Outdoor Education and Pedagogical Content Knowledge: More Than Class Five Rapids

Abstract

This chapter presents the argument that technical pursuit skills and knowledge are not enough to become a good outdoor educator. What is needed is an understanding about teaching and learning, also known as pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). While outdoor education (OE) has often been defined in contrast to mainstream education, for outdoor educators to be able to present our case for the value of outdoor education, we need to be able to articulate the teaching and learning that occurs in outdoor education (OE) in the same language as educators in other subject areas. We present a PCK framework for OE (OEPCK) as a means to achieve this end and identify key critiques and benefits of this framework. In particular, in linking our work in OE to other areas we can use the OEPCK framework as a way to better understand the foundations of our practices and use this to develop our own practice, improve the outcomes for students, guide professional development and improve the status of OE more broadly.