Opening Up the Outdoors: A Case Study of Young Children's Outdoor Experiences in One Childcare Centre

Abstract

"Let's go outside" is where I began: I became intrigued by how often I saw evidence of children's enthusiasm for the outdoors when I visited centres as a supervisor of early childhood teacher trainees on practicum. Having discovered how little research there was into young children's outdoor play, I wanted to investigate this topic, particularly because I suspected that what we do in New Zealand is very different from the outdoor play described in overseas research reports, where the typical scenario is a brief outdoor recess.

The belief that outdoor play contributes to young children's development dates back to Rousseau (1712-1778) and Froebel (1782-1852) and the tradition continued in early kindergartens in the United States (Frost and Wortham, 1988), English nursery schools (Straw, 1990), and also within the New Zealand kindergarten movement (May, 1997). Over time, however, the commitment to outdoor play has been challenged by other pressures - increasing urbanisation with a concomitant reduction in access to the outdoors; increasingly academic programme orientation (Frost, 1992); supervision and safety concerns (Bilton, 1993; Frost and Wortham, 1988); and even staff reluctance (Bilton, 1993; Stine, 1997).