A professor of outdoor and experiential education reflects on the development of group relations and on lessons in outdoor ethics learned during a canoe trip in the Canadian Arctic. Written to celebrate a transforming experience, this paper illustrates the experiential learning and individual development that can result from intensive outdoor…

Outdoor education programs help students realize their "wild" nature by linking them concretely with their surroundings, providing stories that explain the natural world, encouraging feelings of wonder, and expanding identification with nature as parts of the world, previously perceived as "outside," become part of the self.…

This study explores how high school students learn from their experiences in an extracurricular adventure program and illustrates how students' narrative inquiries relate to experiential learning. Twelve canoe trips were studied by participant observation methods. Data were collected from recorded interviews with students and staff, field notes,…

Essential features of an outdoor integrated curriculum include experiential learning, whole process, authenticity, challenge, responsibility, and connection with the community. Additional factors that result only from outdoor learning include inescapable consequences, personal growth, and sense of wonder. Problems of curriculum integration include…

Analysis of recent literature on experiential education provides material for a model for learning experiences in experiential education. The model is constructed from six interconnected and overlapping parts, ranging from the profoundly foundational to the more specifically tactical. First, the learning experience attends to the human condition.…