOLA KEMP: How can we develop a practice that leads children towards nature and towards that connectivity?

TANSY WATTS: Going outside offers that opportunity to be in touch with the changing seasons, the weather of the day, the light conditions, children direct access to the opportunity. And then through that, the children can lead really through their relationships and their behaviour and their activity in their play. They can demonstrate its value. And that could be highly influential I think on adults in understanding the possibilities that it offers.

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Now have a go at answering these questions, noting your responses in your Learning journal or text box below.

What do you understand by the phrase ‘sensory nutrition’?
What are the implications for parents and practitioners?

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Discussion

The idea of sensory nutrition can be helpful in relation to thinking about the needs of the youngest children. It emphasises how important it is to think about the sensory characteristics of an environment. Outdoor environments offer particular opportunities for nurturing the young child’s senses holistically and is an important consideration when parents, carers and practitioners are thinking about the affordances of particular environments for young children.

2.3 Opportunities to sleep, rest and be quiet

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

A continual thread throughout this course has been the practice in specific cultural contexts of using the outdoors as a place for babies to sleep. Given the developmental significance of sleep for babies and toddlers, it is perhaps surprising that so little consideration is given to the environments in which this occurs in all cultural contexts. Newborn babies spend up to 18 of 24 hours asleep and by the end of the first year this has changed relatively little (although sleep periods will have extended and shifted towards night-time (Anders and Taylor, 1994).

Writing from the perspective of Norway, Ulla (2017) suggests that sleeping should be understood as a key part of both young children’s care and learning; as such, it needs to be given greater attention. Session 1 illustrated how in some cultures this attention is given and that therefore the outdoors is seen as an appropriate place for babies and toddlers to sleep during the daytime. There is research evidence that documents some of the physiological connections between sleeping outside and the healthy development of babies and toddlers such as longer sleep duration and brain maturation. Because of this, the practice of sleeping outside is gaining popularity again. Here one English practitioner describes their approach:

We have sleep pods outside; our children can crawl in and curl up when they need to, or they can be encouraged to rest by their keyperson who recognises the signs of the need to rest in their individual children. We do not put our children to bed by the clock but by their needs. They may also go to sleep indoors.

Other settings use traditional prams that are located in a sheltered outdoor space as illustrated in Figure 5.

Figure _unit7.2.3 Figure 5 Sleeping outside.

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Prams under a marquee.

Figure 5 Sleeping outside.

3 Natural environments

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

You should now understand that different types of outdoor environment, offer different opportunities for engagement. In this section you are going to explore some of the research that explains why specifically natural environments might be particularly important for babies and toddlers to spend time in. But before you can do this, it is important that you know what is intended by ‘natural environment’ because it is a phrase that could be defined in different ways. Even the term ‘nature’ will be defined in different ways depending on the cultural and geographical context you find yourself in. Kara Lamb was making this point in 1996 when she wrote:

What is nature? Perhaps it is something of our own invention, perhaps not; but before we can begin researching the proper way to conserve it, we must come up with an accurate notion of what it is. Unless we examine the values we place on the environment and the resulting conflicts in which we trap ourselves, we will never be able to employ our definitions of nature, nor argue for our reactions toward it. Without a unified concept, perceptions of nature will create conflicting methodologies in terms of the environment – most of all, in terms of how we see it. Without a perception of the natural world, we aren’t quite sure what it is we are trying to save.

(Lamb, 1996, p. 475)

You will see that Lamb’s argument was focused on environmental awareness, an important factor which will be discussed in great depth in the next session. For now, in this section, you will consider how to define nature, the importance of spending time in nature and also ideas of why young children need to feel a connection with nature.

3.1 What is a natural environment?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Different scenarios may come to mind when you think about a natural environment. For example, you may think it needs to simply have a few plants and trees. Some may consider their garden or the local park to be a natural environment whereas others may disagree and consider a natural environment should not contain too many elements of human interference.

It is important to think about different meanings and understandings of what a natural environment is. What comes to your mind when you are asked to picture one? Josephidou and Kemp (2022) decided to use the following definition by Hartig et al. (2014) to help them think about their work. These researchers suggest a natural environment involves:

the physical features and processes of nonhuman origin that people ordinarily can perceive, including the ‘living nature’ of ﬂora and fauna, together with still and running water, qualities of air and weather, and the landscapes that comprise these and show the inﬂuence of geological processes.

(Hartig et al., 2014, p. 208)

This might make you think about protected natural environments such as National Parks rather than local outdoor spaces. However, spaces which include natural features but have been constructed for a particular (human) use such as parks, canals and gardens are also considered as natural environments. Such environments are often called green (land-based) and blue (water-based) spaces.

Nadiya is a parent of two young twins, and she wanted to spend more time in natural environments with them because her instinct told her it was important. She felt they were calmer and slept better when they had opportunities to do this. She also recognised all the vocabulary they were picking up because they were interested in everything they saw. Furthermore, she noticed how it helped her to feel more relaxed with a greater sense of wellbeing. She decided to make a list of all the places she could visit to spend time outdoors in nature.

Box _unit7.3.1 Places in nature I could visit with the twins

Our own garden – it’s only small but there is a grassy area, a hedge, lots of weeds (!) and they can see surrounding trees.
College campus – only 10 minutes’ walk away and there are lots of green spaces, a view of the hills and the coast – even a duck pond!
Walk to campus – we pass lots of hedgerow on the way, the plants there seem to change every day and there are lots of insects too.
Park in town – has some ‘wild’ areas and a large pond but I would need to get the bus.
Canal in town – I would also need to get the bus but there is lots to see including birds.

If Nadiya’s list was viewed through the lens of Hartig et al.’s (2014) definition of nature, it is interesting to see how the places she has chosen meet this criteria. Nadiya was realistic that she would visit some places more than others; for example, it was much easier to go into her own garden – however small. But she realised, that, however occasionally, it would be good to visit the other environments to give her children different experiences of nature.

3.2 Spending time in natural environments

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Natural environments can offer multi-sensory stimulation and are also fascinating for children. Remember the practitioners in Hall et al.’s paper (2014) (in Session 1) who noticed that the babies ‘used their eyes, hands, feet, mouths and entire bodies to experience the minutiae’ (p. 198). These interactions with the natural environment provide multi-sensory stimulation which has a different impact on the nervous system to an indoor environment and is really important for young children’s healthy development and sense of well-being.

There is an interesting theory called Attention Restoration Theory (ART) which explains how spending time in natural environments can help the parts of the brain that have become fatigued from concentrating on cognitive tasks; such an environment helps the brain to recover. They have been found to offer ‘soft fascination’, which allows your attention to recover through the opportunity for reflection and the exploration of other thoughts (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1995). While this research has not included very young children, it is easy to see the way in which babies and toddlers can be fascinated by aspects of the natural world.

Look at Figure 6 and see the ‘soft fascination’ that the young child has as she is engrossed by the peeling bark of the tree.

Figure _unit7.3.1 Figure 6 Fascination with nature.

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A toddler peeling bark off a tree.

Figure 6 Fascination with nature.

In a study of a setting in Melbourne, Australia, Morrissey et al. (2015) compared the responses of babies and toddlers to the affordances of both natural and built play spaces. They noticed that in the natural space, the children spent more time engaged in quiet and sedentary activities, as well as a wide variety of physical activities. The researchers also noted increased engagement with the natural world:

… children were observed sitting or standing still, peacefully observing a bee flying around the plants or branches swaying in the breeze.

(Morrissey at al., 2015, p. 49)

This suggests that natural environments have properties that are particularly well suited to the development needs of very young children. As one practitioner in the research of Kemp and Josephidou noted:

The natural environment provides the exact stimulus that babies need without being too overpowering. Outdoor environments provide opportunities for babies to use all their senses to explore them.

3.3 Attached to nature?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Other researchers go further and argue that spending time in natural environments is a fundamental human need and that our health and well-being depends on it. You may have heard of the work of John Bowlby, a British psychoanalyst, who explored the significance of the mother child relationship from birth. His attachment theory suggests that very young children need to develop a strong and stable attachment to their main caregiver in order to go on to make further positive relationships as they grow and develop. When this doesn’t happen, and a baby’s needs are not met by their caregiver, the attachment is considered to be insecure and can have lifelong effects. It is the quality of attachment that is significant.

Just as babies are born with an innate ability and need to form human attachments, some researchers have proposed that they also have a need to connect with nature. This is sometimes referred to as biophilia and is most often associated with the biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson who published a book in 1984 based on this idea. Others have expressed concern about both the quality and quantity of young children’s experiences of natural environments. For example, DEFRA (2011) found that:

Children are spending less and less time outdoors and the likelihood of children visiting any green space at all has halved in a generation.

(DEFRA, 2011, p. 12)

Activity _unit7.3.1 Activity 3 Nature Tots

Timing: Allow 20 minutes

Concerns about the declining and unequal access to outdoor environments on young children’s health and wellbeing has led to a growing number of initiatives to support nature connection. One such initiative is Nature Tots offered by Derbyshire Wildlife Trust (England) for under-fives to engage with nature in their local area. Listen to Diane Gould, the Wilder Engagement Lead, introduce Nature Tots and respond to Nicola’s questions.

How are babies and toddlers involved in Nature Tots?

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NICOLA KEMP: Thinking about the youngest children, I was wondering, Diane, how do you involve them in your practice at the moment?

DIANE GOULD: We run sessions called Nature Tots for pre-school children, and they are open for nought to five-year-olds. So we have people who bring along three-week-old babies to this, and so they are involved. But we just do simple activities, like we might have-- in autumn, we might have a tub that's filled with dry autumn leaves, and the children lay in it, or there's things to look at, to feel, or to listen to. So we might have wind chimes in the woods as well.

So for the very young ones, it's simple sensory activities. And to be honest, it's more about them getting used to being outdoors and being happy outdoors and experiencing that. As they get slightly older for the toddlers, there's a whole array of things that we can do. We have mud kitchens, mud painting. We get little ones doing pond dipping, going on bug hunts.

Again, the sensory activities are really important for that age group. And they're just naturally curious. They love nature, so they're very easy to engage outside, learning about it all. And we can do physical activities as well. So we might put a hammock up in the woods. So they're just learning to cope with getting in and out of it and being in a different situation outside.

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What do you think are the benefits of an initiative like Nature Tots?

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NICOLA KEMP: What do you think the benefits are for babies and toddlers of spending that time in natural environments from what you've observed in your practice?

DIANE GOULD: There's the sort of "straightforward" benefits, so does it-- most people say there's the health and wellbeing benefits. They're in fresh air. They're in sunshine. That's going to be good for them.

But on a more detailed level, there's evidence that being outside and exploring in nature can help their language development because it promotes conversation between the adults and the toddlers. It's also really good for their physical development.

They're learning to navigate different surfaces, even if it is just walking over a bit of woodchip instead of walking over a flat pavement, navigating over tree roots-- all these sorts of different natural surfaces are really good for them-- or they might be clambering over logs. And they're just learning to use their bodies in different ways.

On another level, as well, I think they can develop empathy for the natural world. So it's giving them that sort of benefit as well.

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What support is there for those wanting to engage babies and toddlers outdoors?

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NICOLA KEMP: So what advice would you have for any adults who are wanting to develop their outdoor practice for this age group of babies and toddlers, which are often not really thought about as much in terms of early years practice?

DIANE GOULD: There's a lot of groups out there. If you look, there are outdoor groups already established. So if you can get along to one and observe and join in, with the children as well-- and I think seeing how much they enjoy being outside and getting ideas off of the leaders is really useful to boost your own confidence.

There's loads of great books and websites available to give you ideas on different activities that you can do outside. And when it comes to the practicalities of it, just kind of relax with it. Don't be worried about sticking to a plan. Usually, toddlers will go off on a tangent, and that's absolutely fine.

I mean, I was running a session the other day. And we were meant to be doing about worms, and we were worm charming. Then a frog hopped in the middle of the group. And so we completely forgot about the worms. And we looked at the frog. And then we went off to look at the tadpoles in the pond.

And that's fine. I had a plan. We didn't stick to it. But it's going with what they're engaged in. And they will go off on a tangent. But just make the most of those moments that they're really enjoying.

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The Trust has developed a Wild Tots at home website. This offers ideas for nature engagement that can be done in the home or setting. Find out more by having a look: Wild Tots at home | Derbyshire Wildlife Trust

4 Reflective activity

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Finally, it would be good at this point to reflect on all the learning you have engaged with in this session and in particular to consider what you can take from this content to develop your own practice with young children.

As before, there are some questions to support your reflection – don’t forget to record your responses in your Learning journal or text box in the activity.

Activity _unit7.4.1 Activity 4 Reflecting on Session 6

What did you find helpful about this session’s learning and why?
What are the three main learning points you will take away from this session?
Think about Gibson’s concept of affordances (in Section 1.2). Make a list of the affordances in the outdoor environments you share with young children.

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5 This session’s quiz

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Well done – you have reached the end of Session 6. You can now check what you’ve learned this session by taking the end-of-session quiz.

Session 6 practice quiz

Open the quiz in a new tab or window by holding down Ctrl (or Cmd on a Mac) when you click on the link. Return here when you have finished.

6 Summary of Session 6

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Now that you have completed this session, you should be able to:

describe the concept of affordances and how it is helpful to thinking about engaging young children outdoors
outline the learning and development needs of babies and toddlers in relation to outdoor environments including engaging with nature
explain why natural environments are particularly appropriate for young children.

In the next session, you will build on this learning to consider not just what young children can get from nature but how they can learn about their responsibilities towards nature from a very young age.

You can now go to Session 7.

1 Unsustainability: first the bad news …

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Humans are living in unprecedented times; human activity is now recognised as the key driver of a global environmental crisis. There are multiple problems ranging from soil degradation, forest fires, pandemics, plastic pollution, sea level rise and extreme weather events, and they are all connected in different ways.

The latest reports from the IPCC (2021) and IPBES (2019) detail the science behind the events which are causing the natural world to lose its richness, diversity and stability. This situation is sometimes referred to as the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, as it is recognised that global wildlife populations have dropped by around two thirds in the last 50 years (WWF Living Planet Report, 2020).

It is not just the climate and environment that are on the brink of disaster. The list of crises can easily be lengthened to include issues such as social injustice, gender inequality, health and social care, and poverty. A concern is, that as nature declines and children are born into a less ecologically diverse world, there is a vicious cycle that is fuelled by an ‘extinction of experience’ (Pyle, 1993, p. 130) and a lack of concern and care for what remains:

Those who know and recognize less, care less, and therefore act less, leading to still more losses.

(Pyle, 2003, p. 9)

The ‘cost’ of this cycle is seen in the poor health and wellbeing of humanity and the global environment – or, in other words, ‘unsustainability’.

1.1 The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

An important place to begin this discussion is to remind yourself of the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals).

Activity _unit8.1.1 Activity 1 Thinking about sustainable goals

Timing: Allow about 10 minutes

Watch these two videos introducing them and then have a go at answering the questions below.

Please note that the first video has no audio.

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SPEAKER: In high income countries, one in five children lives in poverty, one in three 15-year-olds does not meet minimum education standards in reading, science, and math, one in eight children faces food insecurity. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are a roadmap for improving the lives of children in rich and poor countries alike.

New research from UNICEF ranks countries on how well-prepared they are to meet their goals. Sustainable development means protecting the rights of all children, no matter where they live.

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What are the Sustainable Development Goals?
Why do we need them?
How are they relevant to early childhood education?

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Discussion

In 2015, the 193 member states of the United Nations agreed 17 Sustainable Development Goals in recognition of the need to work collectively on the social, economic and environmental challenges facing the world. These built on the previous Millennium Development Goals and each goal has a set of ambitious targets to be achieved by 2030.

The relevance of the SDGs to early childhood are two-fold. Firstly, there is growing awareness of the effects of ‘unsustainability’ on the lives of children from birth. It is therefore vital for the adults who care for them to be aware of the issues and the ways they can contribute to the realisation of relevant targets (such as quality education). Secondly, early childhood is a time when the foundations for later values, attitudes and behaviours are established. As Froebel (1887, p. 24) recognised: ‘often the whole life of man is not sufficient to efface what he has absorbed in childhood … for this reason the care of the infant is so important’.

1.2 The need for new ways of thinking

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Many would argue that the idea of ‘sustainability’ should be at the centre of humans’ thinking as they consider their place in the world. However, the term ‘sustainability’ may be ‘confused and contentious’ and have ‘no universally accepted … definition’ (Boyd et al., 2017). Some draw on the definition of the Brundtland World Commission on Environment and Development report (United Nations, 1987) which describes the term as the ability to meet ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (p. 43).

Others would suggest that this definition leans more to the ‘get’ approach described earlier i.e., the focus is clearly on human need. At the same time the causes of ‘unsustainability’ are diverse and complex. Nevertheless, by 2030, SDG 4 states that ‘all learners [should] acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development’ and Boyd et al. (2017) remind us that ‘early childhood education [is] … a key phase to establish learning relating to sustainability’.

If the increasing consensus that the ‘problem’ lies in contemporary perspectives of human/non-human relations, is valid, then it seems to make sense to go right back to the beginning and consider how very young children are introduced to their world, how they become acquainted with the environment. Boyd et al. (2017) refer to the work of Professor Julie Davies and her focus on the three areas of learning ‘in the environment, about the environment and for the environment’ (Davies and Elliot, 2014, p. 4) chiming very much with Froebel’s ideas of the child ‘in and with nature’.

This way of thinking about the child and nature aligns very much with the idea of the ‘steward’ that was discussed in the introduction of this session. It also calls to mind the Māori and Pasifika perspective and the child as ‘Kaitiaki’ (guardian and protector) that was noted in Session 1.

Of course, it would be ridiculous to suggest that young babies should be lectured about the dangers of climate change, but it is not so difficult to envisage how they could learn ‘in, about and for’ their environment in developmentally, and socio-culturally appropriate ways. For instance, Davies stresses the importance of play in ‘how babies begin to understand their surroundings and the relationships between themselves and others, using all their senses and every part of their body … [so that they] … come to terms with the unpredictability of the world and associated human and non-human relationships’ (cited in Boyd et al., 2017).

Put simply, the argument is that if humans see themselves as separate to the natural world, they may care less about what happens to it. We know that historically and internationally, different understandings of nature/environment relations have been dominant. The Māori perspective introduced in Session 1, for example, is one of continuity and connection. The Froebelian perspective explored in Session 3, is similarly holistic.

Sustainability scholars argue that what is needed is a fundamental change of perspective to one that aligns more with these two, rather than piecemeal technical or practical fixes. Educational philosopher Gert Biesta (2022, p. 3) argues: ‘the question how we, as human beings exist “in” and “with” the world, natural and social, that is the central, fundamental, and if one wishes, ultimate educational concern’.

1.3 Futures thinking

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Nicola Kemp, one of the authors of this course, is the Academic lead for the Academy for Sustainable Futures at Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU) in England, an organisation you will explore in the next activity.

Activity _unit8.1.2 Activity 2 Futures thinking

Timing: Allow 20 minutes

Have a look at the ‘Futures Thinking’ page of CCCU’s Exploring Sustainability website and note down your responses to the questions below. There are no right or wrong answers – it is a reflective activity to develop your personal perspective.

Given the context of unsustainability, why do you think it has been challenging for the early childhood sector to respond?
Spend some time imagining and dreaming about your ideal early childhood setting for babies and toddlers that encourages learning ‘in, about and for’ the environment. What would it look like and how would it work, who would it be for, where would it be? Try and sketch your ideas and continue to add notes and thoughts as you work through this session. You could add inspirational quotes from things you have read or listened to.

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Discussion

There are many reasons why it has been challenging for the early childhood sector to respond to the challenges of unsustainability. These include valid concerns about the emotional responses (such as guilt or anxiety) that knowledge about the state of the world could invoke in young children. Futures Thinking offers a positive way of engaging with sustainability by putting the focus on the ‘world we want’ and planning for this.

2 The interconnections between human and environmental health

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In the previous session you were introduced to the concept of biophilia and the idea that humans might ‘need’ nature to flourish. Drawing upon attachment theory, the implication is not just that humans need to spend time ‘in’ nature, but to be ‘with’ nature – in the sense of being open, attentive and responsive – if they are to develop strong, secure and lifelong attachments. In their exploration of what they term children’s human nature connection (HNC), Giusti et al. (2018) found that there are three progressive stages:

feeling comfortable in natural spaces
feeling attached to natural spaces
taking care of nature.

Their argument is that if children are to learn to care for nature, they need to first feel comfortable in natural environments, then to develop attachments. Look at Figure 2 and think about what the baby is experiencing and feeling.

Figure _unit8.2.1 Figure 2 Growing up green

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A toddler sitting on the ground surrounded by flowers.

Figure 2 Growing up green

Surrounded by lavender bushes, there is likely to be a strong sensory reaction, from the smell, the texture of the lavender, the sound of bees humming as they collect nectar. The baby is bare foot and sitting directly on the ground and looks relaxed and content. Using Giusti et al.’s (2018) framework, comfortable is an appropriate term to describe the baby in this context.

2.1 Learning to take care of nature

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

There is an argument therefore that those who care for young children should extend their focus beyond the needs of the child and their well-being to those of the natural world. In particular, a consideration should be given to how children’s earliest experiences of nature could support a lifelong ethic of care towards the natural environment. Writing about the development of pro-environment attitudes, environmental educator David Sobel argues that childhood experiences ‘… provide the essential glue, the deep motivational attitude and commitment’ (Sobel, 2008, p. 12).

Care as a concept is fundamental to early childhood, particularly in relation to babies and toddlers, and can equally be applied to the home as to the setting. However, it tends to be understood in terms of human relationships yet it is also a concept that can be equally applied to the natural world.

2.2 Nature Friendly Nurseries

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In the next activity you will meet Professor Jan White whose work you were introduced to in Session 4. Here she is talking about a concept she calls Nature Friendly Nurseries.

Activity _unit8.2.1 Activity 3 Nature friendly nurseries

Timing: Allow 20 minutes

Watch the video, and then have a go at responding to the questions below.

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Transcript

JAN WHITE: Increasing the amount that you have in your outdoor space, but with the notion not so much of increasing the presence of nature for child development, so we might have sticks and stones because they're good for those parts, so they're good for children's development. The real key idea for me with nature friendly nurseries is that children are able to spend their lives in relationship with the other elements of nature. And that they grow up experiencing themselves as part of nature.

So I think the big issue we have in our culture is, over the last few decades, is that we have seriously separated ourselves from the natural world. And we don't experience ourselves as being part of nature, this nature culture divide. And so with the new thinking around post-humanism, it's known as, the idea that humans aren't at the centre of the universe, or at the centre of everything, and that we are just one species embedded in a complex web of life.

What I want children to be able to do is to grow up experiencing themselves as part of that interconnected web. So they're immersed and embedded and emplaced in a nature filled environment, in the natural world. And as they grow up and they learn about themselves being an individual who's autonomous and has agency, they also know that they are an embedded part of this very complex, very fragile as well, web. That with things we do influence everything else, and whatever happens influences us. So growing up with the experience of sharing our world with the rest of the natural world.

So that children can develop an ecological identity, a sense of themselves as part of ecology, part of the world, part of the universe. And that they see other beings, other species, trees, plants, toads, snails, birds, they see those as kin, as part of their family. And when you grow up with that feeling, that they are my kin, then you can't possibly harm them. And you are internally driven, you don't have to think about it, you're driven to take care of it, and it can take care of you.

It's one of the things I'm aware of is how important nature is to me when I'm not feeling very good, and how well it puts me right. And I'm so grateful that somehow I grew up with the ability to let nature look after me. You know that when I'm not feeling good, that I can go to nature and feel better, and just get put right without having to think about it.

So I think it's not just about growing children who want to and can take care of the planet, it's that they can grow up being able to be taken care of by the other creatures that live with them. So nature friendly nurseries really is, what we're planning, this is a project from early childhood outdoors is that will help nurseries know practically, very practically how to increase the plant and creature life in their outdoor space.

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What do you understand by nature friendly nurseries?
What do you think Jan means by a child’s ecological identity?
What do you think about the idea that nature can care for humans?

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Discussion

The focus of Nature Friendly Nurseries is the biodiversity and natural richness of the outdoor space. Jan references the idea of the child being immersed, embedded and emplaced in nature. There is now strong research evidence that ‘spending time in natural environments as a child is associated with adult pro-environment attitudes and feelings of being connected with the natural world and is also associated with a stronger sense of place’ (Gill, 2011, p. 8).

Ecological identity here relates to the way in which children can experience a sense of being part of nature rather than separate to it. They understand that they share the world with the rest of nature. For this to be developed, natural elements need to be built into outdoor spaces for the youngest children, so they are able to ‘grow up green’ and to become ‘agents of care for the natural world’ (Chawla, 2009, p. 6).

The idea that not only can we learn to care for nature, but that nature can care for us, takes us back to the previous session. Here we explored the ways in which humans might need nature to flourish and how spending time in nature can restore our sense of health and wellbeing.

2.3 The Natural Learning Initiative

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

The Natural Learning Initiative was set up in North Carolina in the United States with the stated mission of ‘Creating environments for healthy human development and a healthy biosphere for generations to come’ (2022).

It is based on the principle that ‘the health of humankind, animals, and the biosphere is interwoven in a single, interdependent system’ (Moore and Cosco, 2014, p. 169). This one-health model, with its dual consideration of ‘naturalization as a health promotion strategy’ positions ECEC settings as ‘land restoration sites.’ (Naturalise means ‘to cause a plant or animal from another place to begin to grow and live in a new area’. The vast majority of childcare centres can be visualised as sites where natural ecosystems can be restored, designed, and managed (naturalised) to engage children while increasing biodiversity.)

The development of features such as pathways, shade/shelter, trees, shrubs, vegetable gardens and edible landscapes as well as more modest elements such as planters are recognised as encouraging or ‘pulling’ young children outdoors to engage with the natural world as well as enhancing the biodiversity of sites. Although it has a strong physical activity focus, it provides a contemporary holistic model for ECEC that could be developed, bringing together human and environmental concerns through ECEC practice.

3 Growing up Green in practice

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

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A child surrounded by flowers.

A model of practice that seeks to support human and environmental well-being requires a different way of thinking. In this section, you are invited to explore the idea of a ‘nature engaging, nature enhancing pedagogy’, you will consider how outdoor spaces can be thought of in a different way, as can the role of the adult. Finally, you will consider what these ideas could look like in practice.

3.1 Nature engaging and enhancing pedagogy

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Josephidou and Kemp (2022) use the term ‘nature engaging and enhancing pedagogy’ to emphasise the need to think about

a.opportunities for the youngest children to engage with the natural world for their learning, development and wellbeing
b.opportunities to enhance the nature-richness and diversity of the outdoor area to support environmental wellbeing.

They use the term ‘enhancing’ in a tentative way to express what could also be termed naturalisation – that is enhancing the natural biodiversity of an environment ideally through the introduction of native species. The important point is that it requires a three-way focus on the inter-relationships between the child, the adult and the environment.

The concept of nature engaging and enhancing is underpinned by an ethos of attentiveness and care. This ethos needs to be applied similarly to the social and natural world (i.e., to the ways people relate to both humans and the non-human). Effective care requires a willingness to be open, attentive and responsive whether it is a question of caring for young children or for plants and animals. Froebel’s idea of the garden is helpful to return to here as it emphasises the gardener’s responsibility to tend to its changing needs through the seasons.

3.2 Rethinking outdoor spaces and the role of the adult

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In the previous session you considered the concept of affordances which emphasises the functional aspects of outdoor environment (effectively human use value). You learned how natural features can tend to be absent from the outdoor spaces regularly accessed by young children due to health and safety concerns. However, children need to see the value of natural environments for their own sake (in relation to biodiversity) and adults need to consider how this can be maximised. Previously in this session, Jan White has argued a need to move away from seeing outdoor spaces as playscapes and instead view them as gardens to be tended with care. Moore and Cosco (2014) go further and suggest they can be understood as sites for land restoration. The implication is clearly that natural elements need to be built back into the design of the outdoor spaces for the youngest children if they are to grow up green.

The understanding of nature as risky, as discussed in previous sessions may encourage adults to take a surveillance role when outdoors. One manager Kemp and Josephidou spoke to referred to it as ‘meerkating’ when adults stand around waiting to intervene and sort out problems. In contrast, Froebel promotes a pedagogy based on close observation of the child and their interests arguing ‘nothing, therefore, is left for us to do but to bring him [sic] into relations and surroundings’ (pp. 10–11). This observational approach is evident in the work of Hall et al. (2014) and provides a potential contemporary model for practitioners to be ‘attentive and responsive’ adults (Bento and Dias, 2017, p. 159) who closely observe children interacting with their environment. Hall et al. (2014, p. 202) add that ‘children’s developmental growth in outdoor spaces is supported when adults themselves delight in the learning that occurs in the natural world’.

3.3 A best practice toolkit

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

The Natural Learning Initiative has developed a Preschool Outdoor Play and Learning Environments Best Practice Toolkit Activity that you can download from their website. There is a whole section on balancing risks with benefits and this is a key challenge in practice. They have identified 13 best practice indicators although it is important to recognise that a) they have been developed for pre-schoolers rather than under twos and b) there is an explicit emphasis on physical activity as the project has a public health aim of reducing obesity.

There are 10 or more play and learning areas.
There is a looping, curvy, primary pathway for circulation and wheeled-toy use.
There is a grassy lawn for games, activities, and events for many children.
There are sufficient shady settings in addition to trees.
There is a variety of loose materials, accessible for children to play with.
There is sufficient portable play equipment, including different types of wheeled toys, accessible for children to play with.
There are sufficient gross motor activities supported by the outdoor play and learning environment.
There are sufficient trees.
There is a proportion of trees that are edible fruiting species.
There are sufficient shrubs and vines (including fruiting species), ornamental grasses, and perennial flowering plants.
There is a designated vegetable garden with sufficient produce for snacking and/or meals.
There is a covered outdoor classroom/gathering place large enough for all children in a class to use together.
There is sufficient storage for wheeled toys, portable play equipment, loose parts, and other play and learning materials.

Activity _unit8.3.1 Activity 4 A best practice toolkit

Timing: Allow 15 minutes

Watch this video and then answer the questions which follow.

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Transcript

SPEAKER: High quality outdoor learning environments do not happen overnight. But usually over several years as resources become available, as volunteers get interested, as funders are convinced, and as teachers become trained and excited. Implementation is guided by a master plan, but more importantly, it is a learning process for all involved. We call this incremental development.

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Which of the 13 best practice indicators do you think are most appropriate in developing an outdoor environment for babies and toddlers?
Do you agree that creating a high-quality outdoor environment involves ‘incremental development’? Why?

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Discussion

Providing shady/sheltered areas is likely to be particularly important for very young children, particularly those who are not yet walking (4 and 8). Similarly, the emphasis on edible plants means that concerns about the children putting things in their mouths is minimised (9 and 10) and a vegetable garden (11) provides a clear link between growing and eating. Indicator 10 emphasises sensory diversity of plants in terms of function, height, texture and visual appeal. While it is possible to transform an outdoor space in a short period, it takes time to understand what plants will thrive and how children will interact with and use the space. An incremental approach is potentially more collaborative and can involve members of the wider community.

4 Reflective activity

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

At this point there is an opportunity to reflect on your learning this session.

As before here are some questions to support your reflection – don’t forget to record your responses in your Learning journal or text box in the activity.

Activity _unit8.4.1 Activity 5 Reflecting on Session 7

What did you find helpful about this session’s learning and why?
What are the three main learning points you will take away from this session?
In what ways have you considered your own relationship with nature? How can you develop a reciprocal relationship that includes both the ‘give’ and the ‘get’?

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5 This session’s quiz

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Well done – you have reached the end of Session 7. You can now check what you’ve learned this session by taking the end-of-session quiz.

Session 7 practice quiz

Open the quiz in a new tab or window by holding down Ctrl (or Cmd on a Mac) when you click on the link. Return here when you have finished.

6 Summary of Session 7

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Now that you have completed this session, you will be aware of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and the ways in which these are relevant to early childhood. You have seen how human and environmental health are fundamentally interconnected and that there is a need to foster an ethic of care towards nature from birth. Professor of Practice, Jan White explained her concept of nature friendly nurseries and the need to think about how settings can enrich their outdoor environments not just to benefit children, but also to contribute to environmental health. The last part of the session focused on ways in which practice can help children to ‘grow up green’.

You should now be able to:

outline the key dimensions of the global environmental crisis
recognise the interconnections between human and environmental health
describe what ‘growing up green’ could look like in practice.

In the next and final session, you will be thinking about the big questions needing to be asked in relation to the youngest children and the outdoors.

You can now go to Session 8.

Introduction

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Do you remember back in Session 1 you began this course by thinking about your responses to certain questions about your own engagement with the outdoors and nature as a young child? As you arrive at the final session of this course, you are again going to think about questions. Young children are wonderful at asking questions aren’t they? Even before they are forming full sentences they will point and ask, ‘What’s that?’ before moving on to those really difficult questions that you just don’t know how to begin to answer.

Figure 1 Thinking about the big questions

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A child thinking.

Figure 1 Thinking about the big questions

In this eighth and final session of the course, questions will be explored for you to ponder so that you can make decisions in the way you choose to move forward. You will also be invited to ask questions of your own. No doubt, you will be aware of the substantial amount of knowledge you have gained up to this point regarding babies and toddlers and their engagement with the outdoors and nature.

You may like to look back at the notes you have made in your Learning journal and reflect on all you have learned, thinking about the big ideas that really stand out for you. Hopefully though you still have questions and can see this as a positive; a questioning approach is a really helpful one to adopt in terms of moving forward. In this session, you may find some answers to those questions yet at the same time, you will be encouraged to think about even more questions that could, and perhaps should, be asked.

By the end of this session, you should be able to:

identify further questions that need to be asked concerning young children’s engagement with the outdoors and nature
describe ways that settings can review their practice
identify key sources of support for practitioners who wish to lead on this practice.

Before you begin, listen to this audio of Joanne Josephidou, the session author, introducing the session.

Download this audio clip.Audio player: yon_1_s8_audio.mp3

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Transcript

JOANNE JOSEPHIDOU: And so we come to the eighth and final session of this course. At this point, you may find you have many, many questions.

Questions, of course, form the basis of research. You must know what you want to find out before you decide how you're going to proceed.

We mentioned right at the beginning of this course that it is informed by a piece of research we carried out, which was funded by the Froebel Trust. And this continual development of questions is exactly what we have experienced in our research into babies and toddlers engagement with the outdoors and nature.

As soon as we answered one research question, many others arose. We began by asking, what can published research tell us about this engagement? Which led on to the question, why are babies missing? This made us ask, what is happening in practice? And when we answered that question, we went on to wonder about pedagogies that not only allowed very young children to connect with nature, but that also supported children in developing an understanding of their responsibility towards nature. We still have many questions at this point, and hope that you do too.

So questions are a focus of this session. We are encouraging you to think about the questions you should be asking. We have included some reflective models to help you to do this. And there are also video clips of Professor Jan White, professor of practice with the University of Wales Trinity St. David and director of Early Childhood Outdoors. These videos will help you as you consider how to move forwards and what are the big questions we should be asking.

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1 Bigger questions

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

If you think back to Session 4 you will remember that you considered some of the challenges, risks and opportunities you may face if you wish to develop your practice in this area. It is key here to focus on the third strand of opportunities and not to be distracted by challenges.

The challenges and risks are easy to find but creative thinking about what could work is exciting and energising. You need look no further than the children to find answers to any dilemmas remembering Froebel’s words from Session 3:

And very, very little is needed from those around the child, to give it [sic] what the years of childhood require. We need only to designate, to name, to give words to what the child does, perceives and finds.

(Froebel, 1887, p. 41)

Being able to reflect on practice with young children is an important factor in the role of the adult. ‘Reflection’ can, however, become a throwaway term, easy to say but more problematic to carry out. One way to do this is to continually have the ‘What?’ So what? Now what?’ questions at the back of our mind. Take the example of watching a young child outside and reflecting on that observation. Table 1 demonstrates how the adult can use this questioning model to take practice forward.

Table _unit9.1.1 Table 1
What?	What can I see happening? What am I doing? What are the children/other practitioners doing?
So what?	What are the implications of this? What could it mean? What could happen as a consequence of this?
Now what?	How could I intervene to enhance the positive consequences? Should I intervene at all? What is my role here? What might be a better way of doing x/y/z?

1.1 Exploring possibilities

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In this section, you are going to look at the case of a reflective owner/manager, Sadie. She has been thinking about the outdoor provision for very young children and how she can get her team to think creatively about opportunities and possibilities. She calls a team meeting, which her staff are surprised to find takes place in the local park. As they walk around the park, they talk about the affordances they notice and how they think the children would respond to these affordances. Some people laugh as they see the mud and bring to mind certain children who they know would love that. Others are drawn to collecting twigs and stones, thinking of other children who they will share them with when they come to the setting on the next day.

When the staff arrive back at the setting, they are feeling relaxed and full of ideas. They are ready to make sketches of, and discuss, their favourite and most comfortable spaces, both indoor and outdoor. They talk about their favourite seasons and what it is about each season that they enjoy. They share with each other why certain spaces feel positive to them and how they can make themselves comfortable in areas that don’t attract them. By starting in this way, with opportunities rather than challenges, they are able to think creatively about how they might move forward with their nature engaging, nature enhancing pedagogy.

Activity _unit9.1.1 Activity 1 Exploring your possibilities

Timing: Allow 15 minutes to record (you will need to include a further 30 minutes for a walk outside)

You can have a go at this exercise and record it in your Learning journal. Find a natural environment close to your home that you can spend about 30 minutes in. Remember the definitions of natural environments in Session 6. You don’t need to go to the countryside; it could be spending time in a garden, a park or going for a walk where you know there will be some natural features. The important thing is that you will be able to engage with some aspects of nature. You may like to go on your own or you may like to go with a friend/colleague so that you can discuss your observations. It doesn’t matter which. As you are walking think about your responses to these questions:

What do you notice in nature?
What pulls your attention?
Which senses are you using?
Which spaces make you feel comfortable and give you a sense of wellbeing? Why?

When you return, you may like to make a sketch of the place(s) you visited and annotate it with your thoughts. Think also about your favourite season and why you have chosen that particular one. Think more generally about spaces you feel comfortable in and those you don’t. How could you make yourself feel comfortable in spaces that don’t attract you?

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1.2 What big questions should we be asking?

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In the previous section the questions you were asking and responding to were questions at a micro (your individual response) and meso (the setting context) level. But there also questions that should be asked at a more macro (societal) level. Figure 2 illustrates the possible differences between these levels of questions. Once more, a positive creative response has been taken, rather than focusing on the challenges.

Maximise

Figure _unit9.1.1 Figure 2 Micro, meso and macro questions.

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The image is made up of three circles. There is a large circle, in which there is a smaller circle and then a smaller circle inside that. The smallest circle is labelled as Micro. There is then a list of associated questions: What excites you about taking young children outside in nature? What positive emotions do you feel outside in nature? What clothes do you like to wear outside when engaging with nature? The middle circle is labelled Meso and has the following list of questions: How can you work together drawing on the strengths of the team to develop nature engaging and nature enhancing pedagogy in your setting? What are the biggest opportunities? Who could help you develop these opportunities? What are the next steps you need to take? The large circle is labelled Macro and has the following list of questions: What would be the impact of policy addressing outdoor/nature provision for babies and toddlers? Does the society you live within have anything to learn from other societies? What might be the impact to society if babies and toddlers were brought up to feel comfortable about interacting with nature/outdoors?

Figure 2 Micro, meso and macro questions.

Now watch the following video where Jan White answers the question: What are the big questions we should be asking?

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_s8_jan_q1_1.mp4

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Transcript

JAN WHITE: It really, it all comes down to why. Why do young children need to be outdoors? Why is it not a nice thing to do, but a necessary thing to do. I've certainly come to the opinion that it's a right of children to be outdoors. And this applies right from birth. But why should young children be outdoors and why, in particular, should they be in a nature-rich environment? I think if I start answering that one first, I think I'd like to start with a quotation that I've got from the wonderful Jim Greenman who was an American who was the founder of Bright Horizons nursery.

Well, huge programme of work. And he wrote a book called Caring Spaces Learning Places. It's published in America. But I believe it's available here. He said human beings evolved outdoors. Our bodies need sunlight and fresh air. Our minds need the experiences and challenges that nature presents. Our souls need the day-to-day appreciation for the miracle of the world and all its complexity.

I found myself getting emotional there because I think actually that's one of the foundational things is that our spirits, not just our minds and bodies need to be outdoors, but our spirits require it. And I agree with him that we evolved outdoors over many millennia, many, many millennia. And our bodies and minds and spirits expect to live in the outdoors. And in fact, child development is crafted by the outdoor environment and the requirements of being in the outdoors.

Yes, we had shelters to live in always. We've always needed that, but we've basically until recent times lived an outdoor life. And everything about us requires the outdoors, which means a nature-filled environment, not a nature-depleted environment. So I think that the thinking about the why of why young children must be outdoors for their health, happiness, wellbeing, and futures is one of the huge questions we must be asking. And I don't feel like we've been asking that question enough for many, many decades even.

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Jan poses a very simple ‘big’ question: ‘Why should young children be outside?’ She emphasises that this is a question that we have stopped asking for many decades – why do you think this might be the case?

You may have noted ideas such as health and safety concerns, worries over stranger danger, issues with air pollution or that there are a lack of green spaces, particularly for children who live in urban areas. Those of you who work in settings may also acknowledge the difficulties that routines can offer or having to stick to prescriptive curricula guidelines. Now watch the next section of the video where, as Jan continues with her questioning, she picks up many of the threads woven throughout this course.

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_s8_jan_q1_2.mp4

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Transcript

JAN WHITE: And I wonder if associated with that is why have we lost this understanding. When I was a baby, my mum told me, I slept outdoors in a big Silver Cross pram until I was three. And I had long afternoon naps. When I say slept outdoors, I do mean in the daytime. I had long afternoon naps under a tree. And often I've seen it too that the baby will wake up and lie there happily for some time, not immediately wake up and need attention, but the feeling, the sensation, the cool, the fresh air moving around you and things moving.

Make you feel good. And so the child who's had a long sleep outside has, feels good about living and feels good after they've woken up. So why have we lost the understanding that young children should be in the outdoors? I do think this is a Western phenomenon. It's not the whole world that's lost this understanding, but in our cultures we have. And again, associated I think is why have we let the concerns and fears come more important and drive us more than the understanding of the benefits and the need for being in the outdoors.

So that's one big set of whys. That one's a big set of questions I mean. And another question I have is, and I'm so grateful that you've been doing the research that you have been doing, is that why has there been such a lack of attention to this age group. I think when over the last decade, there's been a great deal more research on children from birth to two, but there's an absolute paucity and there continues to be a paucity of research and investigation into babies and toddlers being outdoors. And that's a very worrying and big question is to why have we not been attending to this enough.

And that's left providers in a state of concern and vulnerability because they haven't got the evidence-backed thinking to work with, to help them understand the benefits and the need to be outdoors. And so I guess the concerns and vulnerabilities let's face it, is overtaken Western British life the last couple of decades. And those fears and concerns have just become so much bigger than the understanding of the benefits. So we do need a great deal more inquiry and support into why and how young children need to be outdoors and in nature.

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To conclude this section, although there will be micro type questions that practitioners will want to ask in terms of how things would work at a practical level, encourage yourself to ask, and keep on asking, much bigger questions as well. These are questions, not just about what children will enjoy and will be of benefit to their learning, but also questions about what it is to be human. Especially, what it is to be human in a world where there are important issues with how humankind has interacted with the environment up to this point. Questions around what it means to be a baby at this time in environmental history, and if we have the view of a child as competent, then when does their responsibility to the environment kick in. If we are saying that young children do have a responsibility then how do we respond to this through the pedagogies we provide. As you can see – lots of questions!

2 Responding to questions through practice

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

This section will consider some of the ways that settings can both respond to some of these big questions and review their practice. First, return to Professor Jan White who suggests the starting point is ‘Our why’. What does she mean by this expression and what is ‘Your why’?

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Transcript

JAN WHITE: Alongside that, I feel a question is, whose responsibility might it be to give children, very young children, loads and loads of time in the outdoors? We know that in children's family lives, they're accessing the outdoors. And they're accessing green space, in particular, I think less.

So less time outdoors altogether because of the way we live our lives now. And less opportunity to spend time in green space for a variety of reasons.

And I think that early childhood education has always been compensatory. I'm thinking about the original British nursery school set up at the beginning of the 1900s-- Rachel McMillan Nursery School, for instance-- where the work was around children's health because they lived in what was termed "squalid conditions." And the nursery was around compensating for what was missing in those children's lives.

So the question is, is it our responsibility as providers of early childhood education and care-- does it become our responsibility to make sure that children are accessing the outdoors and nature for all those development wellbeings-- happiness, life-- life meaning.

Going back to that quote, the meaning of life is wrapped up in your experience of being outdoors in nature, isn't it? When you witness the miracle of life and all that goes on-- not just who's there, but all the things that are happening-- that gives you something that's in your core for the rest of your life.

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2.1 The importance of observation

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

A great place for settings to start in reviewing their practice is to actually take the children outside and then observe what they do. Those who work with young children are used to observing as part of their daily routine but what is being suggested here is a very close observation, very different to the practice of collecting evidence to see if developmental milestones have been met.

This sort of observation is illustrated in a practitioner paper by Hall et al. (2014) who carried out practitioner research in a setting in Colorado, USA. Because of the close observation of the very young children in their care they noticed that the outdoor environment was ‘a place for hands-on learning about the world of nature’ (p. 206). They explain in their research report how through close observation of the babies, they noticed how these little ones ‘used their eyes, hands, feet, mouths and entire bodies to experience the minutia’ (p. 198). They suggest that the interactions with the natural environment provided the children with multi-sensory stimulation which they noticed had a very different impact to that provided by the indoor environment.

This close watching of the children’s behaviour outdoors is nothing new – if we look back for example to Froebel’s work and his exhortation to watch the young child’s interactions with nature and then subsequently Margaret McMillan’s work where she encouraged her team of teachers to engage in very close observation of the children much in the same way as Hall and her colleagues have done.

Although observation in the discipline of psychology has often taken this measurement stance, it is only in recent years, that such observation to quantify has become a key feature of practice with young children. Many would suggest that this is a sad turn of events as this way of measuring children does not give the full picture of what they can do, what they know and where they would like to go in their learning (see Josephidou et al., 2021). Stella Louis relates how it is helpful to keep Froebel’s principles in mind when observing young children and in particular the idea of unity and connectedness; she states, with this in mind:

Children are whole beings whose thoughts, feelings and actions are interrelated. Young children learn in a holistic way and learning should never be compartmentalised for everything links.

(Louis, 2022, p. 1)

2.2 Questions of quality and reviewing practice

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Both researchers and practitioners have used a variety of methods to measure what quality looks like in relation to the outdoor environment provided for babies and toddlers in ECEC settings. The Infant and Toddler Environmental Rating Scale – Revised (ITERS-R) is one of the most commonly employed and was developed as a way of assessing the quality of setting provision based on a suite of indicators relating to the physical, mental and emotional needs of infants and toddlers (Harms et al., 2006).

However, there are concerns about the limitations of such measures. The indicator for quality in outdoor provision is ‘an easily accessible outdoor area where infants/toddlers are separated from older children.’ This immediately suggests that the youngest children need to be protected from older children and does not recognise the potential benefits of younger children being able to watch and engage with older children ‘being’ outdoors (Kleppe, 2018; Rouse, 2015). It also categorises natural features (such as exposed tree roots) as a minor hazard which suggests a problematising of the natural environment in relation to the youngest children.

When Kemp and Josephidou wanted to audit provision across settings in Kent, England, they used their reading of research literature to help them come up with audit questions. They were interested to find out about the nature and extent of each setting’s outdoor provision; how much time children spend outdoors throughout the year; the activities the children engage in, and resources provided by the setting to support this. You can see an example of some of these questions below:

How is the accommodation in your setting organised, i.e., are babies and toddlers separated or do they share the same space?
Approximately how big is the outdoor area you use for babies/toddlers?
What types of surface does the outside of your setting consist of?

If you wanted to audit your own settings or home provision, then you could adapt some of the questions in their audit which you can find in the appendices of the report ‘Making Connection with their world’. Below you can see an adaptation of some of their questions which would work for an individual setting, or an individual parent/carer, to think about their practice and care.

Table _unit9.2.1 Table 2
On average, approximately how frequently are babies/toddlers taken outdoors each day?	Table 2 1, Your response 1
What activities do children engage in outside and what experiences are provided?	Table 2 2, Your response 2
What are the most important factors which influence the duration and frequency of access to the outdoors at your setting/in your home?	Table 2 3, Your response 3
What are the challenges to being outside with babies and toddlers in your setting/home?	Table 2 4, Your response 4

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Are you going to take up Jan’s challenge? Have you decided that you are responsible for ensuring that young children access the outdoors? One way to do this would be to first carry out a review of your provision whether that be in your setting or your home. In the next video, Jan is discussing how settings can review their practice:

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_s8_jan_q2.mp4

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Transcript

JAN WHITE: It's worth giving children lots of time outdoors, and it's worth working out why you think it is the best place for children to be in, for young children to be in. I think-- I mean, I've spent decades looking into this and I have been very concerned about some of the provision I've seen. I'll just tell a short story. I got into looking at babies and toddlers in particular in the outdoors. So I was mostly working on three to five, but I visited a new neighbourhood nursery.

This was back in the time of shore starts and neighborhood nurseries. And this place had been designed purposely to provide child care and education in an area that needed extra support. And the practitioners were making the best of the design, so I'm not criticising what they did in the slightest. But whoever designed the building conceived that the youngest children, the environment that they needed in the outdoors, was a rectangle, a flat, rubberised surface surrounded by the green or red school fencing, that looped fencing you see around schools.

And it was like a cage and there was nothing there but a little plastic slide. In fact, the practitioners didn't use that area for their babies and toddlers and the reason the slide was there it was for physical activity for other children. And they took their babies and toddlers into a different space, but the building had been designed with direct access into the outdoors.

And the babies, I think in the mind of the designer, the babies were intended to crawl from the indoor space, their indoor dedicated birth to two area into this dedicated birth to two outdoor area that was just a flat, rubberised safety surface. And it was at that point, I thought, I need to try and do something about this. So I started investigating the thinking and understandings around the youngest children being outdoors and what was going on.

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In this section you have considered questions at the meso level to help you think about practice. You have noted the powerful tool of observation that supports practitioners and carers to follow the lead of the child when they are outdoors so that the adult is not imposing a way of being. But of course, in order to observe, it is necessary to reflect on the type of environment that is being provided within which the child can be observed. You considered the importance of environment in Session 7. In the following section, the focus will shift to post-audit; what support is there to help you develop your pedagogy and care outdoors?

3 Support to develop your pedagogy and care outdoors

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

In this section, you will be able to find out about different resources there are to support you as you develop your practice. First, listen to Sacha Powell explaining what support is available from the Froebel Trust.

Download this video clip.Video player: yon_1_s8_sacha_q3.mp4

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NICOLA KEMP: So finally, the question that I'd like to ask is around the role of the Froebel Trust in supporting practitioners to develop their practice with babies and toddlers outdoors. So what can you offer in support?

SACHA POWELL: Lots of things, starting with a whole raft of free resources, which are all available on our website. So they vary from things like lovely pamphlets. This one is about observing. And of course, what I've just talked about is using observation to learn more about children, but also to perhaps learn more about ourselves in doing that observation to help support and extend babies’ and toddlers’ learning. There are other things like, and it's a bit more practical specifically for babies based on Froebel's very famous work around family songs.

So songs rhymes and finger plays is another pamphlet. And so there are a raft of those pamphlets, which are free. And we also have a DVD which is about treasure baskets. And although people might traditionally think that a treasure basket is something that you'd use inside with a baby or toddler. Of course, the outside world has wonderful resources, just things you'd find around. Sticks and stones and pine cones and leaves and all sorts that can become objects within a treasure basket, as well as perhaps bringing indoor objects outside to add to a treasure basket for a baby to explore and manipulate.

I think also we've got some fantastic research reports, your own included, Nicola, which give insights into what practitioners have been doing, what they think about what they've been doing, what they'd like to be doing. And so we've got empirical research findings from real world research in nurseries. And that can be read, and we've got recordings of conference and short webinar speeches about being outdoors with babies and toddlers, all of which can be seen for free.

We run courses, short courses, which can be accessed online or face-to-face in a setting. And then we also offer grants for colleagues working with young children, including babies and toddlers who might want to explore their own practice or develop their own practice or do research. So there's a variety of things that I think the Trust can do and we're always open to ideas. So we love it when people contact us and say, have you thought about such and such. Welcome interaction and feedback from people who engage with us too.

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The website mentioned by Sacha in the video is the Froebel Trust website.

If you would like to further develop your knowledge and understanding, you could engage with some of the following further reading resources.

The Froebel Trust website:

Here you will find a considerable number of excellent resources, including illustrated pamphlets to share with parents or colleagues, recording of free webinars and research reports.

Early Childhood Outdoors:

Early Childhood Outdoors is an organisation run by Jan White who you have watched in several videos in this session. You may like to find out more about Jan’s work and in particular follow her blog which is full of useful information.

If you are interested in reading any of the reports that informed this piece of work then the following can be downloaded for free:

You may also be interested to watch Nicola Kemp and Joanne Josephidou talking about the findings from their research in this Froebel webinar: ‘Where are the babies? Exploring outdoor provision for children from birth to two.’

4 Reflective activity

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Now you have reached the end of Session 8, and indeed the whole course, it’s a good time to reflect on all your learning.

In particular, you might like to consider what are the big questions you still need to find answers to and how you intend to move forwards. Don’t forget to complete your Learning journal one last time or add notes to the text box in the activity. Once again there are some questions below that may help you in your thinking.

Activity _unit9.4.1 Activity 2 Reflecting on Session 8 and the course

Timing: Allow about 10 minutes

What did you find helpful about this session? Why?
Are there three key points you will take away from this session? What might you choose to share with others?
Think about three action points you could write down in terms of moving forward. Make sure they are doable and not too aspirational. Remember the importance of small, incremental steps.

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We hope you have enjoyed this course and enjoyed getting to know Friedrich Froebel, and hopefully his ideas will have been useful to you as you think about your care of young children. Let’s leave the last word to him:

Children who spend all their time in the open air may still observe nothing of the beauties of Nature and their influence on the human heart. The boy sees the significance …but if he does not find the same awareness in adults the seed of knowledge just beginning to germinate is crushed.

(cited in Tovey, 2017)

5 This session’s quiz

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

Now it’s time to complete the Session 8 badged quiz. It’s similar to previous quizzes, but this time instead of answering five questions there will be fifteen, covering material from the last four sessions of the course.

Session 8 compulsory badge quiz

Remember, this quiz counts towards your badge. If you’re not successful the first time, you can attempt the quiz again in 24 hours.

Open the quiz in a new window or tab then come back here when you’ve finished.

6 Summary of Session 8

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

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A child surrounded by flowers.

Now that you have completed this eighth session, and indeed the whole course, you will have gained an overview of both the importance of young children’s engagement with the outdoors and nature and how best this can be achieved.

After studying Session 8, you should now be able to:

identify further questions that need to be asked concerning young children’s engagement with the outdoors and nature
describe ways that settings can review and audit their practice
identify key sources of support for practitioners who wish to lead on this practice.

7 End-of-course summary

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

After studying the whole course you should now be able to:

understand how to overcome challenges to babies’ and toddlers’ engagement with the outdoors and nature
identify how to develop outdoor opportunities for babies and toddlers
consider how to develop outdoor opportunities in your own situation and practice
describe and discuss some of the key aspects of Froebel’s principles and how they inform ideas about outdoor play.

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References

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

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Acknowledgements

The Open University — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:28:59 GMT

This free course was written by Dr Joanne Josephidou, Dr Nicola Kemp and Polly Bolshaw.

The authors are grateful to Professor Tina Bruce, John Parry and Dr Sacha Powell who acted as critical readers.

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

The material acknowledged below and within the course is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this free course:

Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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Introduction

Course image: courtesy: Jo Josephidou

Week 1

Figure 1: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/ history-baby-cage-1934-1948/

Figure 2: https://wellcomecollection.org/ works/ n4m9j4xv

Section 3.1 image: Creative Commons CC0/ https://pxhere.com

Section 3.3 image: Creative Commons CC0 https://pxhere.com/ en/ photo/ 602870

Timeline of key thinkers

Jean- Jacques Rousseau 1712-1778: https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Jean-Jacques_Rousseau#/ media/ File:Jean-Jacques_Rousseau_(painted_portrait).jpg

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi 1746-1827: https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Johann_Heinrich_Pestalozzi#/ media/ File:Johann_Heinrich_Pestalozzi_(Real_Academia_de_Bellas_Artes_de_San_Fernando,_Madrid).jpg

Friedrich Froebel 1782-1852: https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Friedrich_Fr%C3%B6bel#/ media/ File:Frederick-Froebel-Bardeen.jpeg

Charlotte Mason 1842-1923: https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/ File:Charlotte_Mason.jpg

Margaret and Rachel McMillan 1860-1931: https://blogs.gre.ac.uk/ universityarchive/ tag/ mcmillan-sisters/

Week 2

Figure 1: https://pixabay.com/ photos/ baby-play-toys-baby-toys-kids-toys-921293/

Section 1 image: https://pixabay.com/ photos/ boy-childhood-steps-ted

Figure 2: courtesy: Rachel McMillan Nursery School https://www.rachelmcmillannursery.co.uk/index.asp

Figure 3: courtesy: Chelsea Open Air Nursery School. https://www.coans.rbkc.sch.uk/ about-us/

Figure 4: Daniel Farrell in Flickr https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ by/ 2.0/

Week 3

Figure 2: book cover Froebel’s seminal work The Education of Man

Figure 4: Courtesy Froebel Trust https://www.froebel.org.uk/ https://www.froebel.org.uk/ uploads/ documents/ Froebelian-Principles-Poster-version-with-a-white-backbround.pdf

Figure 5: Photo by Nicola Kemp at Froebel Archive for Childhood Studies, Foyle Special Collections and Archives, University of Roehampton.

Week 4

Figure 1: chadlandman/Pixabay

Section 2.2 images: © Anna Barash/Shutterstock; © Marlon Lopez MMG1 Design; © Photobac/Shutterstock.com; © Christie Cooper/Shutterstock.com

Figure 5: Courtesy Dimples Day Nursery https://www.dimplesnursery.co.uk

Week 5

Figure 2:. Courtesy: Lucy Fogg

Slideshow: images: 1/8/9/10/11/12: courtesy © Polly Bolshaw; 2/3/4/5/6/7: courtesy: © Top of the hill Preschool https://topofthehillpreschool.co.uk/

Week 6

Figure 4: Man’s Twelve Senses in Their Relation to Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition in Man’s Twelve Senses in Their Relation to Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition by Rudolf Steiner Online Waldorf Library

Week 7

Figure 1: Courtesy Jo Josephidou

Figure 2: Courtesy Jo Josephidou

Section 3 image. Courtesy Jo Josehpidou

Week 8

Section 6 image: Archie Binamira/Pexels

Audio-visual

Week 2

Video: Alison Gopnik: What do babies think? TED Talk Alison Gopnik: What do babies think? | TED Talk Creative Commons — Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International — CC BY-ND 4.0

Week 5

Video: Schemas – in and out with Liam: Used under licence: ©Siren Films Child Development video based training - Siren Films

Week 6

Video: Ko plays in the Park used under Licence Siren films https://www.sirenfilms.co.uk/

Week 7

Video: Do you know all SDGs? courtesy: United Nations https://www.un.org/en/

Video: United Nations Sustainable Goals Building the Future. Children and the Sustainable Development Goals in Rich Countries https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=afRqLpfSYHo courtesy: UNICEF Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight

Video: Incremental Development: courtesy https://naturalearning.org/