Bushcraft as an Educational Activity

I recently blogged about my research into the value of bushcraft when it is applied to formal education, this research has now been published by the Institute for Outdoor Learning (IOL) and can be found in the Autumn 2013 edition of their Horizons journal.

A few years before embarking on this more recent bushcraft related research I completed a project partly towards my undergraduate studies and partly as a fact finding/developmental exercise on the effectiveness of using bushcraft in an environmental education setting. This project was a vital part of the formation of teaching resources and courses for my company SurvivalHobbies which I was running at the time.

For the full report of how I used bushcraft to meet learning outcomes such as 'working as part of a group', 'environmental awareness' and 'making the most of leisure time' follow this link.

Teaching plant life-cycles with Bushcraft

Anual, Perennial, Biennial; there are lots of words to describe the life-cycle and life span of plants. Countryside management students need to have a knowledge of these terms and their meanings if they are to control certain invasive species, the control method may demand that they spray, pull or cut the plant at a certain phase of it's growth,  or plant species beneficial to local wildlife, such as cover crops, wild bird seed mixes or pollen and nectar plots for invertebrates. They will also need to be able to identify the plants at the various stages of it's life-cycle.

One method of illustrating this to students which works very well at this time of year is to take them out foraging for burdock. Burdock is a plant that they should all be familiar with and which they should be able to recognise. It illustrates perfectly the distinction between the first and second year of growth in a biennial plant. The end of the first years growth is the stage at which burdock should be harvested for it's roots and at this phase of it's growth it's leaves will be dying off leaving a large swollen root underground. Before the leaves disapear completely they can be used to locate the root which can then be dug up. During it's second year of growth the plant will have developed a long flowering stalk and will have produced the 'burrs' which give burdock it's name, if you were to dig up the plant at this phase you would find a tough shrivelled root underneth which would not be edible at all.

Foraged Burdock roots after a bit of scrubbing, ready to be baked in a campfire. All these roots came from relatively small burdock plants but as you can see they are quite large. Over the summer the root has become swollen and will provide the plant with the nutrients and energy it requires to survive the winter and continue into it's second year of growth next spring.

Keeping Students Engaged Around the Camp Fire

When I cook on a campfire with students I often cook cakes or pizza as this is something they probably wont have done before. The problem with this is once the dutch oven is on the fire there really isn't any need for the students to stay involved with the camp fire until it's time to take the oven out of the embers. They might cook marshmallows or do other things to occupy them while it's cooking but they're not involved in the cooking of 'their' cake or pizza.

Today I experimented with a way of keeping all my students involved in a camp cooking task; They had been doing some plant ID looking at Umbelifers and identifying them from stems and seeds, having learned to identify cow parsley and hog weed we collected some hog weed seeds to make biscuits with. Keeping students involved in the preparation of a campfire and mixing of ingredients rarely presents any problems, all of them were fully engaged with lighting the fire, grinding the seeds and mixing the ingredients. Once everything was mixed and ready instead of using a dutch oven as I normally would each students wrapped the blade of a spade with tinfoil and cooked their own biscuit in it. 

This worked really well, everyone was fully engaged with the whole cooking process including checking the biscuits while they cooked and making sure they were done which they would not all have been able to do if we had done the cooking in a dutch oven.   

Orange Ash Cakes

One of the simplest camp fire baking exercises you can imagine; 

• make a simple sponge cake or chocolate brownie mixture 
• Half several oranges (it also works with grapefruits and melons, but orange is best for flavour) and scoop out the pulp (don't worry if quite a lot is left attached to the inside of the skin)
• Spoon the cake mixture into the now empty orange skins, don't over fill them as they will rise and spill out. 
• Rake the embers of your camp fire out relatively flat in a bed an inch or so deep.
• Place the orange half's into the hot embers of your camp fire.

 

et voila; 10-15 minutes in the embers (depending on the size of your orange) and you have orange flavored cakes in biodegradable, environmentally friendly, if slightly hot (be careful) wrappers.   

If you're wondering why there are bricks in my fire (in the right of the picture) they had been part of a brick oven in which I had cooked a chicken and sweet potatoes (I sense this will be the topic of a later post) as the main course of this meal. 

Campfire Pizza

My son Michael with the fruits of a mornings dutch oven cooking on the camp fire, he was determined to have pizza for dinner the night before but he fell asleep so fast in the hammock that the pizza had to be left for breakfast. As long as he doesn't expect pizza for breakfast every morning!!