‘I know how to say it, but I still don’t know it in my hands’: examining practices and epistemology in Forest Education

Abstract

In recent years, Forest Education has gained increasing traction around the world. Yet its unique features, as well as their relations with other outdoor environmental education approaches, remain undertheorized. This study explores the pedagogical practices of one emerging strand of Forest Education, and the epistemology underpinning it, in order to better position it with respect to other environmental education approaches. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork that included participatory observations and interviews in a leading Israeli Forest Education organization. We identified four key pedagogical practices: outdoor play, primitive skills and crafts, sensing, and dwelling. These, we argue, reflect an epistemology in which knowledge and learning are situated in the immediate embodied context and sensory experiences, and are intended to facilitate a meaningful connection with nature. This epistemology prioritizes such modes of learning over abstraction, generalization and transfer, which are often central to science-oriented environmental education approaches.