Policy, practice and outdoor adventure education: Diversity in an uncertain and rapidly shrinking world.

Professor Barbara Humberstone PhD
Keynote speech to the 6th European conference 'Sharing Diversity and Building Networks' 'Frajda' Czarnocin , Poland 4th October 2003

In September 1998 the European Institute for Outdoor Adventure Education and Experiential Learning was hosted at the Edinburgh conference. The conference title was 'Celebrating Diversity: Learning by Sharing Cultural Differences'. During the following years the 4th and 5th conferences were hosted in Rimforsa, Sweden in 2000 and then followed in Marburg, Germany in 2001. 'Sharing Diversity and Building Networks', is the 6th European conference hosted here at 'Frajda' Czarnocin , Poland and I would like to extend my personal thanks to Magda Jedrzejczyk and all her colleagues for making this conference possible.

During this time and particularly stimulated by these conferences, networks between people, organisations and countries have flourished. European funding has supported some of these networks and projects, although most partnerships have developed without this financial help. (See Higgins & Nicol (2002) which is the published outcomes of a EU Comenius project, initiated through the Edinburgh conference)

For the purpose of this paper, I will take OE as a process in which experiences are made available through some sort of adventurous activity with others, normally in the outdoors, which can bring about learning and development. One of the main elements are challenge by choice and individual and group reflection upon the experience. As a European Institute working within the developing European Union, we are concerned with promoting links and building bridges within and between nation states to develop outdoor adventure education as an important vehicle for such areas as youth development, sustainability and inclusion policies.

Underpinning good policy into good practice, I would argue is sound research, which supports and gives credibility to our work. For it is only through recognising and understanding practice that good practice can be made available to a wider audience. Sound research feeds into theory and vice versa. Sound theory and its underpinning concepts are important for informing and influencing social policy. Policy, practice and research are importantly and inexorably interlinked.

In 1999, in UK, for example, the foreword to the report to the government Social Exclusion Unit from the Policy Action Team on arts and sport claims that,

[A]rt and sport can not only make a valuable contribution to delivering key outcomes of lower long term unemployment, less crime, better health and better qualifications, but can also help to develop the individual pride, community spirit and capacity for responsibility that enable communities to run regeneration programmes themselves (DCM&S: 2).

Importantly, outdoor adventure education and experiential learning is not overtly named in this statement, rather it is included under the guise of sport. Arguably, OE is neither art nor sport but may be constituted by some of the elements of both. It is clearly a cultural product (as are art and sport) and research indicates that it can make a valuable and, on occasions, unique contribution to addressing some of these issues identified in the statement above. In the UK, government funded policy has led to the utilisation of OE residential courses and adventure activities in their Connexion youth schemes as helping young people into employment or higher education (see Brown and Humberstone 2003).

The main element of OE is of course adventure. This is a complex concept and I do not intend to try to discuss this further here. However its association with safety and risk is also complex and much debated. For those interested in discussions around these I refer you to the OUTRES discussion list (www.jiscmail.ac.uk), which currently has risk/safety and outdoor practice as one of its main focus. The adventure usually occurs in an outdoor environment. The form of the adventure and the ways in which it is made available, particularly in an outdoor context, arguably are its uniqueness. The significance of young people's engagement with nature cannot be underestimated. Much has been written of the power of the outdoors for people's growth and change. The Australian aborigines, through their Dreamtime, link their sense of self to their landscape. For many traditions, wilderness and nature are significant in spiritual development. The maintenance and sustainability of local environments and global nature is frequently a conscious element of adventure experiences.

Informing youth policy in Europe, the 1999 report for the European Commission, 'European Study on Sport as a Tool for the Social Integration of Young People' differentiates 'non-competitive-sports' and experiential learning from traditional sports, highlighting the particular contribution of nature- based adventurous activities. In this report, Professor Peter Becker draws attention to the ways in which adventure based activities can provide important opportunities for preparedness for life for young people. These activities such as kayaking, climbing and walking, and particularly those with a journeying element, are significant because they may have uncertain outcomes. Instantaneous decisions are required based upon current and future circumstances largely influenced by environmental conditions as well as group members' experiences and relationships. The thrills generated through these experiences arguably meet the needs of many young people seeking excitement, who perhaps might otherwise engage in less beneficial thrill-seeking behaviours.

In his keynote to the 5th Eurocongress in 2001, Professor Peter Becker talks of 'going into the untamed wildness of a foamy river with the risk of failing' where such experiences may be analogous to 'canoe[ing] into an open and uncertain future full of crises'. In this way, through meeting crises or challenges in nature that can not be avoided, he argues, the young person who manages these crises can learn a great deal about themselves and transfer their knowledge of their abilities to engage with uncertain or unknown situations in every day life. Further, he argues that through these engagements with nature not only do these experiences engage with the practical-cognitive side through new experiences and enlarging knowledge, but also a young person may develop an understanding of themselves and their abilities to deal with every day life problems. Arguably, they may also gain greater awareness of and respect for the local environment and nature.

Even a largely gently flowing river may cause some young people in the 20s to feel uncomfortable or afraid. This year, our Outdoor Education &Adventure Recreation (OE&AR) degree students undertook their final year independent expedition on the river Spey in Scotland. They had spent at least four months planning the trip and had retrieved information about the river from many sources. On the very first day in what was expected to be no more than a four-hour paddle before reaching their proposed campsite, they were still paddling after six hours and strangely the landscape did not correspond to their map. One or two of the students became extremely concerned and even anxious, perhaps they thought they had put in on the wrong river; they began to doubt the competence of their peer river leader. However, after a further hour they could match the river with their map. Some how a whole 15 miles had been lost in the planning. This occurred at the change over from one map to another. Much was learnt from this experience, which no doubt may be transferred to their every day life in different ways for different students. Not only were all the students challenged in a variety of ways, but they also gained greater awareness and understanding of their peers, which was not always positive. Here, another person or facilitator did not mediate the experience. In a sense, the adventure experience, 'spoke for itself' for these more mature students. Other aspects of the journey also spoke to them. In their daily telephoned report, they told me how they were struck by the quietness and beauty of their surroundings. The reflective reports, which each student was asked to complete evidenced the differences in perspectives of the same journey and highlighted the significantly changing group dynamic.

Outdoor adventure provides possibilities for developing greater awareness of other people and their needs, of greater awareness of the importance of the group and of the environment in which the journey or adventure takes place. Taking the idea of the journey in a canoe still further, imagine a group of young people in canoes travelling down a gentle river. This time the group is made up of young adolescences. Each canoe carries some of the equipment and supplies to enable the group to live by the side of the river for a number of days. On arrival at a suitable site, it begins to rain. Is it better for each individual to sort out his or her own gear first or for the group to work together to put up a communal shelter? Members of the group may learn in a variety of ways from the experience, giving different meanings to that experience. In the student canoe expedition I talked of earlier there was no 'facilitator' or teacher. They were there own teachers. In this last example, the teacher or facilitator might draw upon the situation to discuss the variety of options and possible outcomes of individual and community decisions.

Landscape and waterscape provide the environmental contexts within and through which such experiential learning occurs. Experiences in different landscapes and diverse cultures provide a wealth of opportunities for sharing diversity and for building connections.
Drawing again from the OE & AR students, but this time a different group who spent three months living in a small community Nurmes in Karelia, Finland based at the local college. This experience is part of the Winter Adventure Skills module and the International Perspectives module undertaken in year 2. This opportunity came about when a lecturer from the college made a visit to BCUC and in discussion with my colleague Hugh Mannerings both saw this opportunity providing valuable learning experiences for her students and the OE & AR students. One of the most unusual experiences for the students was to walk, and later to drive, across a frozen lake. As part of their three months, the students spent twelve days journeying on skies self- sufficiently through the Finnish winter landscape in the company of three Finnish instructors. This experience was very different from their experiences of outdoor adventure education in the UK. Throughout the skiing journey they only came across one other person. They spent the nights in 'lean-tos' or made OB shelters or traditional Quinces, out of snow. They took turns in pulling the sledge, which many found hard work. They learnt how to bore holes in the ice to catch fish and how to listen to the frozen landscape. The instructors were part of a small organisation, which had been accredited by the International Outward Bound. However, their practice and engagement with their landscape was firmly routed in local practices and informed by local winterscapes. For these students the stay in Nurmes and more particularly their journey through the winter landscape was a significant learning experience. They learnt new ways of engaging with nature and experienced the cultural contradiction of traditional ways of being and modern society.

Their experiences over the three months in Finland enabled the students to develop a greater understanding of the cultural significance of the outdoors through a different environment and many have taken Finnish practices back with them to try and use as part of their everyday life. They valued their opportunity and still talk about it 6 months on from coming home.

That these students can spend time in Finland and that we come together here to share best-practices and make new contacts is by and large a consequence of faster and easier transport and the greater porousness of national boundaries, in short -a consequence of Globalisation. Globalisation can be thought of as the widening, deepening and quickening of the worldwide interconnections in social, cultural, political and economic life (cf. Giddens 1999). Social analysts claim that the world is getting smaller in scale as economic and other relations become larger in scale. Global relations and patterns now touch almost every corner of the world, effecting economic markets, consumption and lifestyles, cultural identities, politics, the environment, the military, cultural artefacts and so forth. The world is now a 'global village'-people are travelling more, watching and reading global media products, being at the mercy of events outside the control of their nation state and national economy, and subject to cultural sameness (homogenisation). Some of these processes have longer historical precedents than others, most notably through imperialism and the expansion of empires in the past. Few areas of life escape this homogenisation of mass consumption. This homogenisation (convergence towards sameness) of cultures reduces space for locality. This loss of local affects and can diminish cultural identity and traditions.

One of the things that the English students in Finland became aware of was the cultural contradictions which seemed to emerge between the influences of dominant values upon the Finnish peoples' life styles, particularly the young people and the traditional values associated with people's interaction and relations with their landscape and local nature. When I asked Finnish students about their outdoor life, many claimed that they did not think there was one. Yet when we talked further there clearly was a significant engagement with the nature which was generally taken for granted and might easily become under-rated and perhaps lost.

Kirsti Pedersen's research has done much to identify and analyse such cultural contradictions through her ethnographic research of outdoor life in Northern Norway (see Pedersen 2003). This Institute, and in particular this congress, is significantly about sharing cultural diversity, not reducing the space for the local cultural heritage and traditional relations with nature. We all lose if we fail to acknowledge different ways of engaging with nature that may have been part of a nation's and diverse culture's traditions.

However, a word of warning -traditional dominant relations with the landscape may on occasions be exclusive rather than inclusive; in such instances diversity becomes denied rather than celebrated.

In the UK for example, the work of the Black British Photographer, Ingrid Pollard, makes visible the hidden ideologies of the Quintessentially English landscape. Remember, that Black people have always been part of English history even since the Romans landed on the Island. Ingrid Pollard uses her photography to consciously draw attention to the racism inherent in everyday assumptions of the English countryside. Historically, the English countryside was appropriated by the white, upper class, English gentleman who enclosed open spaces, turned many of the working class from their farms or expected them to work for the gentry. The countryside belonged to the white, male gentry and in many cases it became their 'playground'. Pollard, through her photography, consciously makes visible the hidden ideologies embedded in the English landscapes paintings, which celebrated the white male upper class, usually portrayed surveying their territories. In a sequence of self- portrait photographs, titled Pastoral Interlude, she is seen climbing over a style and rowing across water in the Lake District in UK. Each photograph is sub-titled with comments about Pollard's feelings of being 'out of place' in the English landscape. In the late 1980s when these were first exhibited in UK, they portrayed the crossing of implicit boundaries about who naturally belongs in the English countryside of the white English poets, such as William Blake and William Wordsworth. Ingrid Pollard, a Black woman seen in the English countryside was somehow 'out of place'. Historically, then different groups may have been excluded from the outdoors and from adventurous activities.

Disability also excludes many people. Not so much the person's disability but society's perception of that disability. Analysts argue that this has largely been created through the medical profession's ability to both define and name illnesses and body parts as well as its power to heal injuries and cure illnesses. The medical profession works from a biological perspective and this is a major reason why disability is generally conceived of as merely a biological product. Therefore, society generally assumes that the problems that face people with disabilities are the result of their physical and/ or mental impairments and are independent of the wider socio-cultural, physical, and political environments (see Brittain and Humberstone 2003). This has played a significant role in creating many of the perceptions that are embedded in our understanding of disability. Some times this can lead to exclusion of people with special needs rather than inclusion in outdoor experiences. Nevertheless, at this conference, as at previous conferences we have organisations such as the NRC/APPC from Portugal who work with young people with special needs utilising outdoor learning. The European Institute provides opportunities to build networks for sharing good practice in outdoor learning through enabling partnerships between nation states and between diverse groups.

To conclude
I have briefly drawn attention to the inter-relatedness of policy/research/theory and practice and to the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of outdoor work.
I have highlighted the possibilities of outdoor experiences for intellectual and physical development of young people and for the ways in which such experiences carefully organised may enable young people to be better able to manage movement into employment and to deal with every day life decisions. Building networks with and between East European as well as West European nation states provides tremendous opportunities for and understanding of diversity in all its forms.
Globalising processes, which diminish our world and break down boundaries, alert us to both its benefits and dilemmas. We need to value diverse cultures and landscapes, making sure that we share equally diverse outdoor cultures, affirming those that might otherwise become hidden by the 'commercialisation and 'individuation' of predominating English speaking nations. OAE is arguably a cultural product; let us create a respectful and inclusive yet diverse cultural product here through our sharing of good practice and network building in the forthcoming days.

Thank you

References
Brittain, I and Humberstone, B. (2003) In Pursuit of Excellence: Experiences of Paralympic Athletes in A. Ibbetson, B. Watson and M. Ferguson (eds) Sport, Leisure and Inclusion: Potential, Participation and Possibilities LSA, 82
Brown, H. and Humberstone, B. (2003) Researching Youth Transitions and Summer Activity Initiative: Problems and possibilities in B. Humberstone, H. Brown and K. Richards (eds) Whose Journeys? The Outdoors and Adventure as Social and Cultural Phenomena: Critical explorations of relations between individuals, 'others' and the environment, IOL, Penrith, 261-272

Department for Culture, Media and Sport (1999) Policy Action Team 10: Report to the Social Exclusion Unit-Arts and sport. London; HMSO.
GOPA-Consultants (1999) European Union Study on Sport as a Tool for the Social Integration of Young People-Final Report for the EU, Bad Homburg; GOPA.
Higgins, P. and Nicol, R. (eds) (2002)Outdoor Education: Authentic Learning in the Context of Landscapes. Vol 2. Comenius Action 2.1. Kisa: Sweden.
Giddens, A. (1999) Reith Lecture 1-Globalisation- http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_99/week1/week1.htm
Pedersen, K. (2003) Discourses on Nature and Ethnicity among Youth in Northern Norway in B. Humberstone, H. Brown and K. Richards (eds) Whose Journeys? The Outdoors and Adventure as Social and Cultural Phenomena. Penrith, Cumbria: IOL.

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