Disrupting pedagogies: the quiet power of forest school.

This paper presents findings from my recent doctoral study which focuses on the unique positioning of forest school as a popular practice in mainstream UK education contexts. In it, I set out an argument for a new appreciation of the quiet power of forest school. I do this by combining ethnographic data with post-qualitative diffractive writing which explores forest school practice via a new materialist/posthuman conceptual paradigm.
The growth of forest school practice in the UK has been paralleled by a narrowing of the school curriculum, and forest school may be positioned as an alternative approach to education, albeit one that now occupies a relatively mainstream position (Sackville-Ford, 2019). Reported research impacts from forest school programmes are overwhelmingly positive but often tending to “reaffirm anticipated benefits” (Waite et al., 2016, p.871). It has proven challenging to define what makes forest school different from other outdoor education programmes and child-led pedagogies.
Forest school research is often conducted within well-established qualitative research traditions. This paper firstly questions whether it is possible that researchers and practitioners feel that there is something very special about forest school but have at their disposal only the empirical tools and underpinning onto-epistemological frameworks of conventional educational research? I argue that this is a position that prioritises the experience of forest school as it is constructed by the humans who are present (Leather, 2012).Thus, in my PhD study I looked to find a different way to explore forest school, one which disrupted the conventions of traditional qualitative research. I aligned my study with aspects of posthumanist theory which aim to decentre the human and bring the material ‘stuff’ of nature equally to the fore. This turn to matter influenced both my data generation and subsequent data engagement.
For my data generation I used conventional tools of ethnography (i.e. photographs, video, interviews, and field notes) within a single forest school setting over the course of two years. However in methodological respects I broke with some traditional ethnographic conventions. Rather than establishing a bounded position as a participant researcher, I included myself fluidly in the data, along with the other children and adults, in ways that arose from my intuitive entanglement in the research setting. As the study progressed, I broke down my definition of forest school ethos/praxis into three aspects i.e. woodland practice which was regular (occurring weekly), repeated (occurring in the same setting each time), and unstructured (children having freedom to lead their own activities). I shaped my subsequent analysis around the conceptual cornerstones of these three attributes which I identified as time, space, and matter. Data engagement was carried out by writing diffractively through these three concepts and with key posthuman theories relating to time, space, and matter. The thesis thus sought to break the practice of forest school apart and then reassemble it to create new matter-focused meanings.
My findings offer a significant contribution to our understanding of why forest school may be such a powerful pedagogical practice. I suggest that forest school allows humans and non-humans to develop an ongoing almost timeless intra-relationship. The gentle allowing of this relationship is regular and, so, becomes quietly persistent. The joy of the quiet freedoms offered by forest school may appeal as much to the adults as the children in the setting. Additionally I offer a model for future educational research which seeks to move beyond hegemonic norms of ‘what counts as data’ in education research. I suggest that conventional approaches to forest school research may leave less-measurable aspects of the practice unexplored, and that the traditional research paradigm contains a conceptual separation between the humans and the forest itself. And yet, recent environmental philosophies and scientific discoveries propose an undoing of this separation between human and nature (Tsing, 2015). If we are all made of the same stuff existing in sympoesis (Haraway, 2016) – a collective self-organising force - then might it not be the case that the forest-place itself (the ‘matter’ of forest school) should merit at least an equal research significance as the humans? My study therefore suggests ways of moving beyond traditional ways of seeing as regards the practice of forest school.