Case-based teaching of fatal incidents in outdoor education teacher preparation courses

ABSTRACT

This article examines the use of case-based approaches to fatal incidents in outdoor education (OE) with a view to fatality prevention. Fatalities are rare in OE and therefore it is nearly impossible for teachers to learn how to avoid fatalities from their own past experiences. It is, however, possible to learn from the mistakes of others through studying accounts of fatalities. Andrew Brookes, working with specialist OE undergraduates nearing the end of their course, develops the argument for reframing fatality cases as narratives in order for students to not simply analyse the incident in hindsight, but to view the accounts from the perspectives of the people involved at the time. Chris North discusses how he examined the impact of case-based fatality learning on pre-service teachers with a range of outdoor experience levels. The responses of students to studying fatalities required him to reframe his approach and consider how to better differentiate learning. The article argues that case-based learning can make a unique and important contribution to safety, but requires reflexive consideration of both curricular and pedagogical aspects.

KEYWORDS:

• Outdoor education
• safety
• case-based learning
• teacher education
• fatality studies

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their enthusiastic and helpful comments which strengthened this article considerably.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Pseudonym.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris North

Dr Chris North is a senior lecturer in outdoor and environmental education at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. His research interests include initial teacher education and student learning through outdoor and environmental education and practitioner research methodologies. He is deputy Head of School of Health Sciences.

Andrew Brookes

Dr Andrew Brookes is an independent consultant and sessional academic at La Trobe University. Until 2015, he was research intensive Associate Professor and previously served as Head of School. His current project is a monograph based on his fatality prevention research, to be published by Springer.