If you want an insight into the culture of outdoor education in Southeast Asia, watch the WhatsApp chat in the days before and after OFFSEAS. It does not stop. It started pinging well before delegates landed in Kuala Lumpur and continued long after we’d flown home.
The theme of this year’s conference, Out There Together! Building Sustainable Programs for All, was an invitation to think and work collectively towards building programs that are environmentally conscious, community-minded, safe, and inclusive. As the conference call to action put it, ‘our challenges are shared and our solutions must be collective.’
For Infuse, this framing was much welcomed. It is the same ambition that animates our impact and learning efforts: quality in our sector is not the sum of individually well-run trips, but a function of how seriously providers, schools, and host communities take the collective architecture that makes those trips meaningful.
The most enjoyable moments at the conference were conversations over lunch and coffee about learning futures and the things that enable and constrain student flourishing in schools today. Whilst I spent much of my time at our Infuse exhibitor table, I was also able to attend a couple of workshops, and to deliver a workshop myself.
My workshop focused on some of the enduring challenges in our sector and the ways Infuse is attempting to address them. We moved briskly through the big-picture pieces – Infuse’s Theory of Change, our approach to Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning, and our pre and post-departure learning support for students and educators – before turning to how we’re embedding impact-driven decision-making into our operational core, most notably through B Corp certification.
Having discussed impact and learning from a whole-of-business perspective, the second half of the workshop narrowed focus to think about how we move students beyond a “soft” global citizenship that is often heavy on awareness but light on analysis, towards a more critical global citizenship that interrogates questions of power, voice and difference, names structural injustice rather than skirting it, and looks to collective action and systems change rather than individualised feel-good gestures.
This is one of our core aims at Infuse, and the distinction between soft and critical global citizenship is not new. Vanessa Andreotti’s work on soft versus critical global citizenship, Westheimer and Kahne’s typology of personally responsible, participatory and justice-oriented citizens, and the longer Freirean tradition of critical consciousness all sit behind it. But the distinction is easier to assert than to operationalise.
Consider, as one group did in the workshop, a service-learning trip that involves planting mangroves. A “soft” reflective prompt might ask students what they learned about the importance of mangrove conservation, or how it felt to contribute to the community. A more critical prompt asks additional questions: Who benefited from the clearing of mangroves, and who has borne the cost? Whose decision was it that your group plant in this location on this day, and what local livelihoods, governance structures, or longer restoration efforts informed and are shaped by that decision? What would meaningful change for this ecosystem actually require, and what is the role of a school group (big or small) within this change? How will climate change impact on future mangrove health and what are other major ecosystem threats? These are some of the ways we might start to think about this learning experience through a more critical analytical lens.
At the workshops that I attended, I learnt about how educators are applying the compass model to systems thinking and how schools and providers are seeking to meaningfully embrace the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum’s reorientation from community service to community engagement. Both workshops were well-delivered and opened new ways of thinking about how we deliver student learning at Infuse.
Overall, the conference was energising and provided valuable professional development. It was also, I must say, a little vendor heavy… and despite the number of vendors in attendance, the exhibitor hall felt thinly populated. I would have liked more opportunity to talk with teachers —whose questions sharpen my thinking and whose constraints we most need to understand. But, like a tourist complaining about the crowds at a destination they have just added themselves to, I am aware that I too, attended as a vendor.
Perhaps it was the conference theme working on me, but I came home thinking about the diversity of people that make up the outdoor education sector, and the diverse motivations that draw us in. There are the adventurers and the naturalists. There are those drawn to social action, and those drawn to cultural exchange and intercultural understanding. There are believers in learning-by-doing, and there are those of us animated by the possibility of young people becoming changemakers.
Experiential learning and outdoor education can serve all these interests, and the overlaps are real and generative. But you cannot do everything at once, and the temptation to try is, I think, one of the quieter risks in our sector.
The best experiential learning happens when schools arrive with clear learning objectives, and when providers design programs to meet them. This is not an argument for endlessly bespoke programming — that ambition has its own tensions, particularly when set against the need for community engagement to be built on lasting, reciprocal relationships that respond to community-identified priorities in community-led ways. Rather, it is an argument for developing different programs to meet different learning objectives, and for working closely with schools toestablish a coherent shared understanding of what a given program should deliver before anyone gets on a plane.
My own passion is for programs that support young people to become lifelong learners and changemakers. But not every program needs to do this. There is real value in programs that focus on skills development and social and emotional learning, or even just in making learning more fun and more engaging.
What’s needed is to think carefully about what programs are seeking to achieve, and to design learning accordingly. So “Out there together” absolutely, but also out there for clear, and meaningfully different, reasons.
Written by Dr Kearrin Sims, Director of Impact, Infuse Travel
