Developing a place-based approach to outdoor education in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Research team:Teaching staff from Mount Maunganui College and Ngaruawahia High School; Crispin Hills, research assistant.
This Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) funded project seeks to work collaboratively with teachers to understand how they conceptualise teaching and learning in outdoor education.
The researchers will explore the possibilities made available by linking outdoor education with sites of local significance and meaning for participants, investigate how both teachers and students respond to a place-based approach, and disseminate these findings to the broader outdoor education community.
Consideration of where outdoor education is conducted, and students' connections with such places, changes the dynamics with regard to the activities that might be undertaken and the relationships between the teacher, the learner and the broader community. The project is of importance given the growing body of literature critiquing some of the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary outdoor education practices and their impact on student learning and safety.
This project is significant in that it works with practitioners to understand, and potentially reshape, contemporary outdoor education practices. Approaches to outdoor education that focus on the provision of activities involving risk and challenge have largely been informed by theories and practices that were generated in the United Kingdom and North America. As such they have not generally been responsive to the social, historical, cultural and geographical affordances and constraints in which New Zealand outdoor education teachers and their students teach and learn. The primary outcome of this project will be the articulation of an outdoor education pedagogy that reflects the needs and aspirations of teachers and learners who are conscious of connecting with places of meaning and their communities.
For further information visit the TLRI website: http://www.tlri.org.nz/
Project outputs
Brown,M. (2012). Developing a place-based approach to outdoor education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Outdoor ed in our place: "Keepin' it real". Wellington: Teaching Learning Research Intiative. (PDF 272.34 KB)
Intentions poster (PDF 64.35 KB)
Wattchow, B., & Brown, M. (2011). A pedagogy of place: Outdoor education for a changing world. Victoria, Australia: Monash University Publishing.