A place-based pedagogy for outdoor education

This chapter explores the relationship between place and outdoor education, charting a somewhat chequered history where educators have appeared interested in suitably wild and remote backdrops to develop personal and social learning through adventurous activities, with little consideration for the specific place (Wattchow and Brown, 2011). As outdoor learning pedagogy has developed over time, an awareness of the importance of, and role played by, specific places has grown, leading to greater calls for place to feature more strongly and explicitly in outdoor education (Brookes, 2002; 2003a; Nicol, 2003; Sinclair, 2001; Stewart, 2003; 2003b; 2004; 2008; Wattchow, 2008). The publication of Wattchow and Brown’s A pedagogy of place in 2011 brought the relationship between place and traditional forms of adventurous education to the fore in the field of outdoor learning and led to a period of discussion and debate around whether this was a necessary discussion, something inherent in practice already (implying no need for further consideration) or something that would in fact detract from authentic learning experiences in the outdoors. More recently work has revisited and reignited the discussion, applying a post-colonial lens to the importance of place in outdoor education (North, 2020; Barker and Collins, 2022). This chapter presents a case study of curricula designed to explicitly engage in encountering place in outdoor education and the rationale behind the design. The work has been developed through the CaBan teacher education partnership based at Bangor University in North Wales and is written by an academic partner working in teacher education, and teachers at one of the schools involved in the partnership.