John Quay

Experience and Participation: Relating Theories of Learning

This paper explores the relationships between experiential education and other holistic theories of education including constructivism, social constructionism and cultural discourses. Situated learning is introduced because it provides a comprehensive theorization of learning as participation situated in the context of community practice. Thus situated learning affords a telling comparison with experiential education and provides conceptual structures which may support the further development of experiential education. The exploration of other learning theories broadly related to experiential education results in the identification of lacunae, or gaps, within experiential education. These lacunae exist specifically within the theory of learning in experiential education. The consequence of this is that the learning process in experiential education requires further theorization.

More than relations between self, others and nature: outdoor education and aesthetic experience

Self, others and nature (environment) have been suggested over numerous decades and in various places as a way of understanding experience in outdoor education. These three elements and the relations between them appear to cover it all. But is this really the final word on understanding experience? In this paper I explore two emphases within experience expressed by Peirce that offer differing ways of understanding experience: in one emphasis self, others and nature are submerged and not discerned; in the other they appear as the three familiar and related elements. The first emphasis is phenomenological and focused on a simple whole; the other is pragmatic and concerned with a total whole (elements in a totality). The key distinction here is that between something simple (one-fold) and something total (manifold). For Heidegger the difference between these is the ontological difference, where the two differing emphases are be-ing (verb) and beings (noun); or, expressed in another way, phenomenological thinking and calculative thinking. For Dewey these two emphases are revealed as aesthetic and reflective experience, both connected via inquiry. Awareness of this difference and connection suggests that issues involving self, others and nature as elements emerge from and return to the aesthetic ways of being (or occupations) that we build through our programme design and conduct. Relations between self, others and nature are submerged within these ways of being, highlighting how our programme design and conduct does not merely concern activities (including reflective activities), but involves building ways of being.

Skills, strategies, sport, and social responsibility: reconnecting physical education

Physical education is one of the more difficult subjects in the curriculum for generalist classroom teachers in primary schools to incorporate confidently into their teaching. In many primary schools, the generalist classroom teacher defers to a physical education specialist. This situation has both positive and negative features. In this context, this study brings together several prominent models of physical education teaching in an approach that enables the curriculum to be encountered through the interests of the children. This approach offers a generalist teacher, through appropriate professional development, a means for delivering a high‐quality physical education programme, and also complements the repertoire of the specialist physical education teacher at both primary and secondary school levels.

Students Caring For Each Other: Outdoor Education and Learning Through Peer Relationships

Caring is an action oriented value that can provide a way forward beyond the dualism prevalent between the concepts of individual and community. This investigation focused on school students’ understandings of and experiences of caring. It comprised a comparison of Year Nine students’ perceptions of outdoor education and their other classes at an Australian secondary school with respect to their experiences of caring. In order to achieve this it was first necessary to determine a student derived understanding of the meaning of caring, a very broad term. A survey instrument was constructed following analysis of the interview data which enabled this comparison to be made. The results indicated that caring between students was more likely to be experienced in the outdoor education context than in the school classroom context.

Community, Caring And Outdoor Education

In this article we discuss the close ties that exist between the concepts of community and caring on the one hand, and the teaching and learning strategies which are relevant to these concepts in the area of outdoor education on the other. We begin by gauging the extent of our human need for community. The existence of this need leads into an exploration of the ways in which this need can be met in our Western society, which tends to favour the individual. Caring is identified as a major method for achieving community. Ways of educating for caring and community are then revealed through the literature and these are placed, as one would a template, over the existing view of outdoor education to look for any connections and commonalities. These commonalities are identified.

The Evolution of Experiential Learning Theory: Tracing Lines of Research in the JEE

This essay introduces a collection of past articles from the Journal of Experiential Education (JEE) focused on the concept of experiential learning. It outlines the historical trajectory of the concept beginning with human relations training practices beginning in 1946, as it came to be understood as a naturally occurring psychological process and a grounding for pedagogical reforms. The eight articles included in the issue reflect the way JEE authors have contended with problems arising from the concept’s departure from its origins in practice. We suggest that experiential learning’s evolution into a general theory was accomplished by decoupling it from its roots in a particular social practice and ideology, and then focusing on the concept’s technical problems. It is now important for researchers to revisit assumptions underpinning current theory and practice, situate research on experiential learning in wider practical and scholarly traditions, and develop new vocabularies concerning the relationship between experience and learning in educational programs.

Learning Phenomenology with Heidegger: Experiencing the Phenomenological "Starting Point" as the Beginning of Phenomenological Research.

Abstract Phenomenology has been with us for many years, and yet grasping phenomenology remains a difficult task. Heidegger, too, experienced this difficulty and devoted much of his teaching to the challenge of working phenomenologically. This article draws on aspects of Heidegger’s commentary in progressing the teaching and learning of phenomenology, especially as this pertains to research in fields such as education. Central to this task is elucidation of what I believe to be the most important feature of phenomenology—what Heidegger referred to as the ‘starting point’ of phenomenology. I have written this article in the manner of a phenomenological workshop with the intention of inviting the reader to engage experientially with this starting point.

Not ‘democratic education’ but ‘democracy and education’: Reconsidering Dewey’s oft misunderstood introduction to the philosophy of education

Abstract Of enduring interest to philosophers of education is the intimate connection Dewey draws between Democracy and Education in this now century-old seminal work. At first glance the connection may appear quite simple, with the two terms commonly combined today as ‘democratic education’. But there is significantly more to Dewey’s connection between democracy and education than ‘democratic education’ suggests. Evidence for this greater depth can be seen in Dewey’s choice of subtitle for his text: an introduction to the philosophy of education. In this article I illuminate some of the further riches Dewey offered to understanding democracy and education, central to which is his theorization of ‘occupations’ as this aligns with his attempts to articulate a ‘coherent theory of experience’. As with democracy and education, the educational import of occupations cannot be captured with a mere combination of terms as in ‘vocational education’. In both cases we are simply appending an adjective to education, which Dewey found problematic. What we need, he argued, is a sense of education ‘pure and simple’ with ‘no qualifying adjectives prefixed’. An existential consideration of occupations enables just that, wherein occupations define the functional unities of life, the character of social groupings, the ways in which growth is arranged. As such they provide us with new ways of conceptualizing the structure of schools and the nature of learning. Here, democracy and education come together in a much more fundamental sense as expressions of life.

Identity, physical capital and young men's experiences of soccer in school and in community‐based clubs

Abstract This article engages with four key informants from a school into the meaning of soccer in the lives of the informants and the disparity between the schools practice and the cultural meanings attached to soccer, at the school and community‐based clubs. We will demonstrate how their ability and the cultural knowledge developed through playing club soccer over most of their lives provided them with an identity and meaningful membership in communities built around soccer. Drawing on Bourdieu (1884), we see this physical and cultural knowledge as embodied capital. While it provided them with meaningful membership, social status and position within the communities of their soccer clubs, it had far less value at school. Within the community of the school, their embodied cultural capital provided them with few opportunities to develop a sense of social distinction, personal identity, self‐expression and self‐determination.

Outdoor Education and School Curriculum Distinctiveness: More Than Content, More Than Process

For many years now, those of us engaged with outdoor education curriculum work in Australia have been debating questions which orbit around the issue of defining outdoor education. We claim to be doing so in order to clarify what we are pursuing educationally, our purpose, not only for ourselves but for others, so that we can legitimately stake out our position, our own little piece of educational turf, amongst the other subjects in the school curriculum. However, this debate has never been easy and any attempts to bring it to a resolution inevitably, it seems, settle some issues while heightening tensions in other areas. In this paper I explore two of the more recent approaches to the question of outdoor education’s positioning in the school curriculum: the question of distinctiveness and the question of indispensability. Then, through an historical excursion involving Australian and US curriculum history, I highlight some of the difficulties created by shifts in language use. Finally I argue, using definitions of outdoor education that emerged in the United States in the 1950s, that the distinctiveness of outdoor education lies in neither a body of knowledge (content) nor skills and practices (process) but in a deeper level of educational understanding which emphasizes ways of being.