FULL REFERENCE: Rouse, E. and Wishart, L. (2021). Educator perceptions of risk-taking, safety and resilience in the outdoors: a rural early childhood education and care case study. NZ International Research in Early Childhood Education Journal, 23(2), 63 – 77.
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ABSTRACT: The national quality agenda across the Australian early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector has led to a renewed focus on the outdoor environment as a crucial component in children’s learning and development, where many ECEC settings are redeveloping their outdoor spaces. This paper draws from a study investigating outcomes for children arising from a redesign of one outdoor environment in an ECEC setting, located in rural New South Wales (NSW), Australia, that purposefully incorporated affordances to support children to take risks in their play. Using Rogoff’s planes of analysis, this study highlights that an educator’s enactment of a purposeful pedagogy of beneficial risk-taking is informed by their own lived experiences and the surrounding culture of their professional practice context. This study illustrates that educator attitudes to children’s risk-taking in active outdoor play are not simply shaped by overarching regulatory discourses of safety and supervision. Rather, educators may be apprenticed into ways of thinking and acting that reflect the cultural consensus of their specific context of practice. In this case a (rural) communal culture that valued risk-taking in children’s outdoor play and saw children as capable of making judgements about their risk-taking behaviour.
Key words: Risky play, active play, outdoor environments, early childhood pedagogy, affordances, Rogoff’s planes of analysis.
