New boundaries, undecided roles: towards an understanding of forest schools as constructed spaces

Abstract

Forest Schools emerged in the UK in the early 1990s after a group of practitioners developed the Forest School programme following a visit to Denmark. In our recent systematic review of forest school literature in England (Garden and Downes 2021), we proposed that a focus on space in future research to generate new complexities around the broader concepts that allow us to explore hybrid spaces constituted by both classrooms and Forest Schools. This means an examination of the various interactions between children, adults and artefacts that come together to generate existing and new spaces. There is the opportunity to re-conceptualise ideas around the Forest School space through the framing of Massey’s (2005) proposition that space is a product of relations-between and that space is always in the process of being made. Thus, children create and ‘own’ the Forest School space through their inhabitation of it. This paper provides a key contribution to existing knowledge around Forest Schools within outdoor education by examining ways in which new educational spaces can be formed, contested and colonised beyond the classroom.