Is Policy the Whole Story? International Trends and Perspective in Policy Making and Enactment in Outdoor Environmental Education

Children’s lifestyle in the developed world has shifted from out of doors to inside the home; accordingly, children are distanced both emotionally and physically from their natural environment. This is despite literature that indicates the importance of the connection to nature during childhood for students’ cognitive, physical, emotional and social development, and embracing pro-environmental perspectives. This gap can be narrowed through the implementation of outdoor education. In this study, 30 articles on outdoor education policy were reviewed from a much larger number of articles that were first searched and filtered. The review indicates that countries worldwide are familiar with the advantages of outdoor education and have implemented it in various policy documents. Nevertheless, despite its importance, there are discrepancies that impede the implementation of this policy; for example, teachers’ perceptions of outdoor learning, apprehension towards teaching outdoors, lack of experience and suitable training, the size of the outdoor space and its accessibility, preference in promoting international achievement-oriented tests and cultural characteristics that do not include a propensity towards the outdoors. An additional discrepancy is the source of the policy: whether its source is “bottom-up”, which begins as a teachers’ initiation and reaches the hands of policy makers, or a policy whose source is a “top-down” political decision for those who are required to implement it in an educational setting. In order to narrow the existing gaps and succeed in implementing outdoor education policy, this article indicates the importance of policy making that corresponds with the unique characteristics and culture of the countries addressed. Addressing these characteristics supports the implementation of outdoor education, by liaising between educators in the field and policy makers and, as aforementioned, instating policies that do not conflict with the general education policy concept. Implementing the approach and ideas of outdoor education requires appropriate teacher training for both those proficient in this type of teaching and those who are experiencing it for the first time.