Nature Pedagogy and the Enactment of Settler Colonialism in Ontario Forest Schools and Nature-based Kindergartens: A Study of Three Sites
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Forest Schools and Nature-based Kindergartens are a trend that promotes greater connection to land-based learning for their participants. This study examines the promise of Forest Schools and Nature-based Kindergartens in the context of settler colonialism and their impact on education in Canada. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (2015) Calls to Action challenge educators to teach about the effects of colonialism on Canadian society, and to create a more equitable and just partnership with Indigenous peoples. The dissertation takes seriously this challenge and considers a comparative case study analysis of three different sites in central Ontario, focusing on the frameworks of stewardship, connection to nature, and responsibility to Indigenous communities. The study uses policy, curricula, and practice as the lenses to analyze how educators’ practices contribute to or challenge settler colonialism. Data sources includes participant observation at each of the three sites over the course of seven months, interviews with participants and experts, photos, videos, and field notes. Practices in two of the three sites indicate strong influences of western pedagogies that replicate colonial structures. The third site, in contrast, nurtured relationships with a local Indigenous community to provide meaningful, reciprocal experiences and connections for both children and Indigenous community members. This study reveals a spectrum of tensions found in the colonial representations of childhood experiences with nature that have profound implications for our ability to understand the ways settler colonialism is manifested in nature pedagogy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".