Beyond Self-Discovery: Outdoor Education as a Means for Relationship-Building Across Communities

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: Reclaiming Our Own Spaces: Youth and Educators Building Emancipatory Relationships, Identity Constructions, and Resistance

Abstract

Objective
Outdoor education has been proven to be a hopeful pedagogy for increasing positive feelings in regards to nature, a key predictor of prospective conservation behaviors (Bamberg & Moser, 2007). According to Stevenson, et. al, (2013) time outdoors was especially effective in developing a pro-environmental affect in Black and Latinx students. However, in our present time of ecological and cultural crisis we need more than a pro-environmental affect. Indigneous communities, researchers, and educators have been at the forefront of developing pedagogical approaches, revitalizing cultural practices, and building up movements that center relationships across living things and solidarity across communities. Sandy Grande (2015) reminds us to listen to Indigenous and non-Western peoples since they can provide “ potentially transformative paradigms” (p. 95).
If we look to Indigenous communities for inspiration and models, Black Brown, and Asian communities can transform outdoor education to become a counter space where critical and humanizing pedagogy can exist. In this case study, the presenter will analyze a high school outdoor trip led by Black, Brown, and Asian educators for Black, Brown, and Asian students. The study examines how these educators develop an outdoor educational opportunity that not only impacts students’ identity development but that also allows for relationship building across racial and ethnic groups and with other living beings. Through outdoor education can build solidarity, engage in critical thought, and develop a meaningful relationship with the land.

Theoretical framework
This study incorporates the notion of counter spaces (Yosso, et. al. 2009) as a means to document how critical teachers of color create alternative educational opportunities that inspire relationship building and lead students through critical identity development. It draws from Red Pedagogy and Native Science to further look at the ways in which critical pedagogy can be expanded to meet the holistic needs of non-Western communities (Cajete 2000; Freire, 2013; and Grande, 2012;).

Methods
This study uses a series of interviews with three lead educators on the outdoor trip, as well as four students that attended, as a way to examine and produce individual and collective counter narratives. The study also uses photovoice.

Findings
The experiences of Black, Brown, and Asian educators and students of color within a counter space allowed for the engagement of students and teachers in identity development, relationship building (both with nature and others), and critical development activities. Students and teachers felt that these practices were not only transformative but could also be essential in building a more positive school climate that countered the often isolating and racialized schooling conditions that they felt existed at their school site.

Scholarly Significance
This study demonstrates the urgency for an outdoor education that bridges students’ relationship with each other and nature with critical pedagogy; it also highlights the need to redefine outdoor education through non-Western values and perspectives. In our current political moment, where ecological and cultural crisis are so intertwined, Black, Brown, and Asian students deserve and need pedagogies that explicitly engage students in self-determination, cultural revitalization, and sustainability.

Author

• Sara Jasmin Diaz-Montejano, University of California - Los Angeles