When Nature Wears a Camera: Cyborg Well-being and the Future of Outdoor Learning

Outdoor learning and adventure education have long been positioned as pedagogical spaces that foreground embodied experience, relational learning, and wellbeing, often framed in contrast to the perceived intrusions of digital technology in everyday life. As wearable digital technologies such as point-of-view (POV) cameras, smartwatches, and GPS devices become routine features of outdoor and adventure contexts, this framing is increasingly untenable (French, 2016; Beames & Maher, 2025). Rather than signalling a loss of educational value, these developments raise critical questions about the future of outdoor learning: how experiences of time, space, care, and wellbeing are being reshaped through digital mediation, and what this means for pedagogy in outdoor educational settings. This paper argues that engaging critically with these conditions is essential if outdoor learning is to remain educationally relevant, inclusive, and ethically grounded.

The paper draws on posthuman theory and Donna Haraway’s (1985) concept of the cyborg, alongside Braidotti’s (2013) notion of becoming, to develop the idea of the cyborg adventure experience. Rather than evaluating technology in terms of benefit or harm, outdoor learning is conceptualised as emerging from socio-material assemblages in which human bodies, technologies, landscapes, institutional practices, and digital traces are entangled (Reed, 2021). This framing aligns with contemporary debates in education that emphasise the need to move beyond human-centred models of learning and wellbeing in increasingly technologized environments.

A qualitative, posthuman-informed reflective case study approach is adopted, drawing on three empirically grounded vignettes from higher education and teacher education outdoor education programmes (Flyvbjerg, 2006). The vignettes focus on the use of wearable POV cameras in climbing and paddle sports contexts and are analysed as socio-material learning assemblages. This approach enables close attention to lived experience while foregrounding the philosophical and ethical dimensions of technologized practice.

The analysis explores three intersecting dimensions of cyborg experience. First, wearable cameras reshape temporality through recording, replay, editing, and circulation, enabling experiences to be revisited and reinterpreted at later points in time (French, 2016). This temporal mediation challenges assumptions about presence, reflection, and authenticity that are central to outdoor learning pedagogy (North, 2021), raising questions about how learning and wellbeing are shaped when experiences are no longer bounded by the moment of participation. Second, wearable technologies reconfigure spatiality by mediating how landscapes are perceived, navigated, and shared. Research on visual and digital ethnography suggests that such mediation can intensify attention to place while simultaneously altering embodied relations with space (Pink, 2007). For some learners, mediated vision can act as an enabler, supporting confidence, access, and inclusion; for others, it may intensify performativity or surveillance (Hills et al., 2024). Third, these practices produce fluid and distributed subjectivities, as learners become cyborgs whose sense of self and agency is co-constructed through human–technology–environment relations (Haraway, 1985; Braidotti, 2013).

Wellbeing is positioned in this paper not as an individual outcome to be optimised through technology, but as a relational and ethical educational concern. Wearable technologies can support reflective practice, confidence, and participation, particularly for learners who may be marginalised by dominant outdoor cultures (Beames & Adams, 2025). At the same time, they introduce tensions around care, equity, data ownership, and the normalisation of surveillance within educational spaces (Benjamin, 2019). While artificial intelligence is not the focus of the empirical material, the paper acknowledges that emerging data-driven and algorithmic systems increasingly shape how digital traces of learning are stored, sorted, and interpreted, with implications for professional judgement and responsibility in outdoor education (North et al., 2024).

By situating outdoor education within broader debates on digital mediation and wellbeing, this paper contributes to the Outdoor Learning Special Interest Group by offering a theoretically informed framework for understanding technologised outdoor pedagogy without abandoning the field’s longstanding commitments to care, inclusion, and meaningful experience. It argues that outdoor learning’s contribution to health and wellbeing education in times of social, environmental, and mental health challenge depends not on resisting technology, but on developing reflexive, ethically grounded practices that recognise learners as already cyborg. The paper concludes by proposing cyborg wellbeing as a productive lens for future research, policy, and professional practice in outdoor learning and adventure education.