Ecological Encounters in Outdoor Early Childhood Education Programs: Pedagogies for childhood, \nNature and Place
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores how nature, place, and pedagogical practice are perceived by educators in three Canadian outdoor early childhood education programs. Intersections between ideologies in early childhood education and interests in environmental education are introduced to highlight possibilities for collaboration in education for social transformation and ecological justice. Thematic issues and philosophical undercurrents of modern culture are explored and how they shape human and nature relations in educational settings. This research is situated in the movement to reconnect children to nature, whose goals include more outdoor play, enhancing children’s well-being and fostering environmental concern. Elements of critical theory, ethnography, phenomenology, grounded theory, and documents analysis were crafted to inform questions and code for themes that emerged from interviews with educators from the outdoor early childhood programs. Findings revealed that what the educators perceived from outdoor play was that children were more experientially engaged with movement, the land, and the local flora and fauna they encountered outside. The combination of democratic, child-led, and emergent pedagogical approaches with the educator’s conceptualizations of ecological literacy allowed children to construct reciprocal and affective ways of knowing and meaning making in the outdoors. This alternative form of pedagogical praxis, revealed from the educators’ experiences and the immersion of learning and play in the outdoors, demonstrates tangible possibilities for transformative education that honours embodied ways of knowing and reconfigures human and nature relations towards sustaining life and an ethics of co-existence.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".