My career has revolved around ensuring more children and young people can benefit from learning beyond as well as inside the classroom. This is probably because evidence and experience continue to show me, on a daily basis, the transformational impact these experiences can have, sometimes inspiring choices and changes that last a lifetime.
I know I am not alone in having vivid memories of a Primary School visit, in my case to the Weald and Downland Museum where I was silenced by the smoke-rich darkness of an Iron Age house reconstruction and left wide-eyed watching a calf being born.
With hindsight, my later decisions to study environmental science and find myself working at the Chiltern Open Air Museum delivering educational visits might be more than a coincidence!
(A heartfelt thank you to staff past and present at both these museums, who I am proud to say are both LOtC Quality Badge holders too.)
Over the years I have seen time and again that learning delivered in science, nature, heritage, and arts settings ignites sparks and new ways of seeing that open doors and change lives. We are all unique and innately curious individuals, so we must strive to offer students the diversity of learning experiences needed to allow each one to connect the knowledge and insight they gain in the classroom to their lived experience in the real world, to find relevance and personal meaning, and to feel a sense of awe and wonder about the places and the people around them.
People delivering our children’s education are on the frontline, and here at CLOtC we continue to salute you all on a daily basis. The evidence is strong and consistent that learning beyond the classroom delivers a uniquely wide range of co-benefits to health, wellbeing and learning, for teachers and learners alike. So, this is why we believe so strongly in championing learning beyond the classroom as a simple, proven strategy for helping schools mitigate widening inequalities in health and learning. With children tending to spend more of their leisure time indoors and online, and less time exploring their neighbourhoods with their friends or on their own, they have less opportunities to develop skills for life such as independence, resilience, empathy, managing risk, developing sense of place and belonging, and confidence – all vital for them to thrive as they move into adulthood. So, helping them develop these skills through their education is vital.
Connecting with nature
I was lucky to work with a great team on the relatively new scientific construct of ‘nature connectedness.’ Our ‘contact’ with nature is typically measured by how long or how often we visit natural spaces, but our ‘connection’ with nature measures our relationship with nature, including aspects like whether we find beauty in nature, create personal meanings with it through stories or culture, whether we feel part of nature and compassionate towards it. Being able to describe (and measure) the difference between contact and connection with nature has begun to have profound impact on the environmental sector, developing more informed ways of planning, delivering, and evaluating policy and practice designed to respond to the challenges of climate change and sustainability.
The effect of creating connections is not marginal; one often cited reference found that nearly 70% of change in pro-environmental behaviour reported after a school based environmental education programme was attributable to increasing nature connectedness, compared to less than 10% attributable to increasing environmental knowledge. So, allowing opportunities to create both contact and connection with something is really important, and perhaps far more important than focusing on delivering facts about it at least in the first instance.
Building connections
Having worked across many sectors over the years, I am sure the same need for both contact and connection also exists for heritage, science, and arts. (If this evidence is already out there, please let me know as we would love to share it more widely!)
If we are serious about building a society where everyone can benefit from the arts, science, and heritage, and which values these enough to care for them too, then we need to understand how to enable connections with them. Learning beyond the classroom builds connections. Being told about a vortex in a lab or classroom is very different to visiting a science centre and being able to put your hands into a vortex and change the way it behaves. Being told that servants in a historic house used to live in tough conditions is very different to climbing out through a low roof hatch to discover the weirdly low and wide roof gutters installed specifically for the servants to be able to wash in the rainwater coming off the roof (and by definition only when it is raining and probably cold outside.) Being told about habitat adaptation in animals is very different to experiencing the silent flight of an owl overhead compared to the familiar noisy pass of geese or pigeons. Being in the audience of a theatre production can create insights that transform our understanding of narrative, design, and performance. Learning a language in a classroom is very different to being immersed in the country where it is spoken. So, enabling opportunities to connect with science, nature, heritage, and arts as part of our education and development is important, and these opportunities often happen best in settings beyond the classroom or lab.
Museum, heritage and cultural settings offer a very unique kind of learning experience for everyone; in particular, for young people. They provide hands on, immersive opportunities to engage with history, enabling students to connect with the present through an understanding of the past. Museum learning has many benefits beyond the curriculum, contributing to health & wellbeing, social impact, self-identity and discovery.
More opportunities for more students
I am happy to report increasing take up of our school support (including our LOtC Mark Direct and Mentoring) and our support for providers too (including our LOtC Quality Badge scheme.) These will be translating into more opportunities for more schools and students to contact and connect with the heritage, nature, arts and science on their doorsteps and in places farther away too. So, let’s keep this momentum going. Learning beyond the classroom in all its wonderful guises, near or far, inside or out, supports positive outcomes. Our top tip is to simply choose where you think learning will happen best on a case by case basis, and have the confidence to begin to venture beyond the classroom confident that the evidence is now strong and consistent that this will deliver a wide range of positive outcomes.
Igniting sparks...
The team here unearthed an old article for me from the Telegraph (2021) ‘Our school trip memories: the away-days that changed our lives and inspired life-long passions’. For me this echoed the importance of educational visit experiences in creating vivid memories and, for some, igniting sparks that influenced the rest of their lives. Here are some snippets:
Lucy Worsley, broadcaster, author and Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces visited a Tudor Farmhouse when she was 11, and was intrigued after seeing the open-drop toilet (‘a little seat over nothing’)…
‘I was so taken with it that it set me off on a career into the history of all sorts of things, including toilets…the important thing these trips show is that the past wasn’t simply better or worse, but that things can change. And that gives you a sense of hope for the future’
For Bettany Hughes, historian, author and broadcaster, as a child, says:
‘The notion of a school trip approaching used to be the most exciting thing in my life. Fishbourne Roman Palace, in West Sussex, was the one that really landed for me; seeing the mosaics on the floor. I remember feeling that I was in two places at once in my head, that I was in the Roman world and the present. That is obviously what drives my entire life now.’
I also remembered this quote from ‘Making the Most of Museums: the case for learning through objects’ (2019), from a Senior Research Associate: Museum Learning and Participation at The Fitzwilliam Museum
‘A school trip may well be a child’s only opportunity to see what happens inside a museum. Audience research indicates that it is often the most privileged within our society who are the most likely to visit museums. Schools have a vital role to play in ensuring that these cultural riches are made available for all.
If children are supported to develop a positive relationship with museums during their school years, they will discover the potential of collections to support learning, enhance wellbeing, and develop curiosity, creativity and imagination. These experiences could plant the seeds of a lifelong interest in museums and what they have to offer. The most effective museum programmes and projects are those that have been devised in partnership with local schools and teachers and are responsive to local needs and challenges.’
The benefits of learning beyond the classroom are many and go way beyond enrichment or reward. They include increased engagement with learning, achievement and attainment, and positive health and wellbeing outcomes. The greatest benefits may be the positive impact on building connections with ourselves, with others (past, present and future), with our communities, and ultimately with our society.
Join us...
Why not join us at our CLOtC National Conference 2024 on 14th November at Weldon Village Academy in Corby, Northamptonshire for a lively programme of inspiring speakers and engaging workshops delivered by LOtC professionals from across all sectors. Discounted rate tickets are on sale until 31st July.
www.lotc.org.uk/clotc-national-conference-2024
Reference:
Telegraph Article: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/life/flirting-nerding-communal-showers-love-school-trip-memories/
This blog post was written by:
Dr Anne Hunt, Chief Executive Officer at the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom.
Anne took over as CEO of CLOtC in 2020, bringing many years of experience in a wide variety of organisations who enable opportunities for people of all ages to benefit from learning beyond the classroom. Her approach continues to be characterised by building the evidence base needed to improve policy, practice and research; and by creating collaborations that support a more integrated approach to service delivery across sectors, including heritage, science, natural environment, education and health.
