An outdoor education body of knowledge

Abstract

Is there a problem with outdoor education? In his call for papers for this special themed edition of the Australian Journal of Outdoor Education, Glyn Thomas (2005a) suggested that outdoor education suffered from a 'kind of identity crisis'. Both authors of this paper are teachers of a range of subjects in the secondary school system in Victoria, Australia, including the senior Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) subject Outdoor and Environmental Studies (OES). For both of us the ruminations and deliberations of academics is of interest, but usually not particularly relevant. However, Thomas' call, comes at a significant time for us, as we struggle to maintain the OES subject in the face of budget constraints, increasing school administration pressures, and parental and student misperceptions. So, is there an identity crisis in outdoor education? Brookes (2004) has recently described the failure of outdoor education programs to adequately justify themselves, at least to outsiders. For us, the core of this failure stems from the double-edged nature of outdoor education, at least as it occurs in Victoria. We have two quite distinct outdoor education systems in play in this state: the extra-curricular 'camps' programs that are often run for large groups of students such as entire year levels; and the semester or year length elective subjects including OES, offered as one of a range of academic courses to middle and senior students. Both are called outdoor education, but they have very different learning objectives and pedagogical strategies. Unfortunately, school administrations, non-outdoor education teachers, and students and their parents, have failed to understand the differences, and this has led to our own local crisis - falling student numbers and pressure to limit the experiences we offer. Why, we have asked ourselves, does a recognised academic course such as OES, suffer in a way that other VCE subjects - Sciences, Languages, English, Maths, and so on - do not? Clearly there are a number of factors in the lower level of esteem given to OES, many of which other authors have analysed previously. The course is relatively young, is often costly, and makes significant demands on students and teachers in comparison to many others. Our focus in this paper however, is on the links we draw between the ideas of Brookes (2004), Thomas (2005a) and this perceived crisis in outdoor education. For us, what's lacking is a coherent outdoor education body of knowledge. This paper is an attempt to begin the process of developing such a body of knowledge that might address our concerns about outdoor education subjects in the curriculum. It should become clear that both authors love our work in the outdoors. We are therefore biased in our belief that outdoor education is useful and valuable, which could make this paper seem like an elaborate justification. In a sense this is true, but we deeply believe that outdoor education is an important area of educational curricula, which deserves to be recognised as such by both other educators and the wider community. What is outdoor education? Definitions of outdoor education abound. Neill (2004) cites twenty definitions, but a cursory glance at the international literature suggests that there are probably many more. It's quite possible that the abundance of meanings for outdoor education is one of the key problems that led to us writing this paper in the first place - the crisis in identity in outdoor education may well be fuelled by educators working and communicating about their work at cross purposes from different starting points and definitions. Indeed, this view has been described by others. Lugg (1999) for example, reviews a range of definitions of outdoor education, and suggests that while having many definitions may be valuable, it also might "inhibit meaningful dialogue both within the profession and in the larger community" (p. …