Introduction

This paper is based on the Brian Nettleton Lecture, given at the Outdoors Victoria Conference, 2022. Brian thought and wrote about large cultural themes and how they impacted on outdoor and environmental education. He developed terms like ‘nature as friend’, ‘new adventures’ and considered how experiences in the outdoors could be ‘transformational’ for young people. With this in mind, in this paper I will explore how the last two decades have seen an ever-accelerating Digital Revolution which has impacted on almost every aspect of human experience to the point that it is now omnipresent in our lives. Life is now mediated through the screen. As a result, children and young people have become hyper-vigilant, overly anxious, experience a sense of climate trauma, and have decreasing access to, and time spent in, the outdoors. And, to cap it off, they now have two years of education and life interrupted by a global pandemic. What now for Outdoors Victoria and outdoor education?

‘Through the unknown, remembered gate’ is a line from T.S. Eliot’s famous poem Little Gidding. It created a powerful image in my mind while I was in the middle of lengthy lockdowns in Victoria due to the Covid 19 pandemic. It was an image of feeling trapped on one side of a gate that would not open. I felt it not only for myself but for all of my students and colleagues at the regional university where I worked. We could see each other daily through the screen in online classes and meetings, but most of us were stuck inside, hankering to open the gate, or the door, and just get outside. I’ll take some time in this paper to work my way through to the origin of that line of poetry, and the poem and the poet, and why I think it is worth reflecting upon in terms of the challenges that we all face in returning to the outdoors in Victoria with our students. I could just as easily titled this presentation; What Does a World War, a Couple of Revolutions and a Global Pandemic Have to Do with Outdoor Education and Outdoors Victoria for reasons that will become clear. We are, indeed, living in unprecedented times.

But first, a little personal background. I have recently retired from a career in Secondary and Tertiary education, teaching outdoor education, that spanned four decades. And to pre-date even that, because it is relevant to this presentation, I was raised in a household with two parents who were teachers. My mother was an art teacher and an artist. My father was a teacher of English Literature and History and a school principal. I grew up in a house was full of books – and artworks. What a gift that was. I have had a lifelong love of books and reading as well as art which I will draw upon in this paper. I really encourage you to do a quick online search for the artworks, movie posters and book covers when I refer to them. I think there are some interesting lessons when we reflect upon those works. I also studied Modern European History in my final year of Secondary school in South Australia in 1978, and I’ve been trying to think of a way to get that into a talk since, and this might be my last chance. So, let’s begin.

Pedagogy and some of the challenges facing children

Pedagogical Tact, is a book by Max van Manen, a Canadian educational philosopher and I think it makes a good launching point for this paper. There’s that word - pedagogy. I try and explain it to students by going back to the Ancient Greek origins of the word. The pedagogue was the person in a family, a servant usually, who was given the task of taking the hand of the young child and walking them to and from school. Along the way the pedagogue’s task was to teach the young child good manners, how greet people, to be respectful and be observant of their world. This everyday education lay important foundations for the child to grow into being a good citizen. That is the image being a good pedagogue, or teacher, that I like my students to reflect upon. The word translates as ‘the child leader’.

This is how van Manen uses the word, which he joins with the notion of ‘tact’, in the title of his book. The sub-title of the book is Knowing What to Do When We Don’t Know What to Do. The book cover uses a beautiful painting called Into the Water! by Virginie Demont-Breton which she completed in 1898. The painting hangs in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. It shows a mother cradling an infant in one arm while leading a slightly older, resistant young child across the sand and into the waters of a calm sea. When I look at the painting, I try to imagine her thoughts: ‘This child must learn to swim to be safe’, she thinks. ‘The child must learn to love the water’. Her expression is one of deep concern. Is this the right time for this important lesson? How to overcome the child’s fear and reluctance? It is an apt depiction, perhaps, of the challenges we face in working with young people at this moment in history – as we all re-emerge from pandemic lockdowns and pass back through that gateway that leads us back to the outside world.

Over the last few decades, we have seen a rising crisis in children and youth. There is ample research-based evidence that highlights this. Three quarters of UK children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates (Carrington, 2016). Reasons cited include lack of access to green spaces, digital technology and parents’ fears. Richard Louv famously wrote Last Child in the Woods, and coined the term ‘Nature-Deficit-Disorder’ (Louv, 2010). According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare: 12 per cent of children, and only two per cent of adolescents, meet the recommended daily physical activity and screen-based behaviour guidelines. That’s one hour of moderate physical activity per day as a minimum, and no more than two hours of screen time per day as a maximum. According to The Australian Institute of Family Studies.

  • 97% of 15 to 17 year olds are online.

  • They spend, on average, 18 hours per week online.

  • Their online activities include social networking, entertainment and education.

  • They exhibit risk taking online behaviour exposing them to considerable risks in the online environment.

These risks include cyber bullying, exposure to inappropriate material, online abuse, unwanted online contact, damage to their online reputation, and so on. We talk about hazards and risks a lot in outdoor education and outdoor recreation, but there’s a whole new world of risks that young people now face. In addition to mental health risks there are, as the statistics above suggest, considerable risks to young people’s physical health when they trade time outside, participating in physical activities, for ever-more hours online. But, it seems, the society – and I include us as educators – seem to demand more and more of their time be spent online.

Call it the Digital Revolution or a digital transformation, from the invention of the miniature transistor in 1947 to the world where our devices are now fully interconnected, and seem to monitor our every thought and movement, is a remarkably short passage of time. Whether you have a Utopian view of this new digital world or a Dystopian view is a matter of individual perspective. Whether you think we are living in The Matrix or not is up to you. I can remember in the mid-1980s when the first desktop computer (the only one in the whole school) was brought into the Catholic school I was working in and placed on a desk in the staffroom. At recess or lunch time you had no hope of getting on it, because the Science staff were on it playing Space Invaders. One day, when they had an in service, I managed to creep over to it, had a couple of rounds of Space Invaders and said, ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ And then went back to the ping pong table.

If we believe the headlines, as society returns to some semblance of pre-pandemic normality, education will have changed forever. The pandemic has accelerated and exacerbated the kind of online world – for better and for worse – that we all live in, especially for young people. And this is just as true or relevant for those of us working with young people in the outdoors. I believe it would be a mistake to think we can return to ‘business as usual’ in running our outdoor activities and programs.

Recent doctoral research by Keeble (2020) in Victoria, and Polley (2021) in South Australia, suggests a fairly ‘steady as she goes’ approach in the aims, aspirations and practices of outdoor education. As part of his review of literature Keeble analysed research that had been conducted into how OE teachers ranked the importance of learning outcomes. This included studies in Victoria, South Australia, New Zealand, Singapore as well as in Victoria’s Residential Outdoor Schools Association campuses. His review indicates that the greatest emphasis continues to be have been placed on individual outcomes (like self-esteem, taking personal responsibility). After this, the next highest ranked outcomes have been on the ability to participate effectively in a ‘group’, and then on developing relationships with nature. This suggests to me that the notion of providing outdoor learning experiences being about ‘self, others and nature’ remains central to the ambitions of outdoor educators. The lowest ranked learning outcomes included the acquisition of recreational skills and fitness benefits for students. Given the profound changes experienced by young people as a result of the Digital Revolution, compounded by the pandemic, I think it timely for outdoor educators to review the emphasis we place on these ‘staple’ outcomes. But, first, a historical diversion.

Learning to read environmental history

I had been working in secondary education as a teacher of physical and outdoor education for about six years when I decided I needed to know more about my profession. This led me to undertake a Master of Education degree at the University of Calgary, Canada, which I commenced in mid-1988. I encountered some astounding tertiary teachers. The approach to education in universities in Canada at that time was very liberal and we studied everything from educational philosophy, through to ecology, adventure, experiential learning, and so on. And, of course, we spent as much time as possible climbing, paddling, skiing and back packing in the Rockies.

While Max van Manen wasn’t one of my teachers, it was here that I began to read his books on a phenomenological approach to teaching. His ideas have influenced my educational philosophy and practice since. My supervisor and mentor Bill March, a noted mountaineer and writer, saw my interest in wilderness and taking people outdoors. He recommended I take a class with Professor Stephen Herrero, who taught a subject called Environmental Reserves, that traced the history of environmental conservation and the environmental movement. This class was run from seven to 10:00pm on a Wednesday evening, in midwinter, in Calgary.

Now Steve had been a pioneer in big wall climbing in Yosemite in the 1960s and, even more notably, was known as the world expert on bear attacks. The first evening class saw 20 to 30 students crowding into a small tutorial room with space for about a dozen. The imposing Steve fixed us with his steely glare, and simply said; “This is a serious class with lots of reading and discussion. I like to have about 12 people in this class. Looks like there are about 30 here. I think by about Week 2 or 3 we’ll be down to 12. Here’s the first week’s reading, Wilderness and the American Mind, by Nash (1967). Read it before Week 2. You need to know it, through and through.”

Fortunately, I had been given a copy a few weeks earlier by a departing student and was already half way through its four hundred plus pages. I put my head down and got my way through Nash’s monumental study and fronted up to the first class. Steve’s MO was simply to go around the room, posing questions randomly at students. “Brian, tell us about the philosophical movement called primitivism in France into the late 1700s and its impact on the rise of Romanticism in Western Europe.” If you couldn’t answer, Steve’s gaze was withering enough to have you think seriously about fronting up the following week. His estimate of the final class size was unerringly accurate. As a brief aside, I recommend only the brave attempt Nash’s monumental work. It was hard work. Those interested might find Max Oelschlaeger’s The Idea of Wilderness (1991) more digestible.

It was a demanding but thoroughly wonderful class and gave me a knowledge base that explained the rise of the National Parks movement, the history of the conservation movement, the ecology of recreation management and, of course, what to do in the event of bear attack! We read Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson and many others. Not only did this provide a foundation of knowledge for my profession but it further increased my sensibility to how studying history might help us with challenges we face today. Which brings us to ‘Through the unknown, remembered gate’. You may be familiar with the oft quoted lines from ‘Little Gidding’, which was part of Eliot’s collection titled Four Quartets (1943) - We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. But for me, it is the latter lines, suggesting a desire to escape into the outdoors, and experience a childlike return to nature, that are more interesting.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea

Quick now, here, now, always--

A condition of complete simplicity.

A poet, world war II and operation pied piper

Cultural commentators are suggesting that the global pandemic has led us to the biggest seismic shift in how we experience life since the World War II. T. S. Eliot survived the London Blitz - the bombing of London that saw mass casualties and destruction of much of the city. He would, no doubt, have also been aware of the plight of young people during the Blitz. So concerned was the British Government about the bombing of London and likely invasion that they launched Operation Pied Piper in early September, 1939. Two million children were moved out of London over a weekend and were sent to the countryside. They were packed up, said goodbye to Mum and Dad, were put on a train and sent, supposedly, away from danger.

While Eliot was inspired by the history of an Anglican religious community that formed in Little Gidding, and his poem employs the imagery of a Pentecostal fire, I am taken with his reference to the innocence of youth as a way of commenting on the evils of war. Eliot survived the Blitz and also retreated to the rural, picturesque English countryside. I imagine him contemplating what it would mean for a child to survive this kind of experience as he crafted his lines of poetry.

Removed from the city, some of the children had happy billets, or foster parents. Some were put to work. Some stayed in small town institutions. Girls attended open air sewing classes. Boys worked in the fields. But, it wasn’t a good experience for all. An article examining childhood trauma (Wang, 2018) quotes Pam Hobbs, an evacuated as a ten-year old.

Some of my ‘pretend parents’ loved me as if I was their own. One couple showed me what it was like to feel unwanted, to live with hostility and complete indifference to my welfare, and to go hungry. For me, the really sad aspect of this billet was that for the first time in my life I knew what it was like to be unwanted. It founded fears of being unloved and created a lack of self-confidence that stayed with me for years.

The psychologist Anna Freud, daughter Sigmund Freud, completed one of the first large-scale studies of childhood trauma based on the children of Operation Pied Piper. She found that they suffered long term symptoms that we recognise today as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Their mental health suffered more than children who were not evacuated from London. Of the children who were not evacuated, approximately 7000 lost their lives in the Blitz and another 7000 were badly injured. It appears that, as with the Covid pandemic, there are times when there are only choices between the least-worst of options for governments. Freud’s research was primarily into mother-child separation, but it suggests to me that we are going to need to be very alert to the effects of the pandemic induced disruption to normality for children and young people in our community. While they were not all were removed from their families, their lives were completely disrupted on a similar scale and they are likely to exhibit a range of similar mental health conditions to those child evacuees of Operation Pied Piper.

CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, first published in 1950 as part of his Chronicles of Narnia, is the story of a group of young children who were evacuated from London during the Blitz to be billeted in a country estate. The narrative has them pass through a portal (in this case the door of the wardrobe) into the fantasy world of Nania. Here, they must face an adult-like battle between good and evil. Key to the story is that the children suddenly have agency in this new world. It is a story not unlike the contemporary Harry Potter novels. Perhaps it is this sudden acquisition of agency that makes these stories popular and explains why they endure. But I cannot help but have some concerns for how young children are thrown into the world of adult crises when the line between fact and fantasy becomes blurred, as it does now for young people via a few clicks on the internet. Children now are exposed to wars and the effects of climate disasters every day; these battles between good and evil are part of the up-to-the-minute news feed. Which leads me to another brief diversion, if we are to attempt to unpick the locks to the past for lessons for today.

The industrial revolution and its counter movements

As a part of my work in Steve Herrero’s class, and studying in Modern European History at school, I have continued to be fascinated with the Industrial Revolution and its counter movements. The Industrial Revolution (roughly from the mid 18th to 19th centuries in Western Europe) transformed society from one that depended largely upon agriculture and handicraft to an industrial economy of mass production. I believe a knowledge of this history is incredibly important to understand if we are to understand contemporary outdoor recreation and outdoor education. The Industrial Revolution involved as a series of transformative waves, the first of which was the rise of steam power. William Turner’s painting The Fighting Temeraire (1838), depicts modernity in the shape of the compact but mighty, coal-fire powered tug, hauling off the old giant white ghost of a famous battleship of the British Navy. The Fighting Temeraire is being towed away to be broken up in the wrecking yards. The painting heralds the end of one era and the beginning of another.

The other part of the first wave of the Industrial Revolution was the rise of mass production, particularly in the textile industry through the rise of modern spinning mills. A counter movement of rebels, called the Luddites, formed in opposition to their world of small craft guilds being annihilated by the rise of a mass production. The rebels set about raiding spinning mills and took sledgehammers to the modern machinery. Their actions took place between 1811 and 1816, but were quickly seen as a threat to the emerging industrial economy. Under pressure from the industrial capitalists and the government of the day quickly passed a law, the Frame Breaking Act of 1812, that made industrial damage illegal with offenders subject to capital punishment. Many of the Luddites were rounded up and publicly executed, or transported to places like Australia. This first rebellious resistance against the rise of industrial capitalism was quickly extinguished. Yet, there may well be a small ripple of Ludditism in outdoor education, with some of our resistance against the use of modern technology and the desire to make our own canoes and to rely upon our bush skills. For those interested, Nicols Fox (2002) elegant book Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives, describes this history and its lingering effects.

The second wave of the Industrial Revolution involved large-scale production of iron and steel which led to the rise in railways and the mass movement of people. Ironically, some of this movement involved providing easier access for well-off city dwellers to the outdoors, especially to places like England’s Lake District, and the emergence of an embryonic nature tourism industry. Paintings like The Iron Rolling Mill, by Adolph Menzell, seem to depict a heroic masculinity in this modernisation. While Coalbrookdale by Night, (1801) by Philip James de Loutherboug, and the paintings of Edwin Butler Bayliss in particular, present a more pessimistic view of environmental destruction and the subjugation of rural life. These paintings depict how the new factories were polluting and exhausting the countryside. The poet William Blake would famously referred to them as the ‘dark Satanic Mills’. Such environmental destruction is, in part, the setting for JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. We know that Tolkien was writing in part about his experiences in World War I on the Western Front, where he encountered industrial scale warfare. But he was also writing about the Industrial Revolution, where the hobbits represent children, and a way of life that was being destroyed by the endless march of war-like industrialism. For Tolkien fans, perhaps the Mines of Moria and Modor can be seen as representing the furnaces and environmental destruction of the Industrial Revolution.

A second great counter movement to the Industrial Revolution can be seen in the rise of the Romantic Movement. This, I believe, is the origin story of outdoor education. One of the key figures is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1979, first published in French in1762), a French philosopher and writer who wrote,

Send your children out to renew themselves, send them to regain in the open field the strength lost in the foul air of our crowded cities.

That sentiment is easily recognisable to us today. So, let’s take a very, very brief walk through some key ideas about Romanticism. Looking at a painting by John Constable, called The Hay Wain (1821), we see a bucolic English landscape that is under threat of disappearing. Many of his paintings have this quality of rural rusticity. Quick, paint it before it is gone. They are emblematic of the aesthetic ideal of the picturesque. Perhaps of greater interest to us, as outdoor professionals, is the most famous of all Romantic paintings, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), by Caspar David Friedrich. The subject matter here is a person in search of a sublime encounter with wild nature. It marks a significant shift in sensibility. The wanderer stands on a mountain summit and gazes out across a wild landscape. In doing so he hopes to feel the majesty and might of nature, God’s finest creation, and gains a perspective of humanity, small and its rightful place. A final shift in attitude to wild nature can be seen where people were no longer happy just to gaze at the wild from a safe vantage point. Eventually our wanderer steps into the scene, no longer satisfied to stand by, he or she feels the need to participate with wild nature.

This rapidly develops into an early wave of outdoor recreations with the emergence of activities like mountaineering. Gustave Dore’s series of etchings of the First Ascent of the Matterhorn, and the story of that climb, brilliantly depict this fundamental shift. As part of my doctoral studies, I came across Robert Macfarlane’s books. Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination (2003) charts the history of mountaineering and places it in this cultural context. Why were people fascinated with these new risky pursuits? What type of experience were people pursing in these high places? Macfarlane responded by developing the term, the pursuit of ‘pleasurable fear’. It was a penny-dropping moment for me in my own research into paddling and paddlers. How might these new ideas and ideals intersect with our historical understandings of education? For while we might have some renewed understandings of the shift in outdoor aesthetics and participation, the Industrial Revolution and its counter movements had just as a big an impact on modern education.

Which brings us back to Rousseau for his best-known book, Emile, contains a whole philosophy for the education of the young child. Several key ideas emerged out of Emile; that children are different to adults, that they’re born innocent and vulnerable, that they take time to develop, that they develop through stages and phases. And, that the educator’s role is to create a positive learning environment, not necessarily to always instruct them in the ways of being an adult. Rousseau also believed that young children should remain in ignorance of those ideas beyond their grasp. These are all of the hallmarks of Progressive Education, and would be further developed by people like John Dewey in North America, and into what we now call experiential education. While these developments in education were a broad social movement, and Rousseau was only one actor in it, his work is instructive because a book like Emile was foundational in our educational thinking.

It was important because the mainstream view of children in the early Industrial Revolution was simply that they were little people – small versions of adults. Such a view served the industrial capitalists well, because if children were just little versions of adults, it was possible to put them to work like adults – and they did. Young boys made ideal chimney sweeps. Their little bodies were perfect for sending into those hazardous, dangerous work environments. Girls had small, nimble hands and were perfect for working in the textile industry, particularly with fine lace, so they worked long hours on the factory floor. But a groundswell of social movements, including Romanticism, applied pressure to change this industrial exploitation of the young. 1833 saw the first Factory Act which started to regulate the use of child labour. In 1834 the introduction of the Poor Law in the UK, provided public housing for the destitute. These are the foundations of social security that we recognise today. 1880 saw the first Education Act in the UK, that made school compulsory to the age of 10 and, in 1901, a minimum working age of 12 was introduced. Victoria, by the way, had its own Education Act not long after this in the 1880s. Where the physical rebellion of the Luddites failed, the philosophical and intellectual counter movement of Romanticism, changed how we see the natural world, the child and education. Those values remain with us today.

The representation of children in the Australian outdoors

What about developments closer to home. In artworks, stories and poetry from a similar time in Australia, the outdoors is represented as a dangerous place for kids. Frederick McCubbin famously completed a number of paintings depicting children lost in the bush. It was a common motif of the times, and is explored in Peter Pierce’s book The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (1999). McCubbin’s painting Lost (1886) shows a young girl who has wandered off the track and become lost in the alienating Australian bush. There are no landmarks. There is no horizon and she can’t find her way home. The bush seems a dangerous place. This is also evident in Australian literature for young kids. In May Gibbs series of books about Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, first published in 1918, the villains of the stories were the nasty Banksia Men. The message was that parents needed to be ever-vigilant with the children in the Australian landscape, lest the Banksia Men, snatch their baby and take it off into the bush.

This idea of the dangerous bush persisted in Australia until quite recent times. Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock was set in 1900, and was first published in 1967. The haunting film adaptation released in 1975 was very popular. In the story a group of young school girls vanish, assumed to be swallowed up by Hanging Rock, just north of Melbourne, whilst on a Valentine’s Day picnic. Walkabout, a film directed by Nicolas Roeg and released in 1971, shows two very British-like children, abandoned in the outback. Their lives hang in the balance until they encounter a young indigenous boy, played by David Gulpilil. In the film this meeting of cultures reaches a disastrous conclusion. Not only is the outback depicted as inherently dangerous to young non-Indigenous children, their seems a vast gulf of incomprehension between old and new cultures. As the youngest child in a family that valued art and literature, I was taken along to see all these films and read a lot of these, and similar, stories. Walkabout left a fairly lasting impression on this ten year old!

But I think there is a really significant change with a story and film like Storm Boy. The book, by Colin Thiele, and the subsequent film (with screenplay by Sonia Borg, directed by Henri Safran, released in 1976), have remained incredibly popular in the Australian imagination. No doubt part of its appeal was a shift in the portrayal of a landscape like the Coorong. While it could easily have been presented as another example of a harsh and dangerous place – it is represented in both book and film as the opposite. The Coorong was a nurturing landscape for the young Storm Boy. I think we can attribute much of this to Thiele, an educator as well as a writer. Thiele was a teacher, a school principal and then the head of a teacher’s college in Adelaide. Perhaps because he wasn’t inundated by email every night he also managed to write over 100 books in his ‘spare’ time. His experience as a teacher, appears to have given him considerable insight into the lived experience of children. For me, a book like Storm Boy did not seem to present a fantasy world where the child would be expected to resolve the clash of good and evil, or where they were expected to fight the adult’s battle. Storm Boy might be seen to be inspired by Rousseau’s Emile, where the child is given time in nature to slowly mature and to pass through appropriate developmental stages. To an extent the child is protected from civilisation, by growing up in nature. It is likely that an educator like Thiele would have read Emile. And, there is a pedagogue in the story, the Aboriginal man Fingerbone Bill, again played famously by David Gulpilil. It is he who slowly, patiently introduces and educates the young Storm Boy to the ways of the Coorong. As with Romanticism and Emile, the purpose of this act of pedagogical tact, is that the child must ultimately grow to become a fully participating citizen in a democratic society, as someone prepared to defend its values. Finally, as a writer of stories and landscapes for young people, Thiele often hinted at the need to protect and conserve threatened natural environments – another hallmark of Romantic philosophy.

As Australia came out of the 1970s, societal values in relation to the outdoors were changing and they were changing fast. Perhaps the most phenomenal shift in the nation’s perception of the value of wild nature was seen when the Australian Labor Party won the federal election of 5 March 1983. Their campaign had been based largely on their pledge to save the Franklin River from damming in Tasmania. Once in office, they passed the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1983, and ordered the Tasmanian State Government to cease construction on the dam site. The Tasmanian Government’s failure to cease work resulted in one of the most famous legal cases in the Australian High Court - the Commonwealth v Tasmania. The High Court judges voted, by a majority of one, in favour of the Commonwealth’s power to legislate over the states to enforce an international treaty (the World Heritage Act). I think it is no coincidence that the same year, 1983, saw the commencement of the first dedicated higher education outdoor education degree in Australia (in Bendigo). It is this confluence of Romantic and political ideals, and how they have played out in modern times, that leads me back to where we started: the impact with COVID-19 and the Digital Revolution, on the children and young people we work with in the outdoors.

What now for outdoor education and Outdoors Victoria?

When van Manen asks us to consider knowing what do to do when we don’t know what to do, perhaps one of the first things that we should do is talk with, and listen as much as possible, to young people. If you don’t have this opportunity, I recommend The Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s podcast Enough, which presents the voice of young people and the kind of mental health issues and crises they are facing. I ask myself, are we living in the third phase of the Industrial Revolution, or are we in the midst of the next huge cultural shift in history, the Digital Revolution? We call such profound societal changes revolutions only through the power of hindsight. In doing so we acknowledge the impossibility of fully understanding what life would be like on the other side of them.

We have lived in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution for nearly 200 years. If we are in the midst of a Digital Revolution, we are experiencing something we can’t yet see the other side of. But a pre-digital world is fast vanishing in the rear-view mirror. I have no doubt that all of our lives will be profoundly changed and I think we need to reflect on what that means for the work that we do with young people outdoors. As with the interplay of the Industrial Revolution and its counter movements, and the legislation to protect and provide education for children, we are just starting to see the emergence of legislation around the protection of the young in this new digital world. What will those laws and legislation need to look like to protect children who, perhaps at the moment, are the equivalent of exploited child labour by the digital tech giants.

US Congress passed the first Children’s Online Privacy Act in 1998 and even though some of the social media Apps we are familiar with today weren’t around then, they could see the need to protect children from exploitation and the dangers they could be exposed to online. This Act made it illegal for a tech provider to enrol a child under the age of 13 onto one of their platforms, without parental consent. Now I don’t know if you’ve been onto any of these sites and opened an account, but I think it’s pretty much a tick box approach – and kids have worked out how to tick a box on the computer.

Australia now has its Enhancing Online Safety for Children Safety Act, brought in in 2015, and a Federal Government eSafety Commissioner for the protection of children. What might this mean for us in the outdoor profession? Again, this may not represent all the work we do, but I’ll make a few comments. I think our guiding philosophy of educating for self, others and nature has stood the test of time in a post-Industrial Revolution / pre-digital world. But, it might not stand the test of the future. It is timely that we rethink and reimagine outdoor education’s contribution to young people in contemporary times.

Conclusion

What might it mean in terms of the types of learning outcomes that we have for young people in outdoor programs and experiences? If children are failing to meet the one hour per day minimum physical activity standard, should we (and perhaps fitness is the wrong term) be focussing more on mental and physical wellbeing outcomes? Should we be reconsidering what it means for young people to attain outdoor skills in their time away from the screens that so clearly dominate their lives?

It’s great to see that many programs are building strong connections to broader curricular outcomes. Taking inspiration from something like the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland, might awaken us to the possibilities of how outdoor learning can be mandated for all school children, across a wide range of subject areas, leading to daily outdoor time. This does not have to come at the expense of experiences like the outdoor journey or annual school camp to more remote locations. Rather, it requires all educators - history teachers, maths teachers, English teachers, outdoor education teachers, etc. - to be comfortable, working with kids in the outdoors. Daily outdoor experiences might begin on the campus grounds, then be enacted within walking distance of the school, then to nearby locations using public transport, and so on. It seems to me that outdoor educators could be great ‘brokers’ of these daily experiences, providing expertise and support for all teachers.

There is overwhelming research evidence that time outdoors is healthy. What does this mean for us as outdoor professionals? Time doing what? And where, and with who? Can health benefits be linked with other learning outcomes? There are excellent resources around these concepts, like Beyond Blue to Green: The Benefits of Contact with Nature for Mental Health and Well-being (2010)). However, such work does not focus specifically on children and youth, nor does it address the potential role of education and outdoor learning. There is a significant gap in knowledge that might be filled by outdoor professionals. I mentioned that concept of agency earlier. Children and young people need to feel agency, which simply means that they feel they are able to change their circumstances for the better.

There are some amazing emerging examples of young people’s agency that should give us pause for thought. We may have recently seen, in Australia, a Federal election decided for the first time on a global environmental issue, 40 years after the fight to save the Franklin River. The school strikes for climate action certainly indicate a rising tide of youth agency in relation to these critical issues. But we might also see young people’s participation in these campaigns as adding additional stress and anxiety to their lives. We know that many now experience climate trauma through repeated exposure (mainly online) to doomsday scenarios relating to climate change. These mental stresses pile on top of those encountered in the digital environment and the Covid pandemic, and they are not going away. As a result, graduates from TAFE and university outdoor programs will need to have a deep knowledge of the lives of young people. Yet I don’t see a lot of specialist core programs or subjects in outdoor qualifications, about the lived experience of young people and the challenges they face.

Colleagues and I recently reconceptualised the outdoor education degree program at our regional university. We added three major streams to sit alongside the outdoor sequence of courses. One of these was in behaviour management. While negotiating with staff in the psychology program I asked whether they had any core courses focussed on specifically on the lives of teens and young people? None. Our graduates are going to need access to that knowledge and the best research in this space if they are going to have the skills to work effectively with young people in the outdoors. I wonder where that is going to come from. We can all complete Mental Health First Aid training in addition to our Wilderness First Aid qualifications. It is a good start, but I don’t think it is going to be enough. Perhaps we need to reconsider the role of camp counsellor, who has specialist skills in supporting the mental well-being of young people and who can help upskill outdoor professionals. I know many programs are working in this space already.

As outdoor professionals I believe we will need to conduct our work with young people with a high degree of pedagogical tact. We will need to work patiently, carefully, kindly with young people, no matter how they present to us in schools or in tertiary education. While we might be confronted by the notion of a mental health crisis in young people, it presents to us now as the challenge of our time. As educators I think we need to be eternally optimistic and see a bright future, working with them in the outdoors. The lessons of history may serve us well in this endeavour. Especially now that we can open that gate once again, walk through it, and get back outdoors.