Room(s) to be Outside

TBD

The Natural Start Alliance, an organization that promotes high-quality and accessible nature-based education, defines outdoor, nature-based preschools as programs that a) center environmental literacy, b) use nature as their organizing framework, c) spend most or all instructional time outdoors, d) adopt child-led, play-based teaching, and e) embrace healthy risk-taking.

Since the Cedarsong Nature School opened the first American forest kindergarten in 2007—inspired by the German Waldkindergarten model—outdoor, nature-based schools in the US have been on the rise. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been another significant uptick paralleled by a national shift towards understanding the importance of free, risky, outdoor play in early childhood development.

However, as outdoor preschools expand in the US, they continue to grapple with the outdated, indoor-reliant licensure requirements that prevent them from receiving adequate support. Without access to government funding, preschools are left extremely tuition reliant and accessible to only a select few who have, in most cases, two parents, with two streams of income, who can afford to pay up to $50,000 in tuition per year.

The rigidity of the classroom, which has generally stayed the same since the industrial revolution, is due for change, but it is fighting against inertia. If many of us can intuit the value of the outdoors—with abundant research substantiating this intuition—what are the mental and bureaucratic hurdles that are standing in the way of offering this access to our youngest, and therefore most impressionable, learners?

My thesis currently sits between the indoor and the outdoor. What does a licensable interior room for an outdoor preschool look like? How do you design a building that is inhabited for only a fraction of the year, if at all? And, ultimately, how do we make room (or rooms) to be outside?