In this article I share student and teacher experiences of forest walks (in Finnish: Metsäkävely) as a form of outdoor education in a Finnish special education school in a hospital setting. I was the teacher of these students in the hospital school setting, and so was an insider researcher, and teacher as researcher, undertaking…

The degree to which policy, practice, and facilities accommodate trans and non-binary participants in outdoor programmes has been subject to limited research. The outdoors can be a heavily gendered space, demonstrative of both heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity. This research explores current practices and the awareness, confidence and…

It is well known that outdoor adventure has many benefits to individuals' well-being, socialization, and self-concept. Outdoor adventure programs also have the potential to promote and improve an individuals' activities of daily living such as dressing, eating, and transferring. The improvement of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) can showcase the…

In the United States of America, societal structures of oppression frame and underpin nearly every field and industry, including environmental education. Despite growing attention on efforts to diversify the environmental education workforce in the United States, environmental fields have had minimal success attracting and retaining professionals…

This paper is a duoethnography--a dialogic exploration of a person with a disability seeking to participate in outdoor adventure activities and that of an outdoor instructor helping to facilitate such learning experiences. Using dialogue, narrative, and photo elicitation, the authors discuss equitable and inclusive access to nature and outdoor…

Food gardens are an underdeveloped resource for teaching and research in Australian universities. While some campuses have food or botanical gardens, outside the biological or physical sciences food growing is not routinely incorporated into mainstream curricula. This article investigates why and how we might change this. It examines universities'…

What does it mean to grow up? Why is it important? How does one measure it, and what factors make it so difficult to realize? This paper explores how one's experience in an outdoor adventure education program may be observed, understood, and potentially maximized through the lens of Robert Kegan's constructive-developmental theory. This paper…

This qualitative action research study in a Canadian urban public elementary school proposes teachers and early childhood education integrate different types of nature journaling into the Kindergarten Program. In this study, analysis of data collected from weekly classroom lessons and student work samples through two action research cycles led to…

We analyze how gender intersects with risk processes and practices in outdoor adventure education. Language, binary logic, and societal norms work together to gender risk and offer three ways that risk may be gendered in the context of outdoor adventure education courses with youth. First, hierarchical language and the gendering practices of…

Active participation in the outdoors is beneficial for health and wellbeing. However, the impact of extreme weather, particularly heat, on safe participation is causing concern for organisations who lead these activities. Local mitigation strategies and acute management of heat- and sun-related illness (HSRI) are generally well understood by…

Mitigating the environmental impact of rock climbing remains an important task for land managers. Leave No Trace (LNT) Principles offer a proven approach to minimizing outdoor recreation users' impacts on public lands, and this approach has similarly been shown effective among climbers. In recent years, climbing organizations have introduced…

Being active in nature carries many benefits and there are a number of ways to design and deliver outdoor programs so that young people can realize these benefits. This paper provides an environmental scan of the outdoor education (OE) programs currently offered in public school, grades 6-12, across British Columbia (BC). The environmental scan…

How causation is approached has, for some time now, been a central debate within the archives of educational research. Despite rich discussion in broader literature, the influence of what has been described as the 'methodology wars' has rarely featured within the field(s) of outdoor and environmental education (OEE). This paper explores causation…

Canada has a long history of outdoor education (OE) in sectors including summer camps, K-12, and post-secondary education (PSE). However, previous research has demonstrated that OE is sometimes poorly understood in the PSE sector leading to program closures and limited program development. As a result, scholars have called for national and…

This article offers the risky proposition of forecasting the future. The often paraphrased quote of Peter Drucker, famous European management guru, applies here. He was fond of pointing out how predicting the future can be likened to driving backwards down a dark and isolated country road at night with no lights, while looking out the back window…