What’s so special about forest school? A posthuman exploration of regular, repeated, unstructured practice in a woodland space

Abstract

Over the past twenty years the forest school movement has seen a huge growth in popularity in the UK, paralleled by a narrowing of the school curriculum and a perceived decline in children’s freedoms. Whilst the reported impact of forest school programmes is overwhelmingly positive, what makes forest school different from other child-led pedagogies or outdoor education programmes has proven harder to define within the parameters of conventional educational research.

This thesis therefore breaks the bounds of traditional qualitative research. In it, I take the reader through a posthuman exploration of the three attributes of forest school that, in combination, may be said to make forest school truly forest school. These attributes are defined as regular, repeated, and unstructured. I draw upon ethnographic data generated from my observer-participation in a forest school setting. My approach to analysis is underpinned by posthuman philosophies and a new materialist decentring of the human, which includes the material aspects of the forest as well as the humans. Data engagement is carried out through diffractive writing which reads the data through linked philosophical concepts pertaining to time, space, and matter.

My findings suggest that forest school permits both human and non-human entities to develop an ongoing, almost timeless intra-relationship. I suggest that it is the gentle allowing of this intra-relationship to develop over time, in a wild space, and with freedom to intra-act, which makes forest school programmes so special. Forest school is shown to be a programme which other models of either child-led learning or outdoor education cannot replicate. These findings offer a significant contribution to the elucidation of why forest school may be such a powerful pedagogical outdoor practice. In addition they offer a model for future educational research which seeks to move beyond hegemonic norms of ‘what counts as data’ in education.

Date of Award	23 May 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Jane Davies (Supervisor)