Abstract
Although informal outdoor educators play an important role in facilitating pupils’ cognitive and affective development on school trips, the details of their pedagogical practice are not yet clearly understood. This study explores botanic garden educators’ pedagogical approaches when teaching ecological science to visiting schoolchildren (7-13 years old). More specifically, drawing on the sociocultural perspective of learning, which highlights the importance of discourse in learning processes, it examines the interactions between four botanic garden educators and their visiting schoolchildren, focusing on how the pupils’ contributions to the lesson talk are followed up by the botanic garden educators. Moreover, it contains an investigation regarding what kinds of teaching behaviours by botanic garden educators best support pupils’ learning. The analyses of discourse data collected from eight school visits guided by the botanic garden educators show that the educator-pupil interaction is largely triadic (educator initiation, student response, and educator feedback) in nature. It also emerged that most of the botanic garden educators’ questions were closed-ended, which fails to foster the children’s productive thinking. Further, from the analysis of the botanic garden educators’ pedagogical behaviours it became apparent that certain approaches, such as: “explaining by comparing”, “storytelling” and “metaphorical modelling” are effective strategies for communicating ecological science to young pupils. There was much evidence that learning-oriented school visits to botanic gardens could be substantially improved through effective ongoing school-garden collaborations and better education programmes. Finally, the delivery of pedagogical and class management professional development, according to a framework put forward in the thesis, could greatly assist botanic garden educators in providing successful guided visits for school groups.
Reference
Zhai, J. (2011) Engaging children in learning ecological science: The pedagogical practices of botanic garden educators.Unpublished PhD thesis. King’s College London, UK.
Correspondence
Dr. Junqing Zhai
Department of Education & Professional Studies
King’s College London
SE1 9NH, London, United Kingdom
E-mail: junqing.zhai@gmail.com
