The Bush Kinder Assessment Tool: Supporting Educators to Understand Children’s Learning in Nature-Based Early Childhood Education Settings

Nature-based approaches to Early Childhood Education and Care have been popularised since the mid-twentieth century. Grounded in practices from Nordic countries and the United Kingdom, taking preschool children outdoors into forests, parklands and coastal settings has been found to build children’s love of nature and risk-taking behaviours. In the Australian context, local adaptations of UK and European forest and nature kindergartens have gained popularity since the mid-2010s. They have flourished in numbers as educators and parents realise the benefits children gain from being outdoors for learning. The ‘bush kinder’ approach, as it is known in Australia, has challenged early childhood educators to apply pedagogy in new and varied situations. One result of this approach is that educators have been stimulated to find ways to assess children’s learning. This paper reports on a small pilot project that applied a participatory action research methodology. The project’s participants were three preschool educators, an early childhood pedagogical leader and a bush kinder researcher. This study sought to co-design and test an assessment tool specific to nature-based teaching aligned to Australian curriculum frameworks. This paper draws on data generated through the reflections of the research team as active participants in this study, who applied the assessment tool during bush kinder sessions. Data collection occurred through individual interviews with each educator, led by the researcher. This study’s key finding is that the tool developed through this study enables bush kinder educators to deepen their understanding of children’s learning in nature, and it confirms the validity of the bush kinder approach for supporting young children’s learning.