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School trips to Outdoor Residential Centres can represent a significant and formative childhood tourism experience that can potentially influence adult tourism and leisure choices. Commonly located in ‘green spaces’ which range from peri-urban through to wild and natural landscapes, these centres offer adventurous outdoor activities. Alongside developmental and educational learning, children are immersed in nature experiences that can enable emotional connections with local environments. This chapter is based on a UK context, in which current policymaking is concerned with increasing inclusivity of access to British landscapes, in which many of these centres are located. It is argued here that Outdoor Residential Centres enable childhood experiences that can influence future consumer choices, alongside shaping support for the future protection of natural landscapes.

As a markedly under-explored area of the literature in the United Kingdom, this conceptual review of the literature sets out the imperative for understanding the vital role of Outdoor Residential Centres in shaping tourism futures. Through bringing together environmental education and psychology with tourism management literature, the chapter identifies the imperative for further research to enable nature connections through Outdoor Residential Centre experiences. This responds to the UK policy agenda to increase nature connections and support conservation. The application of a ‘sustainable children typology’ to a Welsh case study demonstrates how Residential Outdoor Centres enable children's empowerment through outdoor learning experiences that shape them as ‘sustainability thinkers’ and to potentially influence pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours as ‘sustainability transformers’ – and ultimately, eco-literate tourists.

This qualitative case study provides a detailed description of the ways a Kindergarten/Grade 1 teacher in a Gulf Islands school, located on Canada’s west coast, integrated place-based education in her practice with young learners. The teacher’s integration of place-based knowledge over a school year, and her incorporation of traditional knowledge linked to local Coast Salish ways of knowing, was in response to the British Columbia Ministry of Education’s mandate to include local Indigenous ways of knowing in all classrooms. This study also reveals the ways an Indigenous educator affiliated with the school district and local community members provided the teacher and students with deeper understandings of Salt Spring Island from a historical, place-based, and Indigenous knowledge perspective. Specifically, the Indigenous educator and community members shared their knowledge on the vegetation on the island and shared information about the animals that lived on or near the island. Throughout the study, the teacher drew on a “critical pedagogy of place,” which focuses on the ecological aspects of place and the tenets of critical pedagogy. This study documented the ways the teacher included local Indigenous knowledge in her practice in culturally relevant and appropriate ways – primarily through outdoor learning experiences. The children also shared their perspectives on these learning experiences. In this study, the place-based learning opportunities provided to the children enabled them to acquire rich insight on the history and ecology of their community and island.

Science Education Outdoors provides students with direct contact with natural phenomena and enables active learning, a key factor in Inquiry Based Science Education (IBSE), a student-centred methodology for the acquisition, construction and understanding of knowledge.

This chapter will describe three case studies which used the IBSE methodology as both a teaching and learning methodology, promoting a deeper understanding of how IBSE can contribute to the success of learning and teaching in outdoor settings.

The three case studies were based on three training courses conducted at the Botanical Garden of the University of Coimbra (BGUC, Portugal). The first case study was the annual regular course for garden educators, and the other two were the two editions of the COInquire professional and accreditation training course for teachers and educators. Involving a total of 70 participants, data was collected through the application of questionnaires.

The study revealed that all participants considered IBSE a successful teaching–learning process and they remarked the opportunities created for the active construction of new knowledge. Strengthened by numerous live educational resources, the use of IBSE in the garden facilitated the questioning and interpretation of nature, supporting the open-minded and well-founded training of teachers, educators and students.

Additionally, the participants considered IBSE to be an effective methodology to boost their professional improvement, contributing to the development of innovative approaches to the curricular programmes on biodiversity and sustainability.

Over the last few decades, the formal school curriculum in many countries has become increasingly prescribed and attainment orientated with an insistent pressure to measure progress in the name of ‘raising standards’. This form of constraint on educational practice has provoked counter trends in a desire to enrich the curriculum. Situating learning activities in the open air have become increasingly popular as a counter to formalised schooling. The UK, for example, has seen legislated outside spaces for early years and a growing interest in Forest Schools. The long tradition of activity centres, outside school visits and field trips—offering a valuable way to augment formal learning—has survived in many school settings. The claims for the benefit of taking learning outside are extensive. They range across claiming value for both individual and societal well-being, improving mental and physical health, as well as a way of sustaining inclusion, social cohesion and democratic practice (Nichol, Higgins, Ross, & Mannion, 2007). This article explores how aesthetics and the body may be seen to feature in outside educational experience. By drawing on the work of Richard Shusterman and his extensive work on somaesthetics, the purpose of the article is to augment or ground claims for the worth of ‘outside’ learning in embodied aesthetic experience and therefore help illuminate what is distinctively educational about moving learning beyond the walls of the school.

This chapter describes two courses in which university students were involved with community partners, in one case a local school system and in the other, a local nonformal educational institution. The authors begin with a discussion of the benefits of civic engagement through service learning in an academic setting and describe the integration of socio-scientific issues of local importance and a service-learning aspect into the courses. The authors follow with a discussion of the impacts the project has had on each of the partners involved in the collaboration. The authors conclude with lessons learned as a result of the project and future plans for the partnership.

There is a growing need to train and support educators to introduce or enhance aspects of sustainability into post-secondary curriculum. The authors provide an overview of integration of curricular sustainability development and education as well as related institutional leadership at the post-secondary level. Turning to educational development for sustainability education, the authors share tools and resources to support educators from any discipline, to introduce, integrate, and/or enhance sustainability in their course, program, or initiative. The authors found very few examples of workshops to post-secondary teachers. For one such example, the Sustainability Education Intensive, a three-day workshop that the authors designed and led at the University of British Columbia. The authors summarize the workshop aspects that two years of participants found helpful, and how workshop involvement affected them as sustainability educators. The authors encourage post-secondary institutions to provide support in the form of workshops, resources, and funding to help educators introduce or enhance aspects of sustainability into their courses and programs. Students are asking for this, and, as they are future leaders, it is important that educators address the numerous environmental, social and economic issues that demand attention.

A dialogic approach to Ontario, Canada policy development was utilized to collaboratively re-conceptualize provincial Special Education qualification courses for teachers. The stories, perspectives and lived experiences of teachers, principals, supervisory officers, parents, school board special services personnel, students, and the public were included as essential voices and information sources within policy development conversations. These narratives of experience revealed the forms of knowledge, skills, commitments, and ethical stance necessary for teachers to support students with diverse and unique learning needs today and in the future. The transformative nature of narrative dialogue to enlighten, deepen understanding, and alter perspectives was illuminated. The policy development processes used in this publicly shared educational initiative served as a model of democratic dialogue. The inclusive and dialogic methods employed to collectively re-conceptualize special education courses illustrate an innovative framework for developing policies governing the public good. This model of democratic dialogue holds considerable promise for the future of teacher education policy and practice.