‘All the things children can see’: understanding children’s noticing in bush kinders
- Original Paper
- Published: 27 May 2021
- Volume 24 , pages 151–167, ( 2021 )
Cite this article
- Chris Speldewinde ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9114-0911 1 ,
- Anna Kilderry 1 &
- Coral Campbell 1
1567 Accesses
7 Citations
16 Altmetric
Explore all metrics
This paper presents data from interviews undertaken with teachers and parents of children who attend Australian bush kinders (kindergartens). The bush kinder approach is a recent adaptation of the European and UK forest school approaches, one that continues to gain momentum as increasingly teachers and parents come to understand the benefits associated with this type of outdoor learning environment. The research was undertaken using ethnography (Delamont, 1992 ; Madden, 2012 ), a useful method of research in this type of setting as ethnography enables a deep understanding of how children ‘notice’ in nature over time. The paper applies a discourse analysis (Gee, 2011 ) of teacher and parent interviews critically exploring the learning and development benefits children experience from attending a bush kinder program. Findings reveal that through their noticing, preschool children make a transition from being nature novices to nature experts. The data demonstrate the benefits preschool children can gain from learning and being ‘in’ and ‘with’ nature and the important role adults play recognising young children’s noticing in nature.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this article
Subscribe and save.
- Get 10 units per month
- Download Article/Chapter or eBook
- 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
- Cancel anytime
Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)
Instant access to the full article PDF.
Rent this article via DeepDyve
Institutional subscriptions
Similar content being viewed by others
Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark
Reflections on using pinhole photography as a pedagogical and methodological tool with adolescents in wild nature
Observations in a Set Situation: Children’s Experiences in Worktown/Bolton
Campbell, C. (2020) Learning about STEM. In Kilderry, A. & Raban, B, (Eds), Strong Foundations: Evidence Informing Practice in Early Childhood , ACER (Australian Council for Educational Research). https://research.acer.edu.au/strong-foundations/13/ .
Campbell, C., & Speldewinde, C. (2018). Bush kinder in Australia: A new learning ‘place’ and its effect on local policy. Policy Futures in Education, 17 (4), 541–559.
Campbell, C., & Speldewinde, C. (2020). Affordances for Science learning in “Bush kinders. International Journal of Innovation in Science and Mathematics Education, 28 (3), 1–13.
Chan, K. K. H., Xu, L., Cooper, R., Berry, A., & van Driel, J. H. (2020). Teacher noticing in science education: Do you see what I see? Studies in Science Education , 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057267.2020.1755803 .
Chawla, L., & Cushing, D. F. (2007). Education for strategic environmental behavior. Environmental Education Research, 13 (4), 437–452.
Article Google Scholar
Christiansen, A., Hannan, S., Anderson, K., Coxon, L., & Fargher, D. (2018). Place-based nature kindergarten in Victoria, Australia: No tools, no toys, no art supplies. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education, 21 (1), 61–75.
Cumming, F., & Nash, M. (2015). An Australian perspective of a forest school: Shaping a sense of place to support learning. Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning, 15 (4), 296–309.
Delamont, S. (1992). Fieldwork in educational settings . The Falmer Press.
Dowdell, K., Gray, T., & Malone, K. (2011). Nature and its influence on Children’s outdoor play. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education, 15 , 24–35.
Eberbach, C., & Crowley, K. (2017). From seeing to observing: How parents and children learn to see science in a botanical garden. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 26 (4), 608–642.
Ellis, R. (1997). SLA and language pedagogy: An educational perspective. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19 (1), 69–92.
Elliott, S., & Chancellor, B. (2014). From forest preschool to Bush kinder: An inspirational approach to preschool provision in Australia, Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 39 (4), 45–53.
Fleer, M., & Pramling, N. (2014). A cultural-historical study of children learning science: foregrounding affective imagination in play-based settings, volume 11 of cultural studies of science education . Springer Netherlands.
Gee, J. P. (2011). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (Third ed.). Routledge.
Harvey, C., Hallam, J., Richardson, M., & Wells, R. (2020). The good things children notice in nature: An extended framework for reconnecting children with nature. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 49 (126573), 1–8.
Google Scholar
Jacobs, V. R., Lamb, L. L. C., & Philipp, R. A. (2010). Professional noticing of children's mathematical thinking. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 41 (2), 169–202.
Kaplan, R., Kaplan, S., & Ryan, R. (1989). With people in mind: Design and management of everyday nature . Island Press.
Kelly, J., & White, E. J. (2012). Pedagogy beyond the gate: The Ngahere project. Early Childhood Folio, 16 , 5–7.
Knight, S. (2016). Forest School in practice . Sage.
Kopelke, D. (2018). Outside down under: A brief history of outdoor education in Australia. In M.T. Huang & Y. C. Ho (Eds.), The budding and blooming of outdoor education in diverse global contexts. Outdoor education research office book series 3 (pp. 115–142). National Academy for Educational Research.
Laman, T. T., Miller, E. T., & Lopez-Robertson, J. (2012). Noticing and naming as social practice: Examining the relevance of a contextualized field-based early childhood literacy methods course. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 33 , 3–18.
Last, M. (2019). Medical ethnography over time penetrating "the fog of health" in a Nigerian community, 1970-2017. Anthropology in Action, 26 (1), 52–60.
Leather, M. (2018). A critique of “Forest School” or something lost in translation. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education, 21 (1), 5–18.
Lloyd, A., Gray, T. & Truong, S. (2018). Seeing what they see. Exploring the potential of GoPro cameras in outdoor education with children. Special Issue, International Perspectives in Outdoor Education Research Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education and Leadership (JOREL), 10 (1), 52–66. https://doi.org/10.18666/JOREL-2018-V10-I1-8192 .
Longhurst, R. (2003). Semi-structured interviews and focus groups. In N. Clifford, M. Cope, T. Gillespie, & S. French (Eds.), Key methods in geography (third ed., pp. 143–156). SAGE.
Louv, R. (2008). Last child in the woods: saving our children from Nature-deficit disorder . Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Madden, R. (2012). Being ethnographic: A guide to the theory and the practice of ethnography. SAGE.
Mannion, G., Fenwick, A., & Lynch, J. (2012). Place-responsive pedagogy: Learning from teachers’ experiences of excursions in nature. Environmental Education Research, 19 (6), 792–809.
Mawson, W. B. (2014). Experiencing the ‘wild woods’: The impact of pedagogy on children’s experience of the natural environment. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 22 (4), 513–524.
Moser, T., & Martinsen, M. T. (2010). The outdoor environment in Norwegian kindergartens as pedagogical space for toddlers' play, learning and development. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 18 (4), 457–471.
National Science Foundation. (2019). USA inspiring STEM learning. NSF https://www.nsf.gov/about/congress/reports/ehr_research.pdf . Accessed 1 November 2019.
Nutti Y. J., (2018). Along paths of movement: sámi children and early childhood student teachers as wayfarers. In T. Waller, E. Arlemalm-Hagser, E. B. H. Sandseter, L. Lee-Hammond, K. Lekies & S. Wyver (Eds.) . (pp. 333–347). The SAGE Handbook of Outdoor Play and SAGE Learning . SAGE.
Papandreou, M., & Tsiouli, M. (2020). Noticing and understanding children’s everyday mathematics during play in early childhood classrooms. International Journal of Early Years Education . https://doi.org/10.1080/09669760.2020.1742673 .
Prietto, J. (2018). “Naturalizar Educativamente”: The Chilean quest for introducing outdoor learning and play in early childhood education in T. Waller, E. Arlemalm-Hagser, E. B. H. Sandseter, L. lee-Hammond, K. Lekies & S. Wyver (Eds.). (pp. 511–529) The SAGE Handbook of Outdoor Play and SAGE Learning . SAGE.
Soga, M., Yamanoi, T., Tsuchiya, K., Koyanagi, T. F., & Kanaib, T. (2018). What are the drivers of and barriers to children’s direct experiences of nature? Landscape and Urban Planning, 180 , 114–120.
Speldewinde, C., Kilderry A., & Campbell, C. (in press). Ethnography and bush kinder research: a review of the literature. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood.
Speldewinde, C., Kilderry A., & Campbell, C. (2020). Beyond the preschool gate: Teacher pedagogy in the Australian ‘bush kinder’. International Journal of Early Years Education . https://doi.org/10.1080/09669760.2020.1850432 .
Tiplady, L. S. E., & Menter, H. (2020). Forest School for wellbeing: An environment in which young people can ‘take what they need’. Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning . https://doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2020.1730206 .
Wager, A. (2014). Noticing Children's participation: Insights into teacher Positionality toward equitable mathematics pedagogy. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 45 (3), 312–350.
Waite, S., & Goodenough, A. (2018). What is different about Forest School? Creating a space for alternative pedagogy in England. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education, 21 (1), 25–44.
Warden, C. (2012). Nature kindergartens and forest schools . Mindstretchers.
Warden, C. (2015). Learning with nature: Embedding outdoor practice . SAGE Publications Ltd.
Waters, J. (2018). Affordance theory in outdoor play in T. Waller, E. Arlemalm-Hagser, E. B. H. Sandseter, L. lee-Hammond, K. Lekies & S. Wyver (Eds.) . (pp. 40–54) The SAGE Handbook of Outdoor Play and SAGE Learning . SAGE.
Westgarth Kindergarten (2019). Bush Kinder . Retrieved from http://www.wgkg.vic.edu.au/bush-kinder . 10 May 2020.
Wilson, R. A. (2012). Nature and young children: Encouraging creative play and learning in natural environments (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Download references
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the study’s participants, the teachers, educators and preschool children for participating in the research.
Author information
Authors and affiliations.
School of Education, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Geelong Waurn Ponds Campus, Locked Bag 20000, Geelong, Victoria, 3220, Australia
Chris Speldewinde, Anna Kilderry & Coral Campbell
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar
Corresponding author
Correspondence to Chris Speldewinde .
Ethics declarations
Ethics approval.
Ethics approval has been granted for the study, HAE-15-016 Bush kinders – locating the science through Deakin University Faculty of Arts and Education Human Ethics Advisory Group (HEAG) on May 5, 2015.
Conflict of interest
On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s note.
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Speldewinde, C., Kilderry, A. & Campbell, C. ‘All the things children can see’: understanding children’s noticing in bush kinders. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education 24 , 151–167 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42322-021-00080-z
Download citation
Accepted : 10 March 2021
Published : 27 May 2021
Issue Date : July 2021
DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s42322-021-00080-z
Share this article
Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:
Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.
Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative
- Bush kinders
- Early childhood education
- Nature play
- Forest schools
- Find a journal
- Publish with us
- Track your research
COMMENTS
Bush kindergarten programmes (known as bush kinders), where preschool children learn in, about and with nature, are proliferating in Australian early childhood education. This scoping review reports on, and analyses, the research literature pertaining to how ethnography has been applied to the bush kinder context.
This scoping review reports on, and analyses, the research literature pertaining to how ethnography has been applied to the bush kinder context. We included studies conducted in related contexts ...
Bush kindergarten programmes (known as bush kinders), where preschool children learn in, about and with nature, are proliferating in Australian early childhood education. This scoping review report...
Ethnography. The bush kinder can present a challenge for researchers in capturing numerous, simultaneous events yet ethnography has been demonstrated to be an appropriate research methodology for outdoor settings where children learn through their nature play ... Ethnography and bush kinder research: A review of the literature.
To argue for what constitutes a 'normal' bush kinder, the volume of Australian research reflects the infancy of the bush kinder concept. Our review of the literature indicates that only one bush kinder operation, Westgarth bush kinder, has been reported upon to date (Elliott, 2013; Elliott and Chancellor, 2014; Westgarth, 2015a, 2015b), so ...
The low number of sites was due to the relative newness of the bush kinder approach at the time of initially undertaking of the research in 2015. For example, the bush kinders we visited were in their second year of operation. A pilot bush kinder, based at Chatlock began in 2014 for one term which was extended to five bush kinders in 2015.
She is currently involved in several large nationally funded projects related to these areas and is on the review panels for several international journals. ... Ethnography and Bush Kinder Research: A Review of the Literature ... Ethnography and Bush Kinder Research: A Review of the Literature. Show details Hide details.
The research was undertaken using ethnography (Delamont,1992;Madden, ... rounding the child. To contextualise this research, in the next section we review the literature on children'snoticinginnaturespaces. Nature spaces facilitating children'snoticing ... That bush kinder [session] to the next one, the [change in] awareness of the ...
This paper presents data from interviews undertaken with teachers and parents of children who attend Australian bush kinders (kindergartens). The bush kinder approach is a recent adaptation of the European and UK forest school approaches, one that continues to gain momentum as increasingly teachers and parents come to understand the benefits associated with this type of outdoor learning ...
We discuss an ethnographic study where teaching and learning in three bush kinder settings was observed, each with different pedagogical approaches. ... Using ethnographic methods we draw on fieldwork data and research literature to analyse bush kinder pedagogies. The paper contributes to the conceptualisation of pedagogy in early childhood ...