Outdoor adventure education as a platform for developing environmental leadership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Notwithstanding actions taken to date through policy, programmes and practices, the planet remains on an unsustainable pathway. System level and individual actions are needed to address the challenges that confront us. Finding approaches to encourage individual pro‐environmental behaviours are important for shifting an individual's actions, and these changes can have systemic implications. Outdoor adventure education programmes represent an ideal context to research the development of pro‐environmental behaviours. For outdoor adventure education to effect both individual and system‐level change, it is necessary for participants to connect learning from programmes to wider contexts where they can leverage influence. One of the prominent transferable outcomes of outdoor adventure education is the ability to serve in a leadership role. This article addresses the following primary research question: What aspects of outdoor adventure education programmes promote pro‐environmental behaviour intentions among participants? It explores this by examining various learning mechanisms and design features of NOLS, a global expeditionary outdoor adventure education programme formerly known as the National Outdoor Leadership School. Data were collected and analysed from 202 NOLS programme participants from around the world through open‐ended responses completed as part of a questionnaire at the end of the programme. Results showed that the most prominent aspects of the outdoor adventure education programme that helped to promote pro‐environmental behaviour intentions were the building of conservation and environmental issue awareness, the practice of minimum impact techniques, and engagement in waste and food management. These programme aspects were produced through the learning mechanism domains of structure‐oriented learning, instructor‐oriented learning, environment‐oriented learning, instructor‐and‐student oriented learning and independent student‐oriented learning to varying degrees. Our results illuminate design features of outdoor adventure education that have potential to generate and support environmental commitment and show how pro‐environmental learning is mediated through broad exposure to an array of activities and learning mechanism domains. In combination with the leadership development components, our results suggest that outdoor adventure education programmes show promise for developing and supporting environmental commitment in individuals necessary for solving global environmental crises now and in the future. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".