Infants and Their Educators in a Nature-based Educational Context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nature-based education appears as a powerful response to the increase of an indoor and sedentary lifestyle. Nature-based education refers to a practice where nature is central to children’s daily experiences, such as routines, exploration, and play, and includes opportunities to connect and become comfortable with nature. It offers multiple benefits for children’s whole development (e.g., Kuo et al. 2019). Literature on infants’ experiences with nature is limited (e.g., Jørgensen, 2018; Monti et al., 2019). The present qualitative case study examined the experiences of infants younger than 18-months-old and their educators in two not-for-profit Québec daycares: one urban and one semi-rural centre that integrated regular nature-based practices into their curriculum. Observations examined 19 infants’ experiences into the outdoor natural setting and with their four educators. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with each educator to investigate their perspectives on this approach with infants. Results demonstrated that the natural environment offered a rich context for infants’ whole development in an integrated way: cognitive, social, language, and motor. Educators offered a secure base in a child-led pedagogy by being responsive, sharing joint attention, and supporting infants’ learning experiences verbally and physically. They also held a strong vision of infants as active learners, which is crucial to a child-led pedagogy in a nature-based context. Still, the educators must display strong self-confidence, teamwork and organizational skills to overcome the invisibility of this age group in the guidelines, training, and information for outdoor practices. The findings have important pedagogical and policy implications for the well-being of Quebec’s youngest citizens to make them more visible and to offer them a rich context to explore and learn.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".