Nature Pedagogy is a way of teaching that works with children in ways that embrace nature. This would include the elements you bring inside your classroom, as well as your outdoor environment and even the culture of respecting and working with and in nature that the community take further.
Claire Warden the founder of the Floor Book approach, creator of Auchlone Nature Kindergarten in Scotland, and Nature Pedagogist puts it like this:
“Nature Pedagogy is a way of working with children and creating settings for care and education that embraces nature. It includes the educational environments we create, the process of assessment and planning, and the learning journeys that we encourage children and families to take throughout childhood. Five years after I started using the term, I have refined the definition for Nature Pedagogy through the process of doctoral research. I now define Nature Pedagogy as “the art of being with nature, inside, outside, and beyond.”
Obviously, this pedagogy is focused on getting kids outside and learning outside, because the benefits of being outdoors not only for children’s learning, but also for their healthy social and emotional benefit, is becoming indisputable. Some schools, much like Auchlone Nature Kindergarten, and bush and forest schools, take all or most of their learning outside.
And no, you don’t have to be a hippie to be a nature pedagogist!
What a nature pedagogist does is take the learning that would normally be occurring inside in the classroom, outside. Instead of learning about bugs in the classroom simply using pictures and books, the idea would be to go outdoors and find bugs in their natural environment, observe them there, and participate in the outdoors.