Students are said to learn from experience in outdoor education, yet what they say they learn is not always taken seriously. Foucault's work is used in this article to examine two "flippant" comments made by students. Starting with these comments leads to an analysis of how experiences, students and meaning making processes in outdoor education are constituted and normalised. This highlights how it is possible for these students to make these comments and how they can be judged as "flippant". Analysis of this type lays down a challenge to explore the practices of outdoor education to foreground the complexity and contradictions inherent in students', experience and learning. It challenges us to take students words seriously.