Beth Christie

‘Did you enjoy your holiday?’ Can residential outdoor learning benefit mainstream schooling?

In the United Kingdom there is a long tradition of residential outdoor learning provision, but to date there is limited research evidence for the direct educational benefits of such experiences, and to both critics and supporters the distinction between such visits and ‘holidays in school time’ is not always apparent. This paper summarises an evaluation of one such programme used by a Scottish council as part of an initiative to raise pupils’ achievement, and considers the direct educational benefits in relation to the current educational framework within Scotland. A mixed-methods evaluation involving over 800 pupils combined psychometric analysis, participant observation, group and individual interviews, and was conducted before, during and up to three months after each residential experience. Aspects were repeated over the course of two years. The personal ‘dispositions’ concept prominent in the National Curriculum Guidelines for 5–14 year olds (in place during the fieldwork) provided an overarching analytical framework. The findings were then related to the development of the personal ‘capacities’ specified in the current curriculum in Scotland (Curriculum for Excellence). This paper therefore performs three functions: first, it examines the educational relationship between residential outdoor learning and mainstream education in Scotland; second, it considers the contemporary significance and continued relevance of outdoor learning more generally; and third, it examines the relationship between qualitative and quantitative approaches to such studies. The aim of fostering positive ‘dispositions’ or ‘capacities’ is now prevalent in the curricula of many countries and so the findings may have significance beyond the United Kingdom.

Telling My Story: Being Female in Outdoor Education in Higher Education

This life-narrative reflects upon one female’s career in outdoor education in higher education, the contention being that distributive equality is no longer enough—progress lies in tackling the gendered world that reproduces the problem. Noffke’s (Review of Research in Education, 22, 305–343, 1997) work, particularly her use of professional, personal, and political dimensions, frames the narrative and emphasizes the sociopolitical construction of identity. A challenge is offered to all in the field to share their own critically reflexive stories as a way of interrogating professional practice and the circumstances of that practice, in order that outdoor education as a field can transgress its current gendered nature, rather than simply perpetuate the existing hegemonic discourse.

Space, place and sustainability and the role of outdoor education

The call for this special issue asked whether outdoor education had any specific or special role to play in fostering environmental sustainability. The question was predicated on a small but steady stream of peer-reviewed articles in the outdoor education research literature claiming that there were such roles that were under-realised as yet or in need of deeper investigation (see, e.g., Higgins, 1996; Higgins & Kirk, 2006; Hill, 2012; Irwin, 2008; Lugg, 2007; Nicol, 2002). Indeed, the title of the special issue—‘Space, Place and Sustainability and the Role of Outdoor Education’—attempted to recognise that outdoor education is at the very least a choice about the places and spaces of education (no matter how diverse are those choices), and that this was also a contemporary feature of the sustainability and environmental education research literature (see, e.g., Jones, Selby, & Sterling, 2010; Mannion, Fenwick, & Lynch, 2013). Four papers constitute this issue. Clarke and Mcphie offer a full ontological reexamination of ‘the crisis of perception’ to which sustainability is said to respond, and argue that an animistic sensibility might usefully inform outdoor (and indoor) educational endeavour. Hill and Brown provide an illustrated analysis of how intentionally deployed place-responsive pedagogies might be transformative of learners’ conceptions of sustainability. Gurholt examines her reading of 200 Norwegian youths’ views of friluftsliv (literally: free-air life) education and considers their relationships with the outdoors. Finally, Cook and Cutting present an evaluation of students’ experiences following visits to low-impact communities as a pedagogical strategy. These four papers are suggestive of outdoor education beginning to work positively with the pressing needs of sustainability, in both research and practice. Whilst it is an error to regard a special issue as a snapshot of the state of play, the process of producing the form presents the editors with a potentially revealing story about a field, at least to the extent that it is represented by the authors and audience of the journal in question. In so doing, we read into these four papers a sense that the outdoor education community was pushing at several boundaries for research and practice, two of which we thought seemed generative for future reflection and examination. This editorial therefore considers the extent to which outdoor education evokes sustainability largely in terms of the material world and also in political terms. In the first of these it seemed to us that several of the papers were ‘playing to’ but explicitly moving beyond the relationship between outdoor education for sustainability (OEfS) and natural or semi-natural environments (or the attention given to the learner–nature or learner–environment relationships). The significance of this effort lies in whether the resulting conception of sustainability is primarily material (e.g. the sustainability of finite resources or ecosystem services) rather than, say, social, economic, justice oriented or political. The second, and related, issue that the papers at least imply to be worthy of greater attention concerns what kind of transformation is intended by OEfS. Such transformative purposes might anticipate changes for the learner, or places, or social conditions, including educational conditions, or all of these; thus prompting us to ask: What is the politics of outdoor education when it attends to sustainability? Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 2014 Vol. 14, No. 3, 191–197, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14729679.2014.960684

Facing loss: pedagogy of death

Abstract Loss, impermanence, and death are facts of life difficult to face squarely. Our own mortality and that of loved ones feels painful and threatening, the mortality of the biosphere unthinkable. Consequently, we do our best to dodge these thoughts, and the current globalizing culture supports and colludes in our evasiveness. Even environmental educators tend to foreground ‘sustainability’ whilst sidelining the reality of decline, decay, and loss. And yet, human life and ecological health require experiencing ‘unsustainability’ too, and a pedagogy for life requires a pedagogy of death. In this paper we explore experiences of loss and dying in both human relationships and the natural world through four different types of death affording situations, the cemetery, caring-unto-death, sudden death, and personal mortality. We trace the confluence of death in nature and human life, and consider some pedagogical affordance within and between these experiences as an invitation to foster an honest relationship with the mortality of self, others, and nature. We end by suggesting art as an ally in this reconnaissance, which can scaffold teaching and learning and support us to courageously accept both the beauty and the ugliness that death delivers to life.