The epistemological challenges of evaluating the effectiveness of a pedagogical model for adventure education

Following the publication of Williams and Wainwright's work on a proposed pedagogical model for adventurous activities in 2015, this research has taken forward the model and looked at its deployment with a view to determining effectiveness. The initial phase of research attempted to determine whether the proposed model was practical and realistic to deploy in a secondary school curriculum, and subsequent phases have investigated the effectiveness of utilising the model with individual teachers and across whole-school provision. The research has uncovered epistemological issues surrounding the use/purpose of adventure education which underpin the foundations of the proposed model. It has also examined methods of determining effectiveness, where perhaps a traditional form of 'measurement' may not be appropriate (Christie, Higgins and McLaughlin, 2014) with its restricted view focussed on the outcomes or products of the learning experience and a cognitive focussed knowledge creation agenda (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2011).This research is in progress and hopes to report some early findings on the foundations of the epistemological challenges facing adventure education in the current curriculum and inspection regime, the purposes for which schools in Wales use adventure education, and how this may be expanded with the use of a pedagogical model in the family of models-based practice (from Kirk et al., 2018) and instructional models for physical education (from Metzler, 2011).