Studies show that spending time outdoors promotes holistic health and facilitates healthy cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development among children. Spending time outdoors can also foster empathy for wildlife, inspire love for the natural world, and promote nature connectedness. Given these benefits, the outdoor education (OE) movement—which aims to foster environmental stewardship and enhance learning and development—has taken root in countries around the world. Forest School (FS) is a branch of OE that focuses primarily on early childhood education. The FS learning experience is heavily influenced by culture and context, so FSs vary from place to place. However, certain characteristics are common across all FSs. For example, the idea that spending time in a woodland setting promotes the development of critical thinking, creative thinking, and risk assessment skills is central to FS philosophy. Additionally, FS focuses on developing the whole child using student-centered and experiential learning approaches. This paper describes the historical roots of FS in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and North America and offered insights into the future of FS.
The FS movement began in the mid-1900s in Denmark, where there was deep appreciation for the outdoors and a growing interest in environmental protection and conservation. The movement rapidly spread throughout Scandinavia, where OE and environmental education (EE) were already successfully being integrated into formal education contexts. Scandinavian governments facilitated the proliferation of FSs by supporting favorable policies and allowing educators great freedom in designing FS-inspired curricula.
In the United Kingdom, FSs emerged in the mid-1990s. By the early 2000s, the FS movement had gained traction, and a growing number of educators and policymakers had started promoting FS pedagogy. As FSs spread throughout the region, policymakers developed a set of FS principles to ensure a certain standard of practice across the U.K.. These principles dictated that FSs use student-centered approaches, promote care for the environment, offer complete access to forests throughout all seasons, ensure high teacher to child ratios, and employ qualified teachers. Even with such standards, however, the FSs that emerged in the U.K. have faced challenges integrating into the education system. The U.K. education system does not offer its teachers the same degree of freedom and flexibility given to Scandinavian teachers. Without a certain level of curricular and pedagogical freedom, FSs have struggled to maintain the integrity of the FS approach while also respecting the U.K. culture and context.
The FS movement recently gained traction in North America, it lags behind its Scandinavian and U.K. counterparts. North American interest in OE has leaned toward outdoor adventure education, which has seen quite a bit of growth in recent years. However, within the past 15 years, FS (also called nature school or forest kindergarten) numbers have risen in North America. In 2015, The Council for Nature and Forest Preschools was formed to further energize the nature school movement in North America.
This paper only focused on FSs in Scandinavia, the U.K., and the U.S., but FSs also exist in Australia, South Korea, Japan, Germany, and New Zealand. An examination of the historical trajectory of FSs across all these countries clearly demonstrates that FS approaches are different in different contexts. While all FSs are rooted in the idea that OE is crucial for children's learning and development, the student-centered and experiential approaches at the heart of FS philosophy are easier to implement in contexts that have greater curricular and pedagogical freedom (like in Scandinavia). The more standardized and structured the education system—such as in the U.S. and U.K.—the more difficult it is to implement the FS approach in its originally intended form.
The authors celebrate the fact that the FS movement has global reach and that it continues to grow. They assert that its integration into education systems around the world is very promising in terms of FS longevity. They recommend that practitioners explore ways of bringing the FS approach to older youth. They also recommend that practitioners stay true to the core principles of FS philosophy, namely that students spend time in natural woodland settings, drive their own learning, be encouraged to take safe risks, and have freedom to explore the forest with their peers.
The Bottom Line
This paper explored the historical roots of Forest Schools (FSs) and offered insights into their potential future directions. FS is a branch of outdoor education that uses student-centered and experiential learning approaches to develop the whole child while in a woodland setting. The FS movement began in the mid-1900s in Scandinavia, where there was deep appreciation for the outdoors and growing interest in environmental protection. It expanded to the U.K. and then to North America, where FSs faced challenges integrating into relatively rigid education systems. The authors acknowledge the importance of respecting culture and context when developing FSs but recommend that practitioners stay true to the core principles of FS philosophy.