Maybe what they say is what they experience: Taking students words seriously

Abstract

Abstract 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. Introduction As part of a research project looking at outdoor education practices I followed the outdoor education program of a New Zealand secondary school (1). I went on a number of camps with this school and spent a lot of time talking to students as we did the various activities and lived together for the periods of the camps. After each camp I attended I also had some more formal interviews with a number of the students about the camps. Students said many different things about the experiences they had on the outdoor education program of this school. Two comments made by different students remain with me. My attention was initially drawn to these comments because they seem, on one level, to epitomise much of the outdoor education rhetoric around what students can learn but on another level they bring some of this rhetoric into relief because of the paradoxical nature of these comments. The first comment was made when I was standing by a confidence course with a group of students on the Year 8 camp (2). We were waiting for the teacher to arrive so we could begin the activity. I had asked the students why they thought that the teacher was getting them to do the confidence course and one student said, in a very matter of fact manner, "You do the confidence course to get confidence." Her tone of voice implied that there could be no other reason to do a confidence course. The second comment came from one of the Year 12 students when I interviewed her about her camp experience (3). I asked Matilda (4) how she found the leadership component of the trip and the assessment process for the course. She said, You know how we are being assessed on leadership stuff at this camp, I reckon, like at Brownies that kind of was a beginning. An introduction to all those kind of little skills. Cause we learnt how to work as a team and how to be nice and smiley and all that kind of stuff. You know, which is not really us, but anyway. One reading of these two comments could be to confirm the power and efficacy of outdoor education. The first student clearly knew that doing challenging activities would involve feelings of success and increased confidence. Matilda appeared to have learnt very clearly what was involved in working in a team from her earlier experiences in Brownies. But this is not the immediate reading that a number of colleagues who I have shared these two comments with have made. One response I have had when I have recounted these two vignettes is surprise that I would even bother to consider these two comments seriously. After all, they were flippant, throw away lines. One question that I have been asked a number of times as I have tried to come to some understanding of these comments is if I thought that the students said these things because they thought it was what I would want to hear. Another response that I have had to Matilda's comment in particular, was that maybe she was just a lazy student and knew how to 'fake' it to keep the teacher happy. The general tenor of the responses when I related these two stories was that the comments represented some shortcomings in the students. A suggestion was also made at one point that my interest in these comments represented some shortcomings in my research abilities. …