EXPLORING THE AFFORDANCES OF OUTDOOR LEARNING: HOW TEACHERS UTILIZED THEM TO ENHANCE THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Outdoor learning refers to all forms of learning that take place outside the classroom. This can include specific outdoor education curriculum or other subject areas taught through outdoor experiences. There are many different theories and approaches to outdoor learning, including experiential, environmental, adventure, place or community based, and land-based learning. These approaches may have some differences in goals and methods, but they share similar theoretical foundations and practices. The concept of affordances, which describes the possibilities and opportunities for behavior that objects in the environment offer, is an important theoretical foundation for outdoor learning. The study examined the lived experiences of outdoor learning teachers in relation to how they made use of the affordances available in the outdoor environment using phenomenological methods. Semi-structured interviews were conducted one-on-one with fourteen teachers from Saskatchewan who use the outdoor environment in their teaching practice. Mind-mapping, the hermeneutic circle, and interpretative phenomenological analysis were used to analyse the data. Six themes were identified including: relationships, engagement, flexibility, risk and autonomy, freedom, and health. Out of these themes, six affordances were highlighted including: expansive spaces, distractions, freedom, real, or found, objects, dynamic changeability, and challenge and risk. Teachers utilized these affordances through walks, supporting freedom of expression, camping trips, embracing a student-centered approach, allowing and supporting student interaction with objects, and engaging in challenging or risky activities with proper risk assessment and management. This utilization of the affordances yielded numerous positive benefits including: the development and strengthening of relationships, increased student engagement, student creativity and autonomy, supporting individual learning needs and life skills, and improved student health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".