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Wilderness education taught techniques and skills that will enable you to make yourself at home in the outdoors. It includes an independent field of environmental education. Both in its content and in the teaching and learning forms the wilderness education of other natural and environmental pedagogical approaches differ.

Term

Main concern of wilderness education is to open access to nature. An overarching goal is to promote awareness towards life, an understanding of the complex relationships in ecological systems and developing a bond between man and nature, but also between man and man.

A detailed and uniform development of the wilderness pedagogical methods, their content and objectives So far there is not. The source of the wilderness pedagogy serve traditional knowledge and methods of education from vanquished or the few remaining primitive peoples. Therefore, it determines the dispute with their subsistenter life, their world view, their culture and their craft as well as their relationship to nature as its subject. From this focus, the essential content of the wilderness pedagogy is derived: the ( over-) survival training in nature.

Gerhard Trommer noticed that wilderness education " to provide almost upside down ( seems), what it always went in pedagogy: The liberation of man from its original state, leading out from the state of immaturity. Education was seeking a rule not to an education that makes life fit for living in the remote wilderness. "

Erxleben raises the target of connectedness particularly pointing and speaks of " the meaningful embeddedness ". Intense Nature Experience seeks to promote a sustainable lifestyle: "If someone is really deeply familiar with nature, he lives in accordance with it. And harmony means the concerns of sustainability. "

Through wilderness pedagogical methods can the experiences in the "wilderness" and the encounter with nature to a rediscovery of "full sensuality ", the help and thus promote a refinement of perception affective and imaginative. Psychological and neurological studies confirm the importance that plays a sensual and emotional relationship with nature in the development of man.

Methods

The wilderness education has different orientations. The expression used for the first time Gerhard Trommer in a 2002 publication. Anja told Schendzielorz 2003, the wilderness pedagogical approaches into two categories: Wilderness pedagogy of national parks and that of the free wilderness schools.

Wilderness education in national parks

In line with its educational mission, the German national parks programs for children, youth and adults through environmental education. Since " let nature be nature " with the new buzzword of the wilderness idea was taken up by the organizers of the national parks, there are in the national park movement in Germany increasingly consider how people are as introduce them to this "wilderness".

The educational work in the national parks mostly oriented to different educational concepts and is a mixture of natural pedagogy ( Goepfert, 1987), Ecological instruction (Beer & De Haan, 1987), experiential learning ( Janssen 1988), school backpack ( Trommer 1991), Flow Learning ( Cornell, 1991, 1999 ) Earth Education ( VAN MATRE 1990) and many others.

Wilderness in wilderness education schools

Regardless of the development in the National Park, the wilderness pedagogy developed in the wilderness schools. Wilderness wilderness education schools consider to be independent of large protected areas and apply them regardless of. The transitions between civilization, farmland and wilderness are considered fluent. Anja Erxleben writes, natural landscapes can offer much immediate; for someone from the city have the next forest, with sounds such as birdsong instead of traffic noise, already something wild and suggestions. It is a matter the "little wilderness " to discover the one in front of each door expected ( Erxleben, 2008).

The educational work of the wilderness schools was largely by Tom Brown Jr. and Jon Young, influences from America and derives rather from the "culture of guns" than on the "wilderness" as a landscape. The wilderness schools see their tradition, inter alia, based on the teachings of indigenous peoples and hunter-gatherer cultures.

With the thesis: Local are in nature a wilderness educational course for the first time was scientifically monitored. The first -year wilderness education training course was conducted by Gero Wever 2003. The MDR has sent in his series LexiTV a report on the wilderness pedagogy course a wilderness school.

Areas of application

The offers wilderness education are taken from educational institutions such as kindergartens, youth groups, schools and universities, companies, private groups and families to complete.

In 2000, a network of wilderness educators, the "WIND - Wildlife Schools Network Germany " founded. Since 2007, there are educational wilderness forest nurseries. In the same year, the first three years of wilderness education training course was held. An international infrastructure for the worldwide network of wilderness education tries to establish the 8 Shields Institute, founded in the United States in 2009.

The hypothesis that it is useful to also work independently of large protected areas encounters, currently more and more recognition. The representatives of the two basic lines of wilderness education work more and more in projects in and outside the game parks together.