Studies on learning in school friluftsliv education have primarily focused on teachers’ and other adults’ perspectives. The overall purpose of this thesis is to investigate, from the student perspective, the learning processes that take shape in school programmes in friluftsliv education. The thesis looks at how students’ sensemaking in friluftsliv takes shape and how this occurs in interaction with other students and with teachers. The thesis applies a sociocultural perspective to learning, which centres on the students’ narratives about how they do friluftsliv learning. Learning and learning processes are placed in an analytical context that involves individual students’ view of themselves, their relationship to the group of which they are a part, and the place in which they find themselves. The study is based on an ethnographic approach in which data has been gathered by means of interviews, observations, videos taken with GoPro cameras, and logs that students have written. Two secondary school classes were followed over time in a friluft education programme that consisted of both theoretical and practical components and culminated with a week-long stay in the Scandinavian mountains. The students were also interviewed six months after their week of friluftsliv, with the intention of investigating how acquired knowledge had been transformed or applied in practice over time. 

The study clearly shows three learning processes that were brought to light by the data collected: contextual, relational and identity-developing learning processes. Contextual learning is manifested when the students’ sensemaking of friluftsliv is placed in relation to regular classroom instruction and that they find themselves in what is for them an unfamiliar environment, from which they cannot “check out”. This learning process must be understood as a type of transaction or relationship between individual students and their environment. For the students, the contextual mobility – that is, the students’ movement between different contexts – and the place responsiveness they expressed – in the mountain environment, for example – were seen as significant for the creation of new experiences and insights into the practical aspects of previously acquired theoretical knowledge, not only in the subject of physical education and health but also in history, geography, etc. Relational learning concerns partly the students’ ways of looking at the relationships they have within the group and with teachers, and partly how it develops/changes and how different forms of knowledge capital can be used in the context of outdoor education. Identity-developing learning concerns how friluftsliv education leads students to develop new knowledge about their own mental and physical capacity, which leads them to view themselves, their role in their family and in society, in a partially new way. Regarding the implications for teaching and for students’ learning, the study stresses the importance of a processual perspective that focuses on students’ evolving sensemaking, rather than the short-term goals and objectives of individual blocks of instruction.