Students with direct experience of nature produced richer poetic writing than students with vicarious contact with nature

Governmental agencies in both the UK and Australia advocate for outdoor cross-curricular learning, yet both countries lack strong policy support for implementing outdoor learning. A focus on prescriptive curricula and “high stakes” testing may be inhibiting schools from tapping into the rich resources of natural environments to enhance student learning. This study was based on the understanding that literacy learning and meeting academic standards might be enhanced by locating learning in open, natural spaces.

The study involved 97 students (age 9-10) from two different countries: the UK and Australia. Two classes from each country participated, with one class having direct contact with nature as a stimulus for writing poetry; the other class with vicarious contact. Students with the direct contact experience spent 45 minutes in a densely wooded, natural environment, where they were given the freedom to explore on their own without direct adult involvement or the constraints of prescribed learning objectives. Students with the vicarious contact experience remained in the classroom and used photographs of the natural environment visited by their peers as the stimulus for their creative writing.

The students' poems were systematically analyzed in relation to the range, density and richness of the imagery used. Imagery-rich language was defined as “language that evoked for the reader strong sensory, affective and/or cognitive associations with the natural setting depicted in the poem.” The groups from both countries with direct experience of nature used richer imagery and a wider range of categories than the groups with vicarious experience. The greatest distinction between the poetry of the two groups seemed to be in the use of simile and metaphor, which appeared more often in the group with direct nature experience and was used more creatively by these groups. Twice as many students in the UK forest group used figurative language in their poetry compared with their peers who used photos as writing prompts. The difference was even greater for the Australian students, where four times as many students in the direct experience group used figurative language as students in the vicarious nature experience group.

These findings support other research showing that learning outdoors in a natural environment enhances creativity and language development.