The Forest School approach has become very popular in recent years, with many schools offering this educational experience as part of the regular school day. Forest School provides children with the opportunity to engage with the outdoor environment as part of learning, increasing the amount of time children spend outside in the natural world. The…

Research into pedagogical approaches used in early years' nature education, more specifically European and UK forest schools, remains according to Leather, 'undertheorised.' In a similar situation in Australia, the bush kindergarten programmes (referred to as 'bush kinders'), have had limited research attention. Influenced by European and UK…

Children's books have frequently portrayed groups holding power more favorably than marginalized people. In this essay, we show how such books support a theoretical framework based on the notion that education can either preserve the status quo or change it. We use primary sources consisting of passages from various children's books in addition to…

Learning objectives, especially those well defined by applying Bloom's taxonomy for Cognitive Objectives, have been widely recognized as important in various teaching and learning practices. However, many educators have difficulties developing learning objectives appropriate to the levels in Bloom's taxonomy, as they need to consider the…

Today, outdoor therapies are practiced in many nations around the world, with a broad diversity of philosophies, theories, methods, functions, and formats (Norton et al., 2015). The field of therapy within the outdoors has been much discussed and debated within the experiential profession (Itin, 1998). The disputes and deliberations have centred…

Using a team-based course development approach, the University of British Columbia collaborated with the Asia-Pacific Network for Sustainable Forest Management and Rehabilitation (APFNet) and universities from Australia, the Philippines, Malaysia, China, and Canada to design and develop six transnational, online, distance-education courses…

This article is based on the findings from a Master of Education dissertation, which explored the partnership between a junior school (Year 7-10) in New Zealand and VineLife Limited--a technology company based in Auckland. In this partnership, the students completed a design sprint, including a series of activities that required them to apply…

Bush kindergarten programmes (known as bush kinders), where preschool children learn in, about and with nature, are proliferating in Australian early childhood education. This scoping review reports on, and analyses, the research literature pertaining to how ethnography has been applied to the bush kinder context. We included studies conducted in…

There is growing discussion on the use of local outdoor environments to enhance a person's sense of belonging. Sense of belonging and sense of place are components that can promote positive learning identities and attachments to community and, in turn, address issues of cycles of disadvantage. This article researched the impact of an…

This paper presents data from interviews undertaken with teachers and parents of children who attend Australian bush kinders (kindergartens). The bush kinder approach is a recent adaptation of the European and UK forest school approaches, one that continues to gain momentum as increasingly teachers and parents come to understand the benefits…

Adopting an ecological perspective on context in second language learning, this study investigated the ways in which a group of Chinese students reconceptualized and reconstructed their learning environments in the first 3 months of study abroad in Australia. Focusing on the students' conceptions of the relationship between in-class and…

Classifying educational forum posts is a longstanding task in the research of Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining. Though this task has been tackled by applying both traditional Machine Learning (ML) approaches (e.g., Logistics Regression and Random Forest) and up-to-date Deep Learning (DL) approaches, there lacks a systematic…

This paper highlights the similarities and differences of seven nature kindergarten programmes in Australia and New Zealand. The study targeted three programmes from New Zealand and four from Australia. Participant observations and semi-structured interviews were used to build a profile of each site. The profiles were compared on factors such as…

DNA barcoding is increasingly being introduced into biological science educational curricula worldwide. The technique has a number of features that make it ideal for science curricula and particularly for Project-Based Learning (PBL). This report outlines the development of a DNA barcoding project in an Australian TAFE college, which also combined…

Background: Prior to approaching any field site activity, the question of how researchers in education will interact with the participants in terms of positionality requires careful thought. Observation is often used by educators and researchers as a means of collecting informal data on children's development and learning in early childhood…