A BSTRACT The complex experience of kayakers on an adventure tour is explored through the attributes and qualities of Stebbins' concept of serious leisure. Serious leisure is related to Bourdieu's term 'field' or, more descriptively, a 'way of thinking', which provides a theoretical framework appropriate to understanding adventure tourism experiences. The paper is based on observations of participation, conversations and in-depth interviews with nine tourists on a 14-day white-water kayaking package tour of the South Island of New Zealand, in February 2002. Analysis of the resulting field notes and transcripts of interviews and conversations revealed an interpretation of the participants' experience and their understanding of this experience which, although embedded in the images and language of adventure, is focused on serious leisure attributes of personal challenge, status and safe success. The conclusion of this paper is that the package adventure tour experience can be a significant marker in serious leisure careers.

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Background: Many believe the 'outdoors' is a key factor influencing student learning in 'outdoor education' because it is so different from the 'everyday' indoor contexts of students' lives. In much of the outdoor education literature the outdoors is construed as a neutral and simplified space which allows students to have more 'real' and meaningful experiences than is possible in mainstream or 'indoor' schooling. Purpose: In this paper we draw on Foucauldian theoretical insights to interrogate some of the ways this binary distinction of indoor/outdoor is both produced and sustained in outdoor education and the effect this has on practice. We examine how this presumed indoors/outdoors distinction works to make particular assumptions about what and how students learn in outdoor education appear coherent and plausible while excluding possibilities of alternative student learning in this field. Participants and settings: This article focuses on one aspect of a larger ethnographic study of the outdoor education programme in a New Zealand all girls secondary school. Data collection: The first author observed and participated in the outdoor education programme of this school during 2002. Students were interviewed about their perceptions of their experiences on camp at the end of each residential camp. The two outdoor education teachers were interviewed about their perceptions of outdoor education at the end of the year. Findings: The rhetoric of the role of the outdoors in outdoor education provides a limited and partial understanding of students' experiences and what it is possible for them to learn in the outdoors. We argue that this indoors/outdoors binary produces particular knowledge of self and others and environment and specific ways of understanding students that are not necessarily advantageous to all. Conclusion: We conclude by urging a re-consideration of the sanctity of the indoors/outdoors divide-one that attends to the potential effects on students, teachers and outdoor education as a subject area, of continuing to premise outdoor education philosophy and practice on its unproblematised 'existence'.

This paper examines the gulf between the perceptions of risk and risk management of twelve New Zealand outdoor instructors and the definitions and managerial practices surrounding risk and risk management. This gulf is supported by the discursive practices of risk and risk management which privileges objective and rational models of thinking, denying the subjective experience of both the instructor and the student. Broadening the definitions of risk to recognize the opportunities as well as the loss inherent within risk, better reflects the complexity of this phenomenon. This may open the way for discussion about risk as a social process, rather than just a process of rational decision-making. Refocusing the risk debate on the opportunities it provides may allow the discussion to move away from risk being dominated by its management, to focusing on the learning goals and objectives of adventure education.

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