Emerging themes of research into outdoor teaching in initial formal teacher training from early childhood to secondary education

In the field of school-based outdoor education, researchers claim that pre-service teachers should already be provided with basic knowledge, skills, and methods for teaching curriculum-based content outdoors in their initial schoolteacher training. The present review aims to summarize and structure the variety of topics in the literature regarding outdoor teaching in initial formal schoolteacher training. We analyzed the general characteristics of 46 empirical studies from different regions that investigate skills, content areas, and pedagogical strategies to prepare pre-service teachers from early childhood to secondary education for teaching outdoors. We used deductive-inductive content analysis to identify categories and emerging themes. We identified eight themes in the reviewed studies, of which we detail and discuss the four most frequently mentioned: collaboration, creativity, strategies for outdoor learning and sustainability. We discuss the implications for further research and for teacher training.