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Every year, nearly one million staff work seasonally at summer camps. Although little research has investigated staff experiences compared to campers’ experiences, literature does exist. Understanding the breadth and depth of this literature is an important way to guide future investigations and employment practices regarding seasonal summer camp staff experiences. The purpose of our scoping review was to synthesize the literature about seasonal summer camp staff experiences. Using two scoping review manuals as guides, we systematically retrieved and reviewed the corpus of literature produced from 1900 to 2020 regarding seasonal summer camp staff experiences. We reviewed 116 documents, including peer-reviewed journal articles, theses and dissertations, and refereed conference abstracts. We extracted and analyzed documents’ topics, methods, sample and setting characteristics, major findings, and future research suggestions. We present our analysis of literature in two sections: staff outcomes and administrator/staff concerns. Findings from our review may inform future research and practice.

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Outdoor adventure education has an extensive history of considering how its students should wrestle with privilege. Recent events have brought issues of privilege to the forefront, which raises the question of whether outdoor adventure education can play a role in learning to see and affect systems of privilege. This paper examines several elements of outdoor adventure education that make it an ideal environment for teaching about systems of privilege, and makes the argument that Jack Mezirow’s critical reflection, wherein people question the principles that underlie their ideas, should be a key element of outdoor adventure education curriculum in the 21st century. The authors’ perspectives are grounded in critical theory and the assumption that power dynamics need to be examined in order to be changed. By combining critical reflection with the unique characteristics of outdoor adventure education, outdoor adventure educators may be able to successfully teach participants to recognize and impact systems that operate around them.