Teach Wonder
Teach Wonder
Everything but the Book Study: Outdoor Learning and Critical Thinking
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In this episode, we discuss how outdoor education in fosters critical thinking, resilience, and interpersonal skills. Julie shares how her personal interest in mountain biking took her on a deep dive into the world of outdoor education, highlighting the benefits of outdoor education in overcoming uncertainty and challenges. Julie's brought her citations and research study to this episode, you won't want to miss it!
Links:
How Does Outdoor Learning Support Children's Critical Thinking
Intro Music: David Biedenbender
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Okay, now we're recording. So welcome to teach wonder. Yes, welcome to teach wonder, a podcast hosted by Ashley O'Neill and Julie Cunningham. Welcome to our next episode in our series, everything but the book study, where we bring audio podcasts, articles, something we've engaged with, and one of us has done a little bit of a deep dive into the topic, and the other person knows very little, or in this case, basically nothing. I know the broad topic that you brought today, Julie, but why don't you start by giving us some context, or tell us what we're talking about today?
Julie Cunningham:Sure. So I'm a little bit unsure how this is going to play out, because I didn't start with my podcast that I'm going to talk about did not start with an education like interest that isn't how I listened to it, and it was something sort of educational that came out of it that sent me down a rabbit hole. So I was listening to a podcast about a with a female professional adventure bicyclist back country Ultra kind of skill set. And I expected just to listen to it from a bike perspective, and from to learn something new, maybe about bike packing, or about bicycling skill set type of thing in general. And she started very with with how she got with the person that she was speaking with, the person who was interviewing her. She started by talking about how she got into biking and it wasn't your traditional path. And so I think that was interesting to me. But then additionally, she came at it from an adventure outdoor education perspective. And so lots of things that she had to say from that perspective resonated with me, and so I just went back and listened to it again this morning so that I could get the language correctly. But basically she talked about the value in outdoor education, and specifically outdoor adventure education is that you have an opportunity to work through uncertainty and challenges and adversity, right? Because those things are inherent in places that we can't control, like our natural world and so being out in the wilderness. And so I'm just going to say that again, the ability to learn to work through uncertainty and challenges and adversity, and that oftentimes the things that we develop by working through those areas is we develop leadership skills, character, interpersonal connections and experiences and intra personal experiences. So all of that really resonated with me, and I think I like to do, I don't know, I'm not even call it adventure biking, but I like to do biking that takes me to different places, right, and sort of off the grid, and where there is some amount of challenge inherent in the route that we've chosen, and so that those things really spoke to me. And so this was maybe a week or so ago that I listened to the podcast, and I was just trying to, like, mull it over in my head, because so many of those things we try to teach on probably a smaller scale, but in the makerspace, right? So how do you teach kids to deal with uncertainty and challenges and adversity in an informal education setting that's not nature or the wilderness and so then, what can we learn from those that that their education experiences rely on them being out in the wilderness to teach those things we don't maybe have that some of what we would need to do would probably need to be a little bit more contrived, or we'd have to focus on a little bit more of the nuances in order to identify where those things occur in the MakerSpace. Now, I do think children come up against adversity and challenges and uncertainty in the makerspace, but how do we capitalize on that to get that same value from it? And so that's what I've been mulling over in my head, right? Like if, and I think sometimes I'm a formal educator, not now. Now I work in an informal education space, but I was trained as a formal educator, and I'm not sure that I always gave enough credence or value to these types of experiences and what I could learn from. Of them as an educator, and so I'm just kind of flipping the script, because this cyclist that I was listening to, she did teach us faculty at a university and taught outdoor education and outdoor at a university with an outdoor education degree, right? So, and I think probably a typical place to teach would be someplace like Outward Bound,
Ashley O'Neil:yeah, yeah.
Julie Cunningham:And anyway, so how can we like as more formal educators, appreciate these things, and how do we capitalize on those things in a space that is much more controlled than nature.
Ashley O'Neil:I have so many I have so many thoughts, okay, so that you didn't take this in the way I thought you were going to take it. So I'm also like readjusting, and I'm excited about what you had to say, just for listeners a little bit of like you probably gleaned this, but I'm just going to say it explicitly anyway. By outdoor education, you are referring specifically to there are degrees and programs in places where that focus on outdoor education. We have an outdoor or, like an outdoor rec program here. A lot of times those jobs or become at nature centers at like adventure spaces, right? But basically there is an informal education focus. I would say that a little bit, there's probably some formal education happening now in outdoor Ed, but those are probably like more like alternative schools and alternative schooling choices, right? You don't typically see in a mainstream formal education space a classroom where there's like this huge outdoor education focus in our area. Anyway, I always love when something that you're like doing for your personal life, or something completely unrelated, then like becomes related to what we do at work. That always is fascinating to me. Because the intersection of like, you're really interested in this thing, and you're learning this from this person, and then like applying it backwards, like you said, I think is really cool and a great way for us to stop thinking of education in this strict vacuum, right? Like I learned so much from classroom teachers, I learned so much from other folks, but sometimes I think we've done this thing where we pull out everything about life at school and try to make it so focused on these core content skills, and we, and we think that by removing those things, we allow this big focus. But the truth is, our kids don't stop being full humans when they walk in those doors. And so trying to not address some of these interpersonal skills, these collaborative things, these sticking with a problem like by not explicitly thinking about those in the classroom, we're not doing ourselves any favors, because those students in the context of reading, in the context of math, are still going to come up across those problems, and now we're not practicing those things. So I'm really interested every time we can talk a little less about content standards, and I know that that's a privilege for me as an informal educator, but I'm interested in when we can do that, because and we can talk about stuff like this, because I think at the end of the day, most teachers know how to teach reading and math and writing, and that's not the thing that gets in the way. Sometimes it is, but a lot of times, the thing that gets in the way is doing it with kids and all of their variables and things that they bring.
Julie Cunningham:But then I, you know, so then I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole, and I've been looking at more traditional outdoor learning, which is not what this I think cyclist was exactly referring to. I think adventure outdoor education has a little bit more, like, go out in the realness and you don't, well, you don't really know, right? You better have a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C, so that when planning doesn't work, you're not panicked because you've got Plan B, right? And so you, I think, and I'm always interested to like, I don't know that all adults do that. Like, I like have a plan a plan B, and a plan C, and are comfortable falling back on that. So when I see people do that, and I've had to learn to do some of that with my some of the bike riding that I do, right, or even like trying to keep my cabin open this winter hasn't been easy, and it's not necessary listeners, but I've tried to do it, and so I'm learning a lot, right anyway, and I've had to had plan A, plan B and Plan C often, but I heard somebody I was in a social setting, and they were going out to groom some bike trail up in the up the next morning. And it was very it was that during that time that was very, very cold, below zero, and so they weren't sure that both snowmobiles would work. And so just naturally, these people were saying, well, let's go with Plan A, and plan A is, this is how I'm going to dress, and the snowmobiles all gassed up and whatever, right? Plan a like, everything goes well. And then here's our plan B, and here's what we're going to do. If that doesn't go A. According to plan, like, but I don't know that all people do that, and that all people do that out loud, right? So that like, for the
Ashley O'Neil:benefit of our if
Julie Cunningham:our youth don't, our kids in our MakerSpace, kids in our classrooms don't hear that and don't see that. Like, even if you're doing it in your head, maybe more people do it in their head, then I realize, but then if you don't do it out loud, and people don't see you go through that thought process right, then how do they learn to do that? And so I think in the article I looked up that would be called critical thinking skills, but I also think of it a little bit like resilience, because if I run up against something that's frustrating to me, as we see that happen all the time in the makerspace, right? What am I going to do with that feeling of frustration? Am I going to say, okay, that's fine. I get to be frustrated. This isn't working how I expect it to work. But now, what am I going to do? Or am I going to be brought to tears? Or does it depend on the day, or does it depend on that, right? Right? Like, can you iterate? Can you critically think about what next? Or could you ask for help? Like, maybe that's the compromise in between. If you're not quite to the point of the critical thinking, maybe you ask for help rather than being brought to tears.
Ashley O'Neil:Yes, and in the classroom setting, I hear a desire for that from students all the time, and we might use different language. We might say, I want them to advocate for their needs. I want them to be able to pivot and think flexibly. I want them to be able to compromise with their peers, right? Because there's like, this rigidity of like, this is the plan, and if it doesn't work, I don't know what to do next. Or there is the we're going to try this, and we're going to try this, we're going to try this, we're going to try this, and I think that we talk about this often. And again, schools are not a monolith. Teachers are not a monolith, but just this idea that there's so many kids in here who think that there should be a singular right answer, and the absence of a right answer continually gives them pause or gives them a little bit of like a shock to the system. And that's interesting, because all of these skills, we kind of agree that, you know, we all think that critical thinking, being flexible, you know, having having some tenacity, having some resilience. Those are all beneficial. But, like, that's a stopping point over and over and over again. The other thing I think that's interesting, when you mentioned the adventure side, and we've talked about this a little bit with outdoor education before, is that when you're in this, like, unpredictable place, the woods, the beach, outside, whatever oftentimes it is, all of you, maybe not against the wilderness, but working together. And the challenge comes from this third thing, right, right? And so, like, yeah, we've got to work together. I need you to get the water. There's not enough time, and that the conflict comes between you and the challenge itself, and not between you and your peers. That's not to say like, like there's no discussion or no friction, but like, it's all of us in this against this challenge that we're trying to work on, like, this thing that we're trying to grow from. And I think sometimes we try to create that friction and challenge in a in a in a more sterile environment, in a classroom, but then it becomes competition, right, right? But like in your adventure team, or when you're outdoor biking, or when you're, you know, backpacking through like on the trail, it does you no good if you're warm for the night, but your partner is wet and cold, because you're going to be affected by that in the morning. So you better both have good shelter, enough water, enough food, right? Yeah, like it just naturally has to be so if it's you against the elements, like you have a real world problem
Julie Cunningham:that actually comes up a lot, and not contrived research, and how that plays out for teamwork and the interpersonal connections, yeah, 400% and especially for adolescents, right, who might not be so inclined to be looking at their peers for support, or might feel less more anxiety about needing to look to their peers for support. 100% like that comes up over and over again in the in the research for outdoor Ed and the value of outdoor Ed, yeah, there's somebody else you said that I was thinking about this the so I did find, and this is out of the UK, which actually probably doesn't surprise us after our trip to Iceland, in the amount of forest schools and outdoor Ed experiences We had between the teachers we were with at the UK and the teachers we were with from Iceland, but just the value, and this is not outdoor adventure education. This is just outdoor education, the value in improving critical thinking skills so and they even define that. Not so they say nature based activities help improve children's cognitive function, focus and problem solving abilities by providing real, real world context for learning. And it does go on to say, like, the the challenges that the students encounter should be open ended, right? So, like, just taking your worksheet out to do it outdoors isn't really the same as looking at challenges that are open ended, right? And this also goes on to say the unpredictability of nature fosters adaptive thinking, requiring students to assess risk, make decisions and learn from the outcomes. And I think we saw that even with very young children in Iceland, right? Like, Sure, you can climb that tree, but you have to be able to get yourself down from that tree as well. And that's a risk you have us. You have to assess, right? And then you make a decision, and if you can't get down, maybe that informs the next time that you go up, because that's a natural consequence, yeah.
Ashley O'Neil:And even here, I was at the nature preschool with one of our teachers on those really cold days that we've had a lot of lately. And there was a child who wanted to do something that required their fingertips, but it's very cold, and so they had, like, two layers of mittens on, and they were making this decision of, like, I can't do this thing that I want to do with the gloves that I have on, so do I take them off for a while and then my fingers get cold and wet. Like, what's the plan here? And like, nobody solved that problem for them, but like, there was a lot of open negotiation and like, well, this could happen, and then what will you do? And what will you do here? And again, it was just like this micro moment had nothing to do with, like, we were going to go look at, actually, a deer carcass, but just on that walk, all of that, like problem solving and survival and like cost benefit analysis, like, like, you have the agency to make this decision. You're going to have some real time consequences. Either way, decide what you're going to do and figure it out like that, those just in time moments like that is the thing that's so important. And sometimes I think we rush past those, like, on the way to the real learning. But I want to, like, freeze frame that and say, like, Nope. That is the thing. Like, how much amazing stuff happened in that, like, a minute and half exchange. Well, do you
Julie Cunningham:remember even when they told us in Iceland? Like, I mean, as adults, will tell kids, don't take your mittens off. Your hands. Will get cold, but or don't, don't stomp your feet in the puddles, because your feet are gonna get wet and cold. But until that happens, they don't even know, like, what does that mean? Right? So if I take my mittens off and I put them in my hood because I'm outdoors, walking, and my hands get cold, well now I know what that means, and now I'm either gonna put my mittens back on or I'm going to ask for help in some way, right? And if I stomp through the puddles in my tennis shoes, and my feet are wet and cold now, well, now I know that in the future, if I sound through puddles, this is the outcome of that situation, but an adult just telling me, right, they may not experience issuing edict and rule that doesn't mess right, like it's just another, another rule, yeah, so that this outdoor classroom, that's what's called the outdoor classroom, was the first sort of piece of it's a blog on this website that I found, and then I dug A little bit deeper, and I found it's at children and Nature Network and the whole it's a lit review they did a whole may 2025 so it's recent, a lit review of articles that talk about back country and wilderness adventures for adolescents, and the things that adolescents would learn on these adventures or in these experiences. So that was the next, and there's a there was four different articles, and all of them were research based, which made me happy. So some sort of a research question, and some sort of data was collected, and I just found this really interesting, right? And not surprising, but it helped me to sort of connect the dots. So there was five things that I pulled out, I guess, of the articles in general. And one is, and just again, trying to help me think about if this is what we value for children if we value critical thinking skills and problem solving skills and growth mindset and resilience and like, this is what, and this is what we've said we value in the Maker Place, along with age in the makerspace, along with agency, right? Well, then how do we use these scenarios, and how do we translate that into the work that we do? And again, maybe it's not a one to one translation, but so the first article that I thought was the most appropriate was called lasting impacts of outdoor adventure residential experiences on young people. And the young people are ages 11 to 19, and. And most of their most of the data collected was like firsthand experiences, firsthand, you know, in speaking to the youth, it wasn't like some survey or something, or wasn't like a Likert survey or something like that. Most of it was just, I think, interviews,
Ashley O'Neil:and then they did, like anecdotal data,
Julie Cunningham:I believe. So the big takeaways were the increase in self confidence. And remember, this is 11 to 19 year olds, so these aren't a group of people that you would really say, independence and communication skills. So those were the top three improvements that this group had. But then, like their sub, the subtext was also they're better at teamwork, life skills, intra personal skills, and the ability to take on new experiences.
Ashley O'Neil:Wow, that's and that's and that's so interesting, because, like, like you said, that specific age group, that is the time when you traditionally see a big decrease in those and, like, a reliance on social cues, and this kind of focus on, like, what do other peers think of meanness, and so the fact that those things are in direct com like, contrast to the typical change we see that's incredible.
Julie Cunningham:Yeah, so they the outdoor adventure residentials were defined as they had to involve, they had to take place primarily using the outdoor environment, involve at least one overnight stay, and each included the sharing of a small space and working as a team towards a common goal. So that was the definition of what they so it didn't have to be like Super Adventure ish, right? Could be a camp. So that was really interesting to me. And then the other a lot of these have a tie into just things I'm interested in, in general, which helps me to see, I think more value in this. One of the whole one of the articles, or the lit reviews, was on how many of us think that it would be nice if the younger generation valued nature, so that we'd want to take care of our green spaces and so it's hard to ask kids to value nature if they're not out in nature ever, if they feel disconnected, if they feel disconnected from it. So that was one of the sort of outcomes of this type of education, was that more students valued nature, which seems like, of course, mental health benefits. So for our generation that's particularly rife with anxiety, right and mental health challenges, this is like a natural, you know, go outside, breathe the air, be in the trees, kind of a natural way to alleviate some of the mental health challenges. And then I already mentioned the critical thinking skills. So those were the sort of the value added that I found from these articles. All were about adolescence, and all, I think have outcomes that we can appreciate in more of a classroom setting.
Ashley O'Neil:Yeah, I like it and again, I think over and over and over again. And this is not a diminishing of anything content wise, that teachers do in the classroom. And you know, I can see us saying we keep pulling away like stuff like this outdoor time in unstructured spaces for kids, and applying more structure and more rigor, or our definition of academic rigor, to these things and and the research that we find again and again and again is kind of going Why are you doing this? What's the plan here? And so I I feel a tremendous privilege as an informal educator to have the freedom to think about and talk about that stuff, because I'm not in the classroom space, but I'm hoping that conversations like these and the work that we do help shift the conversation a little bit to say, like reading and this, right? Like all of these things are interconnected, and that we can't tease out aspects of a child and say, Okay, we're going to hyper focus on this content thing for two hours. And that two hour block, all you're going to do is, like content transference. If it was that easy, like that, we could just plug a kid in, right? We wouldn't be having these conversations. But we know that they're whole people, and so when we can see over and over again these positive and beneficial effects of something that's truly, really simple, getting kids outside and giving them less structure in a way, right? Right, and giving them more time to kind of puzzle through these challenges like that seems like a really great place to go. And it would be so interesting to see what would happen if we started applying this with the same level of fidelity and import as we do other things.
Julie Cunningham:I think so often too, when kids think back to what was significant in their childhood. It's going to be experiences like this, right though, things that they go back and rely on and ask themselves, what did they learn from? Where did those intra personal skills? I mean, how rewarding to know that you solved the problem, or you solved the problem as a team, and now you know, you can do it right. Like those are the things I think are going to resonate with them, not the math, I mean, again, not taking away from the math assignment you gave yesterday, but like these, these rich, yeah, right, I think are going to be the ones that, yes, people look back on and say that was really, yeah, significant.
Ashley O'Neil:I think my favorite example I think about a lot is kids in handwriting and scissor cutting. And I think about that because the age of my child is we're deep in handwriting and scissor cutting. So it's a part of my like, daily life. But the best way to develop the skill of scissor using scissors and writing with your hands. Is not to practice using scissors every day, and is not to practice writing every day. It is to pinch rocks and throw them. It is to climb things. It is to tear paper and play with Plato. There's all these other like rich, tactile things that happen out of the classroom, maybe in the classroom, but mostly out of the classroom. You don't think of as a classroom skill. So this, like hitting the same skill over and over again in the exact same way, is not how you build that skill. You have to build all of these other little secretive, seemingly maybe tangential muscles before you tackle the scissors. And I think outdoor education reminds me of that where, like, it's this huge well of skill building that we see then the outcomes of but because the connections aren't direct, like we're not learning the alphabet in the trees. It's hard to say, like, No, you're gonna this is gonna be so amazing for you, yeah?
Julie Cunningham:And I actually had that one written down, actually, as a positive outcome, and I skipped over it. But the sort of, the physical benefit, right? The really, the fine motor skills,
Ashley O'Neil:yeah, it's so true. Just anecdotally, my son, who was in nature preschool for two years, the amount of confidence we saw in his ability to climb things navigate, like climb into his car seat, move his own body, do all those things. And I think all the preschool teachers, or all the preschool parents talked about that, right? And it's not like we were practicing getting the car seat more. It's not like we were practicing like doing daily living things at home more, but he had developed so much more confidence and muscle building and skill from just traversing and walking through the woods that we saw that transference in our daily life. And it was incredible. This is teach wonder brought to you by the Center for Excellence in STEM education. Links are in the show notes and transcripts are on our site. You.