Bushcraft education as radical pedagogy

ABSTRACT

Bushcraft emerged from indigenous knowledge with a skill-base used for military, commercial and recreational purposes.  We identify it as embodied contextual learning,for and with the environment, arising from a deep inter-subjective relationship with the natural world.  This focus suggests a ‘conscientisation’ developing a critical awareness, transformative of society’s relationship with ecosystems and providing autonomous, individual learning. Bushcraft education has gained in popularity in recent years and we seek to problematise and define its educational identity as it appears rarely in mainstream or outdoor education. Accordingly, we suggest that bushcraft education shares some of the aims of radical education, signalled by the transformative purpose in which radical pedagogies are positioned, normally situated outside mainstream formal education. We conclude that bushcraft education may have global significance as radical pedagogy, progressing deeper understandings of the relationship between self and nature, and in transdisciplinary thinking supporting our response to current environmental crises.

KEYWORDS:

• Bushcraft
• bushcraft education
• radical pedagogy
• outdoor education
• transdisciplinary

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The devastating disease which settlers brought with them, whether unintentionally or as part of deliberate colonial violence is extensively documented. However, comparatively little attention tends to be paid to early settlers’ dependence on First Nations support for their survival.