Michel Foucault Goes Outside: Discipline and Control in the Practice of Outdoor Education

Abstract

This paper is concerned with if, and how, measures of discipline and control are involved in outdoor and experiential education. Using the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, author of Discipline and Punish (1975), we shall explore how educational practice may be used to control people and to render them into “docile bodies.” We follow this with an examination of what Foucault calls the three means of correct training used for the creation and maintenance of docile bodies: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgments, and examination. Through the use of examples we will proceed to argue that outdoor and experiential education programs do exercise mechanisms of control that may at times operate contrary to purported goals. Thus, using Foucault as our guide, we examine the question of discipline and control, together with the concomitant issue of the relations of power within our society. While recognizing that discipline and control are, at times, necessary and desirable, we will argue that outdoor and experiential educators should understand how negative relations of power operate so that they may avoid unwittingly incorporating them into their practices and programs.

White Privilege in Experiential Education: A Critical Reflection

“…Intensifying this effect is the educator's responsibility for intentionally metering (to some degree) the level of challenge of an activity. An experiential educator is, therefore, structurally granted an entitlement-a script to help narrate students' experiences-that is the source of power, knowledge, and privilege (Bowdridge & Blenkinsop, 2011;Brown, 2002;Estes, 2004). The content and texture of the subsequent experience may help the experience negotiate its own way and tell its own story, but the experience certainly would not exist without the impetus and manipulation of the empowered and privileged educator.…”

“…This "classroom" now takes on multiple meanings, but it normatively remains any setting in which teaching and learning take place. Implicit in experiential education is an inescapable power differential between teacher and student (Bowdridge & Blenkinsop, 2011), regardless of calls for decreasing or eliminating the distance between these two entities (Brown, 2002;Cooks, 2003;Estes, 2004;Freire, 1970). Despite the incorporation of constructivist pedagogical techniques, experiential education necessarily involves the use of a teacher (instructor, facilitator, or similar leadership position) and one or more students.…”

“…For instance, just as class bells, assigned seats, and rows of desks are indicative of traditional education settings, experiential education often incorporates similarly universalized mechanisms of participant control (Bowdridge & Blenkinsop, 2011), such as circles for discussion, the offer of "challenge by choice," full value contracts, or environmental behavior guidelines such as "Leave No Trace." Experiential education programs may take this perspective for granted, offering curricula deemed to be value-neutral and free of any advantages or disadvantages based on race, gender, class, geography, culture, or otherwise.…”

Traditional assessment as a subjectification tool in schools in Lesotho

“…For power to be exercised, it has to be done on docile bodies/subject -subjectification/objectification. A docile subject does not resist power and control of the influencer who wants to modify one's behaviourdiscipline (Bowdridge and Blenkinsop, 2011).…”

Love letters to services past: risk and outdoor education in youth work

“…However, there have been more recent attempts to look at social theory in relation to outdoor adventure (for example, Bowdridge & Blenkinsop, 2011;Pike & Beames, 2013;Stewart, 2008;Zink & Burrows, 2008), but this would still appear to be part of a relatively small body of literature. Other commentators have developed the notions of the purposes of outdoor education, with, for example, discussion of slow pedagogy across time and place in the context of higher education (Payne & Wattchow, 2008).…”