We tend to think of expensive field trips and character building in the wilderness, but this is not always inclusive or a ordable. Risk assessments can be a headache, but consider the risk profile of sending students back to the campus they have already crossed to get to your lecture. The built environment can be just as stimulating as the wilderness. From a management studies perspective, there is plenty of inspiration there. The challenge is for students to feel like this is a di erent and engaging environment. This requires that they are encouraged to see the built environment anew. To do this, I ask them to notice things they may not have done before. The names of buildings, the scars caused by climate change, the behaviour of people around them. In this way, learners become de-familiarised with their environment and start to think critically. Thinking flexibly about experience The idea of wilderness challenges will be daunting to many business educators. Additionally, there are risks to be considered. Large class sizes rule out many courses – I would not like to take 400 students into the wilderness. Expense will also be an issue. I have been fortunate enough to run a fully outdoor experience for 14 students on the bonny banks of Loch Lomond. It was the day that a teaching experiment became a passion for me. However, my business school could not do that alone; we needed serious professional help in the form of great facilitators and adventurers to maximise the value of that experience. The element that was unseen and did not do the rounds on social media was the risk management. Giving learners a safe environment to learn in without focusing constantly on their own safety requires serious preparation. Thankfully, the outdoors does not mean wilderness. The built environment provides many opportunities for critical reflective thinking, especially for business education. Just a few yards from the campus there are… guess what? Actual businesses. This is, after all, what we teach about and research. A few minutes spent observing businesses, patterns of human behaviour, climatic scars, wear and tear and other artefacts can encourage students to become observant and critical management thinkers. Many management disciplines can be practised outdoors. For example, I created a bespoke field trip for students studying risk as part of their MSc in sustainable tourism. We use local tourism sites as venues to conduct actual risk assessments. The difference with outside learning Inaccessible teaching is not an option indoors – and it is not an option outdoors either. As mentioned, ecopedagogy di ers from ‘character-building’ or ‘team-building’ exercises that take place outside. Learning from these events is usually personal and internal and done properly they can support personal growth. As business educators, we are usually more interested in external knowledge and ecopedagogy is not usually about teaching something di erent to traditional teaching; it just does it in a di erent way.
management education stresses the importance of sustainability and responsible management. But can management students understand these concepts by looking at PowerPoint slides and listening to management theories from 19th-century thinkers? The ecopedagogy approach The term ecopedagogy relates to teaching about the social and natural environments and learning about the world by being in it. While it is not explicitly about outdoor learning, it is, in practice, hard to do in a classroom. Escaping the classroom is central to ecopedagogy. It is future-oriented, ecological and political. Originating from the educator and philosopher Paolo Freire, the modern form of ecopedagogy also takes inspiration from experiential learning theory and critical pedagogy of place, along the lines of Ellen Bayer and Judson Byrd Finley’s Out of the Classroom and into the Wild chapter in their co-edited 2022 book Ecopedagogies . It is an approach centred on our planet, with a special interest on place and experience. This separates it from common perceptions of outdoor learning as a team-building, character-forming or physically challenging pursuit. Ecopedagogy is not a challenge to “climb every mountain” and “ford every stream”, as the song from The Sound of Music goes. This distinction is worth mentioning as it is a misconception that can be extremely unhelpful when securing funding or encouraging outdoor learning. There are three main ingredients for any ecopedagogy project: challenge, reflection and group discussion. The challenge is psychological, not physical. Outdoor learning should be accessible to all, regardless of physical disability, fitness level or neurodiversity. However, I find that many students find the idea of learning outdoors challenging in itself and tend to resist it. When I tell learners 30 minutes into a lecture to walk out of the room and find a building on campus named after a woman, confusion, disbelief and resistance are always a feature. I will explain later how I managed to overcome this. But thwarting these challenges is genuinely formative for students used to passive learning. This can only be of value when learners reflect on their experience. Consequently, ecopedagogy emphasises the role of journaling. It is vital that students record their observations on paper, audio, as photos and so on – however they want. On my courses, I ask students to submit field notes weekly and these build into their graded assessment. It is a joy, for example, to see an online forum with 250 posts. I run short campus field trips of 30 minutes midway through my lectures. Students leave and arrive in groups (although it’s worth pointing out that I never organise them into these groups) and the group discussion provides a rich learning experience. Let’s unpack these campus field trips. I got the idea of such trips from Summer Harrison’s description of de-familiarising everyday environments, mentioned in the Field Journaling in the Wild chapter in the Bayer and Finley book cited above. Campus field trips are an e ective way to bring outdoor learning into your teaching.
20 | Ambition DECEMBER 2023/JANUARY 2024
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