Ally Sangster and Irene Bews

Ally Sangster and Irene Bews are  Outdoor Experiential Education Consultants from Scotland who run their own company Adventurascotland. Both were headteacher/teacher in Scottish schools for many years before setting up Adventurascotland, specialising in the ‘soft skills’ of outdoor education. They developed and delivered many EU funded inservice courses for European teachers in Italy, Spain and Scotland. 

Their main focus is delivering outdoor education experiences for children, teenagers and teachers both at home and worldwide, focussing on experiential learning.  

They are currently working with  Maasai Elders in Kenya on a girls education project, to promote and enable young women to further their education in a fast changing culture due to climate change.

Possibilities of using outdoor education to support speech development and language learning

Over the past quarter of a century there has been a seismic shift in the social behaviours of young people. This has come about due to a combination of factors of which the rise in the use of social media/IT, the effects of COVID and the cumulative rise in the incidence of mental health issues are the most evident.

Scott, Gray, et all (2022) suggest many of these can benefit from engagement with the outdoors. Crucially, this also applies to young people’s language and communication skills which underpin development education, social development and life opportunities generally.

However, a study by Nature England (2009) found less than one young person in ten regularly played in wild spaces which is in stark contrast to fifteen years earlier where this was one of the most common activities for this age group.

Language development in an outdoors setting offers individual's the opportunity to practice a wide range of linguistic skills in real-time life situations. However, this has been at odds with more traditional education systems that are class- bound, based on expository learning and largely exam driven. Furthermore, as it is more open- ended in terms of timescale, traditional evaluations and assessment formats are not always appropriate which throws up significant challenges for the teacher/leader.

 Outdoor education opportunities provide a foundation where play is the perfect vehicle for the encouragement of literacy skills development in general.