The perception, management and performance of risk amongst Forest School educators
Forest School educators altered their risk management practices in response to competing conceptions of childhood and risk
This paper addresses the concern of children being “at risk from the absence of risk itself” and discusses a study addressing this concern. The study was conducted with 37 forest school (FS) practitioners in a FS training site in south Wales. Proponents of the Scandinavia-Forest School pedagogy advocate an approach that encourages children to actively take risks in nature. This approach, they believe, can mitigate some of the perceived harmful impacts of an over-protective, risk-aversive adult world.
The aim of this study was to investigate how risk perception among FS teachers shape and are shaped by their understandings of childhood, pedagogy, and their own professional identity. Data for this study was collected through focus group discussions. Participants in each focus group represented a balance of FS practitioners with different jobs and differing levels of experience. The researchers (and authors of this paper) were FS leaders and trainers and were involved in the subsequent training of some of the focus group participants. Topics addressed during the focus group discussions included how risk is perceived, managed and performed by the FS teachers. The focus groups (with five or seven participants in each group) were conducted over a six-month period. This arrangement allowed the researchers to use some of the initial data to inform questions and analysis for the later groups.
All of the participants indicated that their decision to work in a FS setting was motivated by their belief that children were being denied important outdoor learning experiences. They also believed that both the hyper-vigilance of parents and a narrowing of the focus of education play a role in restricting children’s time outdoors. While the teachers recognized the influence of technology in promoting an indoor, sedentary lifestyle, they did not condemn technology per se. The participants viewed risk as something positive and as something that needed to be reintroduced into children’s lives. Yet, they struggled with questions about how to manage risk with children in their care. The full realization of a FS pedagogy requires risk-taking on the part of the children, but parental concerns and risk-averse institutional procedures and protocols led to insecurities on the part of the teachers. This was especially true for less experienced teachers, who felt they could not rely on their professional discretion to make situationally specific judgments in exposing children to risk. They were thus more likely to draw security from standardized procedures and protocols consistent with a more institutional approach to risk management. As a result, risk management tended to take the form of “social accounting” to the school, the head teacher, and especially to parents.
The overall findings of this study indicated that teachers altered their risk management practice by adopting a more risk-averse approach than what was originally conceived within the Scandinavian FS origins and what is consistent with its foundational philosophy. These findings also indicate that the perception and management of risk with young children does not exist in a social and cultural vacuum; that it is, in fact, informed by competing contemporary views of childhood and risk.
Citation
Connolly, M., Haughton, C., (2017). The perception, management and performance of risk amongst Forest School educators. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(2),
