Understanding life in school: From academic classroom to outdoor education

Like so much outdoor education, however, it seems that attending to the environment has been subsumed here beneath individual and social outcomes, evident for example in John's discussion about decision-making processes during the kayaking phase of the students' journey (pp. 74-80), the se...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of Outdoor and Environmental Education Vol. 20; no. 2; pp. 53 - 55
Main Author Pleasants, Kathleen
Format Book Review
LanguageEnglish
Published Milton Springer Nature B.V 01.01.2017
Subjects
Academic Achievement
Adventure Education
Camps
Classrooms
Cultural studies
Curricula
Educational Experience
Environment
Environmental education
Epistemology
Hidden Curriculum
Kayaking
Middle Schools
Occupations
Ontology
Outdoor Education
Preschool education
Secondary Schools
Students
Teaching Methods
Transfer of Training
Young Adults
United Kingdom > UK
England
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Summary:Like so much outdoor education, however, it seems that attending to the environment has been subsumed here beneath individual and social outcomes, evident for example in John's discussion about decision-making processes during the kayaking phase of the students' journey (pp. 74-80), the sense of physical achievement felt at the end of each day (p. 80), and the communal nature of sleeping in a bivvy together and sitting around a campfire (pp. 82-90).John's aim, 'to share a better understanding of life in school, as experienced by the young people who live it' (p. 145), is clearly articulated throughout the book in the way his narrative highlights the pitfalls of schooling focusing on epistemic aims that limit us to pedagogy and curriculum and postpones ontological concerns until some distant future point.According to St Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei (2016), a stance of 'persistent critique requires that we call into question our most taken-for granted beliefs' (p. 104) in order to create the conditions for something new to emerge.In Understanding Life in School: From Academic Classroom to Outdoor Education, John has called into question some of our most taken-for-granted beliefs about education - the privileging of doing and knowing over being - and comprehensively demonstrated that without attention to the ontological aspects of schooling we are destined to continue to 'stratify and territorialise - to repeat the same, not to produce difference' (St Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016, p. 104).
ISSN:2206-3110
2522-879X
DOI:10.1057/9781137391230