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Turning teaching inside out

University of British Columbia. Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education; University of British Columbia. Faculty of Education

This paper explores some preliminary theoretical considerations into place-based and garden-based teacher education in an outdoor classroom setting. Bringing student teachers into a garden-based educational setting can interrupt the years of formal schooling that have taught us that “real” teaching and learning happens within four climate- and gaze-controlled walls. It also potentially creates the space for new human-nature relationships to emerge in a time when human attempts to escape their relationship with the natural world are threatening the existence of both humans and more-than-human earthly communities. Moreover, outdoor learning spaces are complex palimpsests of (contested) cultural and ecological histories intersecting at local and global scales. I will explore some of these theoretical concerns by drawing on the history of children’s gardens and outdoor learning spaces, Ellsworth’s (2005) work to put “inside and outside into relation,” and my early reflections on designing an outdoor classroom on the UBC campus. [The Explorations & Education Conference is the collaborative effort of graduate student representatives from the Graduate Student Council for the Faculty of Education, the Department of Educational Studies and the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy. The goal is to "to create a safe space for the exchange of academic ideas and to create opportunities particularly for graduate students (at all levels of study) to present their ideas and research".]

Conference Paper

eng

2011-07-20

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/36209

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/