A critical view into pupils’ experience of education outside the classroom and well-being

Education outside of classroom (EOtC) is characterized as compulsory school activities taking place outside the school buildings as a supplement to classroom teaching to provide engaging and varied teaching. Previous research indicates that EOtC can have a positive impact on pupils’ social and academic skills and well-being. However, there is a lack of research on pupils’ own assessment of their subjective well-being, as an indication of how pupils perceive EOtC. Therefore, we aim to investigate how academically strong and academically challenged pupils respectively experience EOtC, and how this influences their well-being in school. During the school year 2014/15, a Danish 5th grade school class participated in EOtC twice a week. Five academically strong and five academically challenged pupils were sampled on the basis of their test results in reading (mother tongue) and math. Qualitative interviews with the pupils were conducted autumn 2015. The intended impact is not to generalize but to inform about pupils’ experience with EOtC. By using an extreme case – a class with a thorough use of EOtC - we gain sound data on so-called ‘good’ EOtC. This study is still in process, but based on the few studies investigating well-being in outdoor learning environment, we expect that EOtC is positively experienced among all pupils corresponding with greater well-being. However, we could also expect that among academically challenged pupils, a more unstructured activity based learning environment may lead to reduced well-being, which could also count for academically strong pupils seeing EOtC as a distraction or waste of time.