Outdoor education as an opportunity for building peer relations

Abstract

The student’s activity in certain places and during well-thought developmental and didactic tasks is a factor that influences the process of learning, upbringing and the way they initiate interactions with peers and teachers. According to Jolanta Zwiernik (2009), personal knowledge, key competences, experiences, strategies of behaviour of students are learned in different situations and various circumstances will be constructed in the minds in different ways and used in new situations. Hence, in contemporary school we should pay attention to the educational spaces for children, developmental tasks and problems to be solved by them and the achievements in this area that will allow to deal with challenges. This article attempts to present the unused potential of the outdoor education, pedagogy of place and the role of developmental and didactic tasks in the process of creation of the relations among students. The material comprises two parts: the description of the educational project “Out side the Threshold” that took the shape of the teaching experiment and the presentation of the results of the research. The essence of this educational project was to develop students’ key competences through developmental and didactic tasks in four-person peer groups. The “Outside the Threshold” project comprised of two six-hour sets of educational tasks entitled “The Nowadays, Past and future of the Tree” and “Smell Hunters”. The tasks had the form of problems and were realised in different natural contexts: social and cultural. The participants of the project were 8 groups of children (7 groups from rural areas, 1 from urban area) from classes I–III , each group consisted of 12 students. The set of tasks was realised within the project entitled “Outside the Threshold – Expeditions of Discoverers” in the Institute of Pedagogy of the Maria Curie Skłodowska University in Lublin and took place from November 2018 to June 2019. The research was aimed to find answers to the following questions: What peer relations take place during outdoor education? In what way the developmental and didactic tasks and educational situations promote the authentic students’ cooperation. The research implemented the method of teaching experiment, observation and interview with students from classes I–III.