The primacy of place in education in outdoor settings

In this chapter, we explore and support the call for greater attention to be paid to place in outdoor education. We consider this call to have particular relevance since education in the outdoors can work as an antidote to what some have described as a sense of de-placement (Orr 1994) as inhabitants of local places that are globally connected. Casey, analyst and interpreter of the deep history of philosophical perspectives on place, provides a starting point for our understanding of how, as educators, we might usefully take more account of place as an event that is always ‘newly emergent’ and radically heterogeneous (Casey, 1998). Our main argument is that place has begun to, and needs to further ‘(re-)appear’ as a primary eventful feature of our understanding of our life in the world but that we need to push further to theorise and understand how in education in outdoor settings. We seek to theorise and suggest ways for how we might more sensitively plan and enact place-responsive outdoor education. We hope our contributions will have relevance for the fields of outdoor education (in formal or non-formal curricula) in outdoor experiential learning, adventure education, fieldwork, and other forms of provision in education settings (such as outdoor play in early years) or in local areas (for example in forest, beach, or urban settings).