Dartmouth Outward Bound Center and the rise of experiential education, 1957–1976

PurposeThe article discusses Outward Bound's participation in the human potential movement through its incorporation of T-group practices and the reform language of experiential education in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Design/methodology/approachThe article reports on original research conducted using materials from Dartmouth College and other Outward Bound collections from 1957 to 1976. It follows a case study approach to illustrate themes pertaining to Outward Bound's creation and evolution in the United States, and the establishment of experiential education more broadly.FindingsBuilding on prior research (Freeman, 2011; Millikan, 2006), the present article elaborates on the conditions under which Outward Bound abandoned muscular Christianity in favor of humanistic psychology. Experiential education provided both a set of practices and a reform language that helped Outward Bound expand into the educational mainstream, which also helped to extend self-expressive pedagogies into formal and nonformal settings.Research limitations/implicationsThe Dartmouth Outward Bound Center's tenure coincided with and reflected broader cultural changes, from the cold war motif of spiritual warfare, frontier masculinity and national service to the rise of self-expression in education. Future scholars can situate specific curricular initiatives in the context of these paradigms, particularly in outdoor education.Originality/valueThe article draws attention to one of the forms that the human potential movement took in education – experiential education – and the reasons for its adoption. It also reinforces emerging understandings of post-WWII American outdoor education as a product of the cold war and reflective of subsequent changes in the wider culture to a narrower focus on the self.

Theory and Praxis in Experiential Education: Some Insights From Gestalt Therapy

Background: Higher education policy increasingly conceptualizes industry-linked, service, and place-based forms of education in terms of experiential education. Although potentially promising, this turn toward experience risks instrumentalizing and marketizing experience, which is exacerbated by individualized theories of experiential learning. Purpose: Some scholars have therefore called for more sociological accounts of experiential learning, inviting deeper consideration of how individual experience is connected to social, cultural, or environmental factors. Methodology/Approach: This article responds to that call by explicating the praxis of Gestalt therapy, often associated with the individualistic human potential movement, but which nevertheless offers a framework for reconceptualizing theory and pedagogy of experiential education in more sociological terms. A brief history of Gestalt therapy foregrounding its sociological and experiential basis is followed by explanation of the three pillars of Gestalt therapy (commitment to dialogue, phenomenology, and field theory). Findings/Conclusions: This framework is shown to support a more sociologically oriented theory and praxis of experiential education that also integrates divergent understandings of experience. Implications: Given the turn toward experience in higher education and contemporary flourishing of cooperative social processes in general, defining experiential education more explicitly in terms of Gestalt praxis promises a timely enhancement of both, in the service of socially responsible objectives.

The Americanization of Kurt Hahn’s Values: Commentary on “Outward Bound and Civic Minded”

This commentary discusses a 2019 JOREL article by Cheryl Bolick and Ryan Nilsen that reported on a study of the way Outward Bound participants came to define public service after their courses. The present essay elaborates on the “pluralistic” view of service, which they found to be prevalent. This view can be contrasted with Outward Bound founder Kurt Hahn’s “traditionalistic” view based in muscular Christianity. The commentary here argues that the pluralistic view is an artifact of Outward Bound USA’s affiliation with the human potential movement in the 1970s and is aligned with the civic tradition known as expressive individualism.

The interpreter as a citizen diplomat

The article presents a case of interpretation as a political activity during the Cold War. In the 1980s and 1990s, a grassroots citizen diplomacy movement was initiated by the Californian Esalen Institute, the center of the American Human Potential Movement. In and around its Soviet-American exchange program, numerous individuals, NGOs and organizations established personal relationships and professional exchange with citizens of the two super powers and travelled in both directions. Interpreters had a complex and crucial role in this exchange which was different from both the professional experience of conference and of communal interpreting.