More than activities: using a ‘sense of place’ to enrich student experience in adventure sport

Abstract

There has been increasing interest in recent years in the significance of a sense of place in the literature of outdoor adventure education. In the UK relationships between outdoor education and the environment still appear largely focused on the science of the natural environment and the activity in question. In this paper we present empirical evidence from an action research project to demonstrate how a combination of formal and informal pedagogy in a higher education context can lead to a socio-cultural and historical understanding of place and enrich the learning experience of students when teaching the classical outdoor adventurous activity of sailing. The sport of dinghy sailing is a module within a Bachelor's undergraduate degree in outdoor education and was taught from a small fishing town in Devon, England. We adopted an integrated and experiential critical pedagogy of place that allowed theory and practice, thought and action to be a holistic experience and this approach provided opportunities for informal as well as formal learning. This action research project used methods including: photo-elicitation, focus group interviews and evidence from the analysis of written student assignments. Our findings show that students discover a significance of the meaningful relationship between the socio-cultural history of where that activity takes place and the activity itself and that as a result their engagement in the learning and research process was enriched.

Psychophenomenology and the explicitation interview for accessing subjective lived experience in sport coaching

“…Visual methods such as videography have been used for studying the submarine sensorium (Merchant, 2011), or student experiences in adventure sports (Leather & Nicholls, 2016), without having been used with a phenomenological approach for studying sport coaching. Sparkes and Smith (2012) proposed interviewing as a multi-sensory event and identified the potential of visual technologies to provide access to the range of senses involved in sport and physical culture activities.…”

Making Nature Personal: Fostering Vulnerability, Compassion, and Personal Growth Through a Transpersonal Eco-Art Process

“…Examples of activities include climbing trees, building dens and shelters, engaging in imaginative and fantasy play such as storytelling, and using full-size tools to cut, carve, and create from natural materials. This psycho educational tool teaches youth to respect nature and develop positive health outcomes (Leather & Nicholls, 2016). Sprinkle and Stephens (2021) defined ecosexual as a "person who imagines sex as an ecology that extends beyond the physical body" (p. 43).…”

Place-based Pedagogy in a Border Region: A Qualitative Examination of Experiences

“…PBE has been used while traveling with students to encourage students to think about the colonialist implications of their travel and study. Outdoor PBE also has the ability to help students form strong relationships with places (Deringer, 2017; Leather & Nicholls, 2016). This project examines how place-based curriculums might have impacted the experience of students who participated in outdoor recreation experiences along the border of Texas and Mexico.…”