Outdoor learning: Pedagogic concept, practice context and hybrid field.

This presentation reports on an ongoing project we are undertaking with outdoor educators in Western Australia and Wales, UK. We present an analysis of an emerging space forming around the practice of outdoor learning (ranging from aquatic adventure activities to climbing, to mountain yoga). We consider this space important because of the novel ways it connects with existing educational and social structures, and how it indicates likely future directions of development. In what follows, first we locate outdoor experiential learning in the context of multiple reflexive modernities, in which increasing levels of destabilising change are occurring. Consequently, many individuals are feeling increasingly alienated from their local environments, nature and even themselves and a variety of ontological insecurities are becoming more apparent including anomie, melancholy, disenchantment, disempowerment, and social, status and climate anxieties. Next, we identify outdoor experiential learning within this context. While outdoor/experiential learning is not new, this specific re-combination aptly reflects a phenomenon we observe people engaging in as an intuitive, antidotal and preventative response to the destabilising processes described above. Outdoor experiential learning involves holistic learning of and through the physical. A primary pedagogy is dispositional and affective (re)attunement, specifically including goals such as mental and physical wellbeing, self-actualisation, community development, embedment of ecological, environmental consciousness, cultural awareness and various forms of active citizenship. The desire for the outdoor or "outdoorsiness" suggests a degree of re-enchantment with the material natural world, where the embodied self is once again free to confront and be moved by the natural elements and forces of nature. The experiential element offers a rebuttal of spectacularised, mediatised, ocular-centric culture. It seeks an alternative ontology where the body is affectively tuned with itself, others and the environment: desiring, communicative, dyadic and located in the present time. Finally, learning in this context suggests a refusal of passivity, closure and rigidity, embracing choice and agency through accumulations of embodied knowing. Finally, we position outdoor experiential learning as an educational sub-space or liminal field occurring at the boundaries of a range of fields and institutions. It might also be described, following Whitchurch (2008) as a type of ‘third space,’ a liminal sub-field existing between, the state, private and voluntary sectors characterised by a blurring of boundaries, between the academic and non-academic, the formal and informal curriculum, the individual, group and environment and the competitive and participative.