Beyond training for tolerance in outdoor experiential education

Author(s):  
Mary Breunig ◽  
Elyse Rylander
2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 369-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danny Towers ◽  
Chris Loynes

Background: Outdoor Experiential Education (OEE) in the United Kingdom is steeped in tradition. Established practices limit the ability of outdoor professionals to respond to the global challenges of the modern world through locally relevant ways. Internationally, Higher Education (HE) is also currently subject to considerable challenges and its continued relevance can be gauged through its ability to become meaningful in a rapidly changing and pluralistic world. Purpose: We examine the impact of our pedagogical approach to working with international students, developing professional practice informed by one place, set within the context of the needs of the world and framed by the question “what kind of outdoor educator do you want to become?” Methodology/Approach: The authors used Dewey’s concept of occupations as an organizing principle for the curriculum. Four excursions involving 86 students were facilitated and reviewed. Findings/Conclusions: The norms of traditional OEE practices were predominantly overcome and innovative ways of co-creating knowledge emerged. Implications: If outdoor educators develop their own occupation in the context of wider needs, they can become place-responsive as well as continuously open to change.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-101
Author(s):  
Kathryn Riley

Background: Teaching and learning in outdoor experiential education is often conducted on lands with troubled histories of settler colonialism. This calls for new and creative forms of socioecological responsibility to attend to human supremacism and exceptionalism that marginalizes, exploits, dominates, and objectifies Other(s) in these Anthropocene times. Purpose: Through posthumanist philosophy (re)conceptualizing Western binary logics, this article explores possibilities for postcolonial land ethics in outdoor experiential education to address past, present, and future socioecological injustices and threats. Methodology/Approach: Adopting new materialist methodologies, this article examines affective materiality emerging from a series of multisensory researcher/teacher enactments, as set within pedagogies attuning-with land with a Grade 4/5 class in Canada. Findings/Conclusions: The affective materiality of sense-making in the researcher/teacher enactments provided opportunities to challenge discursively positioned land ethics, suggesting a transforming-with Other(s) through relationally co-constituted existences. Implications: Understanding that no separate and discrete worldviews exist in which individuals act through autonomous agency, but that worlding emerges through relational agency, teaching, and learning in outdoor experiential education can generate an intrinsic sense of responsibility to attend to more equitable relationships with Other(s) for/with/in these Anthropocene times.


2021 ◽  
pp. 105382592110067
Author(s):  
Viviane Soa Gauthier ◽  
Janelle Joseph ◽  
Caroline Fusco

Background: Outdoor experiential education (OEE) is often presented as a neutral and equitable curricular practice with positive learning outcomes. However, few studies have examined the experiences of racialized and queer White settler students or the representation of Whiteness in OEE curricular documents. Purpose: This article explores Whiteness, racialization, and Indigenous erasure in OEE as an undergraduate curricular practice at a Kinesiology program in a Canadian university. Methodology/Approach: Using critical race theory, a critical discourse analysis of six types of documents used to advertise and organize the outdoor experiential courses was combined with five semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students. Findings/Conclusions: This study demonstrates that students must negotiate Whiteness and settler colonialism to participate in OEE. Three main findings include the following: (a) The imagined student is wealthy and White, (b) students both assimilate to and resist codes of Whiteness, and (c) curricular documents and practices promote Eurocentricity and erase Indigeneity. Implications: OEE presents an opportunity for students preparing to become workers and educators in sport and recreation to learn about Whiteness, racialization, and Indigeneity. Kinesiology program design can use student narratives to shift from supposedly neutral curricular documents and pedagogies to ones that expose and work toward dismantling Eurocentricity.


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