As Australia heads into a new era of implementing a National Curriculum, the place of Outdoor Education in Australian schools is under question. In the initial drafts of the National Curriculum, Outdoor Education has been marginalised. The authors propose that Outdoor Education should maintain a strong role, especially as processes of experiential…

This research examined the decisions that highly experienced outdoor leaders made on backpacking expeditions conducted by a tertiary institution in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. The purpose of the research was to document decision problems and explore them as Recognition-Primed Decisions (RPD) within naturalistic decision making (NDM)…

Social, economic, and environmental issues facing 21st century societies compel a transformative shift towards sustainability in all spheres of life, including education. The challenges this holds for outdoor education programs and practices is significant. If outdoor education theory and practice is to make a greater contribution to…

In this article I review lessons to be learned from five commercial rafting participant fatalities in Northern Queensland between 2007 and 2009, and examine some implications of the coroner's recommendations from an outdoor education perspective. I aim both to help prevent future fatalities and to contribute to discussion about how best to achieve…

Within the field of outdoor education, some theorists argue that although leaps and gains have been made in terms of educating for the intrapersonal or "self"-development, they have come at the expense of the development of equally important relations with the local land and community (Hales, 2006; Loynes, 2002). Given this foregrounding…

Groups are ubiquitous in outdoor education and while there is a lot of literature on groups, there is limited examination of the assumptions made about groups and the effects these assumptions have on the practices of outdoor education. I utilise some of Michel Foucault's (1992) tools to investigate literature on outdoor education groups.…

At all levels of education in New South Wales outdoor experiences and outdoor education are a prominent part of the curriculum. This emphasis on the outdoors begins early. Outdoor activities are an important part of most primary schools whether they are public or private. Likewise at secondary level and at university outdoor education is still an…

This paper examines the viability of using a communitarian framework within outdoor education practice, specifically in order to address the tension between individual rights and social responsibility that is frequently found on overnight (or multi-day) educational expeditions. The setting of educational expeditions offers rich potential for…

This paper reports on a study conducted in 2006-07 exploring the perspectives that some Australian employers have of graduates from an outdoor education degree program. Similar studies have been conducted in the US and the UK; however no such study has been conducted in Australia. This study clarifies some of the tensions that exist in the…

A key signpost to a profession is clarity of disciplinary knowledge. In this paper I describe the content and outcome of a process to refine the qualification guidelines for outdoor education teachers in Victorian, Australia. The guidelines, developed for the Victorian Institute of Teaching, include both practical skills and disciplinary…

Australia has a state-based educational system. In some of these states, outdoor education exists as part of the formal accredited secondary school curriculum. In this paper I analyse the content of these senior secondary school outdoor courses as a means to help delineate and describe the body of knowledge of outdoor education. I suggest outdoor…

The outdoor education literature commonly discusses what it means to be an effective outdoor leader and judgements about the effectiveness or quality of outdoor leadership and leaders are an everyday occurrence in outdoor leaders' professional lives. The basis upon which qualitative judgements are made about leaders and/or leadership and the…

This paper is part of an on-going project to examine outdoor education related deaths in Australia since 1960. It records 17 incidents not previously recorded in papers in this series (Brookes, 2003a, 2003b, 2004, 2007), in which 15 participants, two supervisors or teachers, and one member of the public died. Eleven of the incidents occurred since…

Outdoor Education (OE) and Experiential Education (EE) programs are becoming increasingly popular in Victorian schools. This article is derived from findings that emerged through the interpretation of case study data gathered for my doctoral thesis of a three-phased, non-residential, EE program. This interpretation process highlighted five themes,…

This paper investigates the repertoires teachers employ when talking about taking children outside of the classroom and keeping them safe. Research data were a series of individual and focus group interviews with primary school teachers. Three repertoires were identified: "safe practitioner," "adventurous risk-taker" and "fun, pleasure and…