Outdoor And Environmental Education

Outdoor education and environmental education are separate but closely related areas of study within the field of education. They share some common content and processes, although they are distinctive in other important ways. Various interpretations have appeared in the literature, but their original purposes have changed very little since their inceptions. This article will define the terms and show their relation to each other and to other related educational movements, describe their objectives and purposes, outline their commonly used instructional methods, briefly trace their historical development in the United States and abroad, discuss their status in American school curricula, and suggest several key issues, controversies, and trends.
Defining Terms
The term outdoor education emerged in the early 1940s to describe the instructional use of natural and built areas to meet student learning objectives in a variety of subject-matter disciplines through direct experiences. This type of contextual learning involving the local surroundings has also been referred to as taking field trips, excursions, journeys, or doing field studies. During the late nineteenth century in the United States, some educators realized that taking students out of the classroom to teach appropriate concepts, skills, attitudes, and values could improve education. Some of the early outdoor educators used camp settings during the regular school year to meet academic objectives and to improve students’ social development and leisure skills. Because outdoor education activities were usually tied closely to the school curriculum, the field has adapted to early-twenty-first century reforms affecting the broader educational field.
The term environmental education arose in the late 1960s in the United States as a result of a national social phenomenon called the environmental movement. The classic definition, developed by William B. Stapp and his graduate students, appeared originally in the 1969 issue of the Journal of Environmental Education: “Environmental education is aimed at producing a citizenry that is knowledgeable concerning the biophysical environment and its associated problems, aware of how to help solve these problems, and motivated to work toward their solution” (Hungerford et al., p. 34).
Although public concern for improving and preserving quality environments existed earlier when national parks were set aside, and windblown soil created the dust bowl of the 1930s, resource use or conservation education increased in the 1970s. Some historians point to Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, published in 1962, as one event that helped to spawn the first Earth Day in April 1970. Spurred by federal legislation during the next several decades, environmental education expanded in public and private schools across the nation. Some critics accused educators of simply changing the names of their outdoor science, nature study, or outdoor education programs to environmental education but continuing the same programs as in the past. This practice of changing the names of these closely related fields in order to modernize the program content, methodology, or focus continues today.
Some of the practices in outdoor and environmental education programs do overlap. Although both fields are interdisciplinary, one difference is that outdoor education can be applied to any discipline that can be effectively taught and learned out-side. For example, outdoor education could mean teaching the concept of an acre by measuring a playing field (mathematics); or visiting a park to write poetry or draw pictures inspired by the setting (language arts and art); or recording the information found in a cemetery to learn about past events (history); or testing the pH to determine if a nearby stream is acid or alkaline (science); or climbing a hill to calculate student heart rates (physical education). It could also mean visiting zoos, parks, museums, fire stations, factories, water treatment plants, or any other built environment to create more effective learning opportunities. Environmental education can take place outside as well as inside classrooms and take local as well as global perspectives, but the focus is usually on studying an issue such as water, air, and soil pollution; solid waste and toxic disposal; urban sprawl and population; deforestation; endangered plants and animals; or drought and flooding, especially at upper grade levels. The line separating the two fields is blurred when teachers take students outside to study nature awareness and culture’s impact on ecosystems. It makes little sense to argue over which label to apply to these kinds of outdoor lessons when their purposes blend.

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