The project to advocate the inclusion of Outdoor Education in the National Curriculum is stimulating
some valuable and timely discussion across the Australian Outdoor Ed community. The shape and
content of the National Curriculum is being developed by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA).

The effort to convince ACARA to include Outdoor Education in the National Curriculum is being lead on behalf of the Australian Outdoor Ed community by the former and founding Headmaster of St Michaels Grammar School in Melbourne, Mr Tony Hewison. Due in no small part to Mr Hewison's passion for Outdoor Education and his effectiveness in articulating its benefits to ACARA board members and administrators, the proposal has been quite positively received.

However, this positive interest has highlighted some of the conceptual challenges that have circulated among the Outdoor Ed community for a long time. Central among these is the question of what unique contribution does or can Outdoor Ed make to school education. One attractive and popular answer relates to the capacity of Outdoor Ed to, by virtue of its experiential nature, offer a deeper, more holistic education about the natural environment than other kinds of environmental education. This line of thinking has been a driving influence in the shape of the Senior Secondary O&ES courses in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia.

The other main claimed benefits of Outdoor Ed — personal and interpersonal development — face some strong competing claims from other areas of teaching and learning that tend to be cheaper and simpler to deliver, such as a number of the arts, sport and PE, and a range of cross-curricular strategies in many other subject areas. There is great scope for us to strengthen our claims about the effectiveness of Outdoor Ed as a means of teaching about self and others. There are also urgent reasons for wanting to improve public understanding of nature. A recent Linking Landscapes Summit at Kingscliff NSW, brought together people from a range of sectors with an intimate interest in land use, in order to develop a coordinated response to the conservation of Australia’s ecosystems in the face of climate change, and highlighted the important role that education must play if we are to meet a set of challenges that the word ‘daunting’ seems somehow inadequate to describe.

There remains quite a gulf between the understanding of the people studying this material and proposing management strategies and policies, and the understanding of the general public. The problem with this is that the policy changes required to shift us off the‘runaway’ path and onto a more hopeful one, require a level of political will and commitment that is only ever summoned on the back of sufficient public support. As providers of Outdoor Education, we can play an important part by teaching our students about interconnectedness, about the crucial importance for humans of biological diversity, about the nature of nature and that we are in no way separate from it.

During  an informal chat with a handful of leading scientists, bureaucrats and a politician, a delegate asked how many of them had been ‘outdoor educated’ at school. About half of them had. The other half had spent significant time and/or had had significant experiences in nature as children. All of them said that those experiences had driven them into their current occupations.

At a recent Outdoor Education Australia (OEA) conference, in order to strengthen communities' chance to meet and grow through the challenges facing a sustainable future, OEA delegates supported the immediate commitment of Outdoor Education Australia to advocate for the inclusion of Outdoor Education in the Australian National Curriculum as a subject in its own right.

Written by and reproduced with permission Tony Carden, VOEA