Illuminating Outdoor Pedagogy in Early Learning and Child Care: A Collective Case Study in Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative, collective case study, undertaken through an applied research lens, illuminates outdoor pedagogy by exploring the perspectives and practices of 12 early childhood educators and the relationship between policy and practice in three distinct Early Learning and Child Care (ELCC) programs in Ontario, Canada. Data consisted of educator interviews, field observations, pedagogical planning and documentation artifacts, and centre policies. Drawing on a sociocultural theoretical framework that integrates traditional outdoor learning theory with contemporary literature about Euro-Western approaches to outdoor pedagogy, I employed constant comparison analysis, thematic analysis, and cross-case analysis to identify six themes of outdoor pedagogy: Teamwork, the Role of the Educator, Pedagogical Interactions, the Cycle of Pedagogical Documentation, Environments and Affordances, and Safety and Risk. Further, I determined one overarching theme about the locus of intentionality which informs understanding of the heterogeneity of outdoor pedagogy. I discuss the implications of my findings for practice and policy and for scaling outdoor pedagogy within the impending expansion of ELCC in Canada.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".