Exploring Our Connections And Relationships With Place And/Or Nature

Over the past 10-15 years, I have witnessed the delivery and Outdoor Education and Experiential Learning in Australia and New Zealand to take a different tangent. Typically, facilitators of Outdoor Education and Experiential Learning have operated ‘in a bubble’ unaware or immune to the impact of nature upon human psyche and being. They have primarily been dislocated from nature, taking photographs of our outdoor experiences, but oblivious to the soulful text of the land. As Winton (2003, p.266) poignantly states ‘aborigines sometimes question the “European” urge to climb high and look out across land from a bluff or peak. I suppose if you know what’s there, if you’re intimate with it in a bodily, spiritual way, you don’t need to look.’