17th November 2017

Learning in, from and about the outdoors and the natural world, and experiencing it directly, is crucial to all generations and any idea of a positive future. The role equipment plays in mediating and framing that experience is presently undergoing a shift that conjointly materialise in the educational field. What is the nature of the change and how does it affect both education and experience? What is indoor / outdoor and how the mediation via props (commodification) affects our experience? Having outlined and developed these assertions we would like to explore and share ideas as a group as to how we may respond to this in a way that provides a constructive path ahead. Help!

During this session, we will collectively consider the space and potentials that direct outdoor experiences could entail for our current dominantly urban lifestyle with Richard Lemmey, an ecologist with a lifelong involvement in education.

Richard Lemmey (b. 1953) trained as an ecologist and has been a fish farmer, upland farmer, teacher, university lecturer and until before taking a career break was the Head of Outdoor Studies at the University of Cumbria. Despairing of the commodification of the outdoors, its political hijacking and the imposition of hierarchical control over access and education he has returned to academia to explore alternatives that could foster a better relationship between human beings and the universe through experiential education and the idea that informed personal agency is a far better goal than ‘employability’.