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.

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.

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.

Finding New Ways: Developing a Co-Constructed Approach to Excursions in Higher Education

Background: Outdoor Experiential Education (OEE) in the United Kingdom is steeped in tradition. Established practices limit the ability of outdoor professionals to respond to the global challenges of the modern world through locally relevant ways. Internationally, Higher Education (HE) is also currently subject to considerable challenges and its continued relevance can be gauged through its ability to become meaningful in a rapidly changing and pluralistic world. Purpose: We examine the impact of our pedagogical approach to working with international students, developing professional practice informed by one place, set within the context of the needs of the world and framed by the question “what kind of outdoor educator do you want to become?” Methodology/Approach: The authors used Dewey’s concept of occupations as an organizing principle for the curriculum. Four excursions involving 86 students were facilitated and reviewed. Findings/Conclusions: The norms of traditional OEE practices were predominantly overcome and innovative ways of co-creating knowledge emerged. Implications: If outdoor educators develop their own occupation in the context of wider needs, they can become place-responsive as well as continuously open to change.

Cultivating Nature Connection: Instructor Narratives of Urban Outdoor Education

Background: Outdoor education often aims to facilitate positive human–nature relationships and craft healthy, sustainable lifestyles. Processes and outcomes of program innovations seeking to address “nature-deficit disorder” among children can be understood from a narrative perspective. Purpose: This study illuminates how a group of instructors working for a charity-based outdoor organization in Toronto, Ontario, perceive the cultivation of nature connectedness in and through the urban outdoor education programs they facilitate for children. Methodology/Approach: A narrative methodology was used to engage instructors in telling personal stories about their involvement and perceptions of programs they facilitate, and to interpret thematic insights into the broader meanings circulating within this instructor group. Findings/Conclusions: Analyses revealed that instructors story the cultivation of nature connectedness around three spatial metaphors: creating space for nature connection, engaging that space, and broadening that space. Findings cast light on how instructors situate their practices within a broader community committed to mentoring nature connectedness in individuals, families, and society. Implications: Instructor stories shed light on contemporary practices of outdoor experiential education, and the meanings and perceived impacts of nature-based learning. The study contributes to literature illustrating the promise urban outdoor education holds for fostering nature connectedness.

Diversity in the Outdoors: National Outdoor Leadership School Students’ Attitudes About Wilderness

Outdoor experiential education (OEE) programs often cater to white, upper-class individuals. With major demographic shifts occurring in the United States, OEE organizations are confronting this imbalance. The National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) is addressing this issue with its Gateway Scholarship Program. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to determine whether Gateway Scholarship and non-scholarship students held different wilderness attitudes and whether those attitudes changed following NOLS courses. A quantitative posttest and retrospective pretest was administered online ( n = 74), with follow-up telephone interviews ( n = 19). Results showed that Gateway students held less positive pre-course wilderness attitudes than non-Gateway students, but most post-course scores had converged. Both groups experienced positive change in wilderness attitudes. Interview data revealed potential reasons for attitude change and areas of possible concern about the conceptualization of wilderness promoted by NOLS.