What follows is the speech I gave at the Annual COEO Conference at Dorset on September 26, 1998.

(Check out http://www.headwaters.com/COEO/98conf.html for details about the conference.)

This is my actual speech, transcribed from a recording. Starting in July, 1998, I had posted my working notes here on this site, seeking — and getting! — feedback. As I worked through the process of developing this speech, things became increasingly more connected … which is a good thing!!! My problem at the time of the speech was to cut material out, selecting just the nuggets that seemed appropriate at the moment, breathing into life what had been flat words on the screen of my laptop.

This is version 10 — the final version! — of this online experiment. What you see is what actually I said as transcribed from a recording I made of my speech.

BTW, I was pleased with how the speech went — to see responses to my ideas, check out the Conference issue of Pathways, which includes this version of the speech, plus selected reactions and responses.

My heart-felt thanks to those who have responded. Some of the shortest responses have had the most meaning for me!

(I’m publishing these notes here on the web in plain ‘vanilla’ html, doing it as simply as I can, so as to avoid getting carried away with fancy html-coding. All I’ve done is “save-as html” from within ClarisWorks. So it takes about ten seconds to save as html and another few seconds to upload to the server)

The working title was “Mud Between The Toes”, which comes from the title of the submission I worked with others on for the LEIC-forced amalgamation of the Toronto District School Board. You can see that submission at http://www.sympatico.ca/~mwhitcom/toroe.html
I leaned more towards something along the lines of re-uniting bits and atoms as a theme. Providing experiences that promote active learning is at the heart of what we do best, and I think we as outdoor educators focussed on process are one bulwark against the trend to increasing vicariousness in our society,.

I’d welcome feedback — I’d love to make use of the “group brain”.

Specifically, I’d like examples of outdoor education learning experiences you’ve participated in.

Of particular value would be commentary from you about why this particular lesson was (or perhaps wasn’t) effective.
I welcome vignettes, stories, examples, contacts …

If you have thoughts that you think I’ve missed, I’d be glad to respond to them.
Please respond to me at    

The Actual Speech:

It is indeed an honour to speak to you. It’s been really quite a daunting responsibility to feel that I have to come up with something worthwhile, especially for all you relative newcomers — and there are lots of you, which is really heartening to see. The old-timers here already know how to excuse me ….
This is version 10 of an experiment that I’ve been carrying on since early July. I’ve been putting my working notes online on my web-site. I’ve been really gratified by those of you who have responded to me. Some of the shortest responses have in fact been the most meaningful.
Since part of my idea has been to exemplify learning by doing, you got a piece of paper when you came in the door. Would you take that piece of paper and write one or two sentences about one of the most remarkable outdoor education learning experiences that you’ve ever delivered with students. I want you to focus on outdoor learning experiences that you have delivered with students, as much as you can, please. What made that experience remarkable? Finally, how could you provide that same experience again? It may help some of you to think about experiences that you have experienced as a learner, but if you can,please, focus on experiences that you have delivered.
... snip ... snip ... snip ... (quietness as people think and write … )
I’d like you to turn to the person either behind you or in front of you, or both, and I’d like you to take a minute or two to share those experiences with them.
... snip ... snip ... snip ... (noise and excitement while people chatter animatedly!)
“Mud Between The Toes” and “Re-uniting Bits and Atoms”
This excitement and involvement has been example of exactly what I want to talk about. The working title of the speech has been “Mud Between the Toes”. That phrase come from Mary Roberts, with whom I work at Sheldon. One of the criteria she uses to evaluate a programme is “Do kids have mud between their toes?”, signifying that direct connection, that direct interaction. That title formally comes from a submission to the LEIC (Local Education Improvement Commission) regarding the amalgamation of the Toronto District School Board.. You can see that submission at http://www.sympatico.ca/~mwhitcom/toroe.html
My theme is actually along the lines of re-uniting bits and atoms. I’ll explain that and try to make it sensible as I go along. I believe that providing experiences that promote active learning is at the heart of what we do best, and I think we as outdoor educators focussed on process are one bulwark against the trend to increasing vicariousness in our society, Therefore Mud Between The Toes becomes an important and signal metaphor for that process of direct interaction with some kind of real world where the bits — the information, and the atoms — the physical reality, are re-united by a process of actively learning. We could go on and on, sharing, and if we had the whole morning, we could have …. But I think it‘s important that you begin to think about this, and put it in the context of your own self, your own experiences, so that what I am saying to you, you can verify against your own experiences and make the connections.
I want to relate an experience I had. I worked for a year in the southwest of England up on the top of Exmoor, doing outdoor education at Yenworthy Lodge. I spent one absolutely stunning week working with three 15-year-old wheelchair kids. We did zip lines — you could hardly see the kids for the tangle of webbing and carabiners around them! We abseiled them down steep grassy slopes in their wheelchairs; wall-climbing; surfing in the ocean. I was doing the last evening programme with them. There was a group of Year 11, upper high school students, staying with them at Yenworthy, a group they were somewhat integrated with back in their home school. I was giving them a number of possibilities to do for evening programme. One of the possibilities was to give them a fire-by-friction demonstration, showing them my old stone tools I‘d brought over. Helen, one of the fifteen-year-old wheelchair kids, had a BlissSymbolics board on her wheelchair. Now this was after working with her for six days, but I didn’t really think she was communicating. I knew that she was responding, because when I picked up out of the canoe, and pretended to stumble, dropping her feet into the water, she went rigid with catatonia, with the excitement of it all. I knew she was experiencing, I knew she was reacting. But even though the wonderful people working with her said she was communicating, I had no real evidence of that. One of the men who was eating supper with her, called me over and said, “Mark, come and see this.” And Helen, in a shaky, shaky manner, outlined on her BlissSymbolics board, “What Fire Make?” She wanted to see the fire, wanted to know how I was going to light the fire. And so I did the whole demonstration, lighting the fire by friction, passing the glowing ember around, everyone blowing on it. Helen blew on it, arms going up akimbo in animation, barely able to puff in her excitement. We got fire — but the most amazing fire was the fire in her eyes, and the fire in her heart, in her soul. To me, that’s what outdoor education is about — it’s about making that fire in our hearts and in our souls.
Vicarious Experience
Although the theme of this conference is Transitions, I want to focus us back on what I see as the heart, the centre of what we do. Whatever the changes we have to make — and I think we’re good at changes — whatever changes we have to make must come from our source of strength, and not become a knee-jerk helter-skelter response to some problem.
I think we live in a world of increasing vicarious experience. You can call that mediocrity in experience. There’s less co-operation, less physical touch, less dialogue, less time, less story. To an outdoor educator that would mean fewer campfires, fewer hugs, less teamwork toward common goal, less direct visceral contact with the non-human. I think back to the ‘hot’ versus ‘cool’ of McLuhan; the degree of interaction, the degree of involvement; John Livingston’s Domestication of Human Species versus that sense of ‘wildness’. I don’t know anything about the words of the song, but the title “Too Much Sex and Not Enough Affection” from Timbuk3 makes me want to find out more about it.
So here are some examples of vicarious experiences, and of limited contact with physical reality — ones that to me strike a chord. The boy who, when taken to an aquarium, asked, ”Is this virtual reality or real reality?” While that may seem extreme, there is an aquarium, the Boston Virtual FishTank, a new public aquarium, whose fish are powered by computer graphics. Or there’s the Japanese technology being used in restaurants and so on, with a small aquarium consisting of a thin water tank with a video monitor behind it. Using laser disks and high-definition video technology, the system displays images of fish on the monitor. The water (with bubbles percolating through it) gives a 3-D effect — and you don’t have to clean them. Most offensive to me is the “dogbot“ Sony engineers have come up with. (For those that don’t know much about me, my teaching partner is an eleven-and-half-year-old Golden Retriever called Laddie — just wonderful!) Sony engineers have developed a robotic dog, complete with 64-bit central processing unit, 8 megabytes of memory, and a supersensitive camera ”eye“ that enables it to obey motion commands — if you stick your hand out, dogbot will sit. The design is in fact that you can interchange the head and the tail and the body parts, making the dogbot of your choice. That dogbot is expected to be on the market market for children sometime around the year 2000.
I went to Canada’s WonderLand last year for the first time. I spent the morning going on rides with my daughter and her friends. I got completely taken with what was going on, and yet didn’t have any paper with me to do some journalling, some processing. So I went to the weight-guesser — who didn’t come close! — and won a tiny pad of brightly coloured paper. I sat and thought and wrote. My daughter still laughs at me, and wants to know if I’m going to do that again next weekend when I go again — and yes, I probably will. What struck me was that there is complete safety at WonderLand, and that there is very little choice. You can chose which line-up you’re going to. You can chose when to scream. You can choose when you are going to put your arms in the air. You have no choice other than that. The most ‘real’ exhilaration that I saw was at the bottom of the flume ride where that big boat comes down, spraying up a big wall of water. The most real exhilaration I saw was people standing on the bridge below the waterslide, deciding as the thing was coming down, ‘Am I going to stand here, and get the full force of it, or am I going to chicken out, and get just a sideswipe, or am I going to stand over there and just watch?’ Those were the people who were making personal choices, who were determining the level of their experience. Those were the people — at least to my eye — who had the most exhilarating experience. Another thing that I want to note is that WonderLand experiences are shared experiences — shared in the sense that we ride together, and we scream together. One person starts to scream and we all start screaming — much as a flock of pigeons wheels simultaneously. Please note that there’s no processing of that — other than unintelligible grunts of the level of ‘what I done’. Please note also the heavy emphasis on short-term adrenaline rushes as the definition of ‘fun’ and ‘experience’.
We have a school that we deal with in East York where the kids live entirely in apartment buildings. They are surrounded on three sides by fingers of the Don Valley and Taylor Creek. Many of those kids walk to school through an indoor walkway, through a mall, and across to the school. Many of them are ‘latch-key’ kids because of the socio-economics. Their experience of being outside comes at recess.
We had a kid last year from another city school, a school again surrounded by ravines of the Don Valley. All sorts of real wild things live in that valley: coyotes in the industrial area across from the school, deer travelling up and down the corridor, more foxes than I’ve ever seen at Sheldon. This twelve-year-old boy came recently from a third-world country. He was the oldest of five children, living a latch-key life,with I think five jobs held down between his two parents. This kid grew up without without his parental culture, and in the presence of most limited of North American TV/video culture. He walked on flat surfaces only. When he walked to school, he took the elevator down, walked on the sidewalk, walked over to the school. He had difficulty on stairs, because he had never had experienced stairs in the environment in which he grew up. To get him out on our flat paths at Sheldon was like watching a toddler walk. That was the limitation, the shallowness, the vicariousness of this boy’s experience.
And then we’ve got all sorts of television, videos, cinema, the Net — and indeed all available media, increasingly giving us countenances that are the faces of nobody we need to reckon with.
Please note that I’m far from a Luddite — I’m a wirehead. What I’d like is things in more of a balance — high tech and high touch. We as outdoor educators have that high touch — that’s the core of what we do best.
So while repeating that the theme is Transitions, what I want to focus on is that whatever we do has got to come from the centre, got to come from what we’re unique at, got to come from what we’re good at. By understanding that, and knowing it, and feeling it, we can move forward, we can move outwards, we can move beyond.
So I believe that in our world, information (bits) is increasingly being separated from physical reality (atoms). The bits are being separated from the atoms of physical reality. I think furthermore, bits are separated by a lack of interaction and involvement, by a lack of process that ties the bits and the atoms together, that ties the information and the physical reality together. That process of interacting, of doing, of personal involvement is what we’re all about. So outdoor education, in which those bits and atoms are joined by the experiential process, and joined by that direct connection between actions and consequences, that process of tying bits and atoms together, is where we’re at.
Our Medium is their Massage and our Message
Our Medium is their Massage and our Message. Outdoor education experiences are creators of affect, creators of of feeling, creators of of emotion, creators of reaction. There are at least three areas in which these affects, those feelings, are significant: in creating the initial awe and love for nature that Rachel Carson calls “the sense of wonder”; secondly, the importance of being involved and learning directly — that personal experience; and thirdly, establishing the importance of living, learning, working and playing together through the direct and personal experience of powerful group feelings. So in outdoor education, we are primarily in the business of providing and mediating experience — experiences between the student and the environment, and at least as important, experiences between student and peer. We specialize in creating and manipulating experience. We focus on connections and relationships — relationships to the environment, and to each other. Our medium of experiential learning massages our students, modifying them in significant ways and conveying some powerful meta-messages. Our Medium is their Massage and our Message. (modified after MW, Pathways, June 1992)
So last week we were doing a problem-solving lesson, group dynamics, group initiatives, that was focused on kids working together to solve problems. At the end of it, one of the Grade 6 girls, Sarah, said to Katie and I as we were walking back after the lesson “You know, it’s amazing back there because boys and girls were working together and there was none of that boy-girl stuff that there would have been all sorts of last week. I feel really good about that!” So the way that we set up that lesson — our Medium — Massaged those students so that they had to work together, and they did work together, and there was absolutely none of the ‘eeugh … we have to grab ahold of … eeugh‘ And so Sarah very powerfully got the Message that she could be an equal contributor in groups and that she could expect others to be equal contributors. Our Medium is their Massage and our Message.
Just this past week with another Sarah from another Grade 6 class, we were doing a stream lesson. We found a little mayfly, an incredible little mayfly called Pseudiron — unbelievably streamlined, very flattened, the front femur spread right out tight on top of the rock so that in the fastest water, it gets forced down onto the rock. The front of this gorgeous mayfly is shaped like the downswept front of a racing car — or vice-versa! The hind-side of the front femur is concavely curved, and the front of the next femur is convexly curved to fit into the concavity of the one in front. In order to minimize the turbulence of the flowing water going over top, there are tiny stiff hairs sticking backwards visible under a good magnifying glass, and more amazing even still, there are even tinier hairs sticking forward from the second femur up into the spaces between the front hairs. At the viscosity of flowing water, and at the scale of these insects, these mayflies have in effect created a solid surface. Sarah, who was really interested in stream insects, found one of these Pseudirons. She was going on and on about the enormous shield-shaped head sticking down onto the rocks, making this wonderful thing so streamlined. Using my good magnifier, I was able to help her see not only the shape of the femurs, but also the tiny hairs. She could see and understand the structure and function of these amazing adaptations. Our Medium of interacting with her and getting her to observe closely, Massaged her and got her to begin looking at other bugs. She really got the Message that if she opens her eyes, thinks about it, really tries to understand, she can learn an incredible amount. For that kid, there were light bulbs going off in her head about how she could learn and about the joys of learning that were pretty powerful Our Medium is their Massage and our Message.
In outdoor education, we stress the importance of the connections and connectedness. So when we find something in the stream, we don’t just give it a name, we don’t treat it as a noun, we don’t treat it as an object. It’s a verb, it’s something living, it’s a relationship to the velocity of the stream and the turbulence of the water. It’s a relationship to the algae that it scrapes off the rocks. It’s a connection in the web of life. One of the powerful characteristics of outdoor education is that we focus on and develop the inherent natural connections between knowledge. It’s not science, it’s not math, it’s not history, it’s not language — it’s reality. When we integrate those things, we bring them together.
The Heart of Outdoor Education
I’m not going to define outdoor education as separate from all the other possible terms. There are other groups to represent other specific definitions — and no others than COEO to advocate for active education out-of-doors. That’s one of the things that makes COEO unique and important. COEO has always been cross-curricular with a common, connecting thread.
Education out-of-doors is for the whole person. Education out-of-doors implies direct contact with some kind of ‘natural‘ reality, whether that be in the schoolyard looking at dandelions, whether that be in the community looking at maple keys dropping off the trees, whether that be at some place that’s got special facilities like the incredible Canopy Trail that I experienced yesterday at the Haliburton Forest Reserve. The point is that is a direct connection with some kind of natural reality, natural not in the sense of green necessarily, but natural in the sense of a complete and connected reality. Education out of door stresses the importance of connections.
And outdoor education is fundamentally related to the curriculum and I use that word curriculum in the very broadest sense. We are interested in the development of the whole person within that framework. I think one of things that is important in outdoor education is that we are here for students, whether they be kindergarten kids, or university kids. We are working with people, not with subjects, not with some ulterior goal for some cause, but we are working with people. And that really contrasts with the narrowness of the current government emphasis on business — education being for business, with their whole denial of the educational validity of attitudes and values.
Norm Frost and I were down early in July at the Ministry of Education, giving input from COEO into the Secondary School Interdisciplinary Guideline. We kept saying what was missing in the document was that's there nothing there about values, about attitudes, about what we feel. The Family Studies people were saying the same thing. The Ministry staff were getting quite uncomfortable, and finally said they were being told that they can’t uses those words ‘attitudes’ and ‘values’.
That fundamental opposition points us individually to action — political action that as a non-profit organization The Council of Outdoor Educators can not take. So it’s not COEO that must take political action. That’s our individual responsibility. Advocation that as individuals we must take, not so much against any particular government, but against the neo-conservative reductionist narrow-focus mentality.
We’ve had many trends in our outdoor education past. One of the early trends was natural history, then out-of-doors skills, group dynamics, the environment, and with curriculum being one of the current trends. But consistently, our core and essential value has been and continues to be active learning, i.e., the process of learning by doing and experiencing. So whether that’s Jim Raffan’s “What are we going to have them do?” as the first question and the most important question. Whether is the “hands, heart, and head” that Mary Roberts (whom I talked about earlier) uses at the end of each lesson: Have we reached their hands — what have they done? Have we reached their heart — what have they felt? Have we reached their head — What have we helped them learn something new? Or whether it’s Open Their Eyes, Open The Door, Open Their Hearts (referring to the wonderful little handout that I first got from Judy Halpern and Ian Faulds last Make Peace With Winter Conference).
The process of learning by doing and experiencing is at our core. Judy reports the story of a very cool twelve-year-old girl out in the middle of a field, running up and down the field flapping her arms in V-formation with her classmates like Canada geese, and looking over at Judy, making eye-contact and saying she’d kill Judy if she ever told anyone that she did this, laughing, and going went back to her honking and flapping!
In outdoor education, we have a wonderful history of accessing and honouring multiple modalities of thinking and of expressing. Almost one of the key things about outdoor educators is that we’re creative. Some are creative in coming up with new ideas, or people like me are good at thieving from other thieves.
In outdoor education, there’s that whole importance of learning as developing narrative: living stories, and sharing stories. There’s that idea of the interaction, because a story is an interaction, a story is something that is told, a story is something that is shared — and that’s a really important part of outdoor education.
So I’ll give some more examples of mediating experience — I’ve given some already. A few years ago — this was just genius! — Martin Hunt, who was working at Sheldon at the time, had a group down at the stream, doing a stream study in our incredible Sheldon Creek. There was a kid there with coke-bottle glasses, unbelievably thick glasses. He was standing in the stream with his hip waders, just standing there, turning this way and that way, just feeling the current on his waders. Our Director of Education was there with some trustees, watching the lesson. The Director watched this kid in the stream and watched Martin not getting this kid to do stuff in the stream. The Director walked up to the kid and said, “You look like you’re having lots of fun!” And the kid with these great coke-bottle glasses stared up at him and said in a hushed and awe-filled voice, “I’ve never been in a stream before! It’s just so … wow!” A direct experience! — and not necessarily the direct experience we wish to give.
In the States a few years back I bought a Middle Woodland stone platform pipe. It’s all scratched up by some farm kid who probably found it behind the plough in his fields, and he’d scratched it up with his Barlow knife the way he thought it should look. From the style of the pipe, it dates back to 700–800 AD. I use that pipe in the excellent field archaeology course at Boyd Conservation Centre. (Some people may think that’s some heinous sin I’m committing, using an old artifact as a learning tool — but it’s out of context, and it’s educational value far exceeds it’s potential archaeological significance.) I had a kid last year, a very cool kid, by the name of Tom Jones, so we’re talking 18-years-old at the time. One of the things they were doing was putting together a Celebration, as a way of experiencing how to express the different kind of connection, trying to get them to understand how viewing everything as having a purpose, everything as having a spirit could make sense as a world view. So Tom researched what would be appropriate to smoke, went out and identified and gathered goldenrod, bringing it back and preparing and drying the leaves, and then learning the not-insignificant skill of lighting and keeping a twelve-hundred-year-old stone pipe alive for an extended time during the Ceremony. I saw him just over a month ago. At first sight over a hundred metres away, he started shouting to me: “Remember that pipe? — I can’t forget the feeling of sharing that!” That’s providing experience — that’s mediating experience.
This brings me to what I know as a personal weakness as an outdoor educator. I get so involved in providing experience, that “Oh no, it’s twenty to twelve, we‘re still well out from the Centre. If you’re a hopper, you better run ahead …. The rest of you follow me, and off I stride in my size twelve boots …. ” What I often — too often — miss out is the mediation or the processing — helping the students attach some sort of meaning. One of the most cogent responses I had to my online development of this speech was from my longtime mentor, Bert Horwood. He helped me focus on the point that the meaning I attach should not the meaning that I want to attach but that meaning has got to come from the kids — their meaning. Yes, maybe I do want to bring out the meaning of a food web or so on, but the meaning that really has to come out is their meaning. I would have missed the first Sarah commenting about the equality of the group and the working together of the group, if I had wanted my meaning. It was her expressing of her meaning that gave that experience such a a lasting effect for her — and for me! So we have to allow for that complete processing, in the sense of allowing their emotional meaning to come out and be expressed and to be shared.
Transitions Towards What?
So the theme is Transitions — but transitions towards what? Leading towards creating change for what? Well, we work with people. We work with personal understanding; we work with empowerment; we work towards what some people might call transformation (as being the latest buzz word). I have trouble with the idea of transformation. I much prefer the idea of empowerment and I prefer that because what I want is kids to do is to take control over their own lives so they are the ones who are developing that power. That’s what I want for my own daughters. And that‘s what I want my daughters’ teachers and profs to give to them. And that’s what I want my students to achieve.
I believe that we also want to develop “a living relationship with nature”, whether that’s nature in the schoolyard, or nature at Sheldon, or nature up in Algonquin, or nature up on the Thelon River.
Change towards what? I think that some of the ideas from Learning for Sustainability provide a really good basis of environmental goals.
Outdoor education has that very strong meta-lesson concerning the value and the joy of personal active learning — which is taking the personal responsibility for one’s own learning. I stumbled across a phrase that I really liked and I had it put into some context that really improves my understanding of its meaning. “This I learned experimentally”, i.e., experientially. This was from George Fox, the founder of the Quakers. This I learned experientially. What I experience is the key to my knowledge. Coming from the time when Fox said that, remember that reality came from what the king said and what the church said. Fox said it’s important that I learn from my own experience. That’s learning for life.

It’s worthwhile to think of our own selves. How do we learn as individuals? I don’t learn best in a formal situation. Are we teaching the way that we learn best? — not the way that we learned in the past, but the way that we presently learn the things that really count? And that‘s how we should be teaching — that’s the way we should be striving to be outdoor educators.

I believe that we also have to work towards the development of the sense of service, and finding joy and fulfilment in helping towards the common good — that sense of responsibility and sense of commitment involved in service beyond self. We bake cookies in the old wood stove at Sheldon. The kids have to go down to the barn and gather the eggs, they have to measure things out, they have to choose the right wood, cut the wood, and split the wood, and lay the fire the proper way — all those sorts of things. And no matter whether the cookies are burned or not, the kids love the cookies — which is a good thing, because more often than not, I burn them! When I ask them “Were those good cookies?” “Yeah, awesome!” “Then why are they good cookies?” “Well, we made them!” The next sequence of questions becomes something along the lines of: ‘So what would a pioneer kid have felt? We brought the flour down from the Centre. We brought the milk and the butter from the Centre. But where did the pioneer kid get the flour? Where did the pioneer kid get the milk? the butter? You at least fed the chickens. You at least cleaned the chickens. You at least gathered the eggs. You’ve had that direct connection. But how would have pioneer kid have felt, eating cookies from grain they ground, harvested, tilled, planted, ploughed, etc.,., themselves? And it wasn’t just themselves they were feeding when they made them — who were they feeding when they made the cookies and did all that work? And how is that sense of fulfilment and sense of responsibility different than you get when you buy a bag of Mr. Christies?’ That’s a very, very, different level! I think that kind of responsibility, and that kind of giving to the common good, that kind of development towards service to others is really, really important and crucial — it’s at the heart of what we should do in outdoor education.
Think of the value of that experience, think of the response to that, think of what a pioneer kid would think about, and compare it to the tyranny of fun in our modern society. If you don’t like the channel, you click the button on the channel changer. We go for the maximum adrenaline rush, no matter how short, no matter how contrived, and how controlled. The sobering thing, and something I think we need to be more aware of, is that ultimate value of fun — this is why I call it the tyranny of fun — is being treated as a commodity by organizations who can fill the orders. We get sucked into the tyranny of fun. Think about doing an extended wilderness trip. Think about the satisfaction that comes from the direct connection. You have to pull the paddle through the water; you have to prepare the food; you have to cook the food.

So what am I going to personally do? What are we going to individually do? I think that involves deriving satisfaction from giving to others. “If you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap. If you want to be happy for a day, go fishing. If you want to be happy for a year, plant a garden. If you want to be happy for a lifetime, help someone.“

I’d like you to take your piece of paper. I’d like you to think back to your personal experiences you wrote at the beginning. I’d like you to think about the things I’ve tried to get off my chest. I’d like you to take words, phrases, ideas, concepts that you think are important and I’d like you to write them down.

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What Do We Get Out of Doing What We’re Doing?
Perhaps one of the most meaningful comments I got back during the development of this speech came from my friend, Paul Lydon of Yenworthy Lodge Outdoor Education Centre in Exmoor, England. Paul is the maintenance man, a wonderful cook, excellent watercolourist, and one of the most widely read people I know. He said “Good ideas and so on, Mark — but what does all of this being outdoor educators do for each of us as individuals? What do we got out of doing what we’re doing?”
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On your way out, I’d like you to take one or more of your ideas and jot them down on the experience paper along the walls as a way of developing a group response, a group image, a group poem.
Thank you!

Comments written as Responses

• Experience: wholeness, relationship, circles and cycles, integrity, spirit
• Authenticity, Integrity, Connecting
• Allowing being in time and space versus changing time and space
• love
• Individuality, Patience, Situational, Variety
• Stop being a selfish leader and let group members in on the ‘hands-on’ experiences
• “First, I must create a safety aura and net. Then I must allow Individual freedom and risk.”
• We disorient folks. Sounds bad, eh? But remember Mark’s story about Fire in the Heart and Eyes and place in us we don’t get to enough.
• Let’s kick the plug from the wall
Get our fingernails dirty
Immerse ourselves in the new stream
And grow the wheat
To make the flour
To Bake the cookies
With our children.
• I wonder
Head, Hearts, Hands
People, not Subjects
Choices
Experience it!
Re-connecting with natural reality
Service to Others
Happy for a lifetime
I Wonder …
• Creating imaginations — when you use yours, you’re empowered
• Having no expectations can lead to the most incredible experiences
• The kids are the drivers; we the teachers are the passengers.
• Hands, Heart, Head … their meanings, not ours
• Without being part of the process, we miss our connection with nature.
The wholeness of how we have what we have
Dig a garden
Plant a seed
Pick a cucumber
Make a pickle
Bottle it
Share it
Re-use the bottle
• Hands, Heart, Head
What we do, feel, learn —
Unmediated mediums
Creat the experience
Connect to living
An integrated existence.
• Learn to do by Doing
• Let — allow — the audience to experience reality
• Creating magic
The awe and respect that comes from group sharing
Service
Choice
Responsibility
• The process of life is “The Goods” and “The Goods” is baking cookies in a woodstove.
• Only in a state of reality does your heart beat, do tears flow, can arms enclose your soul.

PARTS OF THE NOTES THAT WERE NOT USED DURING THE ACTUAL SPEECH …

mentoring: people-to-people connections

… and the development of this speech through the online sharing is a personal and striking example … !

the fostering of an outdoor education community

Where does this lead us?

Focus on what we do well, i.e., provide and mediate experience

increase emphasis on debriefing and helping them extract meaning
(see above comments on derivation of meaning … )

learning in relationship to curriculum and the out-of-doors, ultimately the whole of life

strengthen our curricular ties and make them more obvious

research
presentation of what we already do
assisting classroom teachers by making outdoor education relationships to curriculum clear in a way that helps them
getting involved in curriculum writing
participating in curriculum development forums

presenting ourselves

politically
to extend the outdoor education community

increase PD

within outdoor education community
personally as out-of-doors educators

developing the outdoor education community — through personal service

PD
mentoring
conferences
workshops
“THIS THOUGHT RAISES AN INTERESTING QUESTION TO CONSIDER? WE AREN'T THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO WANT TO GIVE KIDS DIRECT EXPERIENCE. AS YOU SAY, IT'S DOING SO OUTDOORS THAT IS OUR THING. BUT WHO ARE OUR NATURAL ALLIES AND HOW DO WE FORGE EFFECTIVE ALLIANCES FOR THE RESISTANCE TO INCREASING VICARIOUSNESS?“

 

Sequence

my idea is to exemplify learning-by-doing:

• Write one or two sentences about one of the most remarkable outdoor education learning experience you’ve ever delivered with students. What made it remarkable? Finally, how could you provide that same experience again?
• share with the person behind you and in front of you

and then how to share more widely (and yet not take too much time … ???)

• make my main points as speech proper (see Concepts)
• writing personal interpretations of main point(s), and then forming group ‘poem‘

?jigsaw as a way of developing shared-reactions within group

Background info — of lesser interest ! …

1998 June 06: from and to Barrie Martin via e-mail:

>CHOICES - Opportunities for Educating Outdoors
I like the thrust. I think I can put something together that glances somewhat at the past, acknowledges the present, and looks forward to opportunities. At this point, I'm thinking about what we do well -- about focusing on the active learning / experiential / hands-on / direct aspects. Environmental issues, curriculum connections, group dynamics, out-of-doors skills ... all have been past trends for outdoor education. And there will be others. But at the heart of our success lie fundamental processes -- and perhaps it's worthwhile to think about what those are. Preparation, knowledge, hard skills, people skills, group processes, active learning, debriefing and follow-up skills -- all enable us to mediate experience and help our learners re-frame and re-interpret. Since our ultimate goal is to create change, I'm also trying to work through what we're trying to change from and what we're aiming for. I've got rough ideas and scribbled notes -- but nothing organized so far.
How does this strike you? One thought is to fix up my thoughts somewhat and then to e-mail people like you for suggestions and feedback -- really an approach to accessing the 'group brain'.

>The 1998 Annual Conference for the Council of Outdoor Educators of Ontario
>September 24 - 27, 1998
>
>The People
>We want to celebrate outdoor educators and all those who support and
>participate -COEO members, practitioners, administrators, classroom
>teachers, student teachers, youth group leaders, camp staff, college and
>university students, park staff and entrepreneurs.
>
>The Vision
>The field of outdoor education continues to experience profound change.
>What are the opportunities and challenges - the choices - facing outdoor
>educators in these times? We wanted to build a conference that meets the
>current needs and wants of outdoor educators as they strive to make the
>right choices. We took the time to ask outdoor educators what knowledge,
>skills and resources they needed to make a difference.
>

rough thoughts:

look ahead rather than look back
vision: uplifting and invigorating and motivating
political strategy
reframing
OLSP ideas
go back to Dewey
review Pathways gems
meta-lesson bit
the way we learn and teach
environmental ed versus outdoor education and all the other definitions …
ethics
what do we do well? — and capitalize on that
do as slide show / presentation? /
use examples and multiple examples
use images and analogy
What Fire Light?
teachable moments: coke-bottle glasses kid in stream with hip waders; archaeology course stuff;
bring in day-centre and schoolyard outdoor education as well as residential; examples from whole spectrum across whole province
send ideas out on a ‘discussion list’ to key people for feedback and commentary
ask more broadly for input and vignettes and examples
need to specifically develop mechanisms to bring in and to develop mew voices and strengths i.e., mentoring, secondments, exchanges
find quote (Margaret Mead?) about individual having effect; local action for global results
importance of networking: “I didn’t know you felt that way too!”
development sense of service and joy and fulfilment in helping toward the common good

?old Chinese proverb: If you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap. If you want to be happy for a day, go fishing. If you want to be happy for a year, plant a garden. If you want to be happy for a lifetime, help someone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson poem ±Success
questions …

what do we do?
what do we do well?
what do we do uniquely?
why do we do it?
in what context?
how do we maintain that context?
how do we develop and extend that context

fundamental skills of an out-of-doors educator:

Skills

preparation
knowledge
hard skills
soft skills
group processing
managing active learning
debriefing
follow-up

an area for development, study and research
skills / attitudes and values / approaches
as a profession, we need to honour the value of knowing

need to get beyond the superficial

“God is in the details.”

… being seduced by the tyranny of fun …

Professional Development needs

as a community: past strong history, but little now

have we lost the zeal? /. How do we foster and re-develop this fervour?

personal: what are we individually doing to grow as an out-of-doors educator?

political skills and the development of people with political outlook

who are our current ‘guardians’?

a la Lloyd, Chuck

and who are the one being groomed for the future?
examples:

MET curriculum forums / NF / LSP /

Miscellaneous:

contact Heather Robertson for main points / purpose / goals
limit speech part to 20 minutes
have multiple ending-stories

How Fire Make
archaeology

begin with anecdote or story — or several short ones
What is the motivation of the audience?


• write out steps of the lesson plan of recent outdoor education learning experience you have delivered with kids
• draw yourself in that experience
• write about your feelings of the most remarkable outdoor education experience you’ve ever had


Residential Outdoor Education
• residential: living and learning, playing and working together — social development for children just beginning to see themselves as social creatures
• experiential: direct connection — ”sense of wonder”, and the connection with global and environmental education
• experiential: learning by doing; not vicarious experience; our medium is their massage and our message
• integrated: enrichment and extension of the curriculum

Model details (though I’ll only be using the material above)

Mass Model Diam Dist scale size
mass Diam dist pack people 4/m^2
E=1 (km) Astron units if 150 adults = total mass of solar system dia of model m dist to model planet
Sun 332946 1392000 0 150 6.123724357
Mercury 0.012 4878 0.39 0.00040547116 kg 255.15518154
Venus 0.81 12104 0.72 0.02736930313 kg 475.11654494
Earth 1 12756 1 0.03378926312 kg 659.88409019
Moon (from Earth) 0.0123 3476 0.00041560794 kg
Mars 0.107 6787 1.52 0.00361545115 kg 1003.0238171
Asteroids 2.33 kg
Jupiter 318 142980 5.2 10.744985673 kg 3422.5988144
Saturn 95 120540 9.52 3.2099799968 kg 6295.2942204
Uranus 14.5 51120 19.2 0.48994431529 kg 12696.169895
Neptune 17.1 49530 30.07 0.57779639942 kg 19924.100296
Pluto 0.002 2300 39.725 0.00006757853 kg 26113.813062

• solar system mass and distance model (… perhaps do this at breakfast … ? or more likely at previous evening Astronomy session … or do solely as a thought-experiment — which would defeat the point of learning by doing … ) (See end of file for model details)

presume that total mass of people present (say 150) is whole solar system
all planets total one-third of person — therefore Sun is all 150 people!!!

Jupiter = baby
Earth = baby’s clenched finger / walnut
Mercury = pea (?pee … !)
… Uranus …

squeeze all people together tightly (4/sq m), covering approx 6m diameter circle
at this scale, Jupiter would be 3km away, Earth would be 750m away, and Mercury would be 300m away!
and biosphere on this walnut-sized Earth would be less than thickness of human hair; all water would be almost-imperceptible mist on surface, and entire atmosphere would be hair-thin …

OETransSpeech as of before Conference 1998/09/23

What follows are rough notes for a speech I’m giving at the Annual COEO Conference at Dorset in late September, 1998. (Check out http://www.headwaters.com/COEO/98conf.html )
These are my working notes as of 1998/09/23. As I work through the process of developing this speech, things are increasingly more connected … which is a good thing!!! My problem now is to cut material out, preparing to select just the nuggets that seem appropriate at the moment.

This is version 9 of this online experiment.
My heart-felt thanks to those who have responded. Some of the shortest responses have had the most meaning for me!
The working title is “Mud Between The Toes”, which comes from the title of the submission I worked with others on for the LEIC-forced amalgamation of the Toronto District School Board. You can see that submission at http://www.sympatico.ca/~mwhitcom/toroe.html
I’m leaning more towards something along the lines of re-uniting bits and atoms as a theme. Providing experiences that promote active learning is at the heart of what we do best, and I think we as outdoor educators focussed on process are one bulwark against the trend to increasing vicariousness in our society,.

I’d welcome feedback — I’d love to make use of the “group brain”.

Specifically, I’d like examples of outdoor education learning experiences you’ve participated in.

Of particular value would be commentary from you about why this particular lesson was (or perhaps wasn’t) effective.
I welcome vignettes, stories, examples, contacts …

If you have thoughts that you think I’ve missed, I’d be glad to respond to them.
Please respond to me at    



Sequence

my idea is to exemplify learning-by-doing:

• Write one or two sentences about one of the most remarkable outdoor education learning experience you’ve ever delivered with students. What made it remarkable? Finally, how could you provide that same experience again?
• share with the person behind you and in front of you

and then how to share more widely (and yet not take too much time … ???)

• make my main points as speech proper (see Concepts)
• writing personal interpretations of main point(s), and then forming group ‘poem‘

?jigsaw as a way of developing shared-reactions within group




Speech: concepts …

world of increasing vicarious experience

mediocrity in experience

less co-operation / less physical touch / less dialogue / less time / less story
to an oe’er: fewer campfires / fewer hugs / less teamwork toward common goal/ less direct visceral contact with the non-human
like the ‘hot’ versus ‘cool’ of McLuhan … ?
thing (humans part of continuing function of a thing — involved in procurement) versus device (means separate from end)
“Too Much Sex and Not Enough Affection” (Timbuk3 song title)
John Livingston’s Domestication of Human Species (versus ‘wildness’


examples of vicarious experiences, and of limited contact with physical reality

the boy who, when taken to an aquarium, asked, "Is this virtual reality or real reality?" Then in NF #74 ("Complex, Emergent, Self-organizing Nonsense")
the Boston Virtual FishTank -- a new public aquarium whose fish, powered by computer graphics
Japanese small aquarium consisting of a thin water tank with a video monitor behind it. Using laser disks and high-definition video technology, the system displays images of fish on the monitor. The water (with bubbles percolating through it) gives a 3-D effect.
"dogbot". Sony engineers have developed a robotic dog, complete with 64-bit central processing unit, 8 megabytes of memory, and a supersensitive camera "eye" that enables it to obey motion commands - if you stick your hand out, Dogbot will sit. ... snip ... snip ... snip ... The head of the research lab expects the dogbot to find a market among children sometime around the year 2000.
WonderLand experience with complete safety and little choice other than when to scream and when to put arms in the air; complete compliance of people with ‘no fear’ t-shirts … ; the most ‘real’ exhilaration standing below the waterslide, making personal decisions as to where to stand and how wet to get … ; heavy emphasis on short-term adrenaline rushes as the definition of ‘fun’ and ‘experience’; note also the importance of shared experiences — we ride together and scream together, much as a flock of pigeons wheels simultaneously …
CresTwn indoor walkway to school through mall …
VP kid: latch-key family, five jobs between two parents, five kids, growing up without parental culture, and in presence of most limited of N Am TV/video culture; walked on flat surfaces only, barely able to negotiate stairs, unable to cross little ditch at Sheldon …
Of course, television, cinema, the Net -- and indeed all available media increasingly give us countenances that are the faces of nobody we need to reckon with.
Note that I’m far from a Luddite — I’d like things in more of a balance … high tech and high touch


information (bits) separated from physical reality (atoms), and further separated from the interactive and involvement process …
contrasted with outdoor education / experiential learning, in which bits and atoms are joined by the experiential process and by the direct connection between actions and consequences: ”Our Medium is their Massage and our Message.”

“In essence, outdoor education experiences are creators of affect. There are at least three areas in which these affects are significant: in creating the initial awe and love for nature that Rachel Carson calls “the sense of wonder”; secondly, the importance of being involved and learning directly; and thirdly, establishing the importance of living, learning, working and playing together through the direct and personal experience of powerful group feelings.
In outdoor education, we are primarily in the business of providing and mediating experience — experiences between the student and the environment, and at least as important, experiences between student and peer. We specialize in creating and manipulating experience. We focus on connections and relationships — relationships to the environment and to each other. Our medium of experiential learning massages our students, modifying them in significant ways and conveying some powerful meta-messages. Our Medium is their Massage and our Message.“ (MW, Pathways)

e.g., Sarah of last week, commenting after group ‘problem-solving’ / group dynamics / co-operation activity, that it was great for her to see that girls and boys were working together, not being silly about not the boy — girl thing: We set up the activities so as to maximize physical interaction; the kids were so caught up in the excitement of the doing that they worked together without hesitation and without the standard segregation; Our Medium of learning by doing, Massaged them into working together and gave Sarah the Message that it is possible to be an equal contributor.


stressing the importance of the connections and the connectedness

Everything in nature is a verb, a relationship, a connection.
outdoor education develops the inherent natural connections between knowledge


I’m not going to define outdoor education as separate from all the other possible terms. There are other groups to represent other specific definitions — and no others than COEO to advocate for education out-of-doors.

“What makes COEO special, different from STAO, OSEE, OAGEE etc.; COEO helps facilitate outdoor and environmental teaching, thinking, and learning in all subject areas, NOT just science or geography or whatever. It is a cross-curricular vehicle which fosters holistic, Earth-centred thinking and gives educators ideas, tools, strategies and energies to inject a connectedness into potentially every subject. COEO has always been cross-curricular with a common, connecting thread. When you think about it, COEO has always been ahead of its time.“ (JE)

education out-of-doors for the whole person

out-of-doors implying direct contact with some kind of ‘natural‘ reality
importance of connections …
fundamentally related to curriculum sensu lato
development of the whole person within this framework
contrasted to the narrowness of current government emphasis on business, with their denial of the educational validity and attitudes and values

That fundamental opposition points us individually to action — political action that as a non-profit organization COEO cannot take, but advocation that as individuals we must take, not so much against any particular government, but against the neo-conservative reductionist mentality.


trends in our outdoor education past: natural history / out-of-doors skills / group dynamics / environmental / curriculum
Constantly, our core and essential value has been and continues to be active learning: i.e., the process of learning by doing and experiencing

“What are we going to have them do?” a la Raffan
“hands, heart, and head” a la Mary (based on Rudolph Stiener of Waldorf Schools)
Open Their Eyes, Open The Door, Open Their Hearts (after Judy Halpern and Ian Foulds et al)

“My students, who spent all their energy in the schoolyard trying to act like twelve year olds going on thirty, loved our trips to secret spots because they got to act like kids! They loved to hide in the woods, to meet the squirrels, to sit with a chickadee, to call to the bluejays, to fly in V formation like the geese (one child who always tried to be the "coolest" made eye contact with me as she ran across the field flapping her arms and said she'd kill me if I ever told anyone in the yard that she did this, I laughed and she went back to her honking!)“ (JH)

accessing and honouring multiple modalities
learning as developing narrative: living stories / sharing stories (see GL) / HB

our role in mediating experience / re-framing and re-interpreting

e.g.,

coke-glasses in stream: I’ve never been in a river before!
What Fire Make with Helen, Sarah, and Paul
Tim Jones, of archaeology, so taken with smoking Middle Woodland pipe during Celebration

>That really brings out what to me is my weakness, and I think a collective weakness. I get so involved in providing experiences that I don't 'mediate' or 'process' -- help students attach meaning. Thanks for the emphasis again!
“Yes. I'd make a distinction. Sometimes that mediation or processing can consist of the teacher's spin being put on the experience. That's okay. In addition, mediation or process can consist of the teachers inquiring of the students what meaning they have made. No amount of the former kind of processing will erase the meaning the students make on their own. Also, it is possible that asking the students what the experience means to them may provoke the very thoughtfulness that we wish students to bring to the work. It also allows for more complete processing in terms of including emotional elements than when we strict strictly to meaning in its teacherly, intellectual sense.“ BH

leading towards creating change

for what? …

personal understanding and empowerment (“transformation” as the latest term — or is it as appropriate a term for the concept of taking control over one’s own life? … )
“developing a living relationship with nature”

Alfred North Whtehead: “craving a direct apprehension of life”

learning for sustainability ideas as a basis of environmental goals

is this counter-cultural? subversive? emancipatory?

our meta-lesson concerns the value and the joy of personal active learning

learning for life
How do we learn as individuals? -in formal classrooms? or in ways more in keeping with this outdoor education learning by experiencing?

development sense of service and joy and fulfilment in helping toward the common good

sense of responsibility and commitment: the sense of service a la Greenleaf

Compare baking Sheldon cookies versus store-bought: satisfaction of doing it by self, but also in contributing to own and to others better good
One of the standard questions I ask kids as they eat the Sheldon cookies they’ve made in the old woodstove is “How do the cookies taste?”
And the answer, even when the cookies are burnt, is often some shade of ‘wonderful!’ And in response to my next question: “So why do they taste to wonderful?” The answer is some shade of ‘because we made them ourselves’
“So how is that different than how a pioneer kid might have felt, eating cookies from grain they ground, harvested, tilled, planted, ploughed, etc.,., themselves?“
What is the form of the satisfaction they derive from baking cookies themselves? and how do we link that to satisfaction / joy / peacefulness / value in baking for someone else/. doing something for others? of contributing to the common good?
How do we regain that joy in serving others? Especially as opposed to the tyranny of the ‘fun’ of modern society as being the ultimate value? (one which is — by design — treated as a commodity whose orders can be filled … )
consider also Bob Henderson’s bannock!
And those of us who do extended wilderness trips know the same joy in being directly responsible for ourselves …

What am I going to personally do?

deriving satisfaction from giving to others
“If you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap. If you want to be happy for a day, go fishing. If you want to be happy for a year, plant a garden. If you want to be happy for a lifetime, help someone.“


mentoring: people-to-people connections

… and the development of this speech through the online sharing is a personal and striking example … !

the fostering of an outdoor education community



Where does this lead us?

Focus on what we do well, i.e., provide and mediate experience

increase emphasis on debriefing and helping them extract meaning
(see above comments on derivation of meaning … )

learning in relationship to curriculum and the out-of-doors, ultimately the whole of life

strengthen our curricular ties and make them more obvious

research
presentation of what we already do
assisting classroom teachers by making outdoor education relationships to curriculum clear in a way that helps them
getting involved in curriculum writing
participating in curriculum development forums


presenting ourselves

politically
to extend the outdoor education community

increase PD

within outdoor education community
personally as out-of-doors educators

developing the outdoor education community — through personal service

PD
mentoring
conferences
workshops
“THIS THOUGHT RAISES AN INTERESTING QUESTION TO CONSIDER? WE AREN'T THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO WANT TO GIVE KIDS DIRECT EXPERIENCE. AS YOU SAY, IT'S DOING SO OUTDOORS THAT IS OUR THING. BUT WHO ARE OUR NATURAL ALLIES AND HOW DO WE FORGE EFFECTIVE ALLIANCES FOR THE RESISTANCE TO INCREASING VICARIOUSNESS?“

Paul’s q: What does all of this do for us as individuals?