Teaching Science and Mathematics outside the Classroom: a pilot study on assesing inquiry based practices

Our research topic is ‘Teaching outside the classroom’, that is, the didactical and pedagogical decisions made by the teacher before and during the teaching practice outdoors.
In this paper, we are going to discuss some of the work we have done recently. The results that have been published as open access, so if you are interested you will find the article in ‘Frontiers in Education’.
Our point of departure is that teaching outside the classroom have been proved to have positive effects on pupils academic learning, personal and physical development (Becker et al., 2017; Bølling et al., 2018; Rickinson et al., 2004). But how do we understand this – is there an cause-and-effect relationship between nature and learning? Interestingly, both the pedagogy and setting of nature-based instruction may contribute to its effects. Hands-on, student-centered, activity-based and discussion-based instruction each outperform traditional instruction—even when conducted indoors. Can the cause and effect be connected to the methods used outdoors, when the teacher leaves the classroom to teach? In this study, we tried to develop a method to assess the pedagogy of outdoor teaching, with emphasis on the inquiry-based teaching. With this in mind, we deliberately broaden the conference theme to ‘Cultural appropriation of spaces, things and approaches in education’.