Table Of Content

Experiencing the Outdoors RESEARCHING ENVIRONMENTAL LEARNING Volume 2 Series Editor David B. Zandvliet, Simon Fraser University, Canada Scope There continues to be growing concern about the state of the environment, yet we are often confused by the complexities of economic, ethical, political, and social issues related to it. Daily, there are references in the news media to environmental issues such as global climate change, ozone depletion, dwindling resources, famine, disease, loss of biodiversity, pollution, and continuing job losses in many BC communities. The problems we face both as individuals and within our broader society are now so pervasive and ingrained within our cultural ways of being that we can no longer look to education about science and technology alone to solve these problems. Resultantly, environmental learning can and should include a sustained critique on dominant societal and industrial practices that often contribute to widespread and localized environmental problems. We must also turn to ourselves as individuals, as researchers and as educational professionals to make change and develop a new ethic – a responsible attitude toward caring for the earth. Working to integrate environmental learning within all subject areas promotes this change in attitude by providing students with opportunities to experience and investigate the relationships linking individuals, societies, and natural surroundings. Education ‘about’, ‘in’ and ‘for’ the environment provides students with opportunities to learn about the functioning of natural systems, to identify their beliefs and opinions, consider a range of views, and ultimately make informed and responsible choices for themselves, their families and communities. This book series aims to look at environmental learning and the associated educational research related to these practices from a broad and international perspective. Experiencing the Outdoors EnhancingStrategiesforWellbeing ForewordbyPeteHay Editedby MargaretRobertson,RuthLawrenceandGregoryHeath LaTrobeUniversity,Australia SENSEPUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM/BOSTON/TAIPEI AC.I.P.recordforthisbookisavailablefromtheLibraryofCongress. ISBN978-94-6209-942-5(paperback) ISBN978-94-6209-943-2(hardback) ISBN978-94-6209-944-9(e-book) Publishedby:SensePublishers, P.O.Box21858, 3001AWRotterdam, TheNetherlands https://www.sensepublishers.com/ Printedonacid-freepaper Allrightsreserved©2015SensePublishers Nopartofthisworkmaybereproduced,storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmittedinanyformorby anymeans,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,microﬁlming,recordingorotherwise,withoutwritten permissionfromthePublisher,withtheexceptionofanymaterialsuppliedspeciﬁcallyforthepurpose ofbeingenteredandexecutedonacomputersystem,forexclusiveusebythepurchaserofthework. TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword vii Pete Hay Preface xi Margaret Robertson 1. An Early Morning Walk: In Search of ‘the Outdoors’ 1 Margaret Robertson 2. Walking the Ground: (Re)storying Footprints 13 Genny Blades 3. A Canadian Wilderness Expedition from a Danish Perspective: Cultural Analysis and Reflections 25 Erik Mygind 4. Pipe Dreams: A Tale of Two Cities 37 Gregory Lowan-Trudeau 5. Ko Ahau Te Awa Ko Te Awa Ko Ahau: I Am the River, and the River Is Me 49 Mike Brown & Sharyn Heaton 6. Embodiment, Nature and Wellbeing: More Than the Senses? 61 Barbara Humberstone 7. Re-imagining the Outdoor Experience: A Philosophical View 73 Gregory Heath 8. Ecouraging Paddling Participation through Canoe Trail Development in the Barmah Millewa Floodplain Forest, Australia 83 Chris Townsend & Ruth Lawrence 9. Adventure in Leisure: An Exploration of Indoor and Outdoor Climbing Communities 101 Paul Beedie 10. Paying Attention to Perceptual Experience within Nature 113 Marcus Morse 11. The Spaces of Outdoor Learning: An Actor-network Exploration 123 Lesley Hodgson v TABLE OF CONTENTS 12.Environmental and Outdoor Learning in Hong Kong: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives 135 Irene Nga-Yee Cheng & John Chi-Kin Lee 13.Affordances of an Ocean Walk 147 Colin Hoad 14.Best Practice in Outdoor Environmental Education Fieldwork: Pedagogies to Improve Student Learning 165 Glyn Thomas & Brendon Munge 15.Safety Ltd. Inc.: Accident Theory and the Institutionalisation of Outdoor Education 177 Lucas Bester 16.Local Environmental Knowledge of School Students 193 Peter Martin 17.Vocational Training and Higher Education: Using Outdoor Education as a Lens 207 Peter Holmes 18.Realising Sustainability Leadership: Role of Green Non-Government Organisations in Outdoor Environmental Education in Hong Kong Eric Po Keung Tsang 223 19.Rewording the World: Narrative and Nature after Poststructuralism Noel Gough 233 20.The Outdoors as a Fluid Concept Ruth Lawrence, Margaret Robertson and Gregory Heath 245 Author Biographies 249 Index 253 vi PETE HAY FOREWORD Outdoors. Not, Therefore, Indoors Here is one of the great binaries of lived experience, and it is a binary replete with portent. Step outside and you cross one of the great divides of daily existence. Life becomes elemental. You are within the weather, and while you remain outside there is no escaping it. In all sorts of other ways, too, you are vulnerable. There are dangers inside of course, but outside they multiply and proliferate, lurking everywhere. But there is also promise and prospect. Around every corner, every bend in the trail, adventure awaits. There are fortunes to be had: these do not usually manifest as material riches, though they may. Phenomenologically speaking – experientially – the contrast between the being of outdoors and the being of indoors could hardly be more pronounced. This being so, it is puzzling why the multi-faceted nature of the ‘outdoors’ should have been so little explicated in the literature extant. Here, though, is a book that goes far towards rectifying this deficiency. It is a huge task, and the contributors to the book come at their subject from a bewildering variety of perspectives. For some, spiritual and phenomenological framings are foregrounded. For some the focus is pedagogical – this, indeed, is a prominent theme linking the individual contributions. How can, and what might, we learn from experienced encounters out of doors? What might we learn that can be imparted to others? These are questions of very great import. Though some of the relevant surveys may be of questionable reliability, the evidence suggests that we spend perhaps as much as ninety percent of our time indoors, and about two-thirds of our waking hours interacting with digital media. This represents an extraordinary change in how we are in the world – in our very beingness, we might say. In centuries past a much higher percentage of time was spent outdoors. This rapidly changed in the twentieth century; a change that is one of the most profound, one of the most portentous, of all the changes wrought to the human condition in that most revolutionary of centuries. The new technologies that do so much to individuate and to privatise life have, in many ways, been a boon. But it has not all been to the good. One of the most significant consequences of this change is, I think, the growth of subtle but powerful barriers between us and the quick and living world that sustains us. Nature is experienced through the medium of ‘tv docos’. We shop on-line and the product-saturated world comes to us. We install a complete home entertainment package and the social facet of recreational activity is deleted from our lives. We withdraw behind the walls of 46 Maple Street, now, to all intents, its own little fortress. vii FOREWORD In doing this we deny our very species-being, which is, in its very essence, that of a communal animal – an animal that negotiates its humanness in interaction with other humans, and with the context of the living processes within which it moves. We are no longer grounded; no longer sure of where and how we fit within a wider world. An indoors life, then, is one that brings on a crisis in the meaning of what it is to be human, and can only result in pathologies of which we have, as yet, seen only hints. We must all get old, and this is happening to me. I know that most of the peak experiences of my life have already occurred. I look back on them and, yes, some of them have occurred indoors such as memorable concerts. But most of the peak moments in my life have taken place outdoors. Some of these have occurred in urban (or, at least, human-constructed) environments, and involve momentous happenings. In 2011 I dropped into the middle of the great and joyous indignados protests in Madrid, and as I struggled through the throngs on the Paseo de Prado my life changed. But some have not involved momentous happenings, or not at the time of my presence there. Standing by the simply potent memorial at Mouquet Farm on the Somme, in which concentrated World War I charnel ground my great uncle Bert Frimley fell, is one such moment. These experiences changed my life in profound though ineffable ways – and could not have been experienced had I not, on those days, taken the decision to step across the threshold and emerge from under the sheltering, life- softening roof. More often, though, such life-redefining experiences have occurred in settings in which the evidence of human passage is minimal. Again, these may take place within a time otherwise quiet and meditative. Watching the stunning spotted livery of the exquisitely small, soft-eyed Eastern Quoll – a species that is functionally extinct on the Australian mainland – as it goes delicately about its carnivorous business in the light bush of a Bruny Island dusk is one, and a recurring one at that. And, of course, life-shifting moments will occur at times momentous. With one of the contributors to this book I have rafted the Franklin River. I floated under enormous cliffs tricked out in the endlessly variable subtle greens of Gondwana rainforest, and there learned a humility, a realisation of my place in the grand tides of change working an inexorable path through deep time. I came to appreciate the context within which my life unfolds, and what was learned in relation to the elemental world was readily transposable to the human realm. I looked up and out on the Franklin, then – but I also looked down – into the micro worlds at my feet, complex worlds of infinite wonder. ‘Nature loves pizazz’, the American writer, Annie Dillard, once observed, and I knew it to be so. Pizzazz, yes, and so much more besides. I could never have learnt any of this had I stayed indoors. To know my world, and my place in it, I needed to go out to meet it, not quarantine myself off from it behind the four walls on my house. Of course, the greater part of this knowing is ineffable. It is absorbed through the receptive pores of the skin; taken in, in fact, by all the senses. It defies my poor attempts to give it voice. But it is there, and it is known. viii FOREWORD That so much of this knowing is slippery makes the task undertaken by the contributors to this book difficult, but all the more timely. As Lawrence, Robertson and Heath signal in the title of the final essay, ‘the outdoors [i]s a fluid concept’. Most of the contributors herein are at the beginning of their academic careers. I hope they stay with ‘the outdoors’, and look forward to further pathfinding works of scholarship on this important phenomenon. Pete Hay The University of Tasmania ix