Pip Lynch

Exploring relationships of trust in 'adventure' recreation.

Abstract A central concept in the notion of leisure, and therefore also of recreation, is freedom. In this article we argue that freedom in organised recreation, especially in activities involving some degree of deliberate risk‐taking (i.e. in adventure recreation), is preserved through relationships of trust between recreation organisers and participants. This article seeks to outline the theoretical field of trust and to begin to explore the concept of trust in the context of adventure recreation. A recent criminal conviction in New Zealand has highlighted the issue of trust in recreation and serves as a point of departure for the purposes of exploring conceptualisations of trust and their application to the adventure recreational context. Trust does not appear to have attracted attention in the recreation literature to date, yet it may provide a useful means of negotiating the contested terrain created at the nexus of recreation culture (in particular adventure recreation), recreation management and application of the law.

Adventures in Paradox

The popularity of adventure recreation and adventure education has arisen, in part, from an assumption that adventure experiences are radically different from those of everyday life in modern societies. A paradox previously pointed out is that those seeking adventurous experiences often make use of technical and technological prosthetics, thus safeguarding against risk associated with adventure. This has generally been understood in the context of the risk society. However, a further and, we argue, deeper paradox than this is manifest in the current popularity of adventure recreation and adventure education. This is the conflict between the use of adventure to provide experiences supposedly ‘missing’ in contemporary societies and the extensive centrality of notions and ideologies of adventure in the history, literature and process of economic expansion of those same societies. We explore this paradox by characterising the current focus on adventure as either deeply contradictory at the social and economic levels, or conversely, as an unintended and reflexive process of (adventurous) subversion of the economic and social forces that initially harnessed the notion of adventure. Our purpose in doing this is to offer a novel framework for researching the notion of adventure in outdoor recreation and outdoor education.

From low jump to high jump: adventure recreation and the criminal law in New Zealand.

Abstract Until recently, New Zealand law set a very low threshold for culpability under criminal nuisance or criminal negligence — namely carelessness — and this threatened to impact negatively on the provision of adventure recreation. In 2004, a new interpretation of criminal nuisance — recklessness — was introduced and this, too, is potentially damaging for adventure recreation by raising the bar to criminal culpability too high. In this paper, we consider the implications of the law of criminal nuisance for New Zealand recreation in general, and we take risk recreations (also known as adventure recreations) as particular cases in which the threshold could have far‐reaching detrimental consequences for recreation provision and participation. Comparison with interpretations of criminal negligence (and civil in Australia) in other common law jurisdictions and a review of the New Zealand adventure recreation culture shows that the swing from a low jump to a high jump for culpability is not in the best interests of recreation in New Zealand, and that gross negligence or a major departure from accepted standards is the appropriate threshold.

Nourishing Terrains? Troubling Terrains? Women’s Outdoor Work in Aotearoa New Zealand

In this chapter, four women examine the influence of gender in their professional outdoor lives in Aotearoa New Zealand settings. Although their personal and professional experiences speak of the outdoors and outdoor learning as nourishing, the chapter advances the notion of “troubling terrains” by picking up on times each woman experienced gender-based exclusions. Working from a data set of individual letters addressing an issue requiring collective analysis, a framework of four terrains related to pedagogies, work, skills, and bodies emerges. “Troubling” the terrains reveals the potential of embodied outdoor experiences and women’s-only collectives as spaces for women to “do” gender differently. Extending the analysis to professional work contexts, the chapter untangles the persistent binding of women to gender and gender work, and posits the necessary contribution of men in outdoor groups and leadership to effecting social change in gender relations.

Accidents in Norwegian secondary school friluftsliv: implications for teacher and student competence

ABSTRACT This article reports and discusses results from a nationwide, quantitative survey of accidents and near-accidents in educational outdoor activities (friluftsliv) in Norwegian upper secondary schools during the period 2010–2013. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics and association analyses. The results reveal that accidents and near-accidents occur regularly, but no fatalities occurred in the three-year period studied. We found few statistically significant associations between variables, yet among the variations of teacher education in friluftsliv one year of teacher education reduced the likelihood of reporting accidents (odds ratio = 0.35, p = 0.007) and lack of any friluftsliv teacher education increased the likelihood of reporting accidents (odds ratio = 2.23, p = 0.048). The results regarding accident and near-accident causes are not very clear, although teachers tend to consider chance factors and student preparedness to be more important causes than other factors. Internationally, and particularly in Norway, there is a need for better knowledge for minimizing accidents and near-accidents in outdoor educational activities for youth.

Maintaining leisure values in adventure recreation events: the role of trust

New Zealands adventure recreation culture is well recognized in leisure research. In organized adventure events, the leisure value of freedom can be preserved through relationships of trust between recreation organizers and participants, yet there is little research on trust as a two-way relationship, trust in recreational settings and in voluntary risk-taking contexts. This paper responds to these knowledge gaps by reporting qualitative data from a study of trust relationships between outdoor adventure recreation event organizers and participants. The data confirms the trust relationship, finding it to be two-way and unequal. Leisure values are maintained by a combination of risk management, trust, participant competence and judgement and the force of law represented by disclaimers. Implications for event organization, outdoor recreation policy and the application of law to recreation settings are discussed.

Educational ‘traditions’ and school “topics”: Outdoor education in New Zealand schools 1935‐1965

Outdoor education was first included in the formal (written) curriculum for New Zealand schools in 1999. This article explores New Zealand outdoor education as a product of a particular coincidence of social and economic conditions and the contested domais of pedagogy and curriculum during the period 1935‐1965. Popkewitz, among others, views school curricula and associated practices as emerging from ‘systems of ideas that inscribe styles of reasoning, standards and conceptual distinctions’ which ‘shape and fashion interpretation and action’. It is these ‘systems of ideas’, or ‘traditions’ in Goodson and Marsh’s terms, that provide a framework for understanding outdoor education in New Zealand schools. Since the 1930s, outdoor education in New Zealand appears to have consolidated from, and been shaped by, competing educational ideologies and changing social and economic influences. The way in which outdoor education accommodated competing traditions is the focus of this, necessarily broad, analysis

Learning Leadership: Becoming an Outdoor Leader.

ABSTRACT Recent leadership research has demonstrated a need for better understanding the process of becominga leader because it might be qualitatively different to being a leader. If so, there is likely to be a need for pedagogies designed deliberately to support first-time outdoor leadership experiences and any such pedagogies must be informed by the needs of first-time leaders. Becoming a leader in outdoor educational settings involves moving from the relative equality of being one participant among several in a group to a position of some influence in the group. This paper draws on empirical data from in-depth semi-structured interviews with adult outdoor education (friluftsliv) students in Norway to explore factors influencing initial leadership experiences in a formal educational setting. We found that becoming an outdoor leader involves transformations that can be complicated by the educational setting. We discuss implications for pedagogical approaches to outdoor leadership development in formal education settings.

Virtual environments for collaborative leisure research

Collaboration is becoming the ‘new normal’ of research practice in response to the complexity of problems being studied and funding requirements. There is some evidence that, in general, research outputs from collaborative teams tend to be of higher quality and wider interest than those from individual researchers. While recent calls for more collaboration in leisure research are prompted by concerns about quality, relevance and funding efficiency, little attention has been paid to virtual resources for implementing collaborative leisure research. At the same time, the Internet and the World Wide Web are increasingly utilised as resources for research. In this paper, we report the experiences of three researchers collaborating internationally on an interdisciplinary leisure-related project, using a virtual research environment (VRE). The potential benefits of VREs for leisure research, and the pitfalls to be avoided or overcome, are discussed.