Robyn Zink

The Nature and Scope of Outdoor Education in New Zealand Schools

This paper reports on a study conducted in 2002 and 2003 investigating the nature and scope of outdoor education in New Zealand primary and secondary schools. The aim of the study was to gather data on teachers’ practices in outdoor education in New Zealand, the beliefs and values that shape those practices, some of the barriers teachers faced teaching in the outdoors and resources that they felt would support them in their teaching. Findings suggest that teachers use the outdoors to support teaching across the whole curriculum but the types of activities undertaken and the reasons for using the outdoors to enhance learning varied across the primary and secondary sectors. The learning outcomes that respondents considered most important were primarily around personal and social development. The study highlights that there is considerable ambiguity in terminology and understanding around teaching and learning in the outdoors that merits further investigation.

Outdoor learning in Aotearoa New Zealand: voices past, present, and future

Many of the principles and practices that have influenced outdoor education in Aotearoa New Zealand find their genesis in the United Kingdom and North America. In recent times, many of these foundational assumptions have been called into question. This paper highlights how emerging ‘local’ voices are questioning and reframing how outdoor education is conceptualised and practiced. In large part this is due to a sense of distinctiveness borne from the bicultural foundations that underpin governance and policy-making. This paper explores how outdoor educators are developing pedagogies that acknowledge the particularities of our context, particularly the bicultural foundation of Aotearoa New Zealand. The paper highlights how social and cultural influences shape educational policy and how outdoor educators are responding, both theoretically and practically, to meet the needs of learners in an increasingly diverse society.

Foucault on Camp: What Does His Work Offer Outdoor Education?.

Abstract In this paper we examine aspects of French social theorist, Michel Foucaults work and the contributions these can make to understanding practices in outdoor education. We look specifically at his notions of practice, discourse, power and the self and the lines of questioning that these concepts make possible in relation to outdoor education. We conclude with a discussion of some of the challenges of doing research with Foucauldian tools.

Maybe What They Say Is What They Experience: Taking Students Words Seriously

Students are said to learn from experience in outdoor education, yet what they say they learn is not always taken seriously. Foucault’s work is used in this article to examine two ‘flippant’ comments made by students. Starting with these comments leads to an analysis of how experiences, students and meaning making processes in outdoor education are constituted and normalised. This highlights how it is possible for these students to make these comments and how they can be judged as ‘flippant.’ Analysis of this type lays down a challenge to explore the practices of outdoor education to foreground the complexity and contradictions inherent in students’, experience and learning. It challenges us to take students words seriously.

What does it mean when they don’t seem to learn from experience?

In this paper we use an example of when students appear not to have learnt from their experience to examine some of the ‘orthodoxies’ of experiential education. This frames a discussion exploring how it is possible for a teacher to declare that students have got it ‘wrong’ in relation to learning from experience. It is argued that both learning through experience and who has experiences is viewed through specific forms of reason within contemporary experiential education. The paper concludes with a challenge to open reason up to greater scrutiny in experiential education and consider the possibilities that emerge through the indeterminacy of relationships inherent in experience and education.

Can we move beyond ‘Indigenous good, non-Indigenous bad’ in thinking about people and the environment?

Bucknell and Mannion (2007) commented that student responses in the 2006 VCE Outdoor and Environmental Studies (OES) exam could be boiled down to a pat answer of “Indigenous good, non-Indigenous bad” (p. 8). They suggest that the subject of OES is too rich for such a simple answer. This paper uses the expression of ‘Indigenous good/non-Indigenous bad’ as a springboard to explore some of the ways notions of the environment, race and ethnicity intersect and how this might lead to an exam question being answered in such a uniform and simplistic way by some students. The aim of this paper is to highlight some of the productive tensions of environment, race and ethnicity as a strategy for richer and more complex debates around peoples’ interactions with the environment.

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.