This paper develops a sensory history of health and outdoor education initiatives which featured (non-)formal schooling, analyzing these as belonging to (a) scented and more generally sensed world(s) ...of learning. Working with photographs as sensory objects of affect, and using as examples Belgian and Luxembourg open-air schools and associated sanitary and social welfare provisions, the paper explores issues that have gone under-researched in sensory scholarship internationally: those of precise educational purposes, methods, processes and effects of sensory engagement, particularly pertaining to "smell". Sensory practices and experiences and uses of senses generally are thereby traced in/as "situated, embodied" movements inextricably "enmeshed" with symbolism. The paper argues that while the educational goals underpinning the initiatives investigated and the approaches and practices characterizing these have changed, some (un)intended effects still have an impact today, for instance through Forest School as given shape in the United Kingdom. The concept of "odorous", or rather "sensuous childhoods", is proposed to denote ways that particular target groups have come to be imagined as in need of explicitly sensorial health and outdoor education.
This article starts from histoire croisée to develop a genuinely relational analysis of performances of health education in the context of open-air schools. It interrogates, through places, people, ...and things conceived of as being performatively entangled, the notion of an internationalisation of school hygiene. These places, people, and things - "international" conferences and exhibitions, "figureheads" of the aspiring New Schools and open-air schools movements, and printed, photographed, and designed materials - reveal open-air schools as "practices and movements" unbound by national or otherwise (real-)imagined borders. Fragmentation accompanied their circulation and ensued from their co-constitutive role in the mediation of knowledge and praxis around hygiene. While still underexplored, economic factors were key to this process. Their analysis from within the "meshwork" in which non-/humans were (are) entangled opens up new lines of enquiry.
As elsewhere in the Western world, between 1900 and 1940 the anti-tuberculosis campaign in the Netherlands produced a wide range of initiatives to promote child health. In each of these the social ...and the medical were linked, as the hygienic 'mood' was encouraged by a child-saving ethos that focused upon the poor. In this article the author discusses the choices that were made between anti-tuberculosis interventions for children, the benefits projected on each of these and the categories of children for whom they were meant. Private and voluntary initiatives dominated the field, whereas the state turned out to be very reluctant to take responsibility. Medically controlled health camps for 'weak' children were a more important instrument than open-air schools and mass medical examination. Medical surveillance produced new categories and data which in turn justified the continued growth of child hygiene after tuberculosis had become less of a threat during the 1930s.
This article inserts the concept of risk in the context of open-air schools and investigates its implications, capacities and limits. It is contended that applying at-risk labels to pupils who ...attended open-air schools is itself a risky business. The category to some extent constitutes an anomaly within most open-air schools' histories, as much of what it would come to denote, did not yet exist as such when these institutes arose and flourished. Moreover, the literature suggests that at-risk labels are often deployed, interpreted, negotiated and resisted by children and youth to whom they are applied. The article investigates that hypothesis by means of a case study of a Milanese open-air school called 'Trotter'. Studied in detail is its everyday educational practice before and after the Second World War.
It is argued that open-air schools like 'Trotter' indeed (re)constructed children and youth in modes similar to those related to at-risk discourse, albeit in ambiguous and context-specific ways. Moreover, the article shows that institutes like 'Trotter' themselves put their target groups at risk, giving occasion to multiple forms of an at-risk paradox. Pupils of such a school particularly risked (but also resisted) being socially bracketed, stigmatized, institutionalized, abused and subjected to streaming.
Residential outdoor schools are multi-day learning camps that provide unique settings in which to deliver environmental education. However, such schools are also very complex to develop and difficult ...to maintain and operate. Within Canada though, there are many examples of successful outdoor school operations, three of which are considered here: the North Vancouver Outdoor School, the Olympic Park Institute and the Golden Ears Learning Centre. From these case studies lessons can be learned regarding issues such as: land tenureship, program design, staffing options, administrative systems, facility requirements, finance options and abilities to attract students. The discussion of these factors can then be applied to the development of a nation wide network of residential outdoor schools within the framework of Canadian Biosphere Reserves.
Currently there are ten Biosphere Reserves in Canada which, when analyzed, prove to be very adequate sites for environmental education from both physical and social stand points. The Canadian Biosphere Reserve Association is the coordinating body which fosters communication and cooperation between individual Reserves. If a network of residential outdoor schools were to be developed within this association framework, it would serve, both to fulfill the Canadian Biosphere Reserve Associations mandate to support environmental education and would help partially alleviate the lack of adequate environmental education facilities in Canada today.
PDF
