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Abstract
This paper focuses on an educational encounter between staff, students and the River Spey, Scotland in September 2009. The themes of water and embodied and culturally constructed ways of knowing the river were used to inform a creative non-fiction narrative that was drafted during and shortly after the journey, and was later refined. Textual descriptions of both significant and seemingly mundane aspects of the experience were built up through observation, discussion and reflection upon actual events as the authors ‘sought a solution’ to writing a narrative-based representation of the experience. This process endeavours to represent an ‘insider's’ view of the experience through descriptions that strive to portray the ‘meaning, structure and essence of the lived experience[s]’ for a particular group of people at a particular moment in time. We propose that this kind of storytelling has the potential to represent important elements of outdoor educational experiences and the places where they occur that would be difficult to relay in other forms of research writing. The paper is presented in three parts: setting the scene; the textual representation of the Spey descent programme; and participants’ evaluations and summary.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the central role of the course participants in the preparation of this article. It is obvious that it would not have been possible without their cooperation. The authors would also like to thank them for their enthusiasm and energy whilst paddling the river, their willingness to discuss aspects of ‘river pedagogy’ and to give time to reading and responding to our creative account of the journey and its significance. The authors would like to thank our colleagues Dr Robbie Nicol and Dave Craig for working with us with the group—it was a joy to be in their company on this beautiful river. Finally, the authors wish to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments that led to significant improvements on the original manuscript.
Notes
This article has been amended slightly since original online publication. For more details, please see Corrigendum at http://dx.doi.org.10.1080/14729679.2013.764612.
1. The Scottish word for valley.
2. ‘Sporting estates’ are areas of privately owned land managed primarily to support hunting of deer, grouse, pheasants and salmon. Much of Scotland is held in these, generally large, areas of land, constituting the most concentrated pattern of land-ownership in the developed world, with around almost 90% in private ownership and over 50% being owned by fewer than 400 individuals (see Wightman, 1996).
3. The Scottish word for lake.
4. Flood.
5. ‘Ghillie’ is the Scots word for someone who supports, assists and guides someone (usually a fee-paying client on a sporting estate) in their efforts to shoot a deer, catch a salmon, and so forth. The estates and private fisheries who own and manage the banks of the River Spey employ ghillies, usually supported by the income from their clients.
6. The names of artificial ‘flies’ tied by anglers to hooks to simulate real local species in their efforts to catch fish.
7. Strokes used to manoeuvre the canoe.
8. ‘Kirk’ is the Scottish word for church.
9. This is a resonance with Baker's (2005, p. 267) argument that outdoor educators should promote ‘landfull’ experiences ‘that actively engage students with place’.