Whose place, whose history? Outdoor environmental education pedagogy as ‘reading’ the landscape

Abstract

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

Keywords:

• Stories
• Metaphor
• Culture
• Place
• Indigenous

Acknowledgements

This paper was written with the support of the Centre for Excellence in Outdoor and Environmental Education, La Trobe University, Bendigo. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Outdoor Education Research Conference, ‘Widening horizons: Diversity in theoretical and critical views of outdoor education’, hosted by the University of Central Lancashire, Penrith, July 2006. Thank you to Noel Gough, Kathleen Pleasants and the reviewers for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Estimates of the size of the indigenous population prior to European contact vary substantially: between 300,000 and 2,000,000. Rolls (2000) has conservatively estimated a population total of 1.2 million, highlighting that massive early losses due to smallpox have been underestimated because little is known of several waves that spread across the continent killing three-quarters of the population.

2. In Australia ‘history wars’ rage over the extent to which the indigenous people ‘quietly slipped away’ or were poisoned, murdered and massacred in the process of dispossession and displacement. It is beyond the scope of this paper to detail this debate due to its scale (for more detail see Attwood & Foster, 2003; Macintyre & Clark, 2003; Manne, 2003b). The maltreatment of indigenous people, however, is well documented (see for example Elder, 2003).

3. In 2000 the World Conservation Monitoring Centre identified Australia was as one of 17 megadiverse countries. ‘The concept of megadiversity is based on the total number of species in a country and the degree of endemism at the species level and at higher taxonomic levels … Together, these 17 countries harbour more than 70% of the earth's species’ (Australian State of the Environment Committee, 2001, p. 13). Other countries include: Brazil, China, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, the USA and Venezuela.

4. The idea of reading the landscape as a ‘text’ is prominent in cultural geography (Stratford, 1999), but has had only passing attention in outdoor environmental education (Slattery, 2001).

5. Systematic documenting and analysis of historical accounts have become more available in the last 30–35 years. The works of Rowley (1970a, 1970b, 1970c) and Reynolds (see, for example, 1972, 1989, 1990, 2004) have been particularly significant in this process. For a more detailed description of the rise of historical accounts of Aboriginal-Euro settler contact see Robert Manne (2003a).

6. These two phrases are borrowed from Sinclair (2001).

7. Individuals have been recorded up to 1.8 m in length and weighing up to 113 kg. Their growth rates vary greatly depending on the river conditions. They are long lived, with the oldest fish recorded by scientists at 47 years old (Sinclair, 2001).