Risk-taking in the New Zealand Bush: issues of resilience and wellbeing

Abstract

This article discusses a single case analysis of teacher-child interactions on an everyday bush walk in New Zealand. It uses a combination of the Leuven wellbeing scale (Laevers, 2000) and a conversation analysis approach to explore how children and teachers attend to specific features of the outdoor environment in a way that encourages risk-taking and builds resilience through problem solving. The collaborative achievement of the activities between the pre- school teacher and the fouryear-old children are discussed as an important and necessary aspect of the interactions, which we suggest may represent physical sustained shared thinking, for supporting wellbeing whilst building resilience and risk-taking. Implications for future practice are considered with regard to implementation of early childhood curricula