My master's thesis deals with the forest school, especially how the entire learning process takes place according to the principle of forest pedagogy and how it is experienced by all involved – teachers, parents and children. In my master's thesis, I focus mainly on experiencing the above mentioned groups, how they view school, where they see advantages and disadvantages. For teachers, I also focus on how to make sure that children reach national standards of knowledge. In this work, I am starting from various theoretical starting points that help me to carry out my research. First, I define what forest pedagogy is, where the concept comes from and how strongly it is established in the Slovenian field. Then I describe how widespread it is abroad and I dedicate one chapter to forest areas in Slovenia, in which I want to check wheter forest pedagogy could be practicable everywhere in Slovenia.
I also describe the forest as a learning environment with its advantages and disadvantages. Then I write about different ways of learning, experiental, collaborative, etc., and about the encouraging enviornment and protective factors. I want to emphasize how important it is for a child to feel good at school. Finally, I would like to adress the role of teachers. In the empirical work, I investigated how the forest school is experienceed by children, employees and parents of the children involved. I wanted to find out how working with children in the forest school affects the development of the individual and the group according to the opinion of parents and teachers, and how the learning process takes place so that children from the forest school reach the set national standard of knowledge. I was also interested in whether schooling in forest schools brings only benefits, or whether parents and teachers also perceive any shortcomings compared to the traditional form of schooling. I also wanted to know more about how the whole teaching and learning takes place within forest school. I conducted a qualitative research that includes semistructured interviews with four employees, three parents and five children.
The results show that forest school promote experiential learning, collaboration, mutual assistance and movement. In the natural environment, there are more interactions between children, more opportunities for free play and the development of closer relationships. Children help each other, encourage each other, resolve conflicts and cooperate. Children express more pleasent emotions, which is also helped by recognizing their own limits, knowing their body and abilities, and building self-confidence. Children are positively influenced by free play, experiential learning, collaborative learning, an open learning evironment, movement and nature. In my research, I found that children in the forest school were more calm, confident and satisified.
The results contirbute to the visibility of how the forest school works, how the teachers employed in it feel, how the parents who have children in it feel, and how the children who attend it feel. We can see what are the advantages and disadvantages and how forest school pedagogy could be introduced into public schools.
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