Outdoor Experiential Education Research Articles

Writing as a method of inquiry about students’ experiences in a New Zealand primary school outdoor education programme

ABSTRACT In Health and Physical Education (HPE) of the New Zealand Curriculum, Outdoor Education (OE) is one of the seven key areas of learning. It has been taught in various forms because it includes a whole range of outdoor adventure activities and leisure pursuits. To better understand/interpret its nature and value in a New Zealand semi-rural primary school, we worked with eight students’ essays on their outdoor experiences to co-construct this paper. Students’ essays and school documents served as our data. Our inquiry linked students’ experiences to the underpinning philosophy of the school and created composite stories of their OE experiences. Students’ writing revealed their emotions, feelings, and the impact of their outdoor experiences during a three-day residential camp. Although this is a small, circumscribed study, the findings illustrate some primary school students’ OE experience and offer pedagogical insight to support the educative purpose of OE. The tangible OE experiences can provide an entry point into students’ affective learning and literacy with learning in other subjects.

Taking Learning Outside: The Effect on Middle School Students’ Mood

School-based outdoor learning is an experiential learning approach that involves the integration of the natural environment with the learning process. This study focused on investigating the effect of a school-based outdoor learning experience on mood among 83 sixth grade students. The researcher found a positive correlation between time spent outside and feeling energetic, and a negative correlation with feeling angry, confused, or tired and with total mood state after students participated in an outdoor learning experience. Additionally, the researcher found a statistically significant improvement in overall mood and in anxiety and confusion following the outdoor education experience. Furthermore, two students participated in interviews and the researcher identified three themes: (a) enhanced learning, (b) improved mood, and (c) nature connectedness. The researcher discusses implications for practice, including teachers collaborating with community and government organization and universities. Furthermore, the author presents considerations for future research to expand upon the current findings, including replication studies.

Examining the risk-safety paradox in outdoor education from a Taoist perspective: a case study of a Chinese outdoor education experience

ABSTRACT There is a paradox between the demands for safety and the productive value of risk in outdoor education and adventure learning. This seems particularly to be the case in Chinese culture, policy, and empirical practice of outdoor education. This paper aims to utilise the rich cultural context and philosophical perspectives of China to broaden the landscape of outdoor education knowledge. Chinese cultural intricacies and insights from Taoist philosophy offer an unconventional perspective for redefining traditional binary concepts of risk and safety, relevant to outdoor education as it is practised in China. A Taoist lens is used to analyse Chinese college students’ documented reflections on their experience of outdoor education through a case study. The convergence of Taoist philosophy and culturally embedded pedagogical practices in China presents an innovative pathway for re-imagining the existing terrain of Western adventure learning research and teaching norms in outdoor education.

Introverts in the Outdoors: Challenging the Extraversion Myth

Summary This case study originated from conversations between a professor and a graduate student/ outdoor experiential practitioner discussing her experiences as a self-identified introvert. In contemplating the topic for the ‘whose bodies belong’, case study special issue, the two of us were drawn to think beyond bodies to psychological attributes and personality traits as well. We believe this to be especially important considering the hegemonic ‘extrovert ideal’, which often prevails in outdoor experiential education, casting introversion as inferior. This case study is both narrative and empirical, conceptually exploring the commonly held assumption that individuals with higher degrees of extroversion are better suited to work in outdoor experiential education settings. Introverted outdoor educators experience an array of unique challenges, including the need to act in ways that are contrary to their quieter tendencies in order to be perceived as effective at their jobs and to express themselves in an assertive and lively manner at job interviews to even be considered for a position. Introverts bring to the workplace and work teams a unique set of skills and talents, including great focus and high levels of productivity. This case will explore the topic of introversion/extroversion through narrative vignettes and evidence-based research, offering recommendations for professional practice. Information © The Authors 2023

Does growth in the outdoors stay in the outdoors? The impact of an extended residential and outdoor learning experience on student motivation, engagement and 21st century capabilities.

Student motivation and engagement underpin educational success, and recent research has found they are lowest in middle high school, especially for boys. At the same time, education systems are recognizing that academic performance is necessary but not sufficient to prepare young people for the adult world, and so-called "21st Century skills" (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity) have been suggested as critical capabilities across all employment sectors in the future. The Glengarry program is a 6-month residential and outdoor learning experience for Year 9 (14-15 years old) boys at an Australian independent school, The Scots College (TSC) Glengarry. Intentionally located during the lowest point of engagement in their adolescent student journey, the Residential and Outdoor Education experience was hypothesized to boost their motivation and engagement and develop 21st Century skills. The Glengarry program involves students living in a boarding-style community for 20 weeks away from their families, participating in classes across all regular school subjects at a bush campus, and undertaking increasingly challenging outdoor education trips each week. The study aimed to measure how these factors transferred into students' traditional school environment after their Glengarry experience. Year 9 was split into two cohorts who both participated in the study: one of which completed the Glengarry program in the first half of 2019, and the other during the second half of the year. Self-reported quantitative and qualitative data supported the hypothesis that the Glengarry program did indeed, boost student motivation and 21st Century skills. While gains in 21st Century skills endured over the next 8-10 months, motivation and some engagement factors decreased upon return to the traditional school environment. Students described key factors in the Glengarry program which facilitated their development, including: an intense residential environment necessitating social growth, a closer connection with teachers in both school and community life, and an appreciation of learning in the natural environment. Recommendations are made for future research to strengthen these findings, and for how these mediating factors could be incorporated into the regular school environment.

Experiences of teachers after training on outdoor education in early childhood

ABSTRACT This study aims to understand the experiences of preschool teachers’ outdoor education experiences in their curriculum after taking the Outdoor Education in Early Childhood Course. In this qualitative study, grounded theory was applied to analyzing data that were collected through an open-ended form and individual and focus group interviews. Results consisted of a main category, namely change in the quantity and content of outdoor education. According to the results, the teachers’ experiences changed to increase and enrich OE. The study revealed that improving the quantity and content of outdoor education by teachers leads to improvement in three interrelated categories: change in pedagogical approach, personal development, and children’s development. These categories are development in coping with obstacles, risky play approach, communication style with children, child-centered practices, self-efficacy, emotional self-regulation, motivation to teach, problem-solving skills, and holistic development of children. Furthermore, all these developments function as mutually reinforcing factors.

Taking Off the Backpacks: The Transference of Outdoor Experiential Education to the Classroom

Schools of education continue to struggle with how to best meet the needs of practicing teachers enrolled in graduate teacher education programs. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Education designed a graduate teacher education program with an embedded outdoor education residency component to disrupt practicing teachers’ concepts of teaching with the intent of impacting their professional practice. This qualitative study reports the results of a multi-year investigation into the transference of the learning that occurs in the outdoor experiential education residency into teachers’ classroom communities. The experiential opportunities were designed to embolden the teachers to rethink community and to reinvent their teaching practice. The findings inform our understanding of the transference of outdoor experiential education as teachers took off their backpacks and returned to the K-12 classroom. Particularly evident in the data were the ways teachers’ own engagement in authentic community as part of the residency model influenced their efforts to create the same opportunities for their K-12 students and for themselves in their school communities. Our findings reveal images of possibility while also noting obstacles to transference.

Exploring an unfamiliar territory: a study on outdoor education in Lebanon

ABSTRACT This paper aims to present findings from a doctoral study on the underexplored practice of outdoor education in the Middle Eastern country of Lebanon. I first propose a working definition for outdoor education before introducing the study’s findings that sought the perspectives of 30 Lebanese public and private primary school educators toward outdoor education and its integration in their teaching practice. Several perceived outdoor education benefits emerged from the participants’ narratives, including the promotion of the children’s emotional wellbeing, creativity, and motivation to learn. They also suggested many implementation challenges related to safety concerns, covering the concentrated curriculum, securing necessary funding, and weather conditions. Furthermore, the educators offered various ideas to integrate outdoor education in teaching languages, sciences, and social studies as well as in addressing environmental issues. I later discuss the findings and propose a set of recommendations to support the provision of enhanced outdoor education experiences.

Exploring the Effect of Outdoor Education Experiences on Students’ Environmental Behaviors and Servant Leadership in Public School Science Education

Exploring the Effect of Outdoor Education Experiences on Students’ Environmental Behaviors and Servant Leadership in Public School Science Education

Lessons From Critical Race Theory: Outdoor Experiential Education and Whiteness in Kinesiology

Background: Outdoor experiential education (OEE) is often presented as a neutral and equitable curricular practice with positive learning outcomes. However, few studies have examined the experiences of racialized and queer White settler students or the representation of Whiteness in OEE curricular documents. Purpose: This article explores Whiteness, racialization, and Indigenous erasure in OEE as an undergraduate curricular practice at a Kinesiology program in a Canadian university. Methodology/Approach: Using critical race theory, a critical discourse analysis of six types of documents used to advertise and organize the outdoor experiential courses was combined with five semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students. Findings/Conclusions: This study demonstrates that students must negotiate Whiteness and settler colonialism to participate in OEE. Three main findings include the following: (a) The imagined student is wealthy and White, (b) students both assimilate to and resist codes of Whiteness, and (c) curricular documents and practices promote Eurocentricity and erase Indigeneity. Implications: OEE presents an opportunity for students preparing to become workers and educators in sport and recreation to learn about Whiteness, racialization, and Indigeneity. Kinesiology program design can use student narratives to shift from supposedly neutral curricular documents and pedagogies to ones that expose and work toward dismantling Eurocentricity.

Exploring the Effect of Outdoor Education Experiences on Students' Environmental Behaviors and Servant Leadership in Public School Science Education

Exploring the Effect of Outdoor Education Experiences on Students' Environmental Behaviors and Servant Leadership in Public School Science Education

“Step Outside the Box and Go to a New Place”: Outdoor Education Experiences of Learners from Multiple Age Groups

“Step Outside the Box and Go to a New Place”: Outdoor Education Experiences of Learners from Multiple Age Groups

Letting them go - outdoor education with/without the teacher educator

ABSTRACT This research is an autoethnographic account of teaching and learning during outdoor education experiences in Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE). Through the process of writing as a method of inquiry, I use a framework of outdoor experiences that went wrong, to identify the symbiotic relationship between teaching and learning in outdoor contexts. By making some experiences visible, through autoethnographic portrayal, I wanted to make sense of risk and errors by focusing on the educational opportunities of the outdoor setting, and the teaching and learning that occurs but might otherwise remain hidden. Accessing teachers knowledge of teaching is crucial to enhancing student learning in meaningful ways. The narrative integrates theory related to learning, teaching, and teaching practice through outdoor education. Knowledge and perspectives from this inquiry aim to provide understandings of pedagogical reasoning, underpinning educational thinking, and vulnerability as a professional in outdoor education.

Landscapes of Belonging: Systematically Marginalized Students and Sense of Place and Belonging in Outdoor Experiential Education

Landscapes of Belonging: Systematically Marginalized Students and Sense of Place and Belonging in Outdoor Experiential Education

Posthumanist and Postcolonial Possibilities for Outdoor Experiential Education

Background: Teaching and learning in outdoor experiential education is often conducted on lands with troubled histories of settler colonialism. This calls for new and creative forms of socioecological responsibility to attend to human supremacism and exceptionalism that marginalizes, exploits, dominates, and objectifies Other(s) in these Anthropocene times. Purpose: Through posthumanist philosophy (re)conceptualizing Western binary logics, this article explores possibilities for postcolonial land ethics in outdoor experiential education to address past, present, and future socioecological injustices and threats. Methodology/Approach: Adopting new materialist methodologies, this article examines affective materiality emerging from a series of multisensory researcher/teacher enactments, as set within pedagogies attuning-with land with a Grade 4/5 class in Canada. Findings/Conclusions: The affective materiality of sense-making in the researcher/teacher enactments provided opportunities to challenge discursively positioned land ethics, suggesting a transforming-with Other(s) through relationally co-constituted existences. Implications: Understanding that no separate and discrete worldviews exist in which individuals act through autonomous agency, but that worlding emerges through relational agency, teaching, and learning in outdoor experiential education can generate an intrinsic sense of responsibility to attend to more equitable relationships with Other(s) for/with/in these Anthropocene times.

Helping Preservice Teachers Learn to Negotiate Sociopolitical Relationships Through a Physical Education Teacher Education Outdoor Education Experience

Physical education teacher education programs are tasked with preparing students for a teaching career in a field that possesses inherent challenges. Purpose: The current study, designed as a descriptive case study, examined how an outdoor education field experience can facilitate important learning for preservice teachers about navigating sociopolitical relationships among colleagues and the greater school community. Method: Interviews were conducted with 13 preservice physical educators and the course instructor, in addition to field observations. Results: An outdoor education experience that includes opportunities to interface with and reflect on working with various stakeholders can help preservice teachers learn to navigate sociopolitics and persist through challenges. Discussion/Conclusion: Despite challenges, the nontraditional and intensive nature of the field experience, as well as the positive relationships developed with students, compelled the preservice teachers to find effective ways to collaborate and manage teaching roles.

Songwriting for nature: increasing nature connection and well-being through musical creativity

We conducted two field studies to examine whether songwriting retreats held in a natural setting would increase nature connectedness, as well as improve emotional well-being and performance on a creative reasoning task. In the first study, high school students took part in songwriting instruction either in their school or at a national wildlife conservation area. Results showed that the natural setting uniquely increased nature connection, while both settings improved mood and creative reasoning performance. In the second study, we observed similar effects for adults who attended songwriting retreats at the same conservation area and compared this to results from a science-based workshop in another remote natural area to assess whether nature connection effects were entirely attributable to nature contact. The findings of these studies imply that both musical creativity and outdoor education experiences improve well-being, while outdoor education also increases nature connectedness, and songwriting also increases creative reasoning.

Beings Who Are Becoming: Enhancing Social Justice Literacy

Background: The Association for Experiential Education identifies social justice as one of its core values. One recent state of knowledge paper explored the confluence of outdoor experiential education and social justice. Social justice theory embraces the idea that social identities do not exist independently. Rather, race, class, sexuality, skin color, and gender (among other identities) exist in intersectionality. Purpose: This article adopts an intersectional approach to review relevant literature and to provide narrative illustrations that offer insights into the concept of social justice literacy. Methodology/Approach: The article is conceptual and adopts an intersectional approach, highlighting relevant literature, theories, and narratives. Findings/Conclusions: The article illuminates prevalent issues and offers practical insights for facilitators and educators on how to enhance social justice literacy and praxes. Implications: The article provides opportunities for outdoor experiential educators to better understand their own privilege and to develop new understandings and actionable behaviors.

Camp as an Institution of Socialization: Past, Present, and Future

Background: Summer camps are perhaps the most expansive outdoor experiential education (OEE) context in the United States today; yet, camp participants are overwhelmingly White and able-bodied, with most coming from middle- to upper-income earning families. Purpose: In response to Warren, Roberts, Breunig, and Alvarez’s question “What will it take before OEE programs become genuinely accessible to all who want to participate?” (p. 98), we explore issues of access, equity, and inclusion within the institution of camp. Methodology/Approach: We present a historical review followed by three case studies that demonstrate how some camps address access, equity, and inclusion in the past and today. Findings/Conclusions: Camps in the United States have shaped young people for over a century through powerful socializing factors, but there is much to be done to ensure camps are truly accessible and inclusive for all. Implications: Our case studies demonstrate specific ways camps can address appropriation of Native American culture and ensure inclusion of transgender youth and youth without the resources necessary to attend camp. We also discuss ways to promote equity across social identities and through environmental justice.

Outward Bound and Civic-Minded: The Impact of an Outward Bound Course on Students’ Understanding of and Experiences With Public Service

Research on individuals’ experiences engaging in outdoor education programs suggests participants are impacted in a number of ways. This study investigated the impact of participation in a wilderness education course on undergraduates’ experiences with public service. This study asked the research question, what is the impact of an Outward Bound course on students’ understanding of and experiences with public service? Participants (n = 109) were undergraduate students who completed a 28-day Outward Bound course between 2002 and 2017. Qualitative data that informed the study included interviews, impact statements, and survey responses. The findings demonstrate a relationship between an outdoor education experience and public service, which can be understood most clearly through considering the development of knowledge, skills, dispositions, and behavioral intention associated with the Civic-Minded Graduate.Subscribe to JOREL