Nature-Based Learning is an evolving term that captures the idea that experiences in ‘nature’ and the outdoors can and should be used to boost academic learning, encourage personal development, and foster environmental stewardship. There is no singular, set way of approaching teaching in the outdoors. Instead, a broad range of approaches and conceptualisations are encouraged to ensure relevancy and appropriateness across diverse disciplines and locations. From taking lectures outside, to field trips, to community-based projects and inquiry-based learning, there is huge range and opportunity under this umbrella term to transform and deepen the type of learning that happens at the University of Edinburgh.

Nature-Based Learning invokes the idea that purposeful teaching in the outdoors can boost academic learning, personal development, and environmental stewardship. As an educational approach, it emphasises the use of natural environments and outside spaces as meaningful and important settings for education. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that teaching in outside spaces can promote learning by improving learners’ attention, levels of stress, self-discipline, interest and enjoyment in learning, physical activity and fitness, and community and cohort-building.

One of the most important questions to keep asking is why nature-based learning in the higher education setting is important. There are many important answers to this question, some of which we have provided below. As this project evolves, we hope to demonstrate yet more reasons as to why nature-based learning should be considered an essential teaching practice at the University of Edinburgh and Higher Education Institutions.

We are living through a climate crisis that demands new ways of teaching, thinking, and existing in the world if we are to create a resilient and sustainable future for ourselves and future generations. For educators, there has never been a greater need for transformative learning that enhances environmental connection and sustainable outcomes. It is the University of Edinburgh’s mission to provide ‘the highest quality learning and teaching environment for the greater wellbeing of students’, as well as to make a ‘significant, sustainable and socially responsible contribution to Scotland, the UK and the world, promoting health, economic growth and cultural wellbeing.’ To achieve these goals and navigate the climate crisis, new ways of thinking and dynamic new teaching approaches are required. We suggest that nature-based and outdoor learning might be one such direction through which the University can achieve these climate and teaching ambitions.

Nature Based Learning provides educators with the opportunity to engage learners in the world around them, providing a stimulating and relevant context to explore how they can contribute to a more sustainable present and future. Not only does learning outside offer hands-on and tangible experiences that can bring to life examples of disciplinary knowledge from chemistry through to cultural studies, this type of learning also gives students the opportunity to begin developing and deepening their relationship with the-more-than-human world, developing emotive ways of knowing as well as practical and theoretical lenses.

Learning that takes place in the outdoors should not only be nature-based but also nature-attentive. In other words, outdoor settings should not be positioned as passive backdrops to learning, but attended to as a presence that actively impacts learners and learning outcomes, and vice versa. Such a process repositions ‘nature’ as having significance and relevance to the lives of learners, promoting environmental literacy and nuanced learning experiences.

A further concern for practitioners is to critically engage with ‘nature’ and definitions of what and where nature is, bearing in mind that the term can vary in meaning between different cultures and different places. Academics at the University of Edinburgh, and beyond, have called for an expanded definition of nature to avoid reinforcing problematic hierarchical nature-culture or nature-society binaries. Nature can be repositioned as present in all facets of our lives, inside and outside of the classroom, in urban and non-urban settings, and an integral part of society, culture and consciousness.