Knowledge construction in outdoor education

An opportunity to develop our teaching arose when we were tasked with organising and facilitating a field trip to a remote (in English terms) valley in the Lake District for an international cohort of masters students studying Outdoor Education (OE). In the UK, the discipline of OE is both process and content ranging across traditional subjects such as physical education and environmental sciences at the same time as foregrounding personal development. The last thing we wanted to be accused of was a neo-colonial teaching of the British ‘way’ leading to the emergence of a globalised practice in places as far-flung and as different in their landscapes and cultures as Columbia, Kazakhstan and the Philippines. Instead, we sought to problematize the ‘occupation’ of being an outdoor educator.