Does growth in the outdoors stay in the outdoors? : the impact of an extended residential and outdoor learning experience on student motivation, engagement and 21st century capabilities

Introduction: Student motivation and engagement underpin educational success, and recent research has found they are lowest in middle high school, especially for boys. At the same time, education systems are recognizing that academic performance is necessary but not sufficient to prepare young people for the adult world, and so-called “21st Century skills” (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity) have been suggested as critical capabilities across all employment sectors in the future. The Glengarry program is a 6-month residential and outdoor learning experience for Year 9 (14–15 years old) boys at an Australian independent school, The Scots College (TSC) Glengarry. Intentionally located during the lowest point of engagement in their adolescent student journey, the Residential and Outdoor Education experience was hypothesized to boost their motivation and engagement and develop 21st Century skills. Methods: The Glengarry program involves students living in a boarding-style community for 20 weeks away from their families, participating in classes across all regular school subjects at a bush campus, and undertaking increasingly challenging outdoor education trips each week. The study aimed to measure how these factors transferred into students’ traditional school environment after their Glengarry experience. Year 9 was split into two cohorts who both participated in the study: one of which completed the Glengarry program in the first half of 2019, and the other during the second half of the year. Results: Self-reported quantitative and qualitative data supported the hypothesis that the Glengarry program did indeed, boost student motivation and 21st Century skills. While gains in 21st Century skills endured over the next 8–10 months, motivation and some engagement factors decreased upon return to the traditional school environment. Students described key factors in the Glengarry program which facilitated their development, including: an intense residential environment necessitating social growth, a closer connection with teachers in both school and community life, and an appreciation of learning in the natural environment. Recommendations are made for future research to strengthen these findings, and for how these mediating factors could be incorporated into the regular school environment

Rediscovering the potential of outdoor learning for developing 21st century competencies

In this century characterised by rapid change and unprecedented challenges, most education systems have acknowledged the importance of developing interpersonal and intrapersonal skills alongside technical knowledge. This chapter describes how two approaches to outdoor learning develop these 21st century competencies, through the lens of experiential education. Outdoor Adventure Education is an established pedagogical vehicle for developing psycho-social skills. Learning Outside the Classroom is a rising movement of teaching subject content while simultaneously promoting interpersonal, communication, teamwork, critical thinking, and conflict resolution skills, creativity and connection with nature. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the potential of outdoor environments to foster transformative competencies, and the inherent challenges for integration into regular school experiences

Is school working for teenage boys? : outdoor learning and real-life skills could be the keys to re-engagement

Whilst boys have been the chief beneficiaries of education through history, there was a shift of international educational focus at the end of the twentieth century to boys who appeared to be struggling in school (Weaver-Hightower 2003). The Australian Parliament commissioned an enquiry into boys’ educational performance in 2002, which revealed that boys had lower average academic achievement (especially in literacy) and school retention, and higher rates of suspension and exclusion from school (House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training 2002). This trend of boys’ poor educational performance has continued since the turn of the century in Australia, and is mirrored in most other developed countries (Thomson et al. 2017). Australian boys’ retention to the end of high school has consistently lagged behind girls (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2012), and boys rate themselves as being more disruptive in class (Griffiths and Webber 2017). Given this mounting evidence across a number of educational metrics, we can conclude that school is not working well for at least some boys

[In Press] Measuring nature-based health interventions : a rapid review of instrumentation and outcomes

Nature-based health interventions (NBHIs) are utilised to treat a range of physical and mental health conditions, and this rapid review sought to describe the breadth of instrumentation utilised to measure the efectiveness of NBHIs on the diferent domains of health and wellbeing. A total of 14,385 records were extracted from three databases, and a review of titles and abstracts and then of full text resulted in a fnal dataset of 167 articles that met the review criteria. NBHI settings were categorised as Garden/Horticulture, Blue Spaces, Urban Green Spaces, Wild Nature, and Camps/Residential. For each of these settings, major population groups included in the studies, health domains and outcomes addressed, as well as assessment tools used to measure NBHIs’ efectiveness were described and analysed in aggregate. A total of 336 measurement tools were utilised across the dataset, with only 29 being specifcally designed to assess NBHIs. Most studies investigated mental health domains and measured the efectiveness of NBHIs to improve psychological factors and physical, behavioural, and healthy eating outcomes. Future research should interrogate how nature-based tools and outcome measurements could be used most efectively in NBHI settings