Abstract
For many years now, those of us engaged with outdoor education curriculum work in Australia have been debating questions which orbit around the issue of defining outdoor education. We claim to be doing so in order to clarify what we are pursuing educationally, our purpose, not only for ourselves but for others, so that we can legitimately stake out our position, our own little piece of educational turf, amongst the other subjects in the school curriculum. However, this debate has never been easy and any attempts to bring it to a resolution inevitably, it seems, settle some issues while heightening tensions in other areas. In this paper I explore two of the more recent approaches to the question of outdoor education’s positioning in the school curriculum: the question of distinctiveness and the question of indispensability. Then, through an historical excursion involving Australian and US curriculum history, I highlight some of the difficulties created by shifts in language use. Finally I argue, using definitions of outdoor education that emerged in the United States in the 1950s, that the distinctiveness of outdoor education lies in neither a body of knowledge (content) nor skills and practices (process) but in a deeper level of educational understanding which emphasizes ways of being.
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John Quay is a senior lecturer in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne. He has spent many years working with young people and adults in the outdoors in both school and university programmes, but now finds himself sitting in a chair at a computer most of the time, attempting to contribute more through the written word (which may explain his enthusiasm for performing the role of editor for this Journal). His current research interests bring philosophy of education and outdoor education together -3 theory informing practice and vice-versa -3 in order to find ways forward in better understanding what we do.
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Quay, J. Outdoor education and school curriculum distinctiveness: More than content, more than process. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education 19, 42–50 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03400993
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03400993