Outdoor Environmental Education as Reading the Landscape: Rhizomatic Natural~Cultural History Pedagogy

Abstract

In this plateau I draw on literature from cultural history and environmental history to explore how these disciplines might inform outdoor environmental education research and pedagogy to address current cultural and environmental issues of specific communities and geographical places. The plateau considers how outdoor environmental education practice around the world occurs in diverse circumstances, environments and cultures, yet the application of outdoor education to specific cultural and environmental issues in particular places and communities has received little attention in research. Although research in fields such as cultural geography has addressed the relationships between cultures, communities and geographical places, this is largely overlooked in outdoor environmental education research. With the aid of the rhizome image for (re)structuring knowledge, I use examples from my practice to demonstrate how reading the landscape and the use of stories, and historical accounts, can assist outdoor environmental educators and participants to probe and reflect on the relationships between personal experience and the complex cultural-ecological processes that shape the places in which we live and work.