ABSTRACT
Outdoor environments have the most potential to become enabling and empowering ‘third teachers’ when we think about them through child development lenses, such as schema and embodiment theories, along with ideas from Landscape studies. I will mine this very rich and productive interface, bringing together some deepening ideas about:
What schematic behaviour might be for.
How young children mobilise their moving bodies to interact with the world they are learning to inhabit.
Ways of thinking in evolutionary and environmental psychology.
This chapter is very exploratory. In it, I will be bringing together thinking from several fields where I have been seeing resonance and investigating the synergy that emerges as the ideas interact with each other. I will also be asking questions, opening up avenues for thinking more deeply about child development, but not necessarily being able to present answers. We certainly do not yet know enough about schemas, nor do we yet fully utilise the potential of the set of ideas that we call ‘schemas’ or ‘schema theory’ – I wish to model this uncertainty, questioning and pushing at the boundaries of these concepts.