
Outdoor Education: Reconnecting with Nature
Thirty minutes outside can restore a tired class's attention — under narrower conditions, and by smaller margins, than is usually claimed. The conditions are the course.
About this course
By Friday you can say exactly what taking a class outside is good for, and you have a session, a term’s plan and a timetable proposal built to those limits. Monday — you score the outdoor space you are standing in against the evidence, and write down what outdoor learning can and cannot honestly claim…
Methodology
The week opens with what the research does not settle. A claim you cannot defend in a staff meeting is worse than no claim, and it is the thing that gets outdoor learning quietly dropped from a timetable.
Every activity gets checked against one question — does this hold attention gently, or does it grab it? Only the first restores anything, and a surprising number of established outdoor activities fail.
Sessions are built and then actually taught outdoors with the group, on the site, whatever the sky is doing — which is also how the weather contingency stops being theoretical.
What you'll take home
Say precisely what the research does and does not support — which findings come from attention-restoration studies and which from school-based outdoor learning — and hold that line with a sceptical colleague or a head teacher.
Tell soft fascination from hard, and rebuild an outdoor activity that was quietly the wrong kind.
Audit a real outdoor space against the four conditions Attention Restoration Theory names.
Fit a thirty-minute outdoor session into a real timetable, with the trade-off written down rather than wished away.
Run a session in poor weather from a risk and logistics sheet a head teacher will actually sign.
Turn one session into a term's plan, and write the one-page timetable proposal that asks for what the term needs.
Other dates for this course
- 21–25 Dec 2026 Antalya Planned
- 1–5 Mar 2027 Rome Planned
- 5–9 Jul 2027 Mersin Planned
- 13–17 Sep 2027 Budapest Planned
- 22–26 Nov 2027 Bremen Planned
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What's included
Not included
Aggregated across all EMA courses, not specific to this session.
+ educators from 20 more countries across Europe and beyond
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