Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices in the Outdoor Classroom, 1877-2007: A Tension Between Safety and Pleasure

Abstract

This thesis examines how beliefs about children’s safety are interpreted by New Zealand’s non-specialist (‘lay’) primary school teachers in their practices outside of the classroom. The non-specialist teachers’ approaches toward taking children outside the classroom are a product of general attitudes and beliefs about children’s safety. Beliefs and understandings of children’s safety as expressed through policy and school practice are explored both in current and historical contexts. This means this thesis is not about the commercial outdoor education industry. The thesis engages with the outdoor education literature around issues of safety in the outdoor classroom. Inclusion of ‘outside the classroom’ activities as part of the educational experience, beginning with the 1877 Education Act, are traced up to New Zealand’s 1999 national curriculum and subsequent documents relating to safety and outdoor education. This thesis engages with the outdoor education literature. Changes in New Zealand’s educational outdoor safety policies are also presented as they contribute to non-specialist teachers’ approaches toward working with children in the outdoors. Children’s enjoyment of participating in outside-the-classroom activities provides a background against which the study occurs. A social constructionist position is taken in the study. This is intentionally and respectfully distinct from empirical approaches to safety in education outside the classroom. In coming alongside these empirical approaches, this study’s social constructionist position provides another aspect of policy and practice: that of how beliefs about children’s safety are interpreted by New Zealand’s non-specialist primary school teachers in their outside the classroom practice. The social construction of safety is investigated through historical policy documents alongside teachers’ talk to highlight a tension that exists for non-specialist primary school teachers between safety, enjoyment and risk when working with young people in the outdoors. The teachers’ talk revealed understandings of safety are not static or discrete, but rather are part of a continual process of teachers’ interactions and teachers’ myths and rituals relating to the social context of the outdoor classroom. This time-situated critical study contributes to understandings of the beliefs, practices and approaches of New Zealand’s non-specialist primary school teachers when teaching in the outdoor classroom. Beliefs include overprotectiveness and that safety is available at the expense of some benefit. Both lay beliefs are common enough for the consequences to be worth investigating. The effects of safe practice and risk anxiety for these non-specialist teachers are presented. Both the negative and the positive effects of non-specialist teachers’ safety beliefs are examined through the document analysis and interview data to reveal the ongoing construction of their curriculum and pedagogy as an effect of social change. Understandings of safety, enjoyment, pleasure and risk are found to be dynamic constructs. The research exposes a tension between safety and enjoyment that primary non-specialist teachers experience and negotiate when interacting with children in the outdoor classroom.