This post presents my thoughts on the article by Chris Loynes, "If you want to learn to navigate throw away the map." (2004). (Read the article)
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This article is reasonably easy to digest and the association the author makes between map reading and personal growth is novel and interesting.
The author lays the groundwork by analysing how a given society might try to apply ‘one size fits all’ solutions to youth development.
Young people post-16 are seeking to distance themselves from parents and home in order to define themselves as distinct. The same can apply to schools and teachers. This gap in support has given rise to funding that has financed a range of interventions including informal education responses using, in part, the outdoors.
Some of these problems stem from the process of choosing a set of values and from living in a culture with an increasing plurality of values. This applies to all young people whether they are still on the ladder to success or have already fallen by the wayside... Even the problem is understood as a failure by the individual and not of the community supporting that individual into adulthood [my own italics]. Youth work organisations have even been known to ‘problematise’ a group of young people in order to attract funding that would otherwise be unavailable. [p.2]
The last sentence in the above quote is a little disturbing, but not particularly surprising especially here in Singapore, where government funding is scarce or requires negotiating substantial bureaucratic obstacles to access.
The author also alludes to Kurt Hahn’s ‘Social Declines’:
Many commentators have written about the problems as well as the privileges of modernity. In short the enlightenment and urbanisation have liberated us socially, economically and politically. At the same time they have disconnected us from the local landscape and culture. This has led to a recklessness that, some argue, damages the individual, our culture and nature. [p.2]
He offers this perspective on ‘sustainability’ which I find useful:
Putting this disconnection to rights is what some call 'sustainability'. Others, who deal with the consequences of this situation, call it ‘therapy’ (Richards et al., 2001). What education can contribute to this project is education for sustainability. So this is not only about a relationship with nature but also a relationship with oneself and with others. [p.2]
The author suggests we re-examine our notions of being ‘connected’:
Of course nature is already honoured. We have parks, national parks, recreation policies, biodiversity plans and nature reserves. We see nature as, variously, an art gallery, gym, assault course, museum, zoo, classroom or therapist's couch. Of course, we are not completely disconnected... It is not only urban landscapes that exclude people from nature. [p.2]
He then ‘cuts to the chase’, as it were:
What have these problems of alienation and rampant growth to do with maps and the art of navigation? To begin making the links I would like you to consider that disconnected people and unchecked growth rates could be understood as people and economies that have 'lost their way.' [p.3]
He goes on to describe a learning journey during which his students experienced unplanned interactions with the local populace. He regarded these interactions that occurred as among the most valuable (in his opinion) learning moments:
Indeed the opposite values of interdependence and serendipity led to the benefits we experienced. Whether you agree with me or not I think this approach certainly offered more of value to a curriculum of sustainability. The students learned a great deal about a landscape they discovered was rich in history and culture and not wild. More importantly they learned a great deal about people who were still in touch with that history and landscape and living with it still. [p.5]
This speaks to me about connections – from connection we derive value, and we come to treasure what we value.
Following a set schedule or programme closely (or, to use the author’s allegory, ‘map work’) may cause the facilitator to miss out on incidental or peripheral learning moments:
Map work gets in the way of an engagement with a place, the people and the moment. It is, as Ringer (2002) put it, algorithmic. By this he meant it is like following a programme or being on a production line. It is hard to deviate from the plan. The person is challenged to keep in control and stay on course. [p.5]
The author suggests that we often overlook the treasures in our own backyard:
Andrew Brookes reminds us that “a landscape is a living landscape brought to life by the interaction of a particular nature and culture”. Yet often we import practices from other cultures and environments or take our students to those other landscapes because our local setting is thought to be lacking in the necessary resources for these standard activities. [p.6]
He points out the danger of developing a blinkered view of environmental education, which I take to mean (as an example) someone specialised in Ecological Literacy may not necessarily be skilled in fostering intellectual or emotional connections:
Robbie Nicols says that “Education ‘in’ the environment does not lead to education concerned with the environment unless it gets some additional curriculum or pedagogic support.” [p.6]
To some extent, I can understand or empathise if facilitators might feel handicapped or reluctant in helping participants to explore feelings or emotions:
Bowles mentions “[Patrick] Geddes, the Scottish educational philosopher, who coined the educational values of ‘head, heart and hands’. ‘In’, that is the hands, ’about’, that is the head, leaves out the ‘with’, that is the heart. Or at best feeling is left to its own devices. Mortlock (1984), an influential British adventure educator, sensed the importance of this emotional world when he wrote of love and respect for the environment as one of his driving educational values. [p.6]
To be sure, I’m sure many would agree that programmes generally don’t allow much room for peripheral learning or experiences. At the same time, I don’t think the author denies the pragmatic imperatives of programming, at least well-designed ones.
The problem is that even the serendipitous encounters of the heart with the landscape are squeezed out by the map work approach to the outdoors. It might be tempting to assume that the rigour of the scientific method adopted by field studies is the antipathy of anarchic outdoor adventure. The truth is both are prone to following a predetermined, outcome driven path that leaves those who follow it unable to turn to the side or take a pace measured in their own time. Both the activities that engage us with a place and the theories and curricula we have mapped out to help us work in that place to good effect in fact close the practitioner and the student down to the possibility of a creative engagement with a living landscape. [p.6]
The above highlights the facilitator’s challenge: the need to stick with a pre-determined programme, balanced with being able to identify teachable moments, which requires - to varying degrees - deviation from the set course. The above also brings to the fore the precariousness of place-based pedagogy, in a world where learning outcomes are rigorously defined and a premium is placed on their efficient delivery.
I recall conducting an outdoor education programme for trainee physical education teachers in 2008. A major activity was a north-south traverse of Singapore, estimated to be a day’s journey. The learning outcome was for the teachers to experience a relatively high level of physical challenge, but along the way hopefully the journey would engender a different appreciation or perspective of Singapore. A key requirement was that the entire journey had to be completed on foot; taking public transport was not allowed. One of the stops was at Kranji War Memorial, which my group arrived at sometime mid-morning. It turned out there was a remembrance ceremony being held there and we had arrived about 30 minutes before it was due to start.
I wanted to allow the group to be part of the decision-making process, so I raised the option of observing the ceremony to the group - the main consequence being that we would arrive at our destination late. I told the group that we would continue the foot journey after the ceremony to cover as much distance as possible, and would take public transport only when we were nearer the destination and when time was going to be tight. The group noted that observing the ceremony was within the scope of the learning outcomes of the journey, thus it was decided to stay.
In the end, we arrived at the destination about 45 minutes after dinner started but I thought this was within reasonable tolerances.
After the trainee teachers had retired for the night, we facilitators met with the Programme Designer to debrief on the day’s events. When he heard that a few of us had allowed our groups to take public transport, he got extremely upset despite us telling him the reasons for doing so.
Without delving in too much detail, the conclusion I drew from this was that neither the Programme Designer nor I was right or wrong; but it brought out how the programme designer’s vision/intent could leave room for facilitators (who are after all, on the ground) to exercise some judgement and arrive at reasoned conclusions or take calculated risks. Of course, this assumes that the facilitator has the appropriate experience or skill.
The author offers several reasons as to why outdoor education has become ‘McDonaldized’ (Ritzer, 1993):
Why do we allow this to happen? I’m not sure. It could just be, as the feminist ecopsychologists would have it, that the masculine controlling and dominating values of the enlightenment are manifesting themselves in this domain. It could be that activity in the environment, the doing, gets in the way of being in or with the environment, the being. It is true that simple activities to enable people to make journeys, cycling or canoeing for example, have been replaced by more technological ones that focus more on the ego of the participant than the aesthetics of the place, mountain biking or play boating for example. It may be that outdoor practitioners want to look like their school-based cousins adopting strategies better suited to classrooms (but perhaps not to pupils in those classrooms!). It is clear that an outcome-based school curriculum has rubbed off on those practitioners determined to make the value of outdoor education apparent to school teachers and policy makers. Certainly the spectre of risk has caused many to be overly concerned with risk management to the extent of avoiding or controlling activity unnecessarily. Another possibility is that policy makers from the institutions representing order in society have seen how effective outdoor experiences can be at instilling certain values in people. This may have led to the preponderance of courses concerning teamwork and leadership. It may also have led to their willingness to fund outdoor approaches to many of the social ills I identified above in my opening remarks. The algorithmic, closed approach works if what you want to achieve is citizens modelled to your own vision. [p.7]
The last sentence also alludes to how Moral, Character or Citizenship Education curricula is aimed to achieve this.
The author also warns that in “treating the landscape as a backdrop for other social enterprises, we lose the potential to engage with it actively.” [p.7] He acknowledges that, even with the unexpected but welcome deviation of his students’ interactions with the locals,
…the setting in which it is tackled is often removed from the neighbourhood of the people receiving the lessons. The group on the remote island learned to value the landscape and people they were visiting. They did not learn to value their own neighbours or \ neighbourhood. At best they were frustrated because they could not exercise these newly discovered values. Mostly they saw the lessons from one place as irrelevant to the other. This is a waste of effort. [p.7]
Perhaps he is also acknowledging his own limitations in being able to facilitate further learning from this unexpected occurrence. I am reminded of the usual lamentations surrounding overseas service learning projects organised by educational institutions here in Singapore.
The author urges a grassroots-based approach that capitalises on the strengths of the local community:
What is needed are programmes that engage people through their communities with their own landscapes. People need to feel that their neighbourhood is their natural environment. This means that it must be more than a nice view, a reserve for endangered wildlife or a gym. It must provide a livelihood, at least for some people, and, ideally, for all people for at least part of the time. Only strategies that allow people to engage creatively with their surroundings will reconnect people with the importance of community and place. [p.8]
The author goes on to espouse the value of exploration:
Navigation as I have described it, in which maps are only safety devices, is, as Hodgkin (1976) put it, generative. It allows the person to be an explorer, creatively responding to a living landscape and culture. The context acts as a perceived but not fully understood world that elicits curiosity and motivates the learner intrinsically. This, I hope, sounds something like a way of working that might support our new youth and their projects of constructing their identities and, I have suggested, their neighbourhoods. [p.8]
Unfortunately, allowing for exploration implies investments in time and space - investments that are not easily afforded by cramped academic calendars and overworked educators.
Within the constraints of tight schedules, non-negotiable outcomes and insufficiently-developed educators, how much room is there for ‘agency’, which is becoming a buzzword of sorts in the education sphere?
As Allison (2000) suggests, I also support the view that good experiential education is a personal enquiry into the being and the knowing of a person. Having been largely constructed by the culture in which he or she grew up the student seeks a place, a natural place, in which to experience themselves more authentically. The personal awareness that results, some would say spiritual development, allows the student to reflect on the culture that nurtured him or her. This perspective allows the student to gain some agency in his or her relationship with that culture. [p.8]
The author ponders how to give our young people the ‘agency’ to make key decisions in their learning lives - a probable avenue is to explore more creative uses of the double bind situation?
My experience teaches me that young people resist attempts to construct them either overtly or covertly and however benign the intention of the person offering help. It is possible to oppress, coerce or trick them. Our own field still claims to ‘impel’ them into experience as Kurt Hahn put it. Perhaps the days of impelling are over… For better or worse our time is a time in which young people have taken this project on for themselves. Yet, as I have indicated, I believe there is a need for a handrail to help them especially those who are struggling and may get hurt...’ [p.9]
I confess I can’t draw definitive conclusions from this article; it is more the norm that I am left with points for reflection as a facilitator and programme designer.
Further reading
Patrick Geddes, Scottish educator
https://rsgsexplorers.com/2016/03/26/patrick-geddes-heart-hand-and-head/
George Ritzer: McDonaldization Of Society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonaldization
Double bind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind
