Rethinking Outdoor, Experiential and Informal Education

Beyond the Confines

Tony Jeffs, Jon Ord

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351590037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book seeks to bring together the two disciplines of informal and outdoor education, and challenges readers to think differently about outdoor and adventure education. It develops core ideas and thinking about informal education within outdoor settings, and explores how its principles and practice can enhance outdoor education.

A wide range of contributors look in detail at the concept of change in the outdoors, whilst also considering the ways in which this expanding field might exploit opportunities offered to young people and adults to engage in reflective informal education. It encourages outdoor educators to experience their immediate surroundings in new and innovative ways and grasp the challenge of promoting a sustainable lifestyle.

Offering a fresh perspective on shifting the outdoor education agenda from that of skills acquisition and 'narrow learning' to the social and political, as well as aesthetic and philosophical opportunities embodied within the outdoor experience, this book will be valuable reading for those studying or working in the field of outdoor education.

1

ORIGINS OF OUTDOOR AND ADVENTURE EDUCATION

Tony Jeffs

Outdoor and adventure education is a long rope comprising many strands. That rope remains unfinished. Thanks to the creativity of practitioners it is still being extended as long-standing modes of practice are remodelled and renewed. Simultaneously it is broadened as new pursuits, such as freerunning, coasteering, urban exploring and skyrunning are woven into the fabric to meld with traditional formats. In part the rope’s strength derives from the accumulated experiences and theories of practitioners seamlessly transferred via conversation, observation and instruction from one worker to another, one generation to another. Just as conversation and dialogue with colleagues helps us to accumulate knowledge of experiences and dangers we have never encountered or techniques as yet untried, so by the same means we acquire theories and ideas from articles and books we may never read or hear of. This is why even snatched ‘professional’ conversations can be so productive. Just as the sensible practitioner values the chance to learn from their contemporaries so the wise outdoor educator relishes the prospect of learning from the expertise of those who went before.

The strength and resilience of outdoor and adventure education emanates from a blending of fieldwork and research which broadens our understanding and deepens our awareness. Consequently, holding onto the analogy of the rope, we can picture an entity that takes ideas and activities, history and vision, analysis and action, and by drawing them together like the strands of a rope gives strength from one to another. This creative interplay of theory and practice, ideas and action, with each nurturing the other and each modifying the other, is not unique to outdoor and adventure education; indeed it is the hallmark of any vibrant profession or area of study. This process, whereby theory changes practice and practice changes theory is what philosophers and educationists often refer to as praxis. It is not a new concept. Aristotle, over 2,300 years ago, maintained there were essentially three fundamental human activities – theoria (thinking), poisis (making) and praxis (doing). He believed ‘life is praxis, not doing. Mere doing is the function of the slave’ (1999, 7.2: 1325). Praxis ultimately entails making wise and prudent practical judgements ‘about how to act’ in given situations (Carr and Kemmis, 1986: 190). Hannah Arendt (1958), one of the last century’s most influential political philosophers, argued it was this application of theoria via praxis that uniquely makes us human, dissimilar from animals and plants. Paulo Freire, who acquired a similar status to Arendt in relation to adult and informal education, likewise spoke of humans ‘as beings of praxis’ who as such had the ability to ‘transform’ the world and ‘humanise it’ (1970: 455).

Exploiting the past

Nothing stands still. Outdoor and adventure education has been unrelentingly reshaped by ‘praxis’ - the interplay of theory and practice, ideas and activity, policy and procedure – much as it has been buffeted by changes occurring in the wider social, economic and physical environment. This perpetual state of flux is at best exciting, at worse unsettling, but either way it is possible to secure a better grasp of what is happening today and construct a notion of the current trajectory of travel by acquiring an awareness of the dynamics of how the building blocks of practice abrade one against another. However this can only be achieved by first interrogating our knowledge of where we have come from. But Galbraith warns us one cannot simplistically require history to ‘pay a dividend’ (1964: 59), for it never obligingly tells us with unerring accuracy what will unfold in the near or distant future. A knowledge of history will, however, help us acquire a superior comprehension of the world around us and contemporary forms of practice, thereby ensuring we are equipped to more adroitly handle the inescapable changes we inevitably encounter during our working lives. Isaac Newton, in a letter written in 1676 to Robert Hooke, a fellow scientist and long-term rival, reminded his colleague that one can always see ‘a little further’ by ‘standing on the shoulders of Giants’ (Iliffe, 2007). It is a maxim that applies with equal force to outdoor and adventure education. To better second-guess where outdoor and adventure education is heading, we, like Newton, must be prepared to stand ‘upon the shoulders’ of the giants who preceded us. Indeed to comprehend contemporary outdoor and adventure educational practices it is wise to secure an appreciation of the ideas and modus operandi that have shaped it, much as ‘one cannot understand the English landscape, town or country, or savour it to the full, apprehend all it’s wonderful variety without going back to the history that lies behind it’ (Hoskins, 1963: 219).Thankfully to help us do so we have Ogilivie’s (2013) magnificent history of outdoor education as well as articles proffering adroit summations of the sector’s development, such as Nicol (2002a, b, 2003), Cook (1999) and Brookes (2016). In addition, fine biographies are available on the lives and work of many pioneers including Kurt Hahn (Rohrs, 1970; Miner, 1990), John Muir (Worster, 2008) and Robert Baden-Powell (Jeal, 1989). Consequently, diligent students and inquisitive practitioners can autonomously carve a route through the thicket to piece together a comprehensive insight into the key events, thinkers and pioneers who created the field of practice they now occupy.

Burrowing down

Given the availability of the literature underscored at the close of the last paragraph, this chapter opts to concentrate on ideas that shaped current provision. But how far back should one delve? That question generates some palpable obstacles not least because the terms ‘outdoor education’ and ‘adventure education’ surfaced relatively recently. According to Knapp (2000), the former emerged in a 1943 article by Lloyd Sharp, a noted American pioneer within the field (Carlson, 2011: 123).This was two years after Hahn, described somewhat quaintly by Priest and Gass as the ‘grandparent of adventure programming’, opened Aberdovey, the first Outward Bound centre (2005:28). Much has been written regarding Hahn’s singular contribution to the advancement of outdoor and adventure education and it is to that launch, according to Hattie and colleagues, ‘most researchers trace the origins of modern adventure education’ (1997: 44). Irrespective of the validity of that assessment, ‘Outward Bound’ programmes certainly incorporated, like the earlier Moray Badge scheme Hahn launched in 1937, an activity package that included orienteering, search-and-rescue training, athletics and gymnastics, small-boat sailing, ocean and mountain expeditions, obstacle courses and community service – which encompass the core ingredients of what soon became known as outdoor education. Baden-Powell similarly formulated a syllabus for Scouting, which he launched in 1908, that comprised most of the activities that the Moray Badge scheme and outdoor education amalgamated within their remit. Therefore in essence the format pre-dated the title. ‘Adventure education’ was similarly absent from our lexicon prior to 1971 and the inauguration of the Massachusetts-based Project Adventure Program (Prouty, 1990). Again the designated activities and educational layout can be encountered long before the categorisation entered everyday language. Therefore a compromise is required if we are to avoid burrowing ceaselessly back in time fruitlessly searching for when, say, the first individuals took a boat out for pleasure rather than to fish or trade, or walked a hillside for enjoyment rather than to scavenge or hunt. To escape this entrapment the author is going to begin with the decades either side of 1712.

Why 1712? First because it was in that year Thomas Newcomen, a village blacksmith in Dartmouth, assembled the first practical steam engine, thereby signalling the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Second, during the same year Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva and England’s last trial of a woman for witchcraft took place; the last executions occurred four years later. What links these disparate events was that they are signifiers of the passing of one historical era and the onset of another. Another was the publication in 1690 of John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, widely seen as the precursor of a century of ‘rationalism and reason’. Dubbed the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ or the ‘Age of Reason’, this was an ‘age’ shaped by a philosophical and social movement that swept across Europe. The Enlightenment was a philosophical idea and an historical phenomenon. Rousseau was by no means the preeminent Enlightenment thinker, but he more than any other paid sustained attention to the content and format of education, and linked it to a consideration of the dynamic relationship between mankind and nature. Thus Rousseau, despite his shortcomings as a philosopher and human being (he was a neglectful parent and fickle friend), has a special place in relation to the development of outdoor education. Finally, in 1720 Gilbert White was born in Selborne (Hampshire). White authored The Natural History of Selborne, commonly viewed as the first ‘ecological book’. Comprising White’s letters to colleagues, it laid the foundation for the modern study of nature and rural life. One measure of its importance is that it has been re-published every year since its launch in 1788 (Scruton, 2012: 332). A German edition, the first of numerous translations of White’s book, appeared four years after it was initially published in Britain (Mabey, 1986). Now we will look at what links Newcomen’s and White’s work and an emerging philosophical movement to the advancement of outdoor and adventure education.

Satanic mills

By stages the machines that tumbled forth following Newcomen’s breakthrough eliminated many time-honoured restraints upon mankind’s productive capacity, thereby manufacturing the conditions for a seemingly limitless multiplication of goods, wealth and people. Usually referred to in its initial stages as the Industrial Revolution, it is a revolution whose momentum up to the present has never totally subsided, although it has always progressed in fits and starts. Currently it seems to be once again gathering impetus with the advance of robotics, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and computerisation. This upsurge is transforming the world in ways Newcomen and his contemporaries surely never predicted. But it is never solely the means of production that alters. As Virginia Woolf, whose father Leslie Stephen between 1858 and 1871 conquered nine previously unclimbed Alpine peaks and was for a time president of the Alpine Club, recalled during the period stretching from her youth to the late eighteenth century, the process of industrialisation meant:

All human relationships have shifted: those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature. (1924: 5)

Britain’s population in 1712 was six million, eighty per cent of whom lived in small towns, villages and hamlets. Mostly tied to the land, they produced food-employing techniques familiar to generations of their ancestors. By the time Woolf was born in 1882, scientific methods, new machinery and the application of industrial techniques meant British agriculture, supplemented by imports made feasible by the arrival of railways, canals and steamships, was able with an ever-diminishing workforce to feed a population six times larger than that of 1712.Year-on-year a steady flow of farm workers departed (or were evicted from) the countryside and relocated in the new industrial centres or emigrated, until around 1810 Britain became the first urbanised nation, one where a majority lived in towns or cities of over 20,000. It was a contagious trend, as gradually across the world in terms of population and wealth the urban began to eclipse the rural. The shrinkage of the agricultural workforce meant the countryside’s appearance altered, as working communities decayed or were transformed into dormitory units for urban areas within ‘easy’ reach, retirement havens or tourist destinations. It has been this restructuring that made available so much of the ‘open space’ outdoor and adventure education, and other ‘leisure’ pursuits have been able to colonise.

As the nation urbanised, so the population grew. Between 1800 and 1850 it doubled, then doubled again by 1900, despite millions emigrating to the USA and colonies. Cities such as Liverpool, Middlesbrough and Leeds seemingly emerged from thin air and wealth accumulated, albeit somewhat haphazardly, on an unprecedented scale. There were tangible benefits, but industrialisation and urbanisation generated what social scientists term ‘diswelfares’. Diswelfares are the price some, often a majority, pay for the progress enjoyed by others. Reisman explains this process as follows:

A opens a railway and B makes a trip – but C loses his forest as a consequence of the sparks. D opens a factory and E buys his goods – but, the river polluted, F as a result can neither fish nor swim. (2001: 159)

Reisman’s examples show how diswelfares are inescapable by-products of unregulated industrialisation, for new technological developments and workplace innovations propagate losers as well as winners. In relation to the environment it warns us we face a perpetual struggle to manage the diswelfares resulting from the extraction of minerals, the use of agri-business techniques, the enlargement of the tourist industry and a demand for greater mobility.

Initially during the first century of industrialisation the diswelfares included overcrowded slums; poor or non-existent sanitation; excessive working hours; grinding poverty; an absence of health care; minimal educational provision; adulterated food; hazardous working conditions; and despoliation of the natural environment in pursuit of raw materials and cheap food. Cumulatively these resulted in urban dwellers having a life expectancy half that of their rural compatriots. In Manchester during the 1830s sixty per cent of children died before their fifth birthday and those who survived enjoyed a life expectancy of just nineteen years (Jones, 1991). Little by little consciences were pricked, righteous anger harnessed and self-interest redirected until the worst excesses were set aside. Since 1840 life expectancy across Britain has improved along with living standards, educational provision, housing and access to free time. Post-1840 it has on average increased by three months per annum (Gratton and Scott, 2016).

Industrialisation and urbanisation redefined our relationship with the countryside and nature. In 1712 three-quarters of the British population worked the land; today it is barely one per cent of the labour force. Yet current output eclipses that of earlier periods; these new farming methods have altered the social structure, appearance and ecological balance of rural Britain. Variations in life expectancy and living standards between urban and rural localities in advanced industrialised nations are now a distant memory. But the overcrowding, pollution, crime rates and sheer ugliness of so much of urban Britain ensure the countryside is still viewed as a healthier alternative, the ‘other’ promising respite, relaxation, rest and recuperation. Hence the countryside and coast are where outdoor and adventure education predominately occurs, the destination to which parties are transported to improve their physical and mental well-being, the setting which promises a chance to step back, relax and form fresh perspectives on life.

Working weeks of seventy-plus hours meant the overwhelming majority of urban dwellers were effectively imprisoned in the towns and cities where they laboured during those first decades of industrialisation. Only the better-off were able to escape to the countryside or coast for holidays or exercise. Nevertheless by 1800 the outflow of ‘visitors’ was sufficient to warrant the publication of the earliest guide books. Amongst the first was William Hutchinson’s ‘account’ of his ‘Excursion’ to the Lake District complete with accounts of his ascent of selected peaks...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the contributors
• 1 Origins of outdoor and adventure education
• 2 Theorising outdoor education: Purpose and practice
• 3 Experiential education: The importance of John Dewey
• 4 Informal education and the outdoors
• 5 The living landscape: Being in place
• 6 Wilderness and informal education: Importance of wild places and spaces
• 7 Mountains, climbing and informal education
• 8 Water environments and informal education
• 9 Development in the outdoors: An asset-based approach
• 10 ‘Living together’: Making the most of the residential experience in outdoor and adventure education
• 11 Fostering sustainability in outdoor and informal education
• Subject Index
• Author Index