Autoethnographic stories for self and environment: a reflective pedagogy to advance ‘environmental awareness’ in student outdoor practitioners

ABSTRACT

There is increasing pressure on academic staff to enhance the graduate capabilities of students, rendering them employable as morally informed global citizens, in addition to enhancing their disciplinary knowledge, reflective practice and understanding. The BA Outdoor Adventure Education degree programme at Plymouth Marjon University, includes the module, Environmental Awareness through Adventure Sport, as one focus to engage students in the environmental ethics discourse of outdoor adventure and explore how adventure activities are managed with specific consideration to ethical environmental practices (Module Descriptor, 2016). We aim to achieve this through learning, teaching and assessment that includes journaling and autoethnography as pedagogy and research method. This approach enables students to experience nature through an adventure activity, in this instance, rock climbing. This is a human experience in a social and cultural context, in, of and for nature. Students are asked to engage with nature ‘making-meaning in, about, and for the various environments’ as outdoor practitioners and leaders. These lived experiences in nature have prompted us to develop a framework where future students and other outdoor leaders can develop understanding and interrogate, the multiple, complex and nuanced ways outdoor activities can engage people with nature.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental ethics
• environmental awareness
• autoethnography
• reflective journal
• outdoor practice

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the Outdoor Adventure Education students who gave us permission to quote their work and for their participation in the module.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Su Porter

Su Porter is a highly experienced outdoor practitioner and educator with over 30 years’ experience. She has extensive experience combining, education informal and formal in the outdoors. She worked on the BA Outdoor Adventure Education programme, Plymouth Marjon University. and continues her practical professional involvement as an active Mountaineering and Climbing Instructor, Mountain Training Course Director and self-employed outdoor consultant.

Pauline Couper

Dr Pauline Couper is a geographer, and Associate Head of School for Geography & Liberal Arts at York St John University. Her primary research interests are philosophy of geography and knowledges of nature, from scientific to experiential. She contributed to the BA Outdoor Adventure Education at Plymouth Marjon University for over a decade.