Theorising the Quiet Power of Forest School

This highly novel volume reframes the popular, yet sorely under-theorised international education movement known as forest school, offering an interdisciplinary framework with which to set apart forest school from other outdoor education programmes and child-led pedagogies.

By broadly defining forest school as regular, repeated, unstructured practice in nature, the book is able to link the established UK-centred understanding of the practice to other similar international movements that share the same Scandinavian-inspired principles, such as those in Germany, the United States, Canada, South Korea, and New Zealand, among others. Centred around three central pillars which demonstrate how forest school may be viewed through three alternative onto-epistemological lenses, chapters engage with data by writing diffractively through these three concepts and with the key posthuman, eco-philosophical, and new materialist theories that relate to them. The book ultimately argues that it is the forest itself – and the quiet intra-relationship that develops – which is the integral keystone of the practice of forest school. This perspective challenges historical human-centred thinking, which has long constrained our understanding of the profound connections between humans and the natural world.

Offering a new appreciation of the quiet power of forest school and an understanding of it as a significant emergent pedagogical practice, this book will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students involved with forest school, early childhood education, the philosophy of education, and theories of learning more broadly.