Barriers to Time in Nature

There are many factors that can make it challenging to take students outside. Barriers can occur and have an impact at different levels—individuals, classes, schools, districts—and can change over the course of a school year or school day. Our research suggests that there is often something that makes it hard to take students outside, but the barrier is not uniform or constant across days, classes, teachers, or schools. The barrier(s) that prevents a class from going outside at 10:00 AM on Tuesday might be different than the barrier at 10:30 AM, and different again than 10:00 AM on Wednesday. Chances are that educators will encounter different barriers at different times, and educators in the same school will experience different barriers. Some of these barriers are large and some are seemingly simple, but they can all prevent a class from going outside. They can all, also, be managed or eliminated through preparation, creativity, and collaboration. This section outlines a range of barriers educators may encounter, brief descriptions of those barriers, and suggestions of strategies that might help.