Unfamiliar Landscapes: Young People and Diverse Outdoor Experiences 303094459X, 9783030944599

Citation preview

Unfamiliar Landscapes Young People and Diverse Outdoor Experiences Edited by Thomas Aneurin Smith Hannah Pitt Ria Ann Dunkley

Unfamiliar Landscapes “Do unfamiliar landscapes thrill or threaten young people? What might be gained, but perhaps also risked, in seeking to familiarise them with landscapes otherwise unfamiliar? What might be the therapeutic and empowering benefits? What might be the strains, pitfalls and discomforts? Who might be deemed unfamiliar, even unwanted, in given landscapes? What does that feel like for the young people affected? What is at stake if efforts are made to include them in these landscapes, to render them familiar presences? How are such efforts enacted, experienced and self-critiqued by adults concerned to widen the outdoor encounters of diverse young people? Such challenging and timely questions energise this remarkably comprehensive and coherent collection of essays. Compellingly reconfiguring the usual concepts and classifications of landscape, blending a multitude of crossdisciplinary and practitioner perspectives, this collection approaches older concerns in novel ways and opens fresh windows for research and practice in, on and with the outdoor geographies of young people.” —Chris Philo, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow “This is a provocative, inspiring and challenging book. It is a must read for anyone involved in outdoor education in its widest sense including teachers, youth workers, outdoor practitioners, researchers and parents or carers, indeed anyone supporting young people. At a time when the natural environment is at risk from human development, outdoor education, and the importance of building our relations with nature, seems more vital than ever. The book explores education in unfamiliar blue and green landscapes, be they urban, rural or wild, large or small, near or far. The book unsettles conventional thinking and practice in outdoor education taking a more nuanced and cutting-edge view of this field. Weaving in practitioner, researcher and young people’s voices it evidences the deep personal, educational and therapeutic benefits of outdoor education for all young people. Most importantly, it confronts us to tackle our conscious and unconscious assumptions about the outdoors and about young people. In so doing it provokes us to work for justice and equity in outdoor education for all.” —Elisabeth Barratt Hacking, Department of Education, University of Bath

“This is a brilliant and challenging collection of essays exploring young people’s diverse encounters with outdoor spaces. Case studies range across outdoor education, fieldwork, heritage, youthwork, play and leisure, past and present. This is a major, multidisicplinary contribution to understandings of landscape, youth and ‘(un)familiarity’. It vividly shows how young people’s encounters with landscapes are haunted by classed, gendered, ableist, racialised and settler colonial norms and exclusions. The book will be important for researchers and practitioners in fields of Human Geography, Sociology, Education, youthwork, playwork, outdoor learning and environmental pedagogies. It should make us question taken-for-granted ideals about outdoor landscapes and pay attention to often-marginalised perspectives. Highly recommended.” —John Horton, Faculty of Health, Education and Society, University of Northampton

Thomas Aneurin Smith · Hannah Pitt · Ria Ann Dunkley Editors

Unfamiliar Landscapes Young People and Diverse Outdoor Experiences

Editors Thomas Aneurin Smith School of Geography and Planning Cardiff University Cardiff, UK

Hannah Pitt School of Geography and Planning Cardiff University Cardiff, UK

Ria Ann Dunkley School of Education University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-94459-9 ISBN 978-3-030-94460-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Aisvri https://unsplash.com/@aisvri This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1

Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction Thomas Aneurin Smith, Hannah Pitt, and Ria Ann Dunkley

Part I 2

3

4

1

The Unfamiliar Outdoors: Producing Unfamiliarity Through Outdoor Education

The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor Education: Gyms, Journeys, and Escapism Jo Hickman Dunne Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor Education Experience in a Remote Landscape Margie Campbell-Price Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences in an Unfamiliar Landscape: Reflections on the ‘Awayscape’ of an A-Level Geography Field Trip Alun Morgan and Denise Freeman

33

59

83

v

vi

5

Contents

Learning in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Role of Discomfort in Transformative Environmental Education Lewis Winks

Part II 6

7

8

9

The Unfamiliar Past: Negotiating Unfamiliarity in Heritage Spaces

Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain: Mobile Technologies and Ecopedagogic Guardians Ria Ann Dunkley and Thomas Aneurin Smith Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites and Their Timeful Exploration with Locals and University Students in Fuerteventura, Spain Elizabeth Rahman Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm Nadia von Benzon Conversations with Practitioners 1: Dr. Sunita Welch Ria Ann Dunkley and Thomas Aneurin Smith

Part III

111

133

159

187 213

Embodying Difference in Unfamiliar Landscapes

10

Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow Jacqueline L. Scott

11

Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through (Racial) Landscapes Tuva Beyer Broch

259

‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’: Encountering and Producing Unfamiliar Bodies and Landscapes Thomas Aneurin Smith and Hannah Pitt

283

12

235

Contents

13

14

Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Necessity of Non-Hegemonic Femininities Sara MacBride-Stewart

309

Conversations with Practitioners 2: Phoebe Smith and Dwayne Fields Hannah Pitt and Thomas Aneurin Smith

337

Part IV

Being Well, and Being Unfamiliar

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy in an Unfamiliar Sea for Young Asylum Seekers Easkey Britton, Sarah O’Malley, and Sara Hunt 16

17

18

Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected by Displacement: How Young People Sense the (Un)familiar and How It Affects Their Mental Health Hannah Sender, Yazan Nagi, and Diana Bou Talea

20

365

391

University Students Noticing Nature: The Unpleasant, the Threatening and the Unfamiliar Francesca Boyd

415

Placelessness and Dis-ease: Addressing the Need for Familiar Places for At-Risk Youth Amanda L. Hooykaas

441

Part V 19

vii

Digital and Sonic Encounters with Unfamiliarity

Sounds (Un)familiar: Young people’s Navigations of the Intersecting Landscape and Soundscape of a Community Radio Station Catherine Wilkinson and Samantha Wilkinson ‘Bio’graphic Filming: Collecting Sense-Data in Sense-Full Environments Sharon Watson

463

487

viii

21

Contents

Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark Ria Ann Dunkley and Thomas Aneurin Smith

Part VI 22

515

Reflections

(Re)Conceptualising Unfamiliar Landscapes Peter Kraftl

539

23 Whose Unfamiliar Landscape? Reflecting on the Diversity of Young People’s Encounters with Nature and the Outdoors Thomas Aneurin Smith, Hannah Pitt, and Ria Ann Dunkley

551

Index

571

Notes on Contributors

Dr. Francesca Boyd is interested in how to encourage young adults’ engagement with urban nature for well-being through interventions and infrastructure. She is particularly interested in how to increase infrequent visitors’ frequency. Francesca’s Ph.D. was on how to tailor nature-based interventions for University of Sheffield students’ well-being. Prior to her Ph.D., Francesca undertook an MSc in Environment and Human Health at University of Exeter whilst working part time at the National Trust. Her MSc thesis identified reasons for people not engaging with the natural environment more frequently, through statistical analysis of the Monitor of Engagement with the Natural Environment survey (2009–2015). Easkey Britton is a renowned Irish surfer and marine social scientist with a Ph.D. specialising in Human Wellbeing and Coastal Resilience. Her work explores the relationship between people and nature, especially water environments. She contributes her expertise in blue space, health, and social well-being on national and international research projects, including the Erasmus+ funded INCLUSEA project fostering greater inclusion for people with disabilities in surfing in Europe. Easkey is the

ix

x

Notes on Contributors

author of ‘Saltwater in the Blood’ and ‘50 Things to Do By the Sea’, has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, and is a regular columnist with Oceanographic magazine. Tuva Beyer Broch is a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Nature Research, Lillehammer. She is a psychological orientated anthropologist who holds a Ph.D. in sport sciences and nature research. Currently she is also attached to the department of social anthropology (University of Oslo) on the project Private Lives; Embedding Sociality at Digital ‘Kitchen-Tables’ where she focuses on digital and emotional identity work among urban and rural young adults. Margie Campbell-Price has worked in education for many decades, as a secondary school teacher and then as a senior lecturer in initial teacher education at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She has an extensive background in designing, leading, and researching educational experiences in contexts outside of the classroom. In her work with future secondary teachers, she encourages them to incorporate meaningful, authentic, and accessible experiences into their teaching to stimulate curiosity and promote holistic learning across all curriculum learning areas. Margie lives in Aotearoa New Zealand and is an avid outdoor enthusiast. Ria Ann Dunkley is a Senior Lecturer in Geography, Sustainability and Environment at the University of Glasgow within the School of Education. Her research interests include sustainability transitions related to ecopedagogy and community-led environmental action. She is particularly interested in exploring how changing perceptions of nature influence individual and community motivation to participate in ecological sustainability-related initiatives. She is also interested in diverse forms of knowledge creation and understanding, beyond scientific and their effects on the transmission and circulation of notions of environmental sustainability. Her research examines how the environmental crisis is driven by human relationships with the natural world and identifies effective formal and informal pedagogies (known as ecopedagogies) that raise the consciousness of this relationship to strengthen nature connectedness.

Notes on Contributors

xi

Jo Hickman Dunne is a socio-cultural geographer and project manager at the Centre for Youth Impact. She leads the organisation’s focus on youth voice and participation, and her professional work centres on participatory research and evaluation practices in the youth sector. Her research interests span youth development and engagement in non- and informal education, as well as a keen interest in creative methodologies, and her thinking and writing is shaped by non-new-materialist approaches. Denise Freeman is an experienced teacher in a large mixed comprehensive school, located in north east London, where she teaches geography. She also has responsibility for staff development and the induction of newly qualified teachers. Denise has contributed to a number of educational publications and research projects, writing about geography education. Particular areas of interest include representations of place and youth geographies. Amanda L. Hooykaas is an instructor with the Department of Geography, Environment & Geomatics, Executive Programs, and the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, an adjunct faculty member of the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography (Waterloo), an MPhil in Human Ecology (College of the Atlantic), an MSW (Wilfrid Laurier University), and a BES in Environment and Resource Studies (Waterloo). When not teaching, she’s learning in the woods and on the water with her young son, Finn. Sara Hunt is a medical doctor specialised in functional medicine. She teaches women and girls about the natural cycles within their bodies and how to maintain hormonal health. Alongside her husband she cofounded a surfing project for children of asylum seekers called ‘Welcome Wave’. The project was founded in memory of their daughter Zoey who died shortly after birth. She is fascinated by how our connection to nature impacts individual and planetary health. She has two sons who are her greatest teachers.

xii

Notes on Contributors

Peter Kraftl is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is an interdisciplinary scholar of childhood, youth, and education. His work examines issues including mainstream and alternative education spaces, child-friendly urban planning, and young people’s engagements with environmental resources and challenges. Peter has published 8 books and over 100 journal articles and chapters on these topics. He is currently a Coordinating Lead Author for UNESCO’s International Science and Evidence-Based Assessment of Education, co-leading the ‘Learning Spaces’ theme. Sara MacBride-Stewart is a Reader in Health Medicine and Society, in the School of Social Sciences and an executive board member of the Sustainable Places Research Institute, Cardiff University. She is an Environmental Sociologist with an interest in understanding the new social inequalities (i.e. gender, geospatial) and problems for health and wellbeing, that emerge from changes to the natural landscape (biodiversity loss, socio-cultural change). Her research is focused on co-constructing and conceptualising social solutions that address problems between the natural and social world in contemporary Wales, and within a wider global context, including New Zealand, Malaysia, and Latin America. Alun Morgan is currently a Lecturer in Education at the University of Plymouth where he leads courses on Environmental and Sustainability Education, Science Education, Global Education, and Outdoor Learning. He has worked in a variety of contexts over thirty years including as a school teacher, teacher advisor, lecturer, and researcher in a number of Higher Education Institutions. His work focuses on the interface between geography and science education, environmental education and education for sustainability, and global citizenship. He has a longstanding research interest in place and landscape as integrative concepts for learning. Yazan Nagi is a medical student at New York Medical College (NYMC) and carries an MSc degree in Global Health from University College London. His research is focused on the health of immigrants and refugees. His work is focused on the intersection of immigration and health, including directing the NYMC Centre for Human Rights and

Notes on Contributors

xiii

leading community outreach for the student-run clinic for uninsured patients. His areas of interest for future research include healthcare access and health policy; within these areas he is interested in mental health and chronic conditions. Dr. Sarah O’Malley is an EU Projects Officer with Limerick City and County Council, Ireland. The projects focus on implementing nature-based solutions and developing green infrastructure in urban/city areas. She has lectured and worked in the areas of outdoor learning, (dis)connection with nature, environmental sociology, education, disability, and inclusion. She has published on these subjects and convenes the southeast Outdoor Learning Research—Practice Hub (UK) which is supported by the University of Cumbria. In her spare time, she is by, in, or on the sea! Hannah Pitt is a Lecturer in Environmental Geography, currently researching skills and work in commercial horticulture. Her research explores interactions between community, places, and sustainability, focusing on these in the contexts of food systems, and engagement with outdoor spaces. She specialises in collaborations with third sector organisations and communities, and has a particular interest in understanding human–plant relations. Elizabeth Rahman is a social and medical anthropologist and the Oxford University’s Centre of Teaching and Learning’s Senior Evaluation Officer, where she provides research-informed input into the design and evaluation of teaching and learning across the collegiate university. Elizabeth’s research interests include health, education, and the environment, specifically implicit pedagogies and paradigms of pan species flourishing. Elizabeth supervises undergraduate and graduate students, teaches anthropology, and is interested in the premium of research to facilitate new paradigmatic thinking and societal transitions. To this end, she coordinates the Educere Alliance and the spinout, Global Campus. Jacqueline L. Scott is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Justice Education, University of Toronto. Her research is at the crossroads of race, place, nature, and outdoor recreation. It is part of a larger project on race and environmentalism.

xiv

Notes on Contributors

Hannah Sender is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London (UCL). Her research focuses on young people’s diverse experiences of un-homing, including, but not limited to, physical displacement. She conducts research with adolescents in areas experiencing rapid change, including small towns in Lebanon and larger urban centres in the UK. She has presented and published work on extended displacement, adolescent mental health, adolescents’ experiences of inequality, and hope. Thomas Aneurin Smith is a teacher and researcher in Human Geography at the School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University. His research interests include environmental, outdoor, and heritage education, with a particular focus on children and young people in the UK and in other contexts internationally. He has also recently conducted research on heritage interpretation, navigation and social interactions outdoors, and the role of digital technologies in these interactions. His work has also broadly been concerned with international development and sustainability, with projects focused on forest conservation, sacred natural sites, low-income home building and livelihoods, and more recently environmental impacts of mining. Diana Bou Talea is a DNA analyst at the American University of Science and Technology (AUST). Her work focuses on forensic, paternity, and kinship testing where she receives cases from private, public, and international laboratories and personnel. She did her Master’s degree in Public Health and worked on the Adolescent Lives project with University College London (UCL) and University of Beirut (AUB), conducting qualitative and quantitative research with adolescents living in Bar Elias, Lebanon. Nadia von Benzon is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Lancaster University. She has a specific interest in the geographies of children, young people, and mothers. Her research into young people and engagement with outdoor green space has been ongoing since her Master’s degree and includes both her own studies and Ph.D. supervision on this topic. Her interest in historical geographies of young people and outdoor green space seeks to situate contemporary narratives within a broader

Notes on Contributors

xv

context. Her recent work includes exploration of historic child migration from Britain to New Zealand and Australia. Sharon Watson trained as a landscape architect and led participatory design projects to facilitate user engagement and enhance access to nature in urban environments. She is also a Forest Schools leader and passionate about facilitating access to existing green spaces, leading outdoor play, and numerous walks for young people and families. Her research thesis developed an innovative participatory model, drawing on sensory ethnography and digital technologies, to engage child-led understandings of urban environments. Her research interests combine nature and well-being, and emerging in-situ research methods. She works at Birmingham City University as a research development and support officer. Catherine Wilkinson is Programme Leader and Reader for Education Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, teaching across at Education Studies and Early Childhood Studies degree programmes. Catherine works at the intersection of a range of research approaches, including: mixed methods, ethnographic, and participatory research. Catherine’s primary research interests are: children, young people, and identity; young people and community radio; and children and young peoplefriendly research methods. Catherine has an established reputation for making cutting-edge contributions, conceptually and methodologically, to research ‘with’ children and young people and uses this research to inspire the teaching she delivers. Samantha Wilkinson is Senior Lecturer in Childhood, Youth and Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has a Ph.D. in Human Geography, from University of Manchester, which explored young people’s alcohol consumption practices and experiences, using a ‘palette’ of traditional and innovative methods. Samantha has written extensively on children and young people’s geographies and mobilities; young men’s performances of masculinities; home care for people with dementia; and animal geographies. She uses innovative methodological approaches, including: joint ethnography;

xvi

Notes on Contributors

diaries; drawing elicitation interviews; mobile phone methods; and (auto)ethnography. Lewis Winks is a research fellow at the University of Exeter department of geography. His research specialisms are environmental education, outdoor learning, and advocacy and behaviour change. He works closely with educators to help develop practice as well as to co-create spaces for reflection and change. Lewis contributes to CPD programmes through his role as a director at the community interest company ‘On The Hill’ based in mid-Devon. He is the engaged research lead for the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at Exeter and is a partner of Lestari consultancy, specialising in combining education and conservation practice with sustainability, behaviour change, and principles of nature connection.

List of Figures

Chapter 2 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Anthony’s moodboard, exploring his experience of the expedition A permanent seating area surrounding a campfire, Ullswater Centre Map in the staff room at Eskdale, with camping, gorging and climbing venues marked with stickers Jordan’s moodboard

41 45 46 49

Chapter 4 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6

Youthscape(s) of learning ‘Awayscape’ a Keywords from the pre-visit survey. b Keywords from the student’s field notes. c Keywords from the post-visit survey Photograph taken by a student of Durdle Door Photograph taken by a student during a boat trip to Old Harry Rocks Video fragments/photovoice montage

88 90

93 97 98 100

xvii

xviii

List of Figures

Chapter 6 Fig. 1

a The children are equipped with swords and shields and dad Rhys with a spear; b The mock battle at the entrance to the Roman camp

144

Chapter 7 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6 Fig. 7

Photograph taken by Marissa Gonzalez Scanlan during the first moments of our ceramics discovery Outside of the Villaverde Cave archeological dig site and it’s contemporary entrance (2019) The interior of Villaverde Cave (2019) José Antonio Lima Vera pointing to triturated ceramics and other surface matter around the Cave of Esquinzo The fallen entrance to the main opening of the Cave of Esquinzo Nauzet attempting to enter the narrow passage to the inner galleries of the Cave of Esquinzo In the depths of Esquinzo Cave, from left to right: José Antonio Lima Vera, Carla Peraza Hernández, Marissa Gonzalez Scanlan, Elizabeth Rahman and Carlos Vera Hernández, the author of this photograph

165 168 169 174 174 176

177

Chapter 15 Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Participants playing and dancing on the beach between surfs Group interactions and celebration during a surfing session

380 381

Chapter 16 Fig. 1

Photograph taken by 17-year-old Syrian male participant

403

Chapter 20 Fig. 1

The ‘alien’ tree described by Kiera. Image from young participant’s footage. Courtesy of the author

497

List of Figures

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4 Fig. 5

Multiple, sequential frames from a clip of Jason filming the ‘tallest tree’ in Moseley Bog show how his camera actions track up and down the height of the tree. Courtesy of the author Multiple frames (‘timeline’) from Jason’s footage at the ditch show how his attention turns away from filming others, to record the materiality of his engagement as he steps into the water, and then captures his clean boots. Courtesy of the author The monster’s legs in Jason’s animation film, The Bollywood Monster. Courtesy of the author A single frame clipped from Jason’s animation The Bollywood Monster. The full length combines hand-drawn backgrounds, characters, and text, with film footage and his voiceover narrating the story. Courtesy of the author

xix

498

499 501

502

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction Thomas Aneurin Smith, Hannah Pitt, and Ria Ann Dunkley

1

Young People and Unfamiliar Landscapes

This book explores the relationships between young people, and ‘unfamiliar landscapes’. We use the deliberately broad term, unfamiliar landscapes, as an opening onto exploring how and why certain landscapes are deemed unfamiliar to young people, and in turn, how some young people are perceived to be unfamiliar with them. When we are thinking T. A. Smith · H. Pitt School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected] H. Pitt e-mail: [email protected] R. A. Dunkley (B) School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_1

1

2

T. A. Smith et al.

about landscapes, we are thinking of green, blue, outdoor, perhaps sometimes referred to as ‘natural’ or ‘wild’ spaces, spaces which, over many decades, a complex, controversial, and sometimes contradictory set of ideas have emerged about their value to, and relationship with, young people. Centring the notion that places might be organised along a continuum of familiarity is in part an effort to circumvent problematic conceptualisations of landscapes according to their degree of naturalness, rurality, or wilderness which are often employed to delineate their moral, salutogenic, or educational value for young people. Whilst bringing its own problems and contestations, we set about exploring unfamiliarity and familiarity with landscape as a way of critically interrogating exclusion and inclusion from these spaces, and to challenge some of the assumptions made about what young people should do, experience, think, and feel in them. Over the last few decades a series of societal panics have emerged about young people, children, and their connection to nature, and linked concerns about their health and wellbeing. There is for sure weighty evidence, in the UK, that young people’s and children’s access to nature and the outdoors has declined over the last decade (Natural England, 2019). And although worries about young people and children not getting enough time outdoors are not exactly new (von Benzon, Chapter 8), there has been a contemporary and popular moral panic about this lack of access to, and connection to nature (Louv, 2005), familiarity with rural and wild landscapes, and declining rights to roam for young people (Smith & Dunkley, 2018). Physical and mental health problems (Thomson & Katikireddi, 2018), and lack of awareness of environmental issues (Chawla, 1998; Dunkley & Smith, 2019a), are seen as connected to this deprivation of access to nature (Freeman et al., 2016). We also know that access to the wellbeing benefits associated with being outdoors, and in contact with nature, are deeply unequal and linked to pervasive social, economic, and racial inequalities (Boyd et al., 2018). How these panics and crisis have been represented and tackled has been challenged as being deeply ethnocentric, reproducing White, classist, and masculinist ideals of the benefits of being in the countryside, of ‘conquering’ the wild, or mastering discomfort (Brahinsky et al.,

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

3

2014; Maina-Okori et al., 2018). It is these inequalities, and how they are connected to the production of unfamiliarity and familiarity with and in landscape, that this book addresses. Unpacking the very idea of landscapes as unfamiliar to young people, and therefore how unfamiliarity is encountered, experienced, constructed, and reproduced, is at the very core of the chapters here. Through exploring relationships of unfamiliarity and familiarity, this collection critically reflects on some of the presupposed relationships between young people and landscape, be these outdoor, wild, green or blue spaces, whether they are small local woodlands or fields, mountain ranges or the backcountry, or whether indeed we should think even more broadly about unfamiliarity and landscape, such as the sonic landscape, or the watery properties of the sea. The very notion of unfamiliar landscapes is interrogated in this collection, with contributors invited to interpret and present what unfamiliarity might mean to the young people they introduce us to. Unfamiliarity itself might be considered a provocation, open and contestable, prompting questioning of assumptions about young people’s relationships with these spaces, and, importantly, how they are guided, coached, and introduced to landscapes through adult-led interventions. Rather than try presume relationships or pathways, the chapters of this book challenge how researchers, practitioners, and perhaps young people themselves, understand the ways that young people are engaged with landscapes they are presumed to be unfamiliar with. We see familiarity switch between being negative and positively encountered or understood, shifting through multiple constructions by the young people and others. This collection is novel, for a number of reasons. It is an interdisciplinary text, drawing from research in Human Geography, Education, Sociology, Anthropology, Leisure, and Heritage Studies. As such, it brings a diversity of practical effort and conceptual thought to challenge commonly held tropes about how and why young people are educated in, and brought to interact with, landscapes with assumptions of unfamiliarity. Taken together, the array of chapters offers new ways to think about how social justice is spatially mediated in outdoor education and leisure, through developing different understandings of unfamiliarity of landscape, and how young people’s embodied presences in landscape

4

T. A. Smith et al.

can be deemed unfamiliar. Whilst many of these chapters consider how young people come to engage with landscapes, and develop different sense of familiarity and unfamiliarity in the doing, others consider how groups often excluded from these landscapes, such as minority ethnic groups or displaced young people, become familiar, or find themselves unfamiliar. Practice is also at the heart of this book. A unique feature of this collection is how it engages with educational and outdoor practitioners, whose work is directly at the interface of young people and their encounters with landscape. The majority of the chapters in this book engage with practice in their own right, through research with schools and university field classes, outdoor centres and activity providers, National Park Authorities, and third-sector organisations. Several of these chapters include practitioners as co-authors, and they are written with both researchers and practitioners in mind, with implications for practice expressed in each. But beyond this, we include three chapters that we call ‘conversations with practitioners’, each of which is an interview with one or two educational or outdoor practitioners, who have read several of the chapters in this book and reflect on their implications for practice. They are lively and challenging conversations, which reflect critically on our overarching themes, including how and why certain landscapes might be defined as ‘unfamiliar’ (and whether doing so is problematic), the extent to which White, masculinist cultures pervade outdoor education work, and the challenges of engaging minoritised and marginalised groups in outdoor learning and activities in a range of different landscape contexts. We hope that these conversations will be informative and thought-provoking to practitioners and researchers alike. Before we continue, we should also acknowledge some of the limitations of this collection. Whilst it provides important challenges to the cultures and ways-of-doing in outdoor education, and activity, it speaks predominantly of examples from Europe and North America, with the notable exception of Chapter 16, which draws on evidence from young refugees in Lebanon, and Chapter 15, reflecting on the experiences of young asylum seekers, although in the European context of Ireland. Therefore, whilst collectively we hope to address the challenges of minoritised groups, of race, class, and gender, we are doing so in

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

5

the main from the perspective of the minority world. Second, though we cover a breadth of encounters between young people and unfamiliar landscapes, there are many such encounters which do not feature here. Whilst our collection is primarily focused on young people, much more could be said about children and families together outdoors. Our aim, we hope, is to provide thoughtful discussions of the relationships between young peoples and landscapes, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, to provoke some critical re-thinking of how and where unfamiliarity comes into play. We hope that these thoughts, ideas, and provocations will transfer to other settings, will spark discussions around what it means to regard landscapes as unfamiliar, and how and why young people are guided towards and in certain landscape encounters. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to two sections. The first, building on this introduction, takes further our ideas about how the concept of unfamiliar landscapes can be approached. This is not intended to determine one definition, or bound the concept, but to provide entry points by which we can come to think about young people and their encounters with landscape in ways that depart from the usual rhetoric. Our invitation to contributors to explore the notion of unfamiliar landscapes allowed them space to consider and shape what the term means and how it might be employed in research or practice; we seek to retain this constructive ambiguity in our exploration of the term. Second, we outline the chapters in this book, organised into five themes. We explain each theme in detail below, but by way of introduction, themes one and two explore outdoor education and heritage spaces, respectively. Theme three examines how young people may be made to feel unfamiliar, for example due to race, gender, or class. Theme four brings together chapters on young people’s wellbeing and landscape unfamiliarity, whilst theme five discusses how sonic and digital technologies might mediate encounters with the unfamiliar.

6

T. A. Smith et al.

2

Thinking About the Unfamiliar and Familiar

2.1

Landscapes as Unfamiliar to Young People

Unfamiliarity with landscapes is one of the guiding narratives behind adult interventions with young people and children in the outdoors. There is a certain logic to this assumption. Young people and children are educated both formally and informally by adults, because they are less experienced, and often therefore require guiding, coaching, and enskilling by those who are more skilled than they are, often, adults (Dunkley & Smith, 2019a). Yet narratives of unfamiliarity and landscape, whether due to lack of experience, skill, exposure, or simply time in particular landscapes, is also, as we noted above, bound up with societal concerns about young people and children’s lack of connection to nature, based on a lack of familiarity with natural, outdoor, rural, or wild environments (Dickinson, 2013). The consequences of this disconnect are varied, and include a lack of understanding of environmental concerns and sustainability, lack of access to wellbeing benefits and therefore declines in physical and mental health, and the lack of future skills to enable them to access and make use of these spaces as adults. Wider discourses are also at work, including the deepening gulf between children’s experiences of nature, and those of technologies which dominate their increasingly indoor lives, further delineating nature and culture through their early experiences (Smith & Dunkley, 2018). Overall, then, a moral geography has developed about the importance of spending time outdoors (Mergen, 2003; Vanaken & Danckaerts, 2018), with particular emphasis on children and childhood. A focus on unfamiliar landscapes does not necessarily come as a way to challenge some of the basic tenets of the above, given that there is significant evidence that children and young people are increasingly spending less time outdoors, have less freedom to roam independently (Jones et al., 2003), as a result of changing lifestyles, and the divestment in outdoor facilities (Mikkelsen & Christensen, 2009). That many young people and children might therefore feel unfamiliar in, or lack a sense of connection to, certain rural, wild, green or blue spaces, is

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

7

likely to be the case in a straightforward way. So, this book is not an attempt to entirely dispute this. Instead, by focusing on the idea of landscapes being ‘unfamiliar’, and how in turn landscapes are made familiar to young people, we want to unpack commonplace assumptions about the nature of unfamiliarity and becoming familiar. We agree with Birch et al. (2020), that it is too simplistic to talk about young people as just having a ‘deficit’ of contact with nature, and that more contact and exposure will simply fix the problem. When instead we talk about unfamiliarity and landscapes, we are wanting to unpick the established norms, cultures, and ideas about how familiarity with landscapes is supposedly achieved: through formal educational practices; through physical challenge that necessitates discomfort; through assumptions about self-actualisation and achievement of goals, amongst others. We want to interrogate the linear narratives that suggest exposure to nature, the countryside, or rurality will necessarily bring young people familiarity with those spaces, and alter their lives for the better. We want to know why cultural norms persist, to understand different interpretations and practices of becoming familiar, and, perhaps most importantly, to hear from a diversity of young people themselves about how they experience unfamiliarity with landscapes, what it means to become familiar, and how this affects them—or not! Whilst we include chapters that also draw on experiences of children, we want to draw attention to how young people appear to be a neglected group. Much of the moral panic about nature/culture disconnects, wellbeing, and environmental crisis, seems to focus far more on children and childhood, tapping into romanticised ideals of rural childhoods in the minority world (Jones, 1999; Philo, 2003). Although we hesitate to make absolute definitions based on age, young people, who we might regard as being from late childhood, into their teens and early twenties, are frequently neglected in these discussions, as if childhood is the critical stage at which connection to nature is established. In contrast to children, young people and adolescents are often treated as an unwanted presence in public space, with social regulations that frequently exclude them and a range of apparently anti-social activities they partake in (Brunelle et al., 2018; Muñoz, 2009). The undesirability of young people’s presence in public parks, in marginal blue spaces like

8

T. A. Smith et al.

canals, or even in more rural and wild spaces where their activities and practices are looked on with suspicion (Bromley & Stacy, 2012; Neal et al., 2015), marks their very presence in such landscapes as unfamiliar, and unwelcome. In this book, we seek to bring to the fore the experiences of young people as they encounter unfamiliar landscapes and adult-prescribed processes of becoming familiar, to open up conversations about what it means to be made familiar, and feel unfamiliar as a young person. Bringing young people to unfamiliar landscapes, and the practices and ideals of them becoming familiar, also draws attention to some of the normative assumptions about how ‘becoming familiar’ should take place, and the desired results. For outdoor or environmental education, or indeed other forms of formal learning that occur outdoors, such as school field classes, there are assumptions that ‘direct experiences’ of such landscapes lead to positive educational outcomes (Nairn, 2005; Soga & Gaston, 2016). Moreover, there can also be assumptions about how such experiences have longstanding impacts on young people’s future lives and selves, for example, in terms of their actions towards sustainability (Campbell-Price, Chapter 3). Other theories of place-based learning, environmental education, and ecopedagogy, can make assumptions about how the experiential aspects of being-in-place, simply being present in the unfamiliar, or dwelling in it, will lead young people towards greater sensitivity towards their environment and how to act sustainably within it (Kahn, 2010; Payne, 2018). It is therefore becoming familiar with the unfamiliar, developing an ‘intimate understanding’ (Cloke & Jones, 2001) in place, in the landscape itself, which leads young people to be ecologically aware, or so it is commonly assumed. We have begun to challenge how the ‘ecological goods’ of environmental education are easily traceable to future orientations and future selves, and the moral, somewhat romantic geographies of place that emerge from them (Dunkely & Smith, 2019b; Pitt, 2018). This collection builds on this, considering how by unpacking unfamiliarity and familiarity with landscape, we might also better critically appraise the workings of environmental education and learning. Another set of assumptions are attached to more experiential, activitybased modes of introducing young people to unfamiliar landscapes.

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

9

The rhetoric of outdoor activities for young people is heavily dominated by notions of adventure, achievement, thrill-seeking (or: controlled risk-taking), which in turn often denotes degrees of personal challenge and resultant development presupposed on endurance through discomfort and suffering (Creyer et al., 2003). The familiar narrative is, of course, that overcoming such discomforts breeds familiarity, and perhaps degrees of self-actualisation (Ray, 2009). Yet such a culture of outdoor activity is, as many have already argued, deeply embedded in masculinist, White, and class-based norms, which can exclude young people who do not see themselves as fitting into them. As one of our practitioners highlights (Chapter 14), cultures of outdoor exploration beyond this exclusive community privilege enjoyment over endurance. Alternatively, and perhaps in contradictory ways to the discourses of adventure, challenge, and discomfort just discussed, blue and green spaces are often assumed to have therapeutic qualities, of benefit to young people’s wellbeing by spending time, or undertaking leisure and sporting activities, in them. Becoming familiar, then, involves becoming comfortable in the unfamiliar, and finding therapeutic benefits from being outdoors or in nature, from simple acts of ‘dwelling’ in it. Yet, as has recently emerged in research on these ‘therapeutic’ spaces, they may be equally sites of struggle, physical strife, and discomfort for young people, relating to their unfamiliarity with the activity, the physical properties of the space, or their awareness of the risks they are exposed to (Britton et al., Chapter 15; Pitt, 2019; Smith & Pitt, Chapter 12). Some of these discourses of therapy, wellbeing and dwelling in nature may also be specific to temporal and cultural moments, which might reinforce some of the exclusions mentioned above, casting particular bodies as unfamiliar. And this unfamiliarity may in turn mean that young people do not necessarily see or feel in these landscapes in the ways assumed by adults. In this book we take these parallel discourses, of physical challenge and therapy, and consider how in each case they presuppose ideas about unfamiliarity and familiarity, and perhaps reinforce specific sets of exclusions and inclusions. The concept of landscape itself is also central to this book. Geographers have long established the ways in which the aesthetics of landscape are expressed through historical and ideological lenses (Cosgrove, 1985),

10

T. A. Smith et al.

and equally the importance of the subjective experience of place as opposed to the assumed objective qualities of space (Simonsen, 2012; Wylie, 2005). One of the key features of research in children and young people’s geographies has been to foreground the phenomenological lived experiences of space and place that children and young people have, and how these might be different from those of adults (Horton & Kraftl, 2018). More recently, research has come to highlight the relational properties of landscape, and the host of non-humans that thrive in and compose landscapes for and with young people and children. In doing so, this work has considered the relationship between young people, nature, and the landscapes they are in to be a hybrid (Prout, 2004), of which the subjective experience is only part, and drawing on a diversity of nonrepresentational, relational, and assemblage theories (Kraftl, Chapter 22; Smith & Dunkley, 2018). The chapters in this book consider, in various ways, how young people and children experience and encounter familiarity and unfamiliarity through bodily and sensorial means, and in turn how the qualities and properties of various landscapes are implicated in the encounter. The unfamiliarity of specific landscape environments, and how embodied encounters with them contribute to feelings of unfamiliarity or becoming familiar, is therefore the focus of several chapters, be these caves (Rahman, Chapter 8), moorlands (Dunkley & Smith, Chapter 6), or the sea (Britton et al., Chapter 15). The properties of non-humans too contribute to the understanding of landscape that this book evolves, including trees (Hickman Dunne, Chapter 2; Watson, Chapter 20), insects (Winks, Chapter 5), or technologies through which landscapes are engaged with (Dunkley & Smith, Chapter 6; Watson, Chapter 20). Yet how young people relay their experiences of landscape aesthetics is also of significance in this book, whether they reproduce familiar tropes, or muddle adult assumptions (Moran & Freeman, Chapter 4; Broch, Chapter 11; Watson, Chapter 20). In re-thinking landscapes through young people’s relational and aesthetic experiences of them, this book explores how landscape itself features in the experience of unfamiliarity.

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

2.2

11

Young People as Unfamiliar in Landscapes

To flip the narrative we have just constructed, we are just as concerned here with how young people’s presences, their very bodies within the landscape, are deemed to be unfamiliar. How is it that some young people, because of where they come from, the colour of their skin, their language or accent, or perhaps the way they move and look about, are assumed to be unfamiliar within any landscape? How in turn are these same young people made to feel unfamiliar, unwelcome, or unwanted in various outdoor settings, and what historical and contemporary events have contributed to this feeling of being made unfamiliar? These are some of the questions that occupy many of the chapters in this book, whether they concern race, gender, class, or age-based definitions of what constitutes an unfamiliar body within a landscape. In answering some of these questions, this book turns to the experiences of those who have been marginalised with respect to their presence in rural, outdoor spaces. In Belonging, bel hooks (2009: 34) writes about her own sense of familiarity growing up in the Kentucky countryside: As a child I loved playing in the dirt, in that rich Kentucky soil, that was a source of life. Before I understood anything about the pain and exploitation of the southern system of sharecropping, I understood that grown-up black folks loved the land.

In this recounting, she challenges many assumptions about the Whiteness of the countryside and how Black identity in the USA came to be defined by the urban experience, contrary to the Black histories and experiences of rurality, often conveniently erased. In recovering a Black countryside, she not only highlights the countryside as a space of deeprooted exclusions and persecutions, but also of familiarity, belonging, and as a place of deep ecological consciousness for Black people. The UK’s countryside is also racialised, as highlighted by Anita Sethi’s experiences as a brown woman who grew up in the inner city, finds freedom in the mountains, whilst also being told she does not belong there (Sethi, 2021). Movements such as Black Girls Hike would not have formed were such experiences uncommon, and if the White men did not still make

12

T. A. Smith et al.

up the majority of gatekeepers to the great outdoors (Chapter 14). It is these exclusions, and wider cultures relating not only to race, but also to gender stereotypes, and ideas about who is judged to be familiar in and with outdoor, natural, and rural spaces, which many of the chapters in this book tackle. Such outdoor cultures are not only about directly experienced forms of prejudices, but also about how particular activities and experiences are valorised in outdoor landscapes, and how in turn these are presented to young people as unfamiliar. Across contexts in the minority world, similar patterns are reported in terms of what groups of young people and children most visit the countryside, or access green and blue spaces (Bryne, 2012). In the UK, children in the most deprived areas are 20% less likely to spend regular time outside than their counterparts in the least deprived areas, whilst those from minority ethnical backgrounds are less likely to spend time outdoors than those from White backgrounds (Natural England, 2019). Lack of resources for many of these broadly defined groups is, of course, a factor (Askins, 2009), as is accessibility and proximity of green and blue spaces (Bell et al., 2014; Comber et al., 2008), and a lack of communication material directed towards these less wellserved groups (Roberts-Gregory & Hawthorne, 2016). But this is not the whole story, indeed a number of studies over the last few decades have identified how countryside and greenspace management, as well as cultures of leisure and outdoor recreation, are dominated by EuroWhite ideologies (Floyd & Johnson, 2002; Gentin, 2011; Rishbeth et al., 2019). Underpinning this is a broader racial and class-based segregation between rural and urban space, in the UK, the USA and more widely in much of Europe (Askins, 2009; Hickcox, 2018). As we argued above, cultures of outdoor leisure are not only White-dominated, they are also heavily gendered, with masculinist notions of adventure, challenge and endurance overshadowing much of outdoor activity provision for young people. As Sarah MacBride-Stewart describes in Chapter 13 of this book, gendered understandings of outdoor space are particularly reflected in ideas about safety for young women, positioning them as vulnerable and at risk. Our book seeks to unpack and challenge how these cultures pervade outdoor education and activity, through exposing the ways in which they

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

13

can act to exclude young people, particularly through the positioning of them as unfamiliar bodies in outdoor landscapes. Whether it is young people of Somali origin taking part in canoeing on urban canals in the UK (Smith & Pitt, Chapter 12), or crossing over city boundaries to access the ski slopes in Norway (Broch, Chapter 11), or the experiences of young refugees and asylum seekers in Lebanon and the UK (Britton et al., Chapter 15; Sender, Chapter 16), we attempt throughout this book to consider how the practices and rhetoric of outdoor education and activity can both challenge and at times reinforce the positioning of bodies as unfamiliar, even though the practices in which young people are engaged are aimed at them becoming familiar. We also query how landscape itself is defined in relation to unfamiliar bodies. Wilkinson and Wilkinson (Chapter 19), consider how young people from often economically disadvantaged backgrounds are marked out as ‘unfamiliar’ on the soundscapes of a broadcast radio by their accents, whilst Boyd (Chapter 17), and Sender (Chapter 16) consider how digital technologies are interwoven with young people’s understanding of, and access to, landscapes which might be deemed unfamiliar to them. In this sense, then, we use the leverage of unfamiliarity and familiarity to open up how landscape, and cultures around landscape access and engagement, come to define who is included and excluded. And through this examination we also pick up on how adults, as educational and outdoor practitioners, as parents and guides, come to be implicated in the relationship between young people and landscape. The exclusions young people face as unfamiliar bodies in certain landscapes are also felt by many adults too, whether related to race, class, or gender (Rishbeth, 2001), and how the discomforts of being an unfamiliar presence mediate the relationships between adults and young people of colour is the subject of Smith and Pitt’s study in this volume (Chapter 12). The role of parents, guardians, and other adult instructors, educators and guides, and their relationship as mediators of outdoor experience is an ongoing focus throughout this book. Indeed, whilst adult guardians are often seen as primary restrictors of young people’s independence and capability to roam (Benwell, 2013; Rixon et al., 2019), they are also important facilitators of outdoor experiences for young people, as Dunkley and Smith interrogate in more detail in

14

T. A. Smith et al.

Chapter 6. Undoubtedly parents and families should be considered as part of the pedagogic apparatus that negotiate unfamiliarity with and in landscapes for young people, and there is a need to further examine, in this book and beyond, how parents, perhaps themselves facing exclusions from certain landscapes, act with young people and children to become familiar. For much of this text, though, we are focused on the roles of what we broadly define as practitioners in guiding, facilitating, or coaching young people through and in unfamiliar landscapes, and how these practitioners are tasked, in various ways, with ‘making familiar’ the landscape to young people. Thinking critically about the role of practitioners in guiding young people and children is something we have described previously as ‘geocoaching’ (Dunkley & Smith, 2019b), in an attempt to bring together how any particular outdoor learning environment is both engaged with through the body and habitual bodily practices (Dewsbury, 2015), and the personal social memories and representations that are brought to the fore through the acts of (often adult) practitioners (Lorimer, 2003). Thinking about how adult practitioners coach young people in and through the landscape (or: geocoaching), puts centre stage how these practices might both include and exclude, in a practical sense, but also in a discursive one. These issues are presented in many of the chapters herein, but they are most prominent in our ‘conversations with practitioners’, where practitioners themselves reflect critically on the pedagogic, social, and moral dimensions of introducing young people to unfamiliar landscapes. Phoebe Smith and Dwayne Fields, in Chapter 14, talk about their own experiences of exclusion when attempting to take part in outdoor activities in their youth and young adulthood, both in terms of class-, gender-, and race-based prejudices, and how this inspired them to take action later through encouraging young people from more disadvantaged backgrounds to access and engage with outdoor recreation. Sunita Welch, in Chapter 9, also describes how countryside management is dominated by White, middle-class cultures of understanding and practising outdoor recreation, and how change is needed to better understand the needs of those least likely to gain wellbeing benefits from the outdoors. These conversations reflect on the everyday nature of

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

15

working with young people for adult practitioners, but also the wider decisions and cultures which perpetuate exclusions. The two ways of thinking about unfamiliarity and familiarity we have just outlined by no means should be thought of as a blueprint for thinking on unfamiliar landscapes, but they do draw together some of the major themes of this book: first, the way landscapes themselves are practically and discursively constructed and engaged with as being unfamiliar; and second how young people’s bodily presence in landscape is treated as unfamiliar. This book, given the breadth of the chapters, of course touches on many other themes: the everyday experience of youth and childhood; the pedagogic architecture of outdoor education; the ways in which past narratives of youth make their way into the contemporary setting; the ways in which technologies mediate young people’s relationship with the environment, to mention a few. We divide this book up into five major themes, under which is a collection of chapters speaking to that theme, as well as the broader considerations of this book towards unfamiliarity and familiarity. We describe each of these themes, and the chapters therein, below.

3

The Themes of This Book

3.1

Theme 1: The Unfamiliar Outdoors—Producing Unfamiliarity in Landscapes of Outdoor Education

Beginning with a theme that may feel most familiar in relation to young people encountering the outdoors is purposeful for starting with the most familiar enables us to unsettle such associations immediately. In the four chapters that contribute to this theme, we address those purposeful pedagogic activities which are by design and implementation aimed at connecting young people to the outdoors and to nature. The chapters in this theme are bound by their focus on residential settings where young people, away from their homes, set about educational- or activity-based tasks, guided by adult educators or instructors. These chapters shed new light on well-trodden paths for young people: the school-based field trip

16

T. A. Smith et al.

(Chapters 4 and 5), a residential outdoor activity setting (Chapter 2), and slightly more unusually the long-duration residential experience (Chapter 3). What emerges is a need to challenge the commonly held rationales deployed during these experiences: that residential fieldwork is purely contributing to knowledges associated with the curriculum; or that outdoor activity settings are purely for the self-actualisation of young people in the face of physical challenges. This theme therefore challenges the familiar tropes of outdoor learning and activity, considering the ways in which unfamiliar space-times are found within often taken-for-granted outdoor and educational activities. In Chapter 2, Jo Hickman Dunne examines the experiences of young people in Outward Bound Trust activity centres. Here, the complex interplay between masculinist culture of outdoor education, and the contemporary role of instructors in sensitively shaping young people’s interactions with landscape comes to the fore. Jo argues that unfamiliarity is negotiated through the use of outdoor settings as a gymnasium, but also as a space in which journeys are experienced, and escapism is evoked. Experiencing the unfamiliar occurs through processes that are not linear: their familiarity is always ‘becoming’. The temporality associated with feelings of unfamiliarity and familiarity is further examined in Chapter 3, where Margi Campbell-Price brings us to the reflections of young people three years after they have been on a residential experience to a remote island off New Zealand. Living somewhat ‘off-grid’, with limited resources, the young participants became more familiar with living sustainably, which cast into relief their ‘normal’, often less sustainable lives at home. For them, the home became unfamiliar on return, but many of the young people reported that, over time, their good intentions waned, in part due to their lack of agency in familiar settings, where sustainable practices were largely governed by their parents. Unfamiliarity was also found in the people that inhabited the island, their approach to sustainability and way of life. School trips in the UK are the focus of both chapters four and five, and, even in this often-familiar setting for young people passing through schooling, these chapters unpack how the unfamiliarity and familiarity of landscapes are critical in understanding young people’s experiences. Alun Morgan and Denise Freeman, in Chapter 4, take us with a group of

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

17

young people from outer London on their residential geography field trip in Swanage, UK. Alun and Denise explore the ways that young people ‘informalise’ otherwise formal learning experiences. They do this through finding moments of drift between staged activities; using their phones to record the aesthetic qualities of landscape and expressions of disengagement and boredom. Unfamiliarity emerges in the social dynamics of the ‘awayscape’ of the field trip, where feelings of belonging and security are somewhat undermined, but that new routines emerge to cope with this unfamiliarity. Feelings of discomfort pervade Chapter 5, where Lewis Winks shares his observations of geography and biology fieldwork at another field centre in South Dorset, UK. Lewis attends to a range of discomforts in the face of unfamiliarity: feelings of disgust on encountering insects; feeling uncomfortable on seeing the visible impacts of flooding on residents; to physical discomforts of being at an exposed beach all day. Whilst some encounters with discomfort engender a change in mindset for some young people (empathy with bugs and residents alike), for some physical discomforts lead to rejecting and resisting the activity. Unfamiliarity here is expressed in the tension between the transformative potential of discomforts, and the potential harm.

3.2

Theme 2: The Unfamiliar Past—Negotiating Unfamiliarity in Heritage Spaces

The past, its manifestations in archaeological form, or in the pages of archives, can find its way into the conception of landscapes as unfamiliar. Just as often outdoor education and activities for young people and children are focused on and in landscape, its formation, or physically tackling the terrain, so also are past histories presented as unfamiliar, to be made familiar through purposeful pedagogies. In a different vein, the past treatment of children and young people also tells us a great deal about how ideas of landscape unfamiliarity are far from new. This theme, then, takes the spaces of heritage, and the archives, as its subject, contrasting the ‘becoming familiar’ of pedagogic introductions to the historical landscapes, with the archived histories of young people’s placement into unfamiliar landscapes from their urban homes.

18

T. A. Smith et al.

How the past is made familiar to children and young people is itself of interest to this theme, and as Chapter 6 demonstrates, this can be through now-familiar technologies (the tablet or smartphone), placed within an ancient landscape of Roman archaeology. Here, Ria Dunkley and Thomas Aneurin Smith take us on a tour of a Roman marching camp in South Wales, with a family following an app-based guide. They explore how the familiar and everyday of the ‘family visit’ interfaces with the unfamiliar or extra-ordinary site of a remote Welsh moorland, and previously poorly visited Roman remains. In doing so, the roles of the parents, the app and mobile device, and the children themselves, all contribute to ‘making familiar’, but not necessarily in straightforward or ‘desired’ ways as idealised by some proponents of ‘slow ecopedagogy’. We continue to familiarise ourselves with ancient remains in Chapter 7, where Elizabeth Rahman, with her students on an anthropology-archaeology field course, journeys through little-explored caves in Fuerteventura. Here, the contrast between the familiarity of cave heritage to local people, and those of young people and visitors to the island, are stark. Through exploring these cavernous spaces as part of an experimental field school, Elizabeth unearths the cave as a landscape that invites alternative modalities of learning. This unfamiliar environment, both in terms of its heritage, and the unfamiliarity of bodily engagement with caves, itself promotes a curiosity to learn and invites alternative ways to do learning. Moral geographies of taking young people from urban to rural locations to experience the ‘unfamiliar’ for their betterment are, as Nadia von Benzon examines in Chapter 8, not only associated with contemporary societal panics around youth, childhood, and nature. Through her examination of archives from reformatory farms for boys in Victorian Britian, Nadia offers an important historical context to debates elsewhere in this volume: the assumptions around the benefits of unfamiliar rurality to urban youth. Reformatory farms were in many respects unfamiliar to those young people moved to them: physically demanding, often dangerous, yet at the same time important interpersonal relations were established in these unfamiliar settings. The classed construction of the countryside as unfamiliar to the inner city, assuming rural spaces to

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

19

be clean and healthy, underpinned an often harsh life for those children displaced to the farms. These first two themes are reflected on in our first conversation with a practitioner in Chapter 9, where we interview Dr. Sunita Welch, Senior Specialist in Evaluation at Natural England, formerly managing Education and Interpretation at the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority. She comments on the themes of class-based access to, and definitions of, unfamiliar landscapes, as well as the masculinist and White-dominated cultures of outdoor activity and education. She picks up on how these are in turn connected to experiences and narratives of discomfort, endurance, and enjoyment in the outdoors, and the extent to which these play into how familiarity and unfamiliarity are framed and felt by young people outdoors.

3.3

Theme 3: Embodying Difference in Unfamiliar Landscapes

Landscapes are deemed unfamiliar to young people, and in synthesis so are particular bodies constructed in discourse and practice as unfamiliar, or unexpected, in these landscapes. How is this done, and what are the consequences? Theme three examines the entwined nature of unfamiliarity for bodies and landscapes, how the embodied and sometimes representational practices of bodies, both present and absent, in certain landscapes contribute to the perpetuation of exclusions. Chapters 10, 11, 12, and twelve take race and exclusion as their focus, in practices of skiing through winter landscapes, and canoeing on urban canals, whilst Chapter 13 fixes on gender, and in particular the enactment of non-hegemonic femininities by young women outdoors, as a way to examine how exclusion and inclusion occur for young people in outdoor spaces. In each of these chapters, we gain a sense of the reciprocity of unfamiliarity between landscape and bodies, how defining landscapes as unfamiliar is reliant on the positioning of bodies in landscape as unfamiliar. Jacqueline Scott, in Chapter 10, scrutinises the intersection of race and class, and with these the nationalist mythologies of Canada and

20

T. A. Smith et al.

other northern nations, in the perpetuation of exclusion of Black people from skiing. She takes a wide-screen approach, from the discomforts experienced by Black Youth from Toronto in the White spaces of the ski slopes, to the representations of Black bodies (or, indeed, the lack of them) in winter landscapes, and how these are perpetuated through a range of media and organisations. These in turn are reflected in the racial streaming of young people into different sports in school, and wider national myths of White conquest. Yet, more positively, she finds the presence of young Black people on the slopes as a way of producing a counter-narrative. These counter-narratives continue in Chapter 11, where Tuva Beyer Broch digs deeper into the experiences of working-class, Black young people from inner-city Oslo during a day’s cross-country skiing. We follow in detail these young people as they assess the White landscape for themselves, on an emotional as much as an embodied journey, and through this journey find how the young people demonstrate their awareness of the hegemonic narratives about race and skiing. Tuva illustrates how exclusions are produced and reproduced by the historical and contemporary structures of skiing, but also by the young people themselves. Thomas Aneurin Smith and Hannah Pitt draw on research from Leicester, UK, and the experiences of young people and their parents of Somali heritage as they engage with a project to better access local waterways, primarily through learning to canoe, in Chapter 12. Feelings of discomfort, expressed by the young people, parents, and researchers alike, are examined for how they reflect the injustices that often accompany the use of outdoor spaces for leisure and recreation by those who are not normatively associated with them. Discomfort is sensorial and emotional, associated with embodied experience of the waterways, and the ways in which spaces are racialised. Whilst therefore offering a critique of narratives of endurance and discomfort as associated with White, male norms of outdoor pursuits, the chapter also demonstrates the excitement of discomfort: getting splashed in the water, wet and cold, were exhilarating for some young people. Chapter 13 switches out attention to gender, and in particular norms around safety, access, and the kinds of activities young women are expected to do in the outdoors. Sara MacBride-Stewart takes walk-along interviews with young

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

21

women participating in geocaching with the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority in Wales, UK. Identified as less likely to access outdoor spaces and activities in the Park, due to class backgrounds, despite their proximity to them, these young women present complex and nuanced understandings of how femininity is and can be expressed in these spaces. Sara finds that how young women treat both familiar and unfamiliar spaces is important, how at times they might reinforce, and at other times transgress, normative femininity. She argues that organisations such as National Parks can have a significant role in allowing young women to experiment with non-normative identities. Phoebe Smith and Dwayne Fields reflect on the theme of this section in Chapter 14. Their foundation, #WeTwo, is working to take young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to the Antarctic, and both Dwayne and Phoebe have worked throughout their varied careers to break down prejudices around access to outdoor recreation. Drawing on their own experiences as young people facing exclusion and prejudices, relating to race, gender, and class, they consider how these exclusions continue to be perpetuated today, as they recount some of the barriers they continue to face, and reflect on the experiences of some of the young people they have worked with. The conversation draws together the threads between the chapters in this theme, on the ways that landscape experiences can be both liberating and exclusionary, whilst offering critical commentary on the notion of unfamiliar landscapes.

3.4

Theme 4: Being Well, and Being Unfamiliar

The chapters in this section connect with the notion that places affect our wellbeing, albeit through presenting very different landscape experiences. Together the insights from young people around the world push us to challenge any assumed pathway through unfamiliarity to familiarity aligned with a journey towards improved wellbeing. The emphasis is on mental health and wellbeing more than physical benefits, although some of the young people’s experiences undoubtedly impacted both. We see young people journeying between familiar and unfamiliar landscapes, both on short sojourns and for long-term moves, sometimes crossing the

22

T. A. Smith et al.

imagined boundary between rural and urban, also moving between land and sea, grey and green. What is apparent as we follow these movements is that we cannot assume how changing places will affect the young people’s wellbeing. To borrow words from one contributor to this theme, ‘Their narratives liberate the terms “unfamiliar” and “familiar” from normative interpretations as either bad or good for mental health’ (Sender). In Chapter 15 it is the sea which constitutes an unfamiliar landscape, especially when its waters are surfed for the first time by young asylum seekers in Ireland. Britton et al. describe groups being taught to surf as part of a programme designed to provide therapeutic experiences for a community facing complex, often acute pressures which harm their wellbeing. As the chapter highlights, these young people are negotiating life in a new country where the daily landscapes are often unfamiliar and disabling. It might then seem perverse to add a potentially threatening seascape to their lives. But we see how in a carefully supported context, introducing them to surfing offers enabling moments such as the surprise of being immersed for the first time or the achievement of catching a wave. In fact, the opportunity to encounter such unfamiliarity has hugely positive effects for the group, with the qualities which make the sea so distinct from other places of daily life essential to the experience. Hannah Sender and colleagues introduce us to another group of young people negotiating life in a new country following displacement, this time to Lebanon. In Chapter 16 they consider how young people seek to feel emplaced in the large informal settlements there, and how this affects their mental wellbeing. Befitting somewhere of many comings and goings, where communities originally from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine interact, this chapter takes place and sense of place to be fluid, ongoing processes. The interactions between wellbeing and place are similarly variable, with nothing inevitable about how a landscape’s familiarity impacts mental health. We see how echoes of previous homes are amplified in order to recreate a sense of comfort, and increasing familiarity with the place brings a sense of home. But others work to persist in places which remain doggedly unfamiliar, or seek connections to faraway places through imagined futures and social media. These experiences

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

23

highlight that young people are never experiencing a landscape in isolation, and that how they rub up against others sharing the place affects their experience and mental health. A crucial contributor to feeling well, is the young people’s sense of efficacy in shaping their current and future places—a finding that surely applies to their peers who have not lived through displacement. The landscape featured in Chapter 17 may well be more familiar to many readers as Francesca Boyd takes us onto a university campus. But again, her research suggests that there is nothing inevitable about how young people—in this case students—interact with familiar places, or the impacts on their wellbeing. In a context of worsening trends in students’ wellbeing, universities may look to the salutogenic potential of natural environments on campus. The intervention presented in the chapter sought to promote health enhancing engagement with natural environments, including through a specially developed app. What students found was that nature is not always appealing or pleasant, and that green places available to them are not necessarily well suited to how they want to use them, especially if not easily incorporated to daily routines and priorities. The findings reveal how campus managers might design and equip greenspaces to encourage students to access them and the associated wellbeing benefits. More broadly, the chapter once again raises questions about what makes a landscape unfamiliar, troubling any assumptions that proximity and regular contact equate familiarity, or that familiarity promotes use. For Chapter 18 Amanda L. Hooykaas foregrounds the experiences of essential figures in the background of the other contributions on this theme: the adults working to engage young people in new places and supporting them to enhance their mental health. Centring on her own time as a guide, she considers how young people from Toronto encounter the wilderness they are introduced to through residential canoe expeditions. She paints portraits of young people from disadvantaged and neglected urban neighbourhoods, many of whom face complex challenges in daily life meaning they lack opportunities to explore rural landscapes. Hooykaas interprets this as a sense of placelessness, contrasting it with the connections they make during the trips—to place, to each other, to the guides, and to themselves. We see how being

24

T. A. Smith et al.

taken out of familiar places and all their negative connotations, whilst not easy, opens new potentials for the young people, also for the adults accompanying them. This guide’s perspective also brings attention to the care required to support young people through these encounters, something else in the background of the other encounters explored under this theme.

3.5

Theme 5: Digital and Sonic Encounters with Unfamiliarity

What we consider a landscape, and the mediums through which landscapes are engaged with, are up for questioning in this theme. The book, to this point, has considered landscape in fairly literal senses: the physical and sensory experiences of landscape as it is encountered. Here, the two chapters in this theme question this configuration of landscape. They ask what happens when we think of the landscape as a conjoined experience of the airwaves of a radio station, and the physical space in which it is produced. They ask how the medium of film, both shooting and editing, configure the relationships children and young people develop with wild, natural spaces, and the non-humans within them. In both the soundwaves and the medium of the camera, these chapters consider the agencies of technologies themselves, as sometimes familiar, sometimes unfamiliar ways to navigate unfamiliar environments. In the case of Wilkinson and Wilkinson’s chapter, the landscape is that of the radio waves, the sonic landscape or soundscape, through which young people broadcast a youth-led radio station. Chapter 19 considers then how familiarity with the soundscape is negotiated between adults and young people through the power structures of the radio station. Young people entering the unfamiliar soundscape develop important skills, some learnt from their peers, but they also navigate unfamiliarity through adapting their accents to create ‘radio voices’, whilst also subverting some of the adult rules of the radio waves. The chapter provides a challenge to how we think about landscapes as physical spaces, but also how young people find familiarity and face unfamiliarity through voice and sound. Creative digital filmmaking is the medium

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

25

through which Sharon Watson, in Chapter 20, considers how children respond to wildspaces. Through this, she explores the role and agency of the camera in ‘biographic filming’ and how the experience of recording and editing footage gives us an insight into how children engage with nature. How children’s voices appear in the films, where they are absent, and how footage is shot, is revealing of the kinds of connections children make to features of the natural world. Their editing of footage is also imbued with much creative expression, highlighting the imaginative work that children often do bringing together their experiences of being outdoors. In both of the chapters of this theme, we see how mediums through which young people and children engage with the world have agentic capacities in their own right, whilst also providing complex vectors through which becoming familiar happens. In Chapter 21, our final practitioner response chapter, Toby Clarke reflects on both themes four and five. As manager for the John Muir Award Scotland, Toby draws on his two decades of experience of working with young people, many from disadvantaged backgrounds. He comments on the ways in which large organisations concerned with the outdoors and nature conservation have adapted to engaging with more diverse groups. This includes how, for many young people, such experiences must take account of young people’s own notions of unfamiliarity and familiarity, introducing a ‘low dose’ of novelty and challenge, but also appreciating where certain nature spaces might even appear threatening, unpleasant or dirty to young people precisely because of their unfamiliarity. He considers the importance of health and wellbeing, and how these feelings might be imbued in both unfamiliar and more familiar spaces. Technology also features in this conversation, particularly in terms of the role technologies might increasingly play in engagement with unfamiliar landscapes in the future.

3.6

Reflections

This book draws to a close through two chapters that bring together, and reflect on, the significant practical and intellectual impactions of thinking through landscapes as familiar and unfamiliar. In Chapter 22,

26

T. A. Smith et al.

Peter Kraftl speaks from across the chapters in this book, offering a critical reflection on the notion of unfamiliar landscapes. He highlights three conceptual modalities of unfamiliarity: the multiple registers through which unfamiliarity is constituted (discursive, emotional, embodied and material); whether unfamiliarity is something people ‘bring’ with them to landscape, and the extent to which any landscape might be defined as ‘unfamiliar’; and the ways in which social difference, in relation to ethnicity, gender, and class, comes to the fore. In doing so, questions emerge about the extent to which defining landscapes as unfamiliar might in itself reproduce unfamiliarity, and whether it might be useful to think about defamiliarising landscapes, to highlight the qualities of discomfort and uneasiness that emerge from encounters with and in them. We follow this with our own final reflections, in Chapter 23, as the conclusions to this book. We primarily consider the implications for practice and partitioners of the working through of unfamiliarity and familiarity with landscape that takes place across this book, as well as some of the significant ways forward for future research with young people.

4

Conclusions

In this opening chapter, we have described the ways in which we have collectively begun to think about unfamiliarity and familiarity with landscape. We introduced two ways of thinking through unfamiliarity. We began with the ways that landscapes are positioned, discursively, representationally and through practice, as being unfamiliar to young people, which opens up a space to critically interrogate how educational and recreational practices that take place outdoors with young people are designed to make such landscapes familiar. Second, we considered how socially defined groups of young people are constructed as unfamiliar within particular landscapes, and the consequences of this. Unpacking unfamiliar landscapes, we have argued, can be a way to think and work critically to address the challenges of young people’s access to, and experiences of, outdoor landscapes, as well as thinking critically about connections to nature, sustainability, wellbeing, and social justice. We

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

27

hope this framing is useful as you read the remaining chapters, and might prompt a re-thinking, or re-doing, of presupposed and normative notions of familiarity and unfamiliarity. We also hope that you recognise other interplays between familiarity, young people, and landscape not foreseen by us or the contributors. Finally, we hope this book inspires critical thinking, discussion, perhaps new creative practices and ideas, for both researchers and practitioners.

References Askins, K. (2009). Crossing divides: Ethnicity and rurality. Journal or Rural Studies, 25 (4), 365–375. Bell, S. L., Phoenix, C., Lovell, B., & Wheeler, A. M. (2014). Green space, health and wellbeing: Making space for individual agency. Health and Place, 30, 287–292. Benwell, M. C. (2013). Rethinking conceptualisations of adult-imposed restriction and children’s experiences of autonomy in outdoor space. Children’s Geographies, 11(1), 28–43. Birch, J., Rishbeth, C., & Payne, S. R. (2020). Nature doesn’t judge you– how urban nature supports young people’s mental health and wellbeing in a diverse UK city. Health & Place, 62, 102296. Boyd, F., White, M. P., Bell, S. L., & Burt, J. (2018). Who doesn’t visit natural environments for recreation and why. Landscape and Urban Planning, 175, 102–113. Brahinsky, R., Sasser, J., & Minkoff-Zern, L.-A. (2014). Race, space, and nature: An introduction and critique. Antipode, 46 (5), 1135–1152. Bromley, R. D. F., & Stacy, R. J. (2012). Feeling unsafe in urban areas: Exploring older children’s geographies of fear. Environment and Planning A, 44 (2), 428–444. Brunelle, S., Brussoni, M., Herrington, S., Matsuba, M. K., & Pratt, M. W. (2018). Teens in public spaces and natural landscapes. In Handbook of adolescent development research and its impact on global policy (pp. 361–379). Byrne, J. (2012). When green is White: The cultural politics of race, nature and social exclusion in a Los Angeles urban national park. Geoforum, 43, 595–611.

28

T. A. Smith et al.

Chawla, L. (1998). Significant life experiences revisited: A review of research on sources of environmental sensitivity. The Journal of Environmental Education, 29 (3), 11–21. Cloke, P., & Jones, O. (2001). Dwelling, place, and landscape: An orchard in Somerset. Environment and Planning A, 33, 649–666. Comber, A., Brunsdon, C., & Green, E. (2008). Using a GIS-based network analysis to determine urban greenspace accessibility for different ethic and religious groups. Landscape and Urban Planning, 86 , 103–114. Cosgrove, D. (1985). Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 10 (1), 45–62. Creyer, E., Ross, W., & Evers, D. (2003). Risky recreation: An exploration of factors influencing the likelihood of participation and the effects of experience. Leisure Studies, 22(3), 239–253. Dewsbury, J. D. (2015). Non-representational landscapes and the performative affective forces of habit: From ‘live’ to ‘blank.’ Cultural Geographies, 22, 29–47. Dickinson, E. (2013). The misdiagnosis: Rethinking “nature-deficit disorder.” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 7 (3), 315– 335. Dunkley, R. A., & Smith, T. A. (2019a). By-standing memories of curious observations: Children’s storied landscapes of ecological encounter. Cultural Geographies, 26 (1), 89–107. Dunkley, R. A., & Smith, T. A. (2019b). Geocoaching: Memories and habits of learning in practices of ecopedagogy. The Geographical Journal, 185 (3), 292–302. Freeman, C., van Heezik, Y., Stein, A., & Hand, K. (2016). Technological inroads into understanding city children’s natural life-worlds. Children’s Geographies, 14 (2), 158–174. Floyd, M. F., & Johnson, C. Y. (2002). Coming to terms with environmental justice in outdoor recreation: A conceptual discussion with research implications. Leisure Sciences, 24, 59–77. Gentin, S. (2011). Outdoor recreation and ethnicity in Europe—A review. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 10, 153–161. Hickcox, A. (2018). White environmental subjectivity and the politics of belonging. Social and Cultural Geography, 19 (4), 496–519. hooks, b. (2009). Belonging: A culture of place. Routledge. Horton, J., & Kraftl, P. (2018). Rats, assorted shit and ‘racist groundwater’: Towards extra-sectional understandings of childhoods and social-material processes. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (5), 926–948.

1 Unfamiliar Landscapes: An Introduction

29

Jones, O. (1999). Tomboy tales: The rural, nature and gender of childhood. Gender, Place and Culture, 6 (2), 117–136. Jones, O., Williams, M., & Fleuriot, C. (2003). ‘A new sense of place?’ Mobile ‘wearable’ information and communications technology devices and the geographies of urban childhood. Children’s Geographies, 1(2), 165–180. Kahn, R. (2010). Critical pedagogy, ecoliteracy, & planetary crisis: The ecopedagogy movement. Peter Lang. Lorimer, H. (2003). The geographical field course as active archive. Cultural Geographies, 10, 278–308. Louv, R. (2005). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Algonquin Books. Maina-Okori, N. M., Koushik, J. R., & Wilson, A. (2018). Reimagining intersectionality in environmental and sustainability education: A critical literature review. The Journal of Environmental Education, 49 (4), 286–296. Mergen, B. (2003). Review essay: Children and nature in history. Environmental History, 8, 643–669. Mikkelsen, M. R., & Christensen, P. (2009). Is children’s independent mobility really independent? A study of children’s mobility combining ethnography and GPS/mobile phone technologies. Mobilities, 4 (1), 37–58. Muñoz, S. (2009). Children in the outdoors: A literature review. Sustainable Development Research Centre. Nairn, K. (2005). The problems of utilising ‘direct experience’ in Geography education. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 29 (2), 293–309. Natural England. (2019). Monitor of engagement with the natural environment: Children and young people report. Neal, S., Bennett, K., Jones, H., Cochrane, A., & Mohan, G. (2015). Multiculture and public parks: Researching super-diversity and attachment in public green space. Population, Space and Place, 21, 463–475. Payne, P. G. (2018). The framing of ecopedagogy as/in scapes: Methodology of the issue. The Journal of Environmental Education, 49, 71–87. Philo, C. (2003). ‘To go back up the side hill’: Memories, imaginations and reveries of childhood. Children’s Geographies, 1(1), 7–23. Pitt, H. (2018). Questioning care cultivated through connecting with morethan-human communities. Social and Cultural Geography, 19 (2), 253–274. Pitt, H. (2019). What prevents people accessing urban bluespaces? A qualitative study. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 39, 89–97. Prout, A. (2004). The future of childhood . Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9780203323113

30

T. A. Smith et al.

Ray, S. (2009). Risking bodies in the wild: The “corporeal unconscious” of American adventure culture. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 33(3), 257– 284. Rishbeth, C. (2001). Ethnic minority groups and the design of public open space: An inclusive landscape? Landscape Research, 26 (4), 351–366. Rishbeth, C., Blachnicka-Ciacek, D., & Darling, J. (2019). Participation and wellbeing in urban greenspace: ‘Curating sociability’ for refugees and asylum seekers. Geoforum, 106 , 125–134. Rixon, A., Lomax, H., & O’Dell, L. (2019). Childhoods past and present: Anxiety and idyll in reminiscences of childhood outdoor play and contemporary parenting practices. Children’s Geographies, 17 (5), 618–629. Roberts-Gregory, F., & Hawthorne, T. L. (2016). Transforming green walls into green places: Black middle class boundary work, multidirectional miscommunication and green space accessibility in southwest Atlanta. Geoforum, 77 , 17–27. Sethi, A. (2021). I belong here: A journey along the backbone of Britain. Bloomsbury. Simonsen, K. (2012). In quest of a new humanism: Embodiment, experience and phenomenology as critical geography. Progress in Human Geography, 37 , 10–26. Smith, T. A., & Dunkley, R. A. (2018). Technology-nonhuman-child assemblages: Reconceptualising rural childhood roaming. Children’s Geographies, 16 (3), 304–318. Soga, M., & Gaston, K. J. (2016). Extinction of experience: The loss of humannature interactions. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 14, 19–101. Thomson, R. M., & Katikireddi, S. V. (2018). Mental health and the jilted generation: Using age-period-cohort analysis to assess differential trends in young people’s mental health following the great recession and austerity in England. Social Science and Medicine, 214, 133–143. Vanaken, G. J., & Danckaerts, M. (2018). Impact of green space exposure on children’s and adolescents’ mental health: A systematic review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15 (12), 2668. Wylie, J. (2005). A single day’s walking: Narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast path. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (2), 234–247.

Part I The Unfamiliar Outdoors: Producing Unfamiliarity Through Outdoor Education

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor Education: Gyms, Journeys, and Escapism Jo Hickman Dunne

1

Introduction

In this chapter, I look to ‘unsettle’ ideas of what counts as unfamiliar. The very notion of an ‘unfamiliar landscape’ suggests that in time such landscapes could become familiar . It gives a sense of landscapes as fixed ‘time-spaces’ (Lorimer, 2003), ready and waiting for us to become familiar with. I challenge this fixity by demonstrating how young people, things and (outdoor) places are always ‘becoming’ in relation to each other through dynamic and messy intra-actions (Barad, 2007). The starting point for this challenge is the now significant pushback against the idea that young people have become disconnected from nature (Rautio et al., 2017; Riley, 2019). Increasingly, geographers are drawing on post-human and new-materialist approaches to focus our J. H. Dunne (B) Centre for Youth Impact, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_2

33

34

J. H. Dunne

attention on the myriad ways in which the agency of non-human things creates and shapes young people’s (nature) experiences (Änggård, 2016). This chapter positions itself within these discussions, following newmaterialist approaches (Barad, 2007; Ingold, 2000) to ‘re-order’ our thinking around how young people experience outdoor spaces in purposeful pedagogical activities (Merewether, 2019)—those designed to create moments of social and emotional learning. In so doing, my focus is threefold. Firstly, I explore how landscapes (and young people) are (re)created through memory, social relations and embodied interactions. Bodies, as material themselves, interweave with other non-human materials and matter (Prout, 2000) through embodied movement. As Horton and Kraftl (2006a: 79) suggest, ‘a closer apprehension of the bodily details of children’s lives […] might give more fresh insights and rich insights into the Children’s Geographies that concern us’. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on young people’s embodied interpretations of educational nature encounters. Secondly, I shed light on the influence of outdoor instructors in this process, acknowledging that their guiding role provides a means of ‘geocoaching’ (Dunkley & Smith, 2019a). This builds on the work of others to recognise the various social conditions which shape encounters with the outdoors (Lorimer, 2003). Finally, I look to make some of this learning applicable to outdoor education practices. The rhetoric of outdoor education—concerned with notions of adventure and an emphasis on anthropocentric benefits—acts to promote binary thinking around nature/culture, and in so doing privileges certain types of skills and bodies (Riley, 2019). However, to conceive of things other than humans as agentic and create a more equitable relationship between nature and culture can be challenging to habitual adult- and humancentric ways of seeing (Merewether, 2019). This is particularly the case where the experience of human actants, as in outdoor learning, is the central focus (Conradson, 2005). Therefore, whilst speaking to academic debates that seek to quite literally ‘re-centre’ child/nature relationships (Rautio et al., 2017), this discussion is grounded in empirical fieldwork and aims to provoke active reflection for those working in these pedagogical contexts. I place young people on a level with non-human things

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor …

35

and matter to open up new ways of viewing child–nature interactions. However, I consciously privilege young people’s views, in order to make these discussions accessible and relevant for outdoor practitioners.

2

Horizontal Understandings of Young People and Nature

This chapter is framed by an understanding of outdoor experiential education as an inherently spatialised opportunity for spontaneous, exploratory and deeply embodied encounters with land and landscape. Indeed, as this chapter will reveal, the Outward Bound Trust (OBT)— the organisation that forms the focus—encourages a slower-paced type of outdoor education than is often experienced in the Western world.1 Both within and beyond an educational context, studies of young peoples’ encounters with nature and natural objects have given rise to fresh and novel ways to view these embodied interactions. In particular, newmaterialist thought—which exposes the immersion of (material) bodies in social relations of power (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012), has disrupted traditional conceptualisations of the child/nature dichotomy. It has put children and young people amongst the active non-human world, acknowledging that both humans and material/matter/things have agency that enact forces actively shaping places and experiences. The criticality of this is noted by Riley (2019: 1), who calls for more ‘creative forms of socioecological responsibility to attend to human supremacism and exceptionalism that marginalises, exploits, dominates and objectifies Other(s)’ in outdoor experiential education. There is a need to challenge euro-centric, masculine cultures historically embedded in Western conceptions of outdoor experiential learning (ibid.), which marginalise earth or animal others as well as minority (human) groups (Braidotti, 2010).

1

Typically, outdoor learning centres offer high-paced and high-intensity ‘fun’ activities. In contrast, the OBT more commonly create ‘type II’ or retrospective ‘fun’ through longer, slower and challenging tasks.

36

J. H. Dunne

For Barad (2007), the agency of humans/non-humans/material and matter is relational. Agency is not an exclusive human quality, or even a quality of individual actants, but something that is brought about through their intra-action. (Re)locating agency from the individual subject to the spaces in between demonstrates how it is the complex intra-actions between young people and their material worlds which produces particular places (Rautio, 2013). From an outdoor education perspective, this approach allows us to move beyond the concept of landscapes as statically and passively ‘affording’ particular ways of being and doing (Gibson, 1979), to actively shaping and reshaping our experiences of and in them. Further, it recasts outdoor environments as only ever being ‘unfamiliar’, given that they are constantly being (re)created through intra-action with human and non-human others. This is helpful in understanding how seemingly similar environments can be experienced and understood in a myriad of ways, and across different time-spaces. However, as I demonstrate in the discussion below, our experiences are always structured by particular social relations and dominant narratives. Whilst materialist theories suggest natural environments are co-created, often young people reproduce social norms or expectations and therefore their past experiences and actions may limit future ‘productions’ of natural environments (Bates, 2020).

2.1

Embodied Dwelling and Mobile Taskscapes

Ingold’s (2000) linked concepts of dwelling and taskscape help to give flesh to this new-materialist approach, by emphasising how we come to know our world(s) through living, moving in, and sensing it/them. The notion of dwelling focuses on relational involvement, such that environments come into being and are always becoming as humans embed themselves within and move through them. Like Barad, Ingold’s inceptions stress that there is no beginning and end, but rather an ‘ongoingness’ in the production of life (and ourselves, and the landscape we move through). The notion of dwelling also seeks to close the gap between human and non-human worlds by crosscutting the boundary to show humans as not the sole dwellers (Ingold, 2005).

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor …

37

As Änggård (2016) asserts, embodiment is a central concept in understanding the relationship between the human and non-human. Bodies—as part of these material intra-actions with the environment— should be central to research endeavours. From a phenomenological standpoint, experiences are lived through the body (Zimmermann & Saura, 2017) and outdoor activities incorporate kinaesthetic experiences which require an expansion of knowledge which comes to us ‘through the body’ (Atherton, 2007: 48). Appropriately, for Ingold, taskscapes are the fields of embodied experience (Lorimer, 2003) which encompass an array of interrelated activities, or ‘tasks’—the constitutive acts of dwelling (Ingold, 2000). In tandem with a focus on bodies/embodiment, Merriman et al. (2008: 192) call for an interrogation of ‘how land/landscape is practiced, emergent through mobile and material practices, and how mobilities animate landscapes and places’. Studies are beginning to attend to young people’s embodied intra-actions with their material/natural environments, and this chapter is inspired by Howe and Morris’ (2009) enquiry of the interrelationship between bodies (in their research, doing performance running) and natural spaces. We can see similarities between outdoor education and running, whereby both can be conceived of as ‘spatially extensive practice[s] involving multiple sites, spaces, and places and […] a particularly close relationship with “natural” spaces’ (Howe & Morris, 2009: 309). As Merriman and Cresswell (2011: 5) suggest, ‘mobile embodied practices are central to how we experience the world […] create[ing] spaces and stories – spatial stories’. This chapter therefore explores how young people’s experiences of, and embodied movements through, land and landscape in the OBT acts to ‘produce’ particular natures. Simonsen (2012) highlights how both spaces and bodies take shape through interweaving movement, and Lorimer (2003: 283) points to taskscapes as having ‘mobile biographies’ which are created through active encounters and told through different episodes or moments. For children and young people, embodied movements are central to their being/becoming, and an understanding of themselves and their environment (Sanderud et al., 2019). Viewing young people’s intra-actions with nature and the outdoors as producing particular taskscapes highlights the

38

J. H. Dunne

highly temporal and active aspects of landscape production (Dunkley, 2009). Dwelling becomes the means of transforming bodies and nature places as we move through them, with human and non-human matter in constant flow. For Lorimer (2003: 283), engaging with land and landscape results in time-spaces which form through ‘the already interwoven stories of people, material objects and field techniques’ as well as the continued happenings of these stories. Given this, we can understand landscapes as being simultaneously joyful and healing, risky and terrifying, and everything in between (Foley, 2015). Further, Dunkley and Smith (2019a) discuss landscape interactions in a pedagogic context as a means of ‘geocoaching’. This captures ‘the development of embodied practices and habits in landscapes as guided by others (and indeed, the self ), but also the surfacing of personal and societal memories in representational practices’ (Dunkley & Smith, 2019a: 293). Thus, the production of taskscapes is not only highly temporal, this temporality is also socially formed (Lorimer, 2003). It is necessary to consider the affective forces, or mobile energy of outdoor spaces (Foley, 2015); the multiple moments stored in body-place memories (Anderson, 2009; Jones, 2011); and habits acting on the body subconsciously (Kraftl, 2016) which shape practices of dwelling and the production of taskscapes.

3

Exploring Outdoor Education Taskscapes

This chapter forms parts of a wider study exploring how the social and physical environments of outdoor learning programmes are constructed and experienced. My fieldwork took place in North Wales, in variety of outdoor learning settings (both indoors and outdoors) used by the OBT in their residential courses for young people. The OBT are a stalwart of British outdoor experiential learning, founded by Kurt Hahn and Lawrence Holt in 1941 (OBT, 2019), they now deliver courses from their six residential centres across the UK. In 2015–2016 they worked with over 25,000 young people aged 11–25 (OBT, 2017), the majority of which were engaged and attended through their schools. The first OBT

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor …

39

school was established with the explicit aim of character training amid fears of moral decline (Freeman, 2011). Hahn’s ‘four pillars’: physical fitness, self-discipline (developed through physical expeditions), craftsmanship and service were seen as an antidote to the ‘declines of modern youth’ (McKenzie, 2003). The practices of the OBT have evolved significantly since 1945, with the language of ‘character training’ giving way to notions of personal development and self-discovery. Nonetheless, working in the context of an organisation rooted in the masculine ideals of character education provides fruitful ground to challenge the ‘human supremacism’ historically embedded in this pedagogical approach (Riley, 2019). The fieldwork was carried out between autumn 2016 and spring 2017, adopting an ethnographic approach to follow four school groups through their five-day residential OBT courses. Courses took place in Snowdonia National Park at the OBT Aberdovey and Ogwen centres (mid- and North Wales, respectively). The selection of schools aimed to provide an opportunity for comparison between schools with different demographics. They were selected based on their location in a local authority district categorised as either largely rural or urban with major conurbation according to the DEFRA 2011 rural–urban classification (Defra, 2017), with two schools chosen from each classification. The location of case study schools (two in London and one each in Wiltshire and Peterborough) provided diverse opportunities for access to urban and rural spaces, which allowed for a range of young people’s experiences of the outdoors in their everyday lives. The immediate physical setting also overlapped with socio-economic geographies of class, race and urbanism across the UK (for example Index of Multiple Deprivation and eligibility for free school meals) and therefore acted as a proxy for contrasting demographics. Present-day OBT courses cover a variety of ‘themes’, but all courses follow a similar format. The week usually begins with the infamous ‘jog and dip’,2 and includes an overnight expedition in addition to other

2

The jog and dip was an element of the original OBT courses, whereby participants ran down to the jetty and jumped into the estuary. It has been adapted for modern courses, but still retains its significance as the first challenge young people face.

40

J. H. Dunne

outdoor activities such as canoeing and gorge walking. The OBT prioritise transferable learning outcomes in their courses, so time is spent setting up for, and reviewing activities. This includes discussions of teamwork and communication, comfort zones and individual goals in the former, and reflecting on experiences, learning and (individual and group) success in the latter. I took part in the entirety of the courses, and the school groups comprised young people in school years seven to nine (aged 11–14) participating in an Adventure and Challenge course. The chosen age bracket reflects the fact that in mainstream education in England and Wales most start secondary school aged 11. This period of the life course is therefore associated with building and maintaining new relationships, negotiating new systems and rules and coinciding with physiological changes associated with puberty. Thus, this study looked to explore young people’s experiences of outdoor learning environments in a common context. Alongside field notes and photographs, the research incorporated: semi-structured interviews with OBT staff (25); participant-directed photography during the ethnography; paired follow-up interviews (23) with the young people (total 44); and a moodboard (Pimlott-Wilson, 2012) task using magazine cuttings (see Fig. 1) within the follow-up interviews (40). These methods were guided—participants were asked to take pictures of situations that evoked strong emotions, and to create moodboards addressing the question ‘how did your experiences during your OBT week make you feel?’. They sought to uncover young people’s perspectives (Pimlott-Wilson, 2012) and produce new knowledges through the creation and discussion of these ‘visual texts’ (Pink, 2007). Data was analysed thematically, with the moodboards, field diary and interview transcripts collated in NVivo11. All participants and identifying features have been anonymised. In the forthcoming sections, following the example of Howe and Morris (2009), I identify three forms of nature (gymnasium/journey/escapism) produced through OBT practices. I highlight how elements of both ‘land’ and ‘landscape’ (Macnaghten & Urry, 2001), as modes of dwelling associated with functional and visual forms of nature respectively, are relevant to understanding the distinctive taskscape of outdoor education. I also draw attention to the shaping

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor …

41

Fig. 1 Anthony’s moodboard, exploring his experience of the expedition

of young people by landscapes, the ongoingness of taskscape formation and the role of instructors in these processes.

4

Nature as ‘Gymnasium’

Outdoor education involves engaging in outdoor activities designed to stretch participants’ physical skills and, unsurprisingly, the young people in the study regularly referred to the physical nature of OBT activities. Alana and Lily (female, year 8/aged 12) discussed the canoeing and the expedition in terms of physiological challenge and haptic environmental interaction: Lily:

It was too cold [the canoeing], and no one like, I think because it was getting towards the end of the week everyone was tired. And we weren’t expecting it to be the way it was I suppose. Interviewer: What were you expecting?

42

J. H. Dunne

Lily: Alana: Lily:

I was expecting it to be like— Not that far. Yeah, I wasn’t expecting it to be as far, but I wasn’t expecting it to be short. I dunno, I was expecting it to be fun so we could joke about, but when we got out on the water —it was just too windy and too hard. And we had everyone saying ‘oh yeah we’re here for support’ but then everyone just stopped, and was just like, ‘we’re not moving we can’t do it’. Interviewer: And what was the worst bit about the expedition? Alana: Climbing up that hill! Lily: Yeah! Climbing up the hill, and probably—I think it was, the only reason it was hard was because we had the big rucksacks on, and it felt like you were carrying the weight of the world. Here, the cold, long distances, steep hills and heavy rucksacks were explicit in young people’s reflections. Similarly, emotions and sensibilities were explored in relation to overcoming the physical elements of courses in young people’s moodboards. As Anthony (male, year 9/aged 13) depicted his expedition (Fig. 1) he explained: This is like the start – so I knew what to do here. And then that was a challenge, and a lot of falling and helping people. And then, there’s an arrow here, and it’s lots of challenges, so this is showing we had to go up this thing, and then this is a part of the expedition where we had to go up hill – and this guy is saying ‘finally downhill’, and this guy is saying ‘nope’, we have to go back up! ‘Unsure’, because I wasn’t sure how to feel at the start, and then overcoming the challenges finally. And then lots of rest and food, and two sheep. Oh and up here is trees and a person trying to crawl through the trees.

As Anthony’s moodboard shows (Fig. 1, top left, ‘knowing what to do’ scrambling on the rocks), young people also enjoyed having fun through physical engagements with OBT environments (see also: Hickman Dunne, 2019). High-intensity, adrenaline-fuelled activities were popular with young people, and instructors used features of the natural environment as a means of injecting entertainment into their courses. For example, during one trip we played ‘hide and seek/predator’ in the woodland behind the centre, as an evening activity, in the dark. This

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor …

43

involved hanging all our headtorches on a ‘safe’ tree, which was consequently lit up, and the young people trying to get to the tree without being seen or caught by their instructor. As well as this hide and seek episode highlighting the way young people manipulate nature spaces and shape them through the routes they tread, a new-materialist perspective allows a multiplicity of interpretations to unfold. Firstly, we can consider how young people’s activities come about as the result of the shape of the trees—the activity described above enabled young people to explore which trees allowed them to hide and stay hidden, and which trees meant they were seen and the game was over. The woodland landscape plays an active role in producing a ‘gymnasium’ taskscape and young people’s encounters within it. Whether through challenge or play, nature is used as a tangible resource, exposing its role as what Howe and Morris (2009) have termed ‘nature as gymnasium’. For Howe and Morris, this constitutes the physiological affordances (Gibson, 1979) of nature in relation to performance running. I broaden this understanding to encompass the context of outdoor education, as well as pointing to the agency of land and non-human matter in this process. Secondly, having access to a range of outdoor environments in terms of the variety of settings (mountains, forest, water), and level of challenge, was also a means through which instructors shape how landscapes are encountered or used to suit individual bodies. This game of hide and seek points the role of instructors in guiding young people’s interactions with these landscapes through processes of ‘geocoaching’ (Dunkley & Smith, 2019a), which acts to guide the development of particular embodied practices and memories of natural places. In addition, this section demonstrates that young people understood themselves to be ‘dwelling’ in nature in a functional sense: generating an understanding of their experiences and their environments through their interactions with them and moving beyond the intended actions of the course. We can see how the ‘gymnasium’ of OBT centres ‘affords a highly distinctive […] environment’ (Howe & Morris, 2009: 320) for the physical practices of outdoor education. The examples above highlight the role of scale and place in landscape encounters and the production of nature taskscapes. Not all environments lend themselves to creating these taskscapes and some are more

44

J. H. Dunne

easily constructed that others—small patches of woodland are generally more accessible (both physically and in terms of the skillset/equipment required to access them) for young people across the UK than canoeable stretches of river. Therefore, the ‘gymnasium’ taskscape emerges in response to the unique features of available outdoor environments. Whilst suggesting that outdoor education is a context within which land and landscape is in a constant process of becoming ‘familiar’, it serves as an important reminder of the intertwining of nature and society/culture (Dunkley & Smith, 2019b; Lorimer, 2003). Instructors, and indeed some young people, who have previous experience of ‘less accessible’ landscapes are more likely to be able to draw on embodied practices and personal memories in producing this physical natural environment. Therefore, the scale of the landscape encounter plays a key role in shaping the production of this particular taskscape, specifically through ideas of being familiar or unfamiliar to young people. I also want draw attention here to the co-production of nature and bodies in understandings of dwelling and taskscape. Although there are discordant time scales in the change of bodies and natures through these processes, temporalities go beyond the immediacies of human memory (Massey, 2006). As Ingold (2000: 203) contends, ‘people shape the landscape even as they dwell. And human activities, as well as the action of rivers and the sea, contribute significantly to the process of erosion’. The effect of dwelling becomes evident in the outdoor education taskscape, including the set-up of campfire circles (Fig. 2), the networks of footpaths used by OBT participants, and the permanent climbing bolts on rock faces. Perhaps the clearest representation of ‘the taskscape made visible’ (Ingold, 2000: 204) are the maps on the walls of the OBT staff rooms, that have all the potential climbing, gorging and camping venues marked on them (Fig. 3). These maps are emblematic of the role of instructors in altering natural environments to make them accessible and therefore shaping how young people interact with them. There was also evidence of more ‘transient’ dwelling associated with outdoor education: flattened patches of grass where tents have been pitched for an overnight expedition on Place Fell; footprints on the intertidal sandflats at Aberdovey; and where footpaths are ‘carved’ as young people walk. We can also see the momentary effects of nature

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor …

45

Fig. 2 A permanent seating area surrounding a campfire, Ullswater Centre

as ‘gymnasium’ on young people’s bodies, through blistered feet, twisted ankles and sore shoulders from carrying heavy rucksacks. Through these ephemeral consequences of dwelling and tasks, both bodies and natures are produced not only over longer time scales but also ‘in the moment’, helping to destabilise hitherto fixed notions of child/nature through a process of emergent ‘ongoingness’ (Horton & Kraftl, 2006b). This broadens the concept of dwelling to move beyond an implied ‘rootedness’ (Howe & Morris, 2009) to a way of being which is productive of ‘multiple spatialities and temporalities, longstanding and momentary, rural and urban, fixed and mobile, coherent and fragmentary’ (Wylie, 2003: 145). As Wylie contends, dwelling ‘must enable the register of the transient and fleeting as well as the enduring’ (2003: 145).

46

J. H. Dunne

Fig. 3 Map in the staff room at Eskdale, with camping, gorging and climbing venues marked with stickers

5

Nature as ‘Journey’

The concept of ‘going on a journey’ was played out through the linking of, and travelling through, diverse landscapes. For OBT instructors, this was seen as pivotal to creating a sense of progression throughout the week via a physical representation of ‘distance travelled’ (Crabbe et al., 2006). Here, the instructors’ roles in choreographing experiences of land and landscape were essential, to manage the ebbs and flows of OBT courses and shape a journey into something meaningful and impactful for young people. Participants were often tasked with canoeing from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’, or completing a hike, and then swapping with another group at the water’s edge to get into canoes. The feeling of moving through landscapes, and the meaning this had for young people, is captured by Haani (female, year 8/aged 11):

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor …

47

[W]e travelled – we went like to different places, we went to the mountains and to the beach. And we used a lot of creativity. And we achieved a lot of things. Like when we climbed the mountain, […] it was hard doing it but it was fun when we got up there.

As Haani reflects, young people were frequently physically challenged through the tasks, whether that be rock climbing whilst combating a fear of heights, or not believing they were fit enough to make it through a mountainous walk. In this regard, the textures and forms of the land created a journey—a particular task—to be completed. For Ella (female, year 9/aged 13), the biggest challenge in her OBT journey was coming down a scree slope (a hill slope of broken loose rock) during her expedition: Definitely Aberdovey was most scary for me. ‘Cos we had to do this walking down all the slates [scree] […] and it was really hard, ‘cos all the rest of the group was like running down it. I was holding on, and at one point I just sat down. I was so scared I started crying. […] All my friends were like ‘oh come on you can do it!’ and I just sat there crying!

Just as nature as gymnasium is contingent on the specific features and scale of natural environments, Ella demonstrates how the physicality of a journey is often specific to the individual, whilst equally embedded in social relations. Ella’s interactions with the scree slope were impacted by her groups’ experience of this feature, both negatively through them finding is relatively easier to negotiate and potentially positively through their verbal support. Each journey is produced differently as human/nonhuman intra-actions occur: which rocks move beneath feet to cause young people to lose balance, how much the mud sucks at boots, and where and when the wind chooses to bite at faces. These physical journeys often culminated in a ‘reward’: impressive views upon reaching a summit, satisfaction in arriving at an overnight camping destination, or broad views of the landscape which enabled participants to tangibly see how far they had come. As Ella continued, “when I did it I looked at it and thought ‘oh my god I’ve just come down that’ and felt so proud of myself ”. This effect can also come through the

48

J. H. Dunne

relational aspect of journeying taskscapes, as seen through Ella’s interactions with her school teacher, who had spoken to Ella’s mum and relayed how proud she was of her daughter. For Ella, ‘that just made me cheer up and think “I can do this”’. These moments of reward also incorporated opportunities for reflection, presenting a more passive mode of dwelling associated with the visual form of ‘landscape’ (Cosgrove, 1985). In this regard, mountains become ‘metaphors’ for the journeys young people physically and emotionally navigate, and ‘nature as journey’ takes on dual meaning. These interactions and reflections also play a role in young people’s understandings of themselves in particular natural environments. Ella now knows she ‘can do this’, which becomes part of her place-body memory, shaping future landscape encounters. In this way, Ella’s story also highlights the ‘ongoingness’ of taskscapes: young people’s experiences of land are storied and open-ended, with emotional responses and memory (in Ella’s case, fear followed by elation)—positive, negative and relational—shaping how young people make sense of past, present and future embodied encounters (Dunkley & Smith, 2019a, 2019b). As Ella demonstrates, for young people in this study the outdoor education taskscape became not only one where work was carried out, but where the emotional labour of that work was realised and their successes were perceived. Nature as formed in this way aligns with Gatrell’s (2013) notion of ‘therapeutic mobilities’, linking mobility to physical and psychological wellbeing. We can observe this in Anthony’s moodboard (Fig. 1) where he portrayed the physical challenges encountered in his expedition and a sense of relief and achievement in overcoming these. Several other young people depicted a metaphorical sense of journey through their moodboards. For example, Jordan (male, year 7/aged 11) who had a fear of heights, which became particularly evident when trying to scramble up a rocky section to reach a summit, talked through his moodboard in relation to this incident, and completing his OBT course in general (Fig. 4): We’ve got this lady, and she’s looking back at all of it – whilst I was looking back at all of this, I think of this lady as someone whose been like ‘woah I actually did this’ […] This was making me hallucinate [caterpillar and picture in nightclub]! Making me hallucinate at the top of the mountain and

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor …

49

Fig. 4 Jordan’s moodboard

making me dizzy. This [man with duck inflatable] was like ‘yay I finally did it’. But it’s also saying ‘I want to do this again’, like at the start I’m ready to do this’. And this one shows that it’s gone through a lot at that time, and it’s got to its goal. […] And I’m gonna do this [Mohamed Ali picture] because he’s done it like ‘Yeah!’.

Jordan and Ella illustrate some of the emotional and psychological elements of engaging with and coming to understand natural landscapes in outdoor education settings. There are intense feelings related to the physical aspects of the journey—as Jordan’s suggestion of ‘hallucination’ indicates—but they also described less tangible feelings of pride and achievement through the experience of ‘nature as journey’. As such, elements of both land , in its material sense, and landscape, as an abstract and evocative discourse play a role in the modes of dwelling necessary to understand this production of nature. In addition, as Howe and Morris (2009) observe, multiple ‘functions’ of nature can be incorporated into an outdoor education site. We see the overlapping functions of a nature as ‘journey’ and as ‘gymnasium’ playing out as the outdoor education taskscape is ‘differently co-produced at different times’ so that natural space may be initially experienced as a gymnasium, but can subsequently emerge as a journey taskscape (Howe & Morris, 2009: 325). This further recognises how ‘natural spaces are by no means fixed and

50

J. H. Dunne

pre-given but are highly relational’ (ibid.). In observing that ‘unfamiliar’ landscapes are always in a process of production, and that child/nature relations have multiple spatialities and temporalities, we can see the role of place-body memories (Anderson, 2009) in recalling, re-storying and therefore reproducing natural environments. Initial emotional responses, such as fear, give way to positive feelings of pride or relief, just as ‘inthe-moment’ landscape constructions give way to retrospective understanding. The interplay between time, the affective forces of outdoor spaces and embodied emotional responses to these forces allows for the co-production of different outdoor education taskscapes by young people, as opposed to a linear and limited process of becoming ‘familiar’.

6

Nature as ‘Escapism’

Young people in the study felt a sense of freedom during their OBT experience in relation to other educational environments. They often expressed a particularly aesthetic view of nature, as Fahmida (female, year 8/aged 12) suggested: It was so nice and sunny, it was just – the way it was, it was more free? ‘Cos [City Name] has a lot of buildings and stuff like that, but in Wales it’s nature. […] I just loved it. It was so nice, the beach and stuff, just looking – it’s much different. And the beach, the beach was my favourite. And the sunrise and stuff.

Even young people who came from rural locations viewed OBT environments as distinctly different from home. Many young people expressed feelings of peacefulness and an appreciation for the visual qualities of the landscape. It is here that the third form of nature emerges, strongly associated with ‘landscape’ (Macnaghten & Urry, 2001) and providing a reprieve for young people through aesthetics and solitude. Given the focus on tasks and group activities in OBT courses, ‘nature as escapism’ was perhaps the least dominant form explicitly elucidated by young people. As Macnaghten and Urry (2001) observe, dwelling in landscape is often located in distinct ‘leisure spaces’ which are geographically and

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor …

51

ontologically ‘other’ to work and everyday life. Fahmida hints at this idea of a specialised leisure space, foregrounding the visual tropes of landscape through her perception of the way the beach looks and observation of the lack of ‘buildings and stuff like that’ . However, and despite the power of the visual, some young people identified this form of landscape through other sensibilities. Amelia (female, year 9/aged 13) referred to the therapeutic effect of the OBT experience through its particular ‘atmosphere’ (Kraftl & Adey, 2008). For Amelia: I think it was quite like, gets you away from problems. So, I have quite a lot of problems at home, so it got me away from that and helped me a lot to have a break from stuff like that.

Similarly, Ella (female, year 9/aged 13) particularly enjoyed: …having time to myself. Because the morning we were in the cabin, I just went outside and sat down and just looked at all the view. It just made my mind blank. It’s just so nice to have the opportunity to come out here and do all this stuff, ‘cos if I was at home we probably wouldn’t have gone and done that.

Fahmida, Amelia and Ella suggest that their interactions with/in these natural environments enabled them to feel distanced from other life stressors or concerns, evoking emotions associated with peacefulness, solitude and opportunity. As such, I suggest the final form of nature produced by young people is nature as a means of ‘escapism’. We can read Amelia and Ella’s words as encompassing not only the natural spaces of the OBT but also the material spaces of OBT courses (particularly Ella’s encounter with the cabin), and the social activities that they participated in. Amelia’s assertion that OBT was an opportunity to ‘have a break’ and Ella’s appreciation of having time to herself is indicative of the ways in which instructors actively sought to create moments of ‘slowness’. This slowness was positioned by instructors in relation to young people’s busy everyday lives as well as stereotypical outdoor centres: When you go to those activity centres, they’re fast-paced, they’re fun – primarily, and it’s much more bang for your buck you’re getting. Whereas

52

J. H. Dunne

an Outward Bound course can be quite slow, and it allows time for people to think and reflect. (Tim, male OBT instructor , 25–35)

Creating moments for reflection corresponds with Varley and Semple’s (2015: 73) idea of ‘slow adventure’, focused on the importance of the ‘temporal, natural, corporeal and philosophical dimensions of being, journeying and living outdoors’. Varley and Semple also seek to recentre the emotional content of human experience in interactions with the ‘more-than-human-world’ (Gelter, 2000), drawing on the Nordic concept of Friluftsliv, a cultural practice and lived philosophy of ‘outdoor experiencing’. OBT instructors purposefully designed courses with a sense of slow adventure, as well as choreographing moments for young people to interact with natural environments in reflective and emotional ways. These moments are again shaped by the natural environment: flat areas that invite young people to sit, or large boulders that provide shelter and allow this ‘slowness’ to unfold. This taskscape is closely interweaved with nature as journey, particularly in the way that instructors incorporated slower moments into lengthier physical activities to allow young people to realise their achievements. It is important to emphasise that a ‘slow’ approach, whilst often related to ‘detached’ and visual interactions with landscape, also demands an active engagement and ‘presentness’. The reflective and ‘slow’ production of nature is still enacted through young people’s embodied, visceral intra-actions with the environment. Despite the seemingly individualised nature of the OBT reflective process, it is important to acknowledge that through producing nature as escapism, natural landscapes become a discursive social construction too. The affect evoked on young people’s bodies by particular landscapes produced somewhat codified emotional responses (Foley, 2015) and normalised narratives of ‘outdoor bodies’—as relaxed, emotionally calm and peaceful (Crang & Tolia-Kelly, 2010). Ideas and narratives of landscape therefore act to reproduce particular symbolic significations (Cosgrove & Daniels, 1989) around what kind of body should dwell in these spaces. Understandably, young people had varied OBT experiences—they expressed feelings of fear and anxiety as well as peace and solitude. Whilst the dominant picturesque mode of viewing landscape was reinforced through the experiences of Amelia and Ella, this was

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor …

53

also challenged by other young people (Hickman Dunne, 2019). The ways in which young people reflected on their slower engagements with landscape is suggestive of how natural environments are always being (re)produced through the interplay of time, embodied emotion and affect. It is quite possible that in-the-moment feelings of apprehension or nervousness can be re-storied as more positive landscape encounters. This emphasises the relationality of ‘dwelling’ in place, and the ongoing process of become ‘familiar’ with natural environments.

7

Expanding Outdoor Education Taskscapes

Environments of outdoor education are not exclusive: it is not only OBT participants and staff who produce particular natures, and are produced through them. As Howe and Morris assert, ‘it is difficult to disentangle the effects of [outdoor education] on the material changes to natures of the taskscape from the effects of the other activities that share some of its spaces’ (2009: 326). Outdoor instructor communities overlap and interweave with those of ‘lifestyle sports’ (Barnes, 2003) and outdoor educators. Emphasising this overlap attends to Massey’s (2006: 41) concern over the spatial–temporal confinement of Ingold’s landscape perspective, where dwelling is associated ‘with a particular landscape, or place, itself ’. The ‘dwelling body’ is perceived of as too ‘subject centred’ (Wylie, 2006) and self-absorbed (Massey, 2006), whereby the active dwelling body becomes an intentional subject with the capacity to ‘synthesise, polarize and organise the perceptual field’ (Wylie, 2006: 521). Although I have foregrounded the subjectivities of young people here, I have also focused on the co-production of multiple natures (by virtue of mobile outdoor education practices), through multiple processes and groups of people. This opens up the spatial–temporal confinements of land, landscape and dwelling, by presenting outdoor education taskscapes as produced over variegated time scales (both ‘in the moment’, retrospectively and seemingly permanently), and through unsettling notions of fixed space via understandings of land and landscape as constantly emergent and ongoing. Thus, nature is produced

54

J. H. Dunne

as gymnasium and/or escapism by young people at particular times in their outdoor education experiences, influenced by the material environment, their embodied knowledge, social relations and elements of ‘geocoaching’. Their environmental understandings are changed over time, and contribute to a flexible production of nature as journey.

8

Conclusions

This chapter has contributed to understandings of relational geography by considering natural landscapes not as fixed entities that we come to know, but spaces that are always ‘becoming’. I have highlighted how the environments of outdoor education are co-produced through interactions between young people and the non-human, as well as the role of geocoaching, social relations and embodied emotions in shaping these productions. By demonstrating how nature can be (re)produced as gymnasium/journey/escapism both simultaneously and across time, I suggest that it may be misleading to cast natural environments as either unfamiliar or familiar. Natural environments are produced and re-storied through interactions between time, emotion and affect, which allows understandings of them to be messy and changeable. However, the social nature of experiencing landscapes means that these experiences are strongly shaped by body-place memories and habits, and degrees of ‘familiarity’ with certain environments play a part in the natures that young people produce. This points to the central role of instructors in shaping positive memories and embodied experiences, which lay the foundations for young people’s future interactions with natural environments. Highlighting the intersections between the taskscapes of outdoor instructors, lifestyle sports and outdoor education is a reminder that outdoor instructors often have a very different relationship with these natural environments compared to young people, and they must be mindful of this disparity when shaping young people’s experiences. Finally, it is necessary to re-visit Riley’s (2019) call to ‘de-masculinise’ outdoor education. The OBT has its foundations in the masculinist

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor …

55

ideals of wartime Britain, with courses designed to promote the qualities of mental toughness and physical prowess through achieving ‘success’ in the mountains and on the water. Despite OBT shifting focus and language towards participation and personal development in recent years, it is difficult to shed the dominant ideals around disciplining the body, performance and competition. In reflecting on engagements with nature as producing physical effort, journeying and reward, and feelings of escapism, this chapter suggests that the apple does not fall far from the tree: the ‘types’ of nature produced through young people’s interactions do not largely challenge these dominant perceptions, and future, alternative ‘productions’ of nature feel limited. Incorporating understandings of countercultural movements such as ‘slow adventure’ goes some way to addressing this problem, and there is no doubt that outdoor education practices have developed to reflect the wider diversity of young people who now access it. However, further work that pushes empirical understanding of human/non-human intra-action in outdoor education settings is needed to understand the boundaries of this more inclusive discourse.

References Anderson, B. (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2), 77–81. Änggård, E. (2016). How matter comes to matter in children’s nature play: Posthumanist approaches and children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 14 (1), 77–90. Atherton, J. (2007). Philosophy outdoors: First person physical. In N. McNamee (Ed.), Philosophy, risk and adventure sports (pp. 43–55). Routledge. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum Physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Barnes, P. E. (2003). Outdoor leaders and cultural phenomena. In B. Humberstone, H. Brown, & K Richards (Eds.), Whose Journeys? The outdoors and adventure as social and cultural phenomena (pp. 241–252). Institute of Outdoor Learning.

56

J. H. Dunne

Bates, C. (2020). Rewilding education? Exploring an imagined and experienced outdoor learning space. Children’s Geographies, 18(3), 364–374. Braidotti, R. (2010). Nomadism: Against methodological nationalism. Policy Futures in Education, 8, 408–418. Conradson, D. (2005). Landscape, care and the relational self: Therapeutic encounters in rural England. Health and Place, 11(4), 337–348. Cosgrove, D. (1985). Prospect, Perspective, and the evolution of the landscape idea. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 10 (1), 45–62. Cosgrove, D., & Daniels, S. (Eds.). (1989). Iconography of landscape: Essays on the symbolic design and use of past environments. Cambridge University Press. Crabbe, T., Bailey, G., Blackshaw, T., Brown, A., Choak, C., Gidley, B., Mellor, G., O’Connor, K., Robertson, A., Slater, I., & Woodhouse, D. (2006). ‘Going the distance’: Impact, journeys and distance travelled: Third Interim National Positive Futures Case Study Research Report. Home Office. Crang, M., & Tolia-Kelly, D. (2010). Nation, race and affect: Senses and sensibilities at national heritage sites. Environment and Planning A, 42(10), 2315–2331. Defra. (2017). The 2011 rural-urban classification for local authority districts in England. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/2011-rural-urban-classi fication-of-local-authority-and-other-higher-level-geographies-for-statisticalpurposes. Access date: 18 May 2020. Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New materialism: Interviews and cartographies. University of Michigan. Dunkley, C. M. (2009). A therapeutic taskscape: Theorizing place-making, discipline and care at a camp for troubled youth. Health and Place, 15, 88–96. Dunkley, R. A., & Smith, T. A. (2019a). Geocoaching: Memories and habits of learning in practices of ecopedagogy. The Geographical Journal, 185, 292– 302. Dunkley, R. A., & Smith, T. A. (2019b). By-standing memories of curious observations: Children’s storied landscapes of ecological encounter. Cultural Geographies, 26 (1), 89–107. Foley, R. (2015). Swimming in Ireland: Immersions in therapeutic blue space. Health and Place, 35, 218–225. Freeman, M. (2011). From “character-building” to “personal growth”: The early history of the Outward Bound 1941–1965. The History of Education, 40 (1), 21–43. Gatrell, A. C. (2013). Therapeutic mobilities: Walking and ‘steps’ to wellbeing and health. Health and Place, 22, 98–106.

2 The (Re)creation and (Re)storying of Space in Outdoor …

57

Gelter, H. (2000). Friluftsliv: The Scandinavian philosophy of outdoor life. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 5 (1), 77–92. Gibson, J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton Mifflin. Hickman Dunne, J. (2019). Experiencing the outdoors: Embodied encounters in the Outward Bound Trust. The Geographical Journal, 185 (3), 279–291. Horton, J., & Kraftl, P. (2006a). What else? Some more ways of thinking and doing ‘Children’s Geographies.’ Children’s Geographies, 4 (1), 69–95. Horton, P., & Kraftl, P. (2006b). Not just growing up, but going on: Materials, spacings, bodies, situations. Children’s Geographies, 4 (3), 259–276. Howe, D., & Morris, C. (2009). An exploration of the co-production of performance running bodies and natures within “running taskscapes.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 33(3), 308–330. Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill . Routledge. Ingold, T. (2005). Epilogue: Towards a politics of dwelling. Conservation and Society, 3(2), 502–508. Jones, O. (2011). Geography, memory and non-representational geographies. Geography Compass, 10, 875–885. Kraftl, P. (2016). The force of habit: Channelling young bodies at alternative education spaces. Critical Studies in Education, 57 (1), 116–130. Kraftl, P., & Adey, P. (2008). Architecture/affect/inhabitation: Geographies of being-in buildings. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 98(1), 213–231. Lorimer, H. (2003). The geographical field course as active archive. Cultural Geographies, 10, 278–308. Macnaghten, P., & Urry, J. (Eds.). (2001). Bodies of nature. Sage. Massey, D. (2006). Landscape as provocation: Reflections on moving mountains. Journal of Material Culture, 11(1/2), 33–48. McKenzie, M. (2003). Beyond “The outward bound process:” Rethinking student learning. The Journey of Experiential Education, 26 (1), 8–23. Merewether, J. (2019). New materialisms and children’s outdoor environments: Murmurative diffractions. Children’s Geographies, 17 (1), 105–117. Merriman, P., & Cresswell, T. (2011). Geographies of mobilities: Practices, spaces, subjects. Ashgate Publishing. Merriman, P., Revill, G., Cresswell, T., Lorimer, H., Matless, D., Rose, G., & Wylie, J. (2008). Landscape, mobility, practice. Social and Cultural Geography, 9 (2), 191–212. OBT. (2017). Outward Bound trust social impact report 2017 . Author.

58

J. H. Dunne

OBT. (2019). Our history. https://www.outwardbound.org.uk/our-history. Accessed 18 May 2020. Pimlott-Wilson, H. (2012). Visualising children’s participation in research: Lego Duplo, rainbows and clouds and moodboards. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 15 (2), 135–148. Pink, S. (2007). Doing visual ethnography (2nd ed.). Sage. Prout, A. (2000). The body, childhood and society. Macmillan. Rautio, P. (2013). Children who carry stones in their pockets: On autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4), 394–408. Rautio, P., Hohti, R., Leinonen, R., & Tammi, T. (2017). Reconfiguring urban environmental education with ‘shitgull’ and a ‘shop.’ Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1379–1390. Riley, K. (2019). Posthumanist and postcolonial possibilities for outdoor experiential education. Journal of Experiential Education, 1–14. Sanderud, J. R., Gurholt, K. P., & Moe, V. F. (2019). ‘Winter children’: An ethnographically inspired study of children being-and-becoming well-versed in snow and ice. Sport, Education and Society, 25 (8), 960–971. Simonsen, K. (2012). In quest of a new humanism: Embodiment, experience and phenomenology as critical geography. Progress in Human Geography, 37 , 10–26. Varley, P., & Semple, T. (2015). Nordic slow adventure: Explorations in time and nature. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, 15 (1–2), 73– 90. Wylie, J. (2003). Landscape, performance and dwelling: A Glastonbury case study. In P. Cloke (Ed.), Country visions (pp. 136–157). Pearson. Wylie, J. (2006). Depth and folds: On landscape and the gazing subject. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 519–535. Zimmermann, A., & Saura, S. (2017). Body, environment and adventure: Experience and spatiality. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 11(2), 155–168.

3 Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor Education Experience in a Remote Landscape Margie Campbell-Price

1

Introduction

Increasingly, schools are encouraged to provide young people with curriculum experiences that enable them to gain the knowledge, skills and dispositions to live full and satisfying lives in a changing and uncertain world. The contribution that outdoor education can make to foster confident, connected, actively involved and future-focused young people has been well documented (Humberstone et al., 2016; Irwin et al., 2012). However, research into the lasting benefits of such experiences, especially extended outdoor education experiences is somewhat thin. The New Zealand school curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) paves the way for schools to innovatively design curricula in ways that engages and challenges young people and is future-focused. An example of curriculum innovation, on which this chapter will focus, was one M. Campbell-Price (B) University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_3

59

60

M. Campbell-Price

state (government-funded) secondary school‘s introduction of a fiveweek outdoor experience for 14–15 year old students, known as the Great Barrier Experience (GBE). Located on a remote “off the grid” island in northern New Zealand the young people were intentionally displaced from their daily lives, relationships and routines so that they could experience and learn through an unfamiliar landscape. Undertaken voluntarily, the GBE was devised by the school’s leaders in collaboration with an outdoor centre on Great Barrier Island (GBI), as an innovative and holistic curriculum experience that reflects the shared vision, values and key competencies across learning areas of the New Zealand curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007). Opportunities to enrich learning through experiences outside the classroom are encouraged, with national guidelines to foster safe, inclusive practices and effective pedagogy (Ministry of Education, 2016). This chapter explores the sustained influence of the GBE through the perspectives of former participants three years after their return home from the island. The research was timed to coincide with a transitionary phase in their lives, midway through their final year of secondary school and looking towards their post-school futures. The use of outdoor experiences for educational purposes has a wellestablished history and takes a variety of forms in many countries. Front of mind for outdoor educators is the natural environment, which presents a “context and a methodology that serves across a range of subject disciplines” (Boyes, 2012: 26). As distinct and diverse forms of outdoor education practice continue to evolve, so too has the critique about the intent, practice and outcomes of school outdoor education. Wattchow and Brown (2011: xv) argued there is a “poor collective understanding about the legitimacy of what we can reasonably claim outdoor education programs achieve.” It is not the intention in this chapter to define outdoor education in the way it could apply to the plethora of learning contexts. The academic and professional discourses that influence the evolving practice of school outdoor education in New Zealand, within which this chapter is situated, share similarities with many countries and the learnings from the programme may have application elsewhere.

3 Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor …

1.1

61

Outdoor Education in New Zealand Schools

Outdoor education was formally recognised in the New Zealand school curriculum in 1999 as one of seven key areas of learning in the Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1999). Through adventure activities and outdoor pursuits, outdoor education “provides students with opportunities to develop personal and social skills, to become active, safe, and skilled in the outdoors, and to protect and care for the environment” (Ministry of Education, 1999: 46). The subsequent release of a single New Zealand Curriculum for English-medium teaching and learning in years 1–13 1 in 2007 (Ministry of Education, 2007) that covered all eight learning areas2 provided no further elaboration about the nature or purpose of outdoor education. However, it intentionally articulated a unified vision for young people: principles upon which school leaders should make decisions about their school’s curriculum design; values to be encouraged, modelled and explored; and five key competencies or capabilities for living and lifelong learning that are key to learning in every learning area. An important new feature of the national school curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) was the inclusion of seven teacher actions and teaching approaches—referred to as effective pedagogy—that had consistently proven to have a positive impact on student learning. In any learning context, the well documented evidence has shown that students learn best when teachers create a supportive learning environment, encourage reflective thought and action, enhance the relevance of new learning, facilitate shared learning, make connections to prior learning and experience, provide sufficient opportunities to learn, and inquire into the teaching–learning relationship. Consequently, the framework of the national school curriculum and the pedagogical approaches that teachers are encouraged to use, opened the way for schools to design student-centred, holistic and integrated curriculum experiences that 1

From now on referred to as the national school curriculum (2007). The eight learning areas include English, science, the arts, health and physical education, technology, mathematics and statistics, social sciences and learning languages.

2

62

M. Campbell-Price

engage and challenge young people and are culturally relevant and future-focused (Ministry of Education, 2007). Although school outdoor education has remained somewhat dominated by the personal and social development goals associated with outdoor pursuits and adventure activities (Campbell-Price, 2012; Cosgriff, 2008), the national school curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) encourages and enables school leaders to be innovative in the design and differentiation of outdoor education experiences for their school communities. This is further supported by national guidelines for education outside the classroom (EOTC) encompassing any curriculumbased learning and teaching that extends beyond the regular classroom (Ministry of Education, 2016). The guidelines position EOTC as an enriching context to “bring the curriculum alive” and this has indeed become a catch-phrase within New Zealand schools and as Hill et al. (2020) reported, it is very much part of the fabric of school life in New Zealand. As in other countries outdoor education practice in New Zealand continues to evolve. In the past two decades the critique of outdoor education has focused around a range of concerns, including environmental sustainability and climate change; the privileging of adventure activities and outdoor pursuits over a more a superficial focus on learning for the environment; a weakening of young peoples’ connection to nature; the (ir)relevance of place in some outdoor learning experiences; safety; the extent to which the outcomes of outdoor education may have been overstated particularly around the notion of “transfer”; and how outdoor education practice aligns with changes in curriculum policy (see for example, Baker, 2005; Brookes, 2002; Humberstone et al., 2016; Irwin et al., 2012; Louv, 2008; Lugg, 2004; Wattchow & Brown, 2011). These critiques justify better retrospective evaluation about what learning is sustained after outdoor education experiences to determine its real value, along with the design features of those programmes deemed effective. In response to these critiques, new visions or re-visionings of outdoor education have been suggested, and examples of practice have been disseminated within professional and academic circles. Typically, these

3 Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor …

63

have focused on ways to embrace a greater place-sensitivity and responsiveness (Baker, 2005; Wattchow & Brown, 2011), allow young people to encounter and take action around future issues particularly in relation to environmental sustainability (Irwin et al., 2012), embrace a pedagogy of adventurous learning (Beames & Brown, 2016), and harness student curiosity through relevant and meaningful learning contexts (Beames, et al., 2012; Irwin et al., 2012). With New Zealand’s enabling national curriculum and the encouragement to embrace learning contexts outside the classroom, there are many possibilities for school leaders to refresh, innovate and change their outdoor education practices. The introduction of a long duration outdoor experience in a remote and unfamiliar landscape that extends across different learning areas is one such unique response.

1.2

The Lasting Value of Outdoor Education

Evaluation of the value of outdoor education experiences has tended to focus on the beneficial outcomes that serve to justify their existence. Several authors have advocated for a closer scrutiny of the “black box” of outdoor education as a way to determine the design elements of effective practice (Beames et al., 2018; Bialeschki et al., 2016; McKenzie, 2000). One way to apply this “closer scrutiny” is to take a retrospective evaluation of the lasting value gained by participants and the processes through which they were achieved. This kind of retrospective reflection, particularly some time after the event, is somewhat lacking in existing studies (Beames et al., 2018). While there has not been a consensus about the optimum length of time following an outdoor education experience to evaluate its ongoing benefits, this chapter focuses on an important transition phase in the participants lives to gauge the ongoing influence or perceived value of their learning in future scenarios. Place and time, along with pedagogy are important design features in outdoor learning experiences. Many outdoor education experiences, especially those involving residential or multi-night stays, take place in environments that are considered unfamiliar to the participants. Unfamiliarity is considered important in the way participants experience a

64

M. Campbell-Price

state of dissonance and a sense of the unknown (McKenzie, 2000), encounter different lifestyles and to learn new ways of doing familiar activities (Larsen, 2008). As young people mature they seek new and different experiences that can challenge them and stimulate their imagination and curiosity (Ministry of Education, 2016). It is not until young people experience unfamiliarity that they have a point of reference from which to make comparisons with and understand the familiarity of their lives at home (Campbell-Price & Duncan, 2015). The duration of outdoor education experiences varies from short “bursts” within a school day to multi-night residential experiences or journeys. Multi-week experiences, such as the GBE are much rarer and a substantial undertaking for schools. The New Zealand EOTC guidelines (Ministry of Education, 2016) argue that with careful pedagogical design there is value in experiences of short and extended duration. Longer duration opportunities are acknowledged as a powerful way to enable deep learning, develop key life skills and strengthen relationships among students and teachers, or others, over an extended period of time. A meta-analysis undertaken by Hattie et al. (1997) that examined the effect of adventure programmes on self-concept, locus of control and leadership found that longer programmes, specifically those over twenty days, had the greater effects. An extended time away from home allows distance from the constraints and routines of daily life (D’Amato & Krasny, 2011; Lai, 1999) and the opportunity to be immersed in a new and unfamiliar environment. Graney and Graney (2012) argued that residential outdoor education centres, such as the one where the GBE takes place, offer rich possibilities to extend learning to the living or domestic context. This means that the programmed and non-programmed times can be consciously developed to maximise learning possibilities. Research by Campbell-Price (2014) about the experience of school groups undertaking international school trips reinforced how important the “dots in between” the structured activities were for young people to manage their personal maintenance, interact with their peers in an informal and more spontaneous setting and make sense of their experiences. With reference to summer camps, Bialeschki et al. (2016: 227) advocated that children and young people

3 Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor …

65

are motivated by the “camaraderie of peer and staff interaction, interesting settings and physically dynamic activities. Additionally, the pace of learning is accelerated through personal insights, social interaction, mentorship and skills development that overlap and can occur within a short span of time.” However, it is how the philosophical framework such as the underpinning values and objectives, along with the pedagogical processes to promote learning, combine with the place and duration that set the platform for quality learning. We now turn to the design of the GBE before exploring its sustained influence for former participants.

2

The Great Barrier Experience

The GBE was “the first long term outdoor education course by a state school in New Zealand for Year 10 students” (school website) and was collaboratively designed between the school and an outdoor centre, with two inaugural courses held in 2012. Together the school and outdoor centre “shaped a five-week course that melds a combination of outdoor activities, community action and studies revolving around the principles of sustainability” (school website). Located inland and two hours drive to the departure point to GBI, the school is in a middle-class socioeconomic suburb of New Zealand’s fourth largest city. The school’s 1700 plus students represent a diversity of nationalities and languages and are drawn from urban and adjacent rural communities. Each year since 2012, about sixty young people (approximately twenty per cent of their year cohort) can apply, stating and justifying why they wish to participate in the GBE during Year 103 (aged 14–15 years). The school leaders make their selection decisions around such things as the potential for growth and a commitment to the broad intentions of the course. Several factors necessitate optional participation in the GBE and include the capacity of the outdoor centre, the duration of the course, cost (to parents) for their child’s participation and noting

3 Year 10 is the second year of secondary school in NZ, with the next three years having internal and external assessment towards the national qualification. Hence Year 10 is commonly perceived to be the final year of ‘freedom’ before assessment is prioritised.

66

M. Campbell-Price

that an extended outdoor education experience is not everyone’s “cup of tea.” Although the school is co-educational, each of the two Great Barrier Experience groups are single sex (either girls or boys). For the entire school year, two Year 10 GBE “home” classes are formed for core curriculum subjects. These home classes enable young people to form and maintain relationships and make explicit connections in some of their school-based curriculum learning to their experiences on the island. The GBE is located on the remote GBI, which is the farthest north east point of the Hauraki Gulf in which New Zealand’s largest city Auckland is located. Access to the island comprises a thirty minute flight in a very small plane, or, as the school groups travel, a four and a half hour boat trip from central Auckland. The island’s resident population of 940 use these public transport services to receive their groceries, deliver their own products to market, and acccess specialised healthcare, business services and secondary schooling. The island is a remote destination for “boaties,” hikers and hosts some holiday homes. Home to several rare indigenous birds and animals, the unfamiliarity of the island for young people is attributed to its remoteness, rugged landscape and lack of mains access to power, sewerage and water which require them to do everyday tasks differently. In its “Parent Manual” the school describes the GBE as a “robust educational programme that is interactive, investigative and integrates the core subjects of Maths, English, Social Studies and Science.” It also “creates personal growth through participation in the outdoor pursuits offered in the island’s pristine environment.” For five weeks, 30 young people and two teachers from the school are based in a remote bay where the outdoor centre is co-located alongside a Christian community called Orama (who are not involved in the GBE programme as such), with whom some facilities are shared, along with regular interaction amongst the students, teachers and outdoor instructors. Weekly “neighbours nights” involve a shared meal amongst all the residents in the Orama community, the outdoor centre and neighbours from nearby bays. In groups of 10, young people are assigned an outdoor instructor for the duration of the GBE—who lead them in the daily activities and expeditions. The teachers take responsibility for the evening activities

3 Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor …

67

and accompany them on some day trips. Instructors and teachers facilitate reflection and debriefing for their respective components of, and their contribution to, the programme. The experiences include a range of outdoor pursuits, overnight and three-day expeditions for both hiking and sea kayaking, undertaking pest eradication and habitat restoration projects alongside conservation organisations, interacting with local people—in the schools, local marae,4 and businesses, and assessing the infrastructure systems on an island that has no power, water or sewerage systems. Sharing a secluded bay with the Orama residents and ongoing informal interactions with the island’s residents are an intentional aspect of the GBE to introduce young people to the unfamiliar landscape and build their understanding of other ways of living. Cell phones are handed in at arrival, the young people have no wifi access, and they have one scheduled telephone call home per week. They are expected to work cooperatively to organise, order and prepare food, and independently manage their personal hygiene, laundry and the cleanliness of sleeping and communal areas.

3

The Research

The main question driving this research asked: what influence the GBE continued to have on participants three years following their return home? In other words, what learning had been sustained over time, if any? Subsequent questions explored participants’ perceptions about the critical elements of the GBE that supported their learning. Taking a retrospective approach, this research sought to look beyond the intensity of those euphoric “wow” moments as an outdoor experience concludes. Three years on from the GBE, the Year 13 students were now in the final six months of secondary schooling where their post-school futures were rapidly gaining attention. Twenty eight former participants who were then in Year 13 voluntarily participated in focus groups on the school’s campus in 2017. I had 4 A marae is a communal, sacred and ceremonial meeting place for New Zealand’s indigenous M¯aori people.

68

M. Campbell-Price

previously undertaken two familiarisation visits to GBI which enabled me to understand the remote and unfamiliar landscape of the island, interact with staff at the outdoor centre staff and observe a girls’ GBE for several days. These insights were particularly useful in being able to visualise the experiences that focus group participants spoke about. As focus groups “promote great discussion and idea generation than would be possible in individual interviews” (Taylor & Smith, 2009: 36), they emphasise collective rather than individual perspectives, enabling participants to explore their memories, recollect their experiences and then voice and consider their own ideas and views in the context of others’ views (Madriz, 2000). The following section draws on and discusses these reflective accounts. Before that, it is important to situate the study’s context within what is a rapidly changing and increasingly ubiquitous global discourse and response to climate change. As will become evident, the GBE raised many participants’ awareness of, empathy for and commitment to environmental sustainability. The New Zealand Government banned single used plastic bags in July 2019. Alongside this, teen climate activist Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future engaged thousands of New Zealand young people in 2019 to participate in school climate strikes. Therefore, in New Zealand and elsewhere there has been a normalisation of awareness about environmental sustainability as a “hot topic” along with some behavioural changes within families, communities and institutions since the study’s participants had their GBE.

4

Reflecting on the Great Barrier Experience

This section draws on participants’ recollections of their experiences on the island, their return home along with the readjustment to what had previously been “familiar.” Their recollections prompted them to acknowledge what they had learned through the experience. Although the development of outdoor skills was acknowledged as one of the key learnings, for this chapter, the learning focuses on two themes—knowledge of sustainability and ability to live with a lighter footprint, and

3 Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor …

69

self-awareness and personal development. The two themes illustrate some of the ways in which participants’ had intended to use their learning, sustained it to some extent, let it slip, or acknowledged it as latent and ready to tap into in future scenarios. Following that, the critical elements that supported and in some cases sustained their learning are discussed.

4.1

A Significant Experience with Ongoing Influence

There was some variation among the participants about the extent to which the GBE continued to influence their lives. There was unanimous agreement that the experience was “significant,” “fantastic,” “awesome,” “influential” and “so worthwhile.” It was evident that the GBE continued to generate strong positive memories and an appreciation of the opportunity provided through the school. However, its influence was no longer front of mind for the young people on a daily basis. When they were asked “if the experience continued to influence them and in what ways?” there were some notable pauses in the conversation. What became clear was that in the passage of time since the GBE the young people had accumulated further life, study, employment, leadership, community, sport and cultural experiences. This reflects a point made by Takano (2010) in her retrospective study of Japanese former youth expedition participants—that learning and personal development is not linear, and involves the interaction between external and internal factors over time. This is even more relevant during the transitions associated with adolescence, as young people develop their identities and independence. However, as participants discussed and recollected their memories a common sentiment that “it is great to be reflecting on Great Barrier again” was voiced. This reinforced the evidence that regular reflection is an effective pedagogical strategy to help people make meaning from their experiences and apply learning in new contexts (Clarke et al., 2003; Ministry of Education, 2007).

70

4.2

M. Campbell-Price

Recollections, the Return Home and Readjustment

A key step in considering the ongoing influence of the GBE was for participants to firstly recollect the transition as they returned from the island and readjusted to their lives at home. It became apparent that over the five weeks they had adapted to the once unfamiliar landscape of GBI in ways that had made it familiar and their new ways of being had become their “new normal.” Consequently, their once familiar lives at home had become, for some, unfamiliar. They recounted some unsettling memories particularly around wastefulness “on the mainland.” This began on their journey home with one participant stating that she remembered “all the lights on in Auckland when we arrived back. We saw all these lights on and were thinking ‘why does this shop have lights on? Its closed!’ They should send the power to Great Barrier!” In making a comparison to their experiences on the island where each dwelling generated its own electricity through solar or diesel generators, a peer agreed stating “Yeah, imagine how many generators this lighting would require.” Similarly, they compared peoples’ access to food on the island with their lives at home, with one noting that “all the junk food we can access seems so wasteful. We think about the people on the island and how they have to make things stretch out to feed their families.” They remembered how community-minded and resourceful the island’s residents were— with shared gardens, and an informal bartering system for food, goods and services. They also commented on what they now realised was a “throwaway society” at home, especially with the ease of curbside waste management and recycling services. Through necessity, on the island the young people had substantially reduced their use of single use plastic, and learned to compost and understand the complexities of managing waste where families and businesses have to undertake that responsibility themselves. Consequently, they noticed behaviours that did not align with their newly acquired knowledge and routines. As one participant stated “before I went to Great Barrier I didn’t really care if I threw the apple core in the rubbish. Now I always put it in the compost. And yeah, I do get bothered if people don’t use recyclable containers or wash out

3 Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor …

71

plastic bags, say if they use glad [clingfilm] wrap. That really bothers me. Even now I tell them not to use plastic and make my Dad use reusable shopping bags.”

4.3

Knowledge of sustainability, and Living with a Lighter Footprint

The design of the GBE explicitly integrated several core subjects with an extended experience living in an island community that has limited resources and services as a way to develop young peoples’ understanding of social, economic and environmental sustainability. Participants acknowledged how their experience had deepened their knowledge of and empathy for people who live in remote communities, with limited access to the resources they take for granted. As one participant said “our main word in Year 10 was sustainability. I probably do look at society and issues differently now. …Yeah, it has had a bit of an influence on me and how I want to live in the future.” Another added that “I suppose I have a moral consciousness about why we, as a society should be more sustainable.” The consolidation of their learning from the GBE when they returned to school helped connect their experiences and some found it particularly beneficial that they remained in the Barrier class for the entire year despite some awareness of perceptions of its exclusiveness and “cliquiness.” The explicit links were made “in Social Studies [where] all of our tests were based on sustainability. It was really helpful being in the Barrier class. We had that shared experience” and “we had actual examples [to relate to].” In the same way that there is justification to use contexts beyond the classroom to enrich learning and bring the curriculum alive, it is equally as important to consolidate the experiences by connecting what is learned outdoors with what is learned in class (Beames et al., 2012; Campbell-Price, 2012; Ministry of Education, 2016). Many remembered how they returned home with good intentions to live more sustainably in practical ways. These actions included initiating a composting system in their family homes, reducing the use of electricity and minimising their use of non-recyclable plastics. However, their

72

M. Campbell-Price

success at sustaining these behaviours depended in part on their own determination, the extent to which their parents in particular accommodated their learning, and whether it actually seemed relevant to their daily lives. Good intentions were difficult to sustain with an acknowledgement that previous roles and routines had been resumed in their family homes. As one participant stated “I have probably slipped back into my old habits – Great Barrier is different but some of the environmental stuff doesn’t feel such a priority here.” It seemed that unless young people were given the opportunity to be an agent of change in their home or at school, such as to grow vegetables or begin a composting system, it was often easier to resume the existing practices of their family. This extended to switching off appliances and lights, especially when there were no immediate consequences given the unlimited supply of electricity and no personal responsibility to pay for it. Nevertheless, looking ahead, there was acknowledgement that their ability to live more frugally would be useful in the future, with one participant stating “when we go to uni and live in flats we will be more aware of the cost, whereas our parents pay [for it at the moment] so it is not so much of an issue.” Another added “I do not know if we have lost all the impetus to be more sustainable. It is still there, like an awareness of how things could be. Appreciation is a key word. We have experienced it [living with limited resources and saving power] so why take it for granted?”. The GBE provided the context to help participants explore, understand and take action towards a more sustainable future. However, if the context to which they returned was not conducive to accommodate their learning its relevance diminished, along with commitment to sustain their learning in their daily lives (Ministry of Education, 2007, 2016). Even though there was an apparent loss of momentum to sustain their learning in practical ways, it was evident that the knowledge of what, why and how remained, to potentially be acted upon in the future.

3 Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor …

4.4

73

Self-Awareness and Personal Development

The participants unanimously acknowledged their own personal development from the GBE and how they had gained self-awareness, confidence, independence and useful self-management skills. Many appreciated their greater sense of autonomy “I learned to direct myself ” and having learned “not to sweat the small stuff.” For others it was more to do with self awareness, as one “realised the world does not revolve around me.” The extended duration of the experience and sustained interactions with other people who were not family members—“definitely not having parents nearby was important”—meant that they had to learn to work together. As another said “I think it was a combination of being on a remote island with other people, having to cooperate with others that you don’t necessarily choose to be with for an extended period of time. You are there for five weeks so you learn some really valuable skills.” He went on to say that “you just have to learn to work with others and you do share the same interests in that you are there for the same reason. But they might not necessarily be people that you like.” Along those lines, another said she had “learned a bit more about how my own actions can impact on others and probably learned to be a bit more sensitive to others.” The lack of digital technology and social media further reinforced the value of “face-to-face communication” and the liberating feel of “enjoying nature and hanging out which is so much better than looking at phones.” Memories of their interactions with the island’s residents— deliberately included in the programme—had necessitated them to look beyond themselves and one noted how “people really looked out for each other. I took that from there [the island] and now at home I try to have longer conversations to find out more about people.” The teachers and instructors played a key role in building a supportive learning culture during the GBE. Participants acknowledged that “you spend nearly all day with your instructors over the five weeks and they are really good at working with young people and working out what they need to help them manage themselves.” Through the outdoor activities, the instructors “gave us the freedom to try things” and “were really

74

M. Campbell-Price

good at pointing stuff out” while at the same time “leaving us to make decisions and take responsibility.” It seemed that there were adequate and appropriate reflection processes. As one participant said “I cannot remember the debriefing much but we did have a reflection after activities or expeditions. Like, what did we learn, how did we feel about it?” When asked if the reflections were useful he responded “to be honest, we were in Year 10. We just wanted to get on with it. Now I guess I can understand the point of it and we use it [now] in sport or other things.” There was an overall acknowledgement that the teachers and instructors scaffolded experiences in ways that gave young people increasing autonomy and accountability for the consequences of their (in)actions, even though they played a role in mitigating conflicts or poor decision “by asking questions to find out what is happening and they would try their best to sort things out with the least drama and then getting us to come up with the solution.” The extent to which the particpants had sustained such learnings were varied. Some spoke of the way in which they had planned and undertaken their own outdoor journeys, and continued to make independent decisions that were “right” for themselves. For a smaller number of participants, the GBE was a turning point (Bialeschki et al., 2016) that enabled them to set their own path in ways that were different to “pre-Great Barrier.” One participant claimed that the experience was the catalyst for his “really good work ethic. The last three years I have been working three jobs as well as school. … I really enjoy working for money and spending money, but not stupidly. I am saving for uni and spending money on things I might need for uni rather than waiting for next year to do it.” However, for others, they reflected somewhat regretfully that they had slipped back into their old ways and not utilised their learning. This was summed up by one particpant who said “in all honesty I lost all my independence. I let Mum do my washing, I didn’t have a driver’s licence so had to be asked to be driven [to places]. Yeah, we were at an age when we couldn’t be fully independent and just had to fit in.” This highlighted the importance of parents being willing to accommodate their child’s learning as well as the young person being agentic to use it. The tensions around this were expressed by a few participants with comments such as

3 Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor …

75

“my parents were trying to let me use what I had learned but it was also ‘I am just in Year 10 and it is hard to be completely independent’”, while another said “I did remind my mother ‘I am really independent now. Let me do this!’”. Even though some had felt the “effect [of Great Barrier] has worn out [and] it is no longer in the forefront” there was a clear sense of optimism and confidence that their learning would “kick in” when they pursued their post-school pathways at the end of the school year. The reflection opportunity through focus groups once again drew attention to their learning and its future relevance.

5

Critical Elements: The Experience Was the Sum of Its Parts

Through each of the focus group discussions it was evident that the value of the GBE was the sum of its parts. There was an intentional learning focus that connected several school-based subjects through structured, interactive and investigative experiences on the island with classroombased learning and assessment when they returned to school. These were complemented by outdoor activities, whether they were undertaken near the outdoor centre, or involved overnight or multi-day expeditions. The pedagogical approaches and skilled facilitation enabled a “tight but loose” sequence of learning experience across the programmed and nonprogrammed times (Graney & Graney, 2012). The “tight” was attributed to the carefully structured and sequenced programme on the island that connected to school learning. The “loose” was attributed to the spaces in between the activities, where participants’ had time to simply “be,” whether that was “times to just sit and we could take the wee boats out and go fishing.” It also related to the skilled facilitation of instructors and teachers who used reflection or debriefing opportunities flexibly—“just enough” to elucidate emerging issues or tensions, and using strategies that guided the young people to make meaning of their experiences and consider their next steps in the learning process.

76

M. Campbell-Price

Although there were some common themes related to what participants had learned, the relevance and meaning for them was individualised. As Graney and Graney (2012) acknowledged, irrespective of what the espoused and enacted curriculum are, the way in which it is experienced, and the way meaning is made, is highly variable and depends on what each young person brings to the moment. Each person undertaking the GBE had to apply to take part and justify their own reasons for participating. Consequently each research participant articulated what they had gained and “held onto” from the experience. The passage of time, new interests and experiences had either reinforced their learning, or pushed it to the background, at least for now. What was learnt on the GBE only remained at the forefront of participants’ minds if it connected or seemed relevant to the present. There was general agreement that when faced with particular situations, whether that be outdoor skills, making decisions or dealing with challenging situations “it all came back quite easily and I said to myself ‘I can do this’.” The participants argued that the duration of five weeks and the remote location of GBI were crucial elements of the programme. The following quotations illustrated how the isolation from families and the familiarity of home reinforced a sense of needing to “step up” individually, and that it took time to adjust to the unfamiliar environment: I think five weeks was a really good amount of time. I would have liked to stay longer but I didn’t really like the first week and a half. When I first arrived, I thought ‘I don’t know about this. Is this what is expected?’... definitely not having parents nearby was important. If the camp was just down the road you would feel like you were right by them. Like we had to go by boat for over four hours and then by road. You knew you were far away and isolated.

A peer agreed, stating “I wasn’t sure I would like it when I first got there but then I thought ‘I just have to make the most of it.’” A further comment that “five weeks away from home matured me. If you wanted help you had to ask for it”, reinforcing the findings of several studies that argue that extended outdoor experiences substantially contribute to personal development and resilience (Beames et al., 2018; D’Amato & Krasny, 2011; Hattie et al., 1997; Neill & Dias, 2001).

3 Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor …

77

The unfamiliar island landscape—its location, people and unique resources—were critically important to participants’ learning. Much about the island was unfamiliar and new to them. Its remoteness highlighted the importance of “being in this together” and this was reinforced through the “amazing neighbourliness” they encountered among the island’s residents. Exposure to nature on a daily basis and the opportunity to contribute to pest eradication projects to protect rare native animals generated a connection to and appreciation of nature. There was something about “the amazing stars – they are so bright on Great Barrier and it seems so dull at home in comparison” while another said “every morning I woke up I thought ‘oh my God this is so beautiful!”’ Some of the most powerful learning was generated by the unfamiliarity of living with limited access to resources. They had to plan their grocery orders and wait for the boat to deliver them on a weekly basis. There were consequences if they consumed food too quickly or missed key items off the order. They had to plan when to do their laundry to capitalise on the hours of maximum electricity supply and minimise their use of water. Likewise, they had to learn to reduce their waste and compost organic matter. Over the five weeks these daily processes and lived experiences became familiar, so much so that there were new feelings of displacement when they returned home. The pedagogical strategies employed by the instructors and teachers facilitating the GBE were critical to its effectiveness for promoting and sustaining learning. Each of the teacher actions outlined in the national school curriculum (2007) was evident in the enacted experience. The development of positive relationships with peers, instructors, teachers and the GBI community underpinned a culture for learning that was supportive. The duration of the experience ensured that participants had sufficient time and opportunity to engage with, practise and apply their learning into further situations on the island and into classroom learning. Shared learning conversations and experiences—in small groups that were maintained throughout the entire experience—were fundamental to cultivate a context where group members and the instructors and teachers could encourage, support, challenge and respond with feedback in ways that promoted learning.

78

M. Campbell-Price

Even though some participants acknowledged that they had let their learning and intended actions slip when they returned home, because it had been highly relevant and meaningful for them on the island they understood why they should take greater ownership of their actions to think and act more sustainably. Even though learnings from the GBE was no longer in front of mind three years on, the research participants acknowledged the further opportunity they were having to reflect on their experience, and in doing so they realised the ways in which they still “held the knowledge and skills” and were confident that they could tap into their previous experiences when new situations made it relevant, such as moving away from home to undertake university study. Finally, it seemed that the teachers and instructors were skilled at making inthe-moment pedagogical decisions that on one hand could nip issues in the bud and use teachable moments in order to promote participants’ curiosity and learning.

6

Conclusions

This chapter has highlighted the value of a retrospective approach to research the sustained influence of an innovative school outdoor education programme. Three years on from participants’ experience on the island, it was timely to capture their memories, encourage them to reflect on what they had gained, applied, let slip or intended to use at a transition phase from their school to post-school lives. The remote long duration outdoor education experience had generated positive impacts for the participants although it did not necessarily lead to transformative changes for all. The focus group interviews enabled lively interaction among participants to share memories and recollect experiences. The interaction enabled them to consider their individual learning and its ongoing relevance in comparison to the perspectives of their peers. Without any prompting, the participants commented on the timeliness of the research in order to reflect on the ongoing influence of their experiences.

3 Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor …

79

The GBE was a memorable and positive experience, with its ongoing influence very much individualised. Some participants intended to return to the island with their families “to share their experiences” although the complexities of getting there had to date limited the realisation of their aspirations. For others, the GBE had been a significant yet somewhat “one-off ” event in their lives. Even though there was a sense that things had moved on and some of the learning did not seem relevant to their present lives, there was an acknowledgement that participants had retained their knowledge, underpinned by strong memories. Participants’ year-long placement in the Great Barrier class, had helped them connect their island-based experiences with their learning at school in several core subjects. However, they encountered barriers as they tried to apply their skills and knowledge after they returned home. What had become familiar and their “new normal” on the once unfamiliar landscape of GBI no longer seemed to be as relevant when they returned to the familiarity of home and resumed their regular lives. One example of this was the impetus to enact a lighter environmental footprint, which subsided for many of them because it no longer seemed relevant when they realised that the resources such as electricity, water, and kerbside garbage disposal and recycling appeared unlimited and they did not have the personal responsibility to pay for the services. This reinforces the individualised nature of learning and the way in which people need relevant meaningful contexts in which to apply and build on their learning. The programme design, interactions and pedagogy utilised were crucial for achieving the holistic outcomes and sustaining learning in some way. Central to this was the context of GBI and the interactive, investigative approach that integrated several core subjects alongside the outdoor activities and expeditions. This set the platform for experiences and learning that was much broader than the more traditional personal development, outdoor skills and shallow environmentalism associated with many outdoor adventure programmes (Cosgriff, 2008; Irwin et al., 2012; Lugg, 2004; Wattchow & Brown, 2011). Moreover, this chapter has illustrated that long duration school outdoor education experiences designed and enacted with careful attention to the why, what and how can have a modest or sustained impact on young people—for some it

80

M. Campbell-Price

could be a turning point. However, attention needs to be given to ensure that the context to which participants return is conducive in ways that enable them to use their learning.

References Baker, M. (2005). Landfullness in adventure-based programming: Promoting reconnection to the land. Journal of Experiential Education, 3(27), 267–276. Beames, S., & Brown, M. (2016). Adventurous learning: A pedagogy for a changing world . Routledge. Beames, S., Higgins, P., & Nicol, R. (2012). Learning outside the classroom: Theory and guidelines for practice. Routledge. Beames, S., Mackie, C., & Scrutton, R. (2018). Alumni perspectives on a boarding school outdoor education programme. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 20 (2), 123–137. Bialeschki, M. D., Fine, S. M., & Bennett, T. (2016). The camp experience: Learning through the outdoors. In B. Humberstone, H. Prince, & K. A. Henderson (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of outdoor studies (pp. 227–235). Routledge. Boyes, M. (2012). Historical and contemporary trends in outdoor education. In D. Irwin, J. Straker, & A. Hill (Eds.),Outdoor education in Aotearoa New Zealand: A new vision for the twenty first century (pp. 26–45). Brookes, A. (2002). Lost in the Australian bush: Outdoor education as curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 34 (4), 405–425. Campbell-Price, M. (2012). School curriculum and outdoor education. Part 2. Secondary school. In D. Irwin, J. Straker, & A. Hill (Eds.), Outdoor Education in Aotearoa New Zealand: A new vision for the twenty first century (pp. 84–103). Campbell-Price, M. (2014). International school trips: A critical analysis of multiple stakeholder perspectives (Unpublished Ph.D thesis). University of Otago. Campbell-Price, M., & Duncan, T. (2015). Experiencing the different everyday on an international school-led trip: A New Zealand example. In C. N. Laoire et al. (Eds.), Geographies of children and young people 6: Movement, mobilities and journeys (pp. 209–229). Springer.

3 Sustaining Learning from a Long Duration Outdoor …

81

Clarke, S., Timperley, H., & Hattie, J. (2003). Unlocking formative assessment: Practical strategies for enhancing students’ learning in the primary and intermediate school classroom. Hodder Moa Beckett. Cosgriff, M. (2008). What’s the story? Outdoor education in New Zealand in the 21st century. Journal of Physical Education New Zealand, 41(3), 14–25. D’Amato, L., & Krasny, M. E. (2011). Outdoor adventure education: Applying transformative learning theory to understanding instrumental learning and personal growth in environmental education. The Journal of Environmental Education, 42(4), 237–254. Graney, B., & Graney, S. (2012). The role of outdoor education centres. In D. Irwin, J. Straker, & A. Hill, (Eds.), Outdoor education in Aotearoa New Zealand: A new vision for the twenty first century (pp. 125–137). Hattie, J., Marsh, H., Neill, J., & Richards, G. (1997). Adventure education and Outward Bound: Out-of-class experiences that make a lasting difference. Review of Educational Research, 67 (1), 43–87. Hill, A., North, C., Cosgriff, M., Irwin, D., Boyes, M., & Watson, S. (2020). Education outside the classroom in Aotearoa New Zealand—A comprehensive national study: Final report. Ara Institute of Canterbury Ltd. Humberstone, B., Prince, H., & Henderson, K. (2016). Routledge international handbook of outdoor studies. Routledge. Irwin, D., Straker, J., & Hill, A. (2012). Outdoor education in Aotearoa New Zealand: A new vision for the twenty first century. CPIT. Lai, K. (1999). Freedom to learn: A student of the experiences of secondary school teachers and students on a geography field trip. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 8(3), 239–255. Larsen, J. (2008). De-exoticizing tourist travel: Everyday life and sociality on the move. Leisure Studies, 27 (1), 21–34. Louv, R. (2008). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Algonquin Books. Lugg, A. (2004). Outdoor adventure in Australian outdoor education: Is it a case of roast for Christmas dinner? Australian Journal of Outdoor Education, 8(1), 4–11. Madriz, E. (2000). Focus groups in feminist research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 835–850). Sage. McKenzie, M. D. (2000). How are adventure education program outcomes achieved? A review of the literature. Australian Journal of Outdoor Education, 5 (1), 19–26.

82

M. Campbell-Price

Ministry of Education. (1999). Health and physical education in the New Zealand curriculum. Learning Media. Ministry of Education. (2007). The New Zealand curriculum for Englishmedium teaching and learning in years 1–13. Learning Media. Ministry of Education. (2016). EOTC guidelines 2016: Bringing the curriculum alive. Learning Media. Neill, J. T., & Dias, K. L. (2001). Adventure education and resilience: The double-edged sword. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 1(2), 35–42. Takano, T. (2010). A 20-year retrospective study on the impact of expeditions on Japanese participants. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 10 (2), 77–94. Taylor, N., & Smith, A. (2009). Research methodology. In N. Taylor & A. Smith (Eds.), Children as citizens? International voices (pp. 35–60). University of Otago Press. Wattchow, B., & Brown, M. (2011). A pedagogy of place: Outdoor education for a changing world . Monash University.

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences in an Unfamiliar Landscape: Reflections on the ‘Awayscape’ of an A-Level Geography Field Trip Alun Morgan and Denise Freeman

1

Introduction

Young people studying geography in a school setting are sometimes presented with opportunities to visit unfamiliar places—or ‘contrasting localities’—as part of a field trip or study visit. Ostensibly, this is seen as a characteristic of ‘good’ geography education, providing students with immersive, real-world and experiential learning opportunities (Kinder, 2013). However, arguably school-level fieldwork can be rather utilitarian A. Morgan (B) University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK e-mail: [email protected] D. Freeman Oaks Park High School, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_4

83

84

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

or instrumental in nature. Too often, fieldwork is seen—by teachers and students—as a means to an end, a necessary part of preparing students for examination success within the narrow constraints of formal curricular and examination syllabi. This places the emphasis on the relatively uncritical acquisition of received ‘cognitive’ and ‘procedural’ geographical knowledge, since this is ultimately what is tested through examinations and coursework tasks. This rather shallow and instrumentalist rationale for fieldwork constrains the potential for deeper, or more emancipatory explorations (Wals et al., 2008) by students of ‘their world’ and ‘their place’ in it. A more holistic framework for outdoor learning has been presented by Malone (2008) which extends the potential beyond the cognitive to include physical, social, emotional and personal aspects of progression or development. This chapter advocates such an expanded understanding of the learning potential of fieldwork. Whilst these broader learning dimensions represent an emerging area of research in Higher Education (Marvell & Simm, 2018; Phillips, 2015), they have received limited attention at the secondary geography school level. What work there has tended to be published in professional rather than academic journals (see: Cook, 2010; Moncrieff, 2008; Selmes & Wallace, 2014). This chapter seeks to partially address these gaps through presenting the findings of a small-scale study into the experiences of a small yet heterogeneous group of students from Outer London who undertook an A-level geography field trip to visit the unfamiliar, ‘contrasting locality’ of Swanage in Dorset in the spring of 2019. The goal of this chapter is to provide support for a broadened understanding of the purposes and scope of geographical fieldwork to unfamiliar places as a vehicle not just for advancing academic study but also for personal and social development. It draws on ‘informal learning’ theory and practice, which explicitly seeks to promote human flourishing by acknowledging and extending the lived experience of learners, establishing and pursuing their wants and needs as the basis for developing their agency (Smith, 2007).

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

2

85

Contextualising Learning

A general contextual model of learning would comprise three inextricable and interrelated dimensions or contexts (following Braund & Reiss, 2004; Falk & Dierking, 2016): intrapersonal (the subjective experiences of the individual learner); socio-cultural or interpersonal (social interactions amongst people in the learning context—learners, teachers, and other people); and physical or ‘place’ (the environmental setting or milieu). Arguably, the physical context represents a range of scales, including the micro-scale (e.g. a desk within a classroom). However, the focus here is on ‘places’ understood as ‘macroenvironments encountered outdoors’ (Matthews, 1992: 2), including considerations of the physical environments encountered in fieldwork. Such places represent complex assemblages of non-living or abiotic elements (soil, rock, buildings), living elements (plants, animals, humans) and social and cultural relationships. All places potentially provide rich contexts for learning in terms of their features (including species, landscapes, cultural heritage and how they are interconnected), and presenting opportunities for individual and collaborative investigation, inquiry and discovery. This observation lies behind the place-based education movement which takes as its focus the ‘home locality’ (Morgan, 2010; Sobel, 2005). However, given that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’, it is often the case that teachers wish to take learners away from the home locality, such as on a field trip. The choice of destination is usually made because of its perceived quality or affordances for progressing learning outcomes. However, the relative unfamiliarity of the destination is likely to give rise to additional considerations and learning implications, whether deliberate or ancillary, as a consequence of factors relating to the intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions, and how they all interrelate. Here, O’Dell and Billing’s (2005) notion of ‘experiencescape’ is helpful. This can be seen as the emergent outcome of the interaction between all three dimensions of the contextual model of learning. These can be further divided into the ‘setting’ (comprising both ‘place’ and social aspects), and intrapersonal ‘set’ (the metaphoric ‘inner space’ of

86

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

subjectivity—the personal dimension) (Tart, 1990) or ‘mindset’. With an unfamiliar landscape, both aspects of ‘setting’ are unfamiliar, and the ‘mindset’ will be affected prior to (anticipation, trepidation, excitement), during (experience) and after (reflection) the field trip event. Consequently, the particular attributes and affordances of the place are crucial, but so too are the social dynamics at play and the subjectivities (motivations, perceptions, responses, etc.) of the ‘experiencing subjects’. This is why it is important, in this study, that we have explored the students’ own shifting perceptions, combining ‘various sensory elements, including physical, intellectual, social and emotional’ (Chen et al., 2019: 10), as they engage with the unfamiliar landscape and social dynamics at play. ‘Mindset’ (emotions, volitions, motivations, reactions, etc.) is crucial since all ‘[s]paces invoke powerful feelings, including those associated with belonging, exclusion, safety and/or danger’ (Leverett, 2011: 9). However, being presented by unfamiliar places, in the context of fieldwork, necessarily involves a number of stressors encountered by young people. These include the challenges of being ‘away’ from home, supportive friends and familiar territory. In addition, being away also means being ‘relocated’ into (potentially) challenging physical environments, unfamiliar social environment (including living communally and working in groups), and travelling long distances (Birnie & Grant, 2001). Thus, a residential field trip potentially undermines feelings of belonging, security, status and identity (Verbeek & de Waal, 2002). However, it simultaneously affords enhanced opportunities for investigation and discovery. Such situations of unfamiliarity can lead to disorientation of existing habitual modes of thinking (or what psychologists refer to as mental schemas) which, ideally, results in ‘learning’ (i.e. reconstructed mental schemas that provide a better fit with this new experience). Of course, this cannot always be guaranteed, and there is the danger of being overwhelmed by unfamiliarity (‘culture shock’ and ‘travel psychosis’ being extreme possibilities).

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

2.1

87

‘Youthscape’, Formal and Informal Learning/Contexts, and ‘Awayscape’

These three dimensions of learning (place-intrapersonal-interpersonal) can be contextualised in broader sociocultural terms. Maira and Soep (2005) introduced the concept of ‘Youthscape’ to describe the lived experiences of young people, set within broader national and global processes. This can be seen as the overarching setting within which learning takes place. A simplistic distinction might be made between aspects of the Youthscape that are relatively ‘formal’ and ‘adult-controlled’, and ‘young people’s informal worlds, friendship groups and social experiences’ (Hopkins, 2010: 184). This relates to a corresponding distinction between formal and informal educational sectors, with formal education taking place in formal institutions (schools, colleges, universities) following externally sanctioned programs. In contrast, informal learning represents the learning taking place in other aspects of social life, in a range of contexts outside of the school, including: ‘the home; the workplace; libraries; museums; popular culture; the media; the street corner, the mall, and other “public” space; and, most recently, the Internet’ (Bekerman et al., 2007: 1). Hopkins (2011) discusses different settings in the ‘home locality’ that are most salient to the Youthscape: home, street and school. He draws attention to the power relations imbued within these various contexts, and their socialising function in ‘reinforcing norms and practices’ (Hopkins, 2011: 30) expected of the formal, adult world. ‘Schooling’ or becoming ‘schooled’ represents the most obvious instance of this. For school geography in England and Wales, this is ordained by the centrally-dictated National Curriculum (DFE, 2013) and examination specifications that is to be followed (DfE, 2014), typically in the formal setting of a geography classroom through mainstream teaching and learning practices and materials, within the broader formal school culture. These adult-impositions or exertions of power are also evident beyond school. Leverett (2011) discusses three processes which are curtailing the independence of young people beyond school, and exerting adult-socialising norms. Firstly, there is ‘domestication’: the increasing

88

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

‘corralling’ of young people into protected spaces such as the home, adult-designed playgrounds and activity spaces. Secondly, there is ‘institutionalisation’: the increasing imposition of adult-organised activities into ‘out-of-school-hours’ often with an overtly ‘formal educational’ rationale of improving ‘success’ through accredited courses e.g. homework, music lessons, and sports clubs. Finally, there is ‘insularisation’: the fragmentation of young people’s experiences and interpersonal contact with their peers as they are ‘shuttled’—by parents/adults—between these imposed activities. However, young people are not without their own agency and create their own informal spaces in the ‘cultural crevices’ and ‘social fissures’ beyond adult surveillance (Hopkins, 2011). Such spaces typically have been created in the home (the bedroom) or in the street (the street corner), abandoned spaces and parks, although the processes of ‘privatisation’, ‘domestication’ and ‘institutionalisation’ are reducing these opportunities. Figure 1 attempts to relate these relatively formal and informal dimensions of the Youthscape within the home locality (the boundary rectangle), with the diagonal line conveying a spectrum of positions rather than binaries.

Fig. 1 Youthscape(s) of learning

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

89

Some have deliberately sought to straddle the formal-informal divide in order to enhance and broaden learning potential. Thus, AponteMartínez and Pellegrino (2017: 102) argue for a process of ‘Youthscaping’ the classroom and curriculum to move ‘beyond mandated standards and nominal attention to student interest, requiring teachers to not only understand what youth are interested in but also the ways that these interests matter to students’. Whilst it might not be possible, nor perhaps desirable, to create a wholly ‘Youthscaped’ geography curriculum employing ‘youthscaped pedagogy’, attempts are underway in geography education to acknowledge young people’s lived experiences. Examples include ‘young people’s ethnogeographies’ (Martin, 2005, 2008), and ‘Young People’s Geographies’ (Firth, 2011). Smith (2007: 19), on the other hand, writes of the desirability of informalising the formal curriculum or ‘learning beyond the formality of the classroom’. Such a process is behind the promotion of extracurricular learning which might be literally and metaphorically outside (or marginal ) to the school curriculum either temporally as in ‘Out of School Hours Learning’ (OSHL: Smith, 2007); and/or geographically as in ‘Learning Outside the Classroom’ (LOtC: DfES, 2006). Such informalising of learning is particularly relevant for field trips, which tend to involve non-school-like settings, in terms of the transportation to and from sites, residential accommodation, mealtime and ‘free time’ arrangements. In addition, fieldwork, particularly those involving a stay away from home, necessarily involves a flattening of the power-relations between staff and students, and affords opportunities to develop learners holistically. We have coined the term ‘awayscape’ (extending Appadurai, 1996; Maira & Soep, 2005) to describe learning spaces or settings away from the familiar, home locality that sit in the lacuna between formal and informal learning contexts (Fig. 2). Figuratively, the awayscape represents a bubble pinched off from the familiar Youthscape of the home with its familiar modes of functioning (formal and informal) which is transported to another, unfamiliar context. Thus, awayscapes offer an ephemeral ‘semi-formal realm’ (Schugurensky, 2007: 101) in which blurring can take place in terms of: social relations (between learners and teachers); acceptable knowledge (between formal, school and academic

90

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

Fig. 2 ‘Awayscape’

geography, and young people’s geographies and youthscapes); and educational purposes (academic success within formal schooling, and personal and social development as advocated in informal learning). We believe that such blurring is both possible and desirable, although all too often, it remains accidental or, at best, permitted rather than positively encouraged. Thus, an awayscape can be seen as a ‘between space’: a space shaped by formal aspects of schooling, and influenced by the informal, lived experiences of students and leaders. What follows is a discussion of a small-scale research project involving a group of students on a field trip in 2019. The research explored the student’s motivations and expectations before the visit, their readings of the unfamiliar landscapes they encountered and the ways in which they made sense of the experience within their own individual Youthscapes.

3

Research Context: The Dorset Coast as Awayscape

The students who participated in the research were aged 16–18 and all attended an outer-London, state-run comprehensive school, in the London Borough of Redbridge. All studied geography at A-Level (a school-leaving qualification in England and Wales completed before university or employment). The participants were a heterogeneous group

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

91

of nine students, from a range of ethnic, social and economic backgrounds, and were mixed in terms of gender and academic ability. The diversity within the group was representative of the comprehensive nature of the school and the range of different religious and ethnic communities living locally. Like most London Boroughs, Redbridge is home to marked disparities in wealth (LBR, 2011). The area around the school is ‘average’ in terms of income and deprivation. The trip was organised in response to requirements for A-level students to complete 4 days ‘in the field’, covering aspects of human and physical geography (DfE, 2014). It was optional and free to attend, and the importance of attending (to meet DfE requirements) was emphasised to students. All chose to take part, although undoubtedly with some influence from their parents. The students travelled by minibus to the coastal town of Swanage in Dorset, located along the ‘Jurassic Coast’ in southern England. The Jurassic Coast is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a status granted in recognition of its geological significance. This location was selected because of its close proximity to several sites of interest for studying coastal geography such as the stacks, arches, coves and bays. The geographically and geologically significant nature of the coastline, with its ‘textbook’ features, means that it has become a widely visited fieldwork destination for schools, colleges and universities, with the infrastructure needed to support educational tourism. As a result, the town of Swanage hosts many school visits and is very familiar to geography teachers. For many students it also has a level of familiarity, due to the number of maps and photographs of the area included in educational resources. The largely rural nature of the Dorset coast stands in contrast to the home locality of the students in this study: a dense, urban landscape in outer London, well connected to central London through public transport. However, its peripheral location on the edge of London, means that Redbridge does have areas of greenery including farmland, a Country Park and recreational lakes. Nevertheless, the Dorset coast can be seen as a much ‘bluer’ and ‘greener’ space than Redbridge. It is also more ethnically homogenous. Redbridge is a home to diverse ethnicities, with the total number from Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME backgrounds) exceeding White British residents (LBR, 2011). The largest ethnic groups

92

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

come from the Indian sub-continent, with 16.4% from an Indian background and 11.1% from Pakistani origins. 34.5% of residents classified themselves as White British. In the same period, 94.6% of those living in Swanage consider themselves to be White British (Dorset County Council, 2020). All of these characteristics created an unfamiliar context for the awayscape. The research data for this study was gathered using several methods. Two surveys were conducted with the group, one before and one after the visit. These consisted of open-ended questions. During the fieldtrip, the students were asked to record their thoughts and reflections, completed at the end of each day, using a structured log sheet. This document is referred to in this account as their field notes. During the four-day visit, the students took photographs and recorded video footage. These multimedia outputs formed part of the data collection process. On the day of departure, the group were asked to take photographs of any aspect of the trip that interested them. This deliberately vague brief was intended to explore how they made sense of the unfamiliar landscape themselves. Aponte-Martínez and Pellegrino (2017) argue that using photographs in this way enables young people to express their thoughts and ideas by giving them a voice, or a ‘photovoice’. The use of video was not planned and was a student-led addition. Two geography teachers accompanied the students, one being the research lead and co-author. Swanage and Dorset were very familiar to both teachers. The research lead kept a field diary of reflections throughout.

4

Exploring the Unfamiliar

Before travelling to Dorset, the group were asked about their expectations and perception of what they would see and do. They were also asked why they were going and what they already knew about the area. For many, their motivations for taking part in the trip were strongly linked to the completion of a piece of coursework or Non-Examined Assessment (NEA), a requirement of their A-level course (25% of their final mark). Visiting the south coast was seen as a useful way to ‘collect data’ for their project and ensure that they achieved a good final grade.

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

93

This instrumentalist focus dominated responses to questions about their reasons for going (Fig. 3). Although one respondent stated that he was also looking forward to having ‘fun with friends’. The pre-visit survey also showed that all the students believed that the field trip had been organised with formal learning and the curriculum in mind, stating that the geography department had planned the trip so that the students could carry out fieldwork, collect data for their NEA and gain knowledge to help them in their final exams. It is likely that this perception came from reading the letter sent home to parents outlining details of the field trip and emphasising its importance in supporting the aims of the geography course. This message was reinforced in class, particularly whilst completing pre-visit tasks. However, the letter home also mentioned the ‘enjoyment’ that past students had experienced whilst away, and the teaching staff often spoke fondly about Dorset and their memories of taking students there previously. Yet, in hindsight, the more informal aspects of the visit and the potential personal benefits of taking part were not explicitly signposted.

Fig. 3 a Keywords from the pre-visit survey. b Keywords from the student’s field notes. c Keywords from the post-visit survey

94

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

Before departing, the majority of the students showed a certain level of ambivalence regarding the location, with one student commenting: I don’t mind where I go, so long as it works best for the course.

A small number were looking forward to seeing the area as they had never been before, but overall the responses provided very little insight into their feelings as they prepared to travel to a new, unfamiliar environment. For most, the trip appeared to be something they expected as part of their role as a ‘school geographer’, and they showed little overt desire to explore unfamiliar places. This could be a reflection on the weight of importance given by the students to their education or that they do not feel a need to visit ‘unfamiliar’ landscapes. A small number expressed concerns about going on the trip, stating that they were ‘…dreading catching up on the work due to missed lessons’. It is important to highlight that the field trip was framed as a school trip, to support school work, not a leisure experience, with most feeling obligated to attend and this likely influenced the group’s answers to the initial questions. Furthermore, the pre-visit surveys were largely completed in school, in a geography classroom setting. The students were also asked what they expected to see whilst they were on the field trip. Overall, the Dorset coast was a largely unfamiliar landscape to the group: only one had been to the area before (also on a geography field trip, with a different school). However, their responses to the pre-visit survey were often place-specific, with many references to locations such as Old Harry Rocks, Durdle Door, Swanage, the Jurassic Coast and Lulworth Cove. These places feature in almost all of the responses and appeared very familiar to the group, primarily because these places were studied in school as part of the geography curriculum (at A-level and before). Images of features such as Old Harry Rocks or Lulworth Cove appear in a multitude of geography textbooks, exam papers and online resources. Thus, whilst most of the students had not yet gained any lived experience of being in Dorset, they had begun developing a sense of familiarity with the area, through the lens of geographical education. Throughout the pre-visit survey, there was also repeated use of key geographical terminology such as rock types, geology, erosion, sediment, formations and landforms. When asked about what

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

95

they thought the area would be like, the students’ responses contained strong evocations of a natural environment shaped by the power of the sea and dominated by rocks and physical structures, including caves, arches and stacks. Their answers made limited references to the social or cultural landscape, although some students included suggestions of small, rural communities, a peaceful landscape and elements of coastal tourism. The Dorset Coast is commonly used as a case study to support the teaching of physical geography and landforms. Once again, this formal learning appeared to have a strong influence in shaping the students’ perceptions of place. As a result, it could be argued that the students travelled to Dorset with an institutionalised sense of familiarity for their intended destination, shaped and structured by their formal classroom learning.

4.1

Engaging with Unfamiliar Places Through Technology

One of the key outcomes of the research was a recognition of the role mobile technologies, namely smartphones, can play in facilitating interactions between students and the unfamiliar landscapes they encounter. In this case, mobile phones enabled the group to engage with their surroundings, document points of interest and record their thoughts. The students were also able to use the same technology to share their reflections with others around them, as well as those further away, who were not directly involved in the visit. The media captured on smartphones can be referred to after the visit, which facilitates an ongoing relationship with a distant landscape and shapes the memories held of that place. The use of mobile technology was a useful research tool, particularly the camera function, which provided a very visible way for students to register their interest in the landscape. This was something that could be easily observed, noted and analysed. Some of this analysis is discussed in more detail below.

96

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

Sharing the Landscape Through Photographs The students were invited to take photographs and record anything of interest to them during the visit. This approach to fieldwork sits well with what Kinder (2013: 187) calls ‘discovery fieldwork’, in which the teacher ‘provides the opportunity and encouragement for learners to explore the environments for themselves’. All the students took photographs without having to be reminded, suggesting this was something they wanted to do and were used to doing. For example, upon arrival in Swanage, after a long bus ride, the group took a walk to explore their new locality. Approaching the seafront, they all gathered by the sea wall and spent time taking pictures of the scene, including the sun setting over the bay. This view appeared to be of interest to them, and one they considered to be important. The sunset seemed to enhance the significance of the view, adding the effect of a natural photographic filter through which to view the landscape. One of the students later noted that their favourite moment of the day had been ‘taking pictures of the coastline’. For another student it was ‘watching the sun set’. Taking photographs promoted a range of social interactions amongst the students, the staff and those not directly involved in the field trip. At the end of each day, the students gathered around the kitchen table to review their photographs and compile their field notes. On the first evening one of the students suggested a way of sharing the images using Bluetooth technology, allowing them to collect the photos together on one device. This became part of the daily routine. The experience of gathering together each night to reflect and share, was an unplanned, student-led event, with the students taking control, making decisions and helping each other. It appeared that coming together to share the photographs became as important, for the group, as the task of taking them. This positive social interaction highlights the value and importance of the interpersonal context, as part of the learning process. It also suggests that smartphones can play a positive role in connecting students to each other and the landscapes they encounter, as opposed to common perception that mobile technologies disconnect young people from others and from ‘real’ spaces.

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

97

Fig. 4 Photograph taken by a student of Durdle Door

The social interaction facilitated by the sharing of photographs also extended beyond the awayscape. For example, a photograph of Durdle Door taken by a student (Fig. 4) was shared amongst geography educators, via social media, by one of the leaders, and was viewed by hundreds of people as a result. It prompted an online discussion amongst other viewers, who added their own layers of meaning to the image, many highlighting technical aspects of the physical landscape and geology. In this way, the students’ photograph provided a vehicle for social interaction beyond the immediate setting. This suggests that mobile technology can challenge traditional conceptions of place-based learning, transcending the ‘fixed’ location of a field trip. Most of the photographs taken by the students were quite traditional in style: predominantly of landscapes (devoid of people) and the same view was often photographed by multiple students. For example, whilst on a boat trip to visit Old Harry Rocks, most of the group took photographs of the white foamy waves generated by the vessel (Fig. 5). Many of the students used the panoramic feature on their phone, to capture vast stretches of the landscapes. Only one student appeared to edit the photographs before sharing them, with no one else in the group using filters to enhance their photographs. The traditional style of the students’ landscape photographs may have been in response to their own perceptions of what was expected of them, on an educational trip focused on landscape features and forms. In this way, formal education can be seen to shape student behaviour and perhaps constrain it. A less critical

98

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

Fig. 5 Photograph taken by a student during a boat trip to Old Harry Rocks

analysis may be that adult perceptions of youthscapes and youth culture are misplaced, and that the students valued the aesthetic properties of landscape.

Documenting the Interactions with the Unfamiliar Using Video The group made a video whilst on the field trip. This provided valuable insights into how the students made sense of and interacted with the unfamiliar landscape around them, as well as the unfamiliar social context of the visit. It was also an important vehicle for promoting group collaboration. The production was led by one student, who recorded the majority of the footage and edited it. On the first day of the visit, this student commented that he wished he had made a ‘vlog’ (video blog) of the trip. After some encouragement from the research lead, he

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

99

began recording, enthusiastically. This was in contrast to his behaviour at the start of the trip, in which he had seemed ‘switched off ’ and distant from the group (spending a lot of time speaking on his phone to friends at home). He appeared disconnected from the awayscape, preferring to maintain connections with the familiar. Once he started filming the vlog, he became committed to producing a final, edited account of the field trip. Being a small group, all of the students’ voices are heard on the film and their shared experience is documented. The students used the video to record the more mundane aspects of their visit and discuss their thoughts, providing a record from their perspective. Footage from the video (Fig. 6) shows the camaraderie of the group developing as the trip progressed. They use a series of hashtags to explain key scenes and clearly developed a group identity, having given themselves a group name, ‘the geostars’. This social interaction is commented on in the follow up survey, with one student stating, ‘it was very fun bonding with the rest of the class’. Another commented that: We [the group] got along really well and all enjoyed our stay – made some very funny memories and inside stories.

The development of relationships is an important part of field trips, with people interacting with each other in an unfamiliar way, in an unfamiliar setting. Making the video became a vehicle for facilitating these interactions. It also appeared to blur the boundaries between formal and informal learning, as well as delving into the ‘Youthscapes’ of those on camera. The formal agenda for the visit provided the context for much of the material; however, the intrapersonal and social dimensions of the learning process are very evident. As with the photographs, the process of making the video became as important, if not more important, than the finished product. Recording, editing, sharing and discussing the footage formed a significant part of each day. As such, making the video played a key role in shaping the awayscape. However, the recording and editing provides a particular perspective of the trip (influenced by the person recording it) and may not reflect how everyone in the group experienced the visit, with some students having feelings they were not willing to share on camera.

100

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

Fig. 6 Video fragments/photovoice montage

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

101

The video provides an insight into the individual, intrapersonal aspects of the awayscape experience. Whilst the field notes (Fig. 3) suggest that the students’ mindset was largely positive (with multiple references to feelings of excitement, fun, relaxation and an appreciation for their surroundings), the video footage show moments in which individuals were quiet or less engaged with the group and their surroundings. For example, the group are slightly withdrawn during a lengthy, cold and windy boat ride across Poole Harbour to view Old Harry Rocks. There is much discussion on the video about the sharing of seasickness tablets before the boat trip, which allegedly made the group drowsy and quiet. Feelings of apparent boredom are also articulated, with one student complaining about having to conduct ‘yet another wave count’ as part of the fieldwork. The student appears on camera, uninterested in the work or the experience of being at the coast. He sits staring out to sea. This is set in contrast to footage of the group laughing on the minibus or working as a group to demonstrate, to camera, how to collect beach profile data. Some feelings of discontent were also present in the students’ field notes, in which they were asked to consider their least favourite part of the day. Many of these refer to the more mundane aspects of the awayscape, such as waiting to do something or the more personal aspects of dealing with shared sleeping spaces. The video footage also documents emotional responses to different aspects of the landscape. Some of the video conversations between student’s centre upon how the landscape differed to their expectations, predominantly their surprise. Several students commented that they expected Dorset to be ‘dirty’ but in fact it turned out to be ‘…actually clean’ and ‘…actually nice’. Cook (2010) discusses how similar findings emerged during a research-based field trip to Malham, in Yorkshire, where students had a similar preoccupation with the cleanliness of the area. It was not clear in what ways the students expected Dorset to be ‘more dirty’. We might speculate that ‘dirty’ is a word that students may use to describe unfamiliar or unknown places, a word used for places that are different to what they usually experience. Or it might be that their perception of places is strongly shaped by their experiences of living in London, in which some parts of the landscape are ‘dirty’ and

102

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

in which there are strong smells associated with ‘dirty’ urban waste and traffic fumes. This highlights the influence of lived experience in shaping perceptions of the physical setting in which learning takes place.

4.2

Engaging with Unfamiliar Places Through Fieldwork

A key aim of the Dorset visit was to undertake geographical fieldwork, in support of formal classroom learning. Malone (2008) argues that, given the opportunity to visit another location, young people are able to acquire knowledge and develop new skills. Writing about school geography, Hope (2009, cited in Hammond, 2018: 172) supports this, arguing that fieldwork is an ‘important mode of learning’ for students. In this instance the students participated in a number of somewhat traditional and formal learning activities in the field, including the collection of coastal fieldwork data and guided tours of the area. However, our research suggests that in this example, learning took place within the unique context of the awayscape: a hybrid space of formal education and informal ‘lifescapes’ or ‘youthworlds’. Furthermore, in this space learning can occur in new and perhaps more spontaneous ways. For the students, smartphone technology became an important learning tool. They used mobile data to explore the meanings of place names, such as the Jurassic Coast and to look at online maps. Each morning, one student would use their smartphone to look up the distances between the places they were due to visit that day, quoting these as the group travelled in the minibus, announcing the expected arrival time for each destination. In doing this, the student was beginning to make sense of the area around her and increase its familiarity. In another example, one of the students suggested using a smartphone app to check the angle of each slope, whilst profiling the beach, illustrating further evidence of student-led learning influencing the fieldwork. This also influenced future fieldwork practice for the staff, who have used this app since with other students. These examples show the way in which smartphones may be used to support learning outdoors, as opposed to detaching students from the experience or their surroundings. This is supported by Anderson et al. (2015: 1), whose research found that rather

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

103

than ‘curtailing ties to the environment’, the use of mobile technology during fieldwork can enhance the development of knowledge. Our research also illustrates ways in which students can be given opportunities, during a field trip, to respond emotionally to the landscape and use their senses to explore their surroundings. When arriving at Durdle Door, with the aim of completing a formal data collection task, the students all walked to the water’s edge and sat down. They sat for some time, talking to each other, looking at the sea and feeling the different pebbles and stones around them. They picked up the beach material and ran it through their hands. Some of them threw pebbles into the sea. For one student, their favourite part of the day was ‘when I got my feet wet in the water’. Here, the planned agenda was paused and the itinerary became student-led. This desire to explore the landscape through touch was also seen during a guided tour of Lulworth cove. When shown some rock samples, a student eagerly stated: ‘I want to touch it’ and reached out to do so. This action was then repeated by the rest of the group. The impact of this experience and their interest in the rocks was evident in their field notes. One student commented: It was interesting finding out about the composition of the rocks and how the resistance of the rock varies, and how the environment affected the formation [of the rocks].

The students’ field notes included a significant number of comments on geology (Fig. 3), and an enjoyment of the guided tour. This could be because the session was led by a local Ranger. It was a new voice, a new narrative, delivered in an unfamiliar way, in an unfamiliar setting. This unfamiliarity may have been what caught their attention and engaged them, in ways that formal learning does not always do. The rocks were ‘real’, tangible. They could be held, touched and seen as situated in, and part of the surrounding landscape. The group had not studied geology in detail at school, therefore it provided a new focus for their learning, and was ‘exciting’ and engaging. Their field notes also highlight that many of the students considered the process of collecting fieldwork data and learning new skills to be significant, with one commenting that

104

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

they ‘enjoyed learning new fieldwork techniques’. Experiencing the landscape first-hand, whilst also learning, was considered a welcome part of the awayscape. Several students commented that they welcomed seeing places such as Old Harry Rocks ‘in real life’ rather than ‘just in exam questions’ or ‘online’.

4.3

Reflections on the Unfamiliar

Upon returning to London, some weeks after the visit, the students were asked to reflect upon their experiences in Dorset. The responses to the post-visit surveys are richer in detail and content than those before the trip (Fig. 3). They make reference to geographical learning, as well as informal social experiences. There is also a greater sense of place and familiarity, with multiple references to the names of locations visited in Dorset, although some places appear to have become more familiar than others, with Durdle Door and Swanage being key memories. As in the pre-visit survey, aspects of the formal geography curriculum are still present, with some focusing on their upcoming assessment (NEA) and how they successfully collected coastal data: It was useful as the skills and methods can be applied to my own coursework.

However, these formal reflections were less pronounced in comparison with the pre-visit survey. The process of ‘bonding with the rest of the class’ and collecting some ‘very funny memories’ were cited as positive elements. One wrote explicitly about the welcome ‘balance between work and independent leisure and recreation time’. The relationship between the formal and informal learning is a complex one. This complexity can be seen in the students’ answers to the question: ‘if you were to go another field trip, where would you like to go and what would you do there’? This generated a lot of ideas and suggestions for future visits. Like their answers to the pre-visit survey, the students’ responses were largely shaped by their experiences of formal school geography and textbooks. For example, they wanted to go to

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

105

Blackpool and look at evidence of regeneration or visit Norfolk to investigate erosion, aspects of geography covered by the school curriculum. However, having experienced the visit to Dorset, their responses show that they now held an interest in visiting other places, in wanting to discover new environments. As such, it could be argued that the visit to Dorset had provided them with a new lens for viewing the world and the formal scaffolding to think about visiting other, unfamiliar landscapes.

5

Conclusions

The goal of this chapter was to provide support for a broader understanding of the role that fieldwork can play in individual learning and development, as well as supporting academic achievement. An important outcome of the study is the realisation that, whilst formal learning provided a reason for this field trip to take place, it did not define it. Although set within the framework of the school curriculum, the personal youthscapes of the students shaped aspects of the trip and influenced how they learnt about the landscape. Students were able to informalise their experiences by exercising their agency at various points, thus enhancing their engagement with unfamiliar landscapes and the unfamiliar social dynamics associated with the awayscape. During the visit to Dorset, students embraced a variety of learning opportunities, beyond simply cognitive development. The many experiential aspects of the visit appeared to contribute to their personal and social development. Thus, whilst the fieldwork was undertaken within the constraints of the formal education systems, where exam results and other performance indicators are key, the potential benefits far exceed this narrow, instrumentalist rationale. The research supports the principle of offering young people a range of learning opportunities during a field trip, as well as recognising new opportunities for learning as they emerge. This generates positive outcomes for those involved in the fieldwork (including trip leaders).

106

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

Furthermore, the research suggests that planning periods of ‘freedom’, away from the formal schedule, can have powerful outcomes for those taking part. Arguably, trip leaders should consider this when planning visits, and provide space for the informal and spontaneous to occur. However, there is a danger of overplanning, of formalising the informal, therefore reducing the impact of serendipitous moments. It could also be tempting to place greater importance on the informal, social elements of the awayscape over formal learning. Instead, our research suggests that formal and informal learning can come together synergistically to create a valuable experience for young people. Furthermore, by making small adjustments to the planning of field trips, there are opportunities for a more holistic approach to fieldwork, capable of embracing different disciplinary traditions (natural science, humanistic and critical). Ideally this would become part of deliberate practice, rather than being accidental, although the freedom to embrace the unexpected is essential. In many ways the field trip described here was no different to many others that take place each year, in many settings. However, the emphasis placed upon ‘experimenting’ and being ‘responsive’ to the students during the visit, was a particular characteristic of the visit. The use of smartphone technology to assist learning and discovery of the unfamiliar was also an important feature of this particular awayscape. The students were able to use tools that were familiar to them (their phones) to make sense of a new experience and an unfamiliar landscape. This approach to fieldwork and to learning can also be explored by those taking young people to unfamiliar landscapes in other contexts, beyond educational settings. The focus of this research was very much that of an ‘eduawayscape’—travelling away specifically for educational purposes—but the outcomes may benefit those working in a range of other contexts involving awayscapes such as youth work or sports-related activity or, indeed vacation and leisure. A closer dialogue between schools and others involved in outdoor learning may also help those planning and running geographical fieldwork.

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

107

References Anderson, C. L., Miller, B. G., Eitel, K. B., Veletsianos, G., Eitel, J. U. H., & Hougham, R. J. (2015). Exploring techniques for integrating mobile technology into field-based environmental education. Electronic Journal of Science Education, 19 (6). Aponte-Martínez, G. J., & Pellegrino, A. (2017). Youthscaping our classrooms: Nurturing youth civic agency through youth-centered pedagogies. The Social Studies, 108(3), 99–110. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. University of Minnesota Press. Bekerman, Z., Burbules, N. C., & Silberman-Keller, D. (2007). Introduction. In N. C. Burbules & D. Silberman-Keller (Eds.), Learning in places: The informal education reader (Vol. 249, pp. 1–8). Peter Lang. Birnie, J., & Grant, A. (2001). Providing learning support for students with mental health difficulties undertaking fieldwork and related activities. Geography Discipline Network. Braund, M., & Reiss, M. (2004). The nature of learning science outside the classroom. In M. Braund & M. Reiss (Eds.), Learning science outside the classroom (pp. 1–12). Routledge Falmer. Chen, Z., Suntikul, W., & King, B. (2019). Research on tourism experiencescapes: The journey from art to science. Current Issues in Tourism, 23(11), 1407–1425. Cook, V. (2010). Exploring students’ personal experiences of geography fieldwork. Teaching Geography, 35 (2), 55–57. DFE. (2013). Geography programmes of study: Key stage 3 (National curriculum in England) (DFE-00193-2013). HMSO. DfE. (2014). Geography GCE AS and A level subject content (DFE-006932015). DfES. (2006). Learning outside the classroom manifesto. DfES Publications. Dorset County Council. (2020). Area profile for Swanage. https://apps.geowes sex.com/insights/AreaProfiles/Parish/swanage Falk, J. H., & Dierking, L. D. (2016). The museum experience. Routledge. Firth, R. (2011). Debates about knowledge and the curriculum: Some implications for geography education. In G. Butt (Ed.), Geography, education and the future (pp. 141–164). Continuum. Hammond, L. (2018). The place of fieldwork in geography. In D. Lambert & M. Jones (Eds.), Debates in geography (2nd ed., pp. 171–183). Routledge.

108

A. Morgan and D. Freeman

Hopkins, P. (2010). Young people, place and identity. Routledge. Hopkins, P. (2011). Young people’s spaces. In P. Foley & S. Leverett (Eds.), Children and young people’s spaces: Developing practice (pp. 25–39). OUP/Palgrave Macmillan. Kinder, A. (2013). What is the contribution of fieldwork to school geography? In D. Lambert & M. Jones (Eds.), Debates in geography (pp. 180–192). Routledge. LBR. (2011). London Borough of Redbridge 2011 census results. https://www. redbridge.gov.uk/about-the-council/information-research-and-data-aboutredbridge/2011-census-results/ Leverett, S. (2011). Children’s spaces. In P. Foley & S. Leverett (Eds.), Children and young people’s spaces: Developing practice (pp. 9–24). OUP/Palgrave Macmillan. Maira, S., & Soep, E. (Eds.). (2005). Youthscapes: The popular, the national, the global . Pennsylvania University Press. Malone, K. (2008). Every experience matters: An evidence based research report on the role of learning outside the classroom for children’s whole development from birth to eighteen years. Report commissioned by Farming and Countryside Education for UK Department Children, School and Families, Wollongong, Australia. Martin, F. (2005). Ethnogeography: A future for primary geography and primary geography research? IRGEE, 14 (4), 364–371. Martin, F. (2008). Ethnogeography: Towards liberatory geography education. Children’s Geographies, 6 (4), 437–450. Marvell, A., & Simm, D. (2018). Emotional geographies experienced during international fieldwork: An evaluation of teaching and learning strategies for reflective assessment. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 42(4), 515–530. Matthews, M. H. (1992). Making sense of place: Children’s understanding of large-scale environments (Vol. 11). Harvester Wheatsheaf/Barnes and Noble Books. Moncrieff, D. (2008). Fieldwork: ‘Placing’ people. Teaching Geography, 33(1), 9–10. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23755274 Morgan, A. (2010). Place-based education versus geography education? In G. Butt (Ed.), Geography, education and the future. Continuum. O’Dell, T., & Billing, P. (2005). Experiencescapes: Tourism, culture and economy: Copenhagen Business School Press DK.

4 Informalising and Transforming Learning Experiences …

109

Phillips, R. (2015). Playful and multi-sensory fieldwork: Seeing, hearing and touching New York. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 39 (4), 617– 629. Schugurensky, D. (2007). “This is our school of citizenship”: Informal learning in local democracy. In Z. Bekerman, N. C. Burbules, & D. SilbermanKeller (Eds.), Learning in places: The informal education reader (Vol. 249, pp. 162–182). Peter Lang. Selmes, I., & Wallace, A. (2014). The fieldwork of place. Teaching Geography, 39 (Autumn), 118–120. Smith, M. K. (2007). Beyond the curriculum: Fostering associational life in schools. In Z. Bekerman, N. C. Burbules, & D. Silberman-Keller (Eds.), Learning in places: The informal education reader (Vol. 249, pp. 9–33). Peter Lang. Sobel, D. (2005). Place-based education: Connecting classrooms and communities (2nd ed.). The Orion Society. Tart, C. T. (Ed.). (1990). Altered states of consciousness (3rd ed.). Harper Collins. Verbeek, P., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2002). The primate relationship with nature: Biophilia as a general pattern. In P. H. Kahn Jnr & S. R. Kellert (Eds.), Children and nature: Psychological (pp. 1–27). The MIT Press. Wals, A. E. J., Geerling-Eijff, F., Hubeek, F., van der Kroon, S., & Vader, J. (2008). All mixed up? Instrumental and emancipatory learning toward a more sustainable world: Considerations for EE policymakers. Applied Environmental Education and Communication, 7 (3), 55–65.

5 Learning in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Role of Discomfort in Transformative Environmental Education Lewis Winks

1

Introduction

Environmental education has been historically informed by a knowledgefocused theory of change; focusing on the development of skills and understanding of issues and possibilities in the face of habitat loss, climate change and threats to species (Heimlich et al., 2013). Although such instrumental approaches remain as hallmarks of environmental education, educators have also been informed by a broader approach drawing upon nature connection (Van Matre, 1990) and more recently attentiveness to the more-than-human world, spanning ecotherapy and ecological education (Clinebell, 2013; Smith et al., 1999). Wellbeing and mindfulness have also become key points of focus for educational research and policy, with nature connection becoming a central concern (Capaldi et al., 2015; Lumber et al., 2017; Wolsko & Lindberg, 2013). L. Winks (B) University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_5

111

112

L. Winks

As such, many experiences now offered by environmental educators contain the key components for developing environmental sensitivity, promoting ecological awareness and relationship with nature, and enhancing wellbeing (Bogner, 2002; Dettmann-Easler & Pease, 1999; Lumber et al., 2017; Robertson et al., 2015; Wolsko & Lindberg, 2013). Research into nature connectedness provides insight into associated outcomes of wellbeing and the fostering of pro-environmental behaviours (Lumber et al., 2017; Pritchard et al., 2019). These recent findings have begun to usher in a more purposeful approach to developing learner sensitivity to the more-than-human world as part of outdoor education programmes (Selby & Kagawa, 2015). For Jickling (2017) such sensitivity can emerge from ‘disruptive moments’, occurring as a component of experiences which are outside of those which learners might normally have with the potential to transform worldviews and behaviours. In the field, encounters with other ecologies, places and landscapes on the boundaries of the familiar provide opportunities for participants to challenge themselves. On occasions this challenge is felt as uncomfortable. This chapter explores how discomfort in association with unfamiliar environments arises, and what potential might be held in these disruptive experiences for transformative learning to occur. The chapter explores the experiences of secondary school aged students (15–18 year olds) in unfamiliar environments. Drawing on three examples from UK outdoor educational practice, the case is made that such encounters on the threshold of familiarity are important components of a transformative education, arising as emergent and unpredictable aspects of learning in unfamiliar settings.

2

Learning and Discomfort

(Mezirow, 1997: 7) remarked; ‘we do not make transformative changes in the way we learn as long as what we learn fits comfortably in our existing frames of reference’. Moving outside of these frames of reference has been regarded as a challenge for many environmental educators pursuing a

5 Learning in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Role of Discomfort …

113

transformative approach to sustainability education (Jickling & Sterling, 2017; Taylor & Cranton, 2012; Wals, 2010). Discomfort has previously been articulated as a pedagogical approach deployed in educating for social justice and relating to issues of exclusion and marginalisation, specifically race and gender, across disciplines such as health work and social care (Aultman, 2005; Coulter et al., 2013; Cutri & Whiting, 2015; Leibowitz et al., 2010; Nadan & Stark, 2016; Zembylas, 2010). The concept of a pedagogy of discomfort was forwarded by Megan Boler (1999, 2004) who suggested that discomfort might operate within educational settings to enable students and educators to ‘willingly inhabit a more ambiguous and flexible sense of self [and to engage with a] critical enquiry regarding values and cherished beliefs’ (Boler, 1999: 176). We embody a set of culturally and socially manifested beliefs and values which provoke certain behaviours. Unsustainable behaviours, although enacted by individuals, are embodied by society and provide a normative set of social conducts and behaviours which become accepted by a social group (Cialdini et al., 1991; Heimlich et al., 2013). Social norms are key to shifting behaviour, but developing new norms has posed a challenge to educators working with issues of environment and sustainability (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002). The mechanism for creating shifts in what Mezerow (1997) terms ‘habits of mind’ towards more sustainable behaviours as well as pluralistic conceptions of justice might be found in an education which acts to discomfort any individuals’ values and beliefs (Cranton & Taylor, 2012). The process of working with discomfort in an educational setting aims to draw out assumptions and place them under scrutiny. Boler has termed this the act of ‘shattering of worldviews’ (Boler, 1999). Working with issues of social justice in the classroom, Arao and Clemens (2013) point out that risk cannot be removed from discourse on such matters, and to suggest so would be counterproductive and disingenuous. Instead, they emphasise that open discussion on these pressing issues comes from an acknowledgement that dialogue about them entails a degree of discomfort and risk, and therefore suggest the use of the word bravery rather than safety. In doing so, Arao and Clemens (2013) propose that students are more prepared to be challenged and confronted in the learning environment. Highlighting the important role of institutions in

114

L. Winks

supporting learners and educators to step in to such spaces, Cook-Sather (2016: 2) suggests that making use of brave space ‘implies that there is indeed likely be danger or harm—threats that require bravery on the part of those who enter. But those who enter the space have the courage to face that danger and to take risks because they know they will be taken care of—that painful or difficult experiences will be acknowledged and supported, not avoided or eliminated’. Additionally, recognising discomfort connects environmental and relational pedagogies, as new emotional frontiers are opened and discussed (Carmi et al., 2015; Zembylas & Chubbuck, 2009). From a relational point of view, uncomfortable aspects of environmental education are seen not as something to be avoided, but part of a broad experience of the environment in which there exists a range of reactions and interactions. Such broad encounters often occur as emergent and unplanned aspects of environmental education programmes, examples of which are discussed in the following section.

3

Co-Curating Learning on the Boundaries of the Unfamiliar

Encountering the unfamiliar, and the uncomfortable in outdoor learning settings can offer opportunities to reassess the value of learning experiences, especially those in which the educational value rests upon factors which emerge—unexpectedly—from the environment itself. The following three stories chart such encounters and the experiences of students taking part in environmental education programmes. For the stories which follow, the notion of co-curation and encounters with the unfamiliar is manifested in varying ways. As has been discussed, learning on the boundaries of the unfamiliar often entails discomfort; sometimes orchestrated, and often unpredictably emerging from the learning situation and the environment. Deliberately challenging and provoking participants through exposure to challenge, risk and discomfort, is a recognised educational approach—entangled as it is with ethical issues and parameters (Zembylas, 2015). Such provocations in education lay at

5 Learning in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Role of Discomfort …

115

the heart of Boler’s Pedagogy of Discomfort and sit behind the considerations of those who have sought to delineate consent-based boundaries for this work (Arao and Clemens, 2013; Boler, 1999). However, this chapter offers an alternative—yet related—perspective on the function of discomfort associated with unfamiliarity in outdoor environmental education. That is the way in which emergent discomfort asserts itself in learning programmes and is taken up—or not—by educators and learners. This form of discomfort finds itself within even the most instrumental of learning programmes and occurs both forcefully and subtly. In the sections which follow, three vignettes are offered— each describing an encounter occurring during residential programmes which took place at a field centre in South Devon, UK. The vignettes were recorded as part of an in-depth ethnography of the field centre and its programmes throughout 2016. I joined each group for the duration of their stay at the field centre, making observational notes, speaking with participants in the field, and running small focus groups at the end of the programme. The participants were all enrolled in post-16 education and taking part in biology and geography curriculum-focused fieldtrips. These fieldtrips were often aimed at building knowledge and datasets to prepare students for exams—or for learning field techniques. The emphasis on softer and wider skills was often less stated. However, what I wish to draw out in the stories which follow is the way in which these encounters often gave rise to nuanced forms of learning in association with unfamiliar environments and experiences of discomfort. These storied encounters diverge from Boler’s pedagogy of discomfort in that in none of them was there an explicit intention to make participants uncomfortable, yet discomfort occurred as an aspect of their experience. These vignettes therefore illustrate the ways in which discomfort is experienced and articulated by participants taking part in environmental education programmes, where it is unplanned rather than intentional.

116

3.1

L. Winks

The Woods

This first vignette could easily represent many field trip experiences which take place in novel and new environments. In it, a group from West London—many of whom had not spent prolonged, if any, time in the woods before—were carrying out leaf litter surveys off the path and in dense undergrowth. It was a humid day in mid-summer. Some of the students found it difficult to touch the leaf litter and to sort through it— and expressed shock and disgust at finding small spiders in the sample trays. In addition to the insect life on the ground the air was also filled with flies which were bothering some of the students: I noticed that one of the students had zipped his waterproof top right up and has the hood up – people notice and began to laugh. He responded with a muffled voice – “the bugs!” he exclaimed – “I hate them! … this is too close to nature for me miss” .

Making notes in the field—I noticed how for some of the students this was far outside of what they might deem comfortable. And, although a ‘routine’ day on such a fieldtrip, for this particular group the unfamiliarity of the environment was the cornerstone of their experience in the woods. As we will hear, these encounters with the more-than-human world were to be formative, yet not the focus of the session, which was to design and implement field techniques. Later on, during a review of the programme, I spoke to some of the students about their experiences in Slapton Woods, and specifically asked them about how they felt when carrying out the leaf litter sampling. Lizzy responded: …I [said], don’t [lay the quadrat] there because there’s not going to be anything. And then all these things, all these spiders came crawling out and I was like, oh okay! So, yeah, that just showed me that when you’re walking through the woods there are so many [insects]…

5 Learning in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Role of Discomfort …

117

Adding: I must have killed so many insects by walking in the woods. Poor little things. (Lizzy)

Reflecting on this, Kirsty commented on the difference being away from home made to her in considering more-than-human life, and her response to finding a spider in the house: Normally, when I’m at home I would kill a spider just like that - with my shoe - I wouldn’t think twice about it and I [would] be like, oh, it doesn’t matter anyway because it’s nothing. When were at home, we’re not in the countryside so we don’t even have to consider it. You don’t really get a lot of bugs where we are unless you have your window open and light on, and you get moth or something… (Kirsty)

Kim continued, saying: If [a moth] was in my room, I would whack it straight away so that it would be gone. But [here] in the woods… I actually feel a bit bad. Like, I’ve been slapping you with a shoe! I feel quite horrible. And you’re looking at them, and [thinking], they’re actually living and crawling and they’ve got everything in their body… they’ve got legs and they move… They’re actually a bit like us. Do you know what I mean? They are alive. And it’s weird to think about it like that. (Kim)

I found these reflections to be important indicators of the depth and richness of the experiences of some of the students, for whom initially the discomfort of the interaction with the environment overshadowed the ‘purpose’ of the work. Lizzie’s recognition of the life in the woods, and the impact she may have had upon them, and Kim’s admission of guilt and empathic reasoning with the life of the insects provide us with a glimpse of the potential power of working with discomfort in environmental education. In this example students went into the woods with an explicit aim of learning fieldwork techniques and learning about the

118

L. Winks

ecology of the woods. The uncertainty and unpredictability which came with these experiences led to feelings of disgust and discomfort yet in turn challenged participant’s understandings and provoked feelings of empathy with the more-than-human world. This example is likely to be familiar to many environmental educators, and involves the invoking of recognisable encounters groups may have within unfamiliar setting of the woods. The vignette which follows steps into a different environment and plays upon alternative approaches to working with discomfort at alternate scales—that of coastal erosion and climate change.

3.2

A Damaged Coastline

In the last vignette, the woods and the creatures which inhabited them were the focus of the student’s feelings and reactions. In this next story, it is the events which unfold and the repercussions for the local community that created ripples of unease amongst the visiting group of young people. In this example, a group of A-level geographers are visiting Torcross, a village on the coastline of Start Bay in Devon in the days following a large winter storm. Although the sea was calm, the evidence of damage to houses and sections of the sea wall was also apparent. Pointing to the houses, a student commented on the state of the houses with surprise—especially considering the calm conditions on the day: They all seem to have boards up. On the front, downstairs windows… like they have been smashed or they were protecting them in case there was a storm or something. They all seem to be really cautious about the fact that there was going to be waves coming over the top like it’s happened before. (Cai)

The students continued to walk along the sea front, looking at the storm damage. Observing the students, I noted how much this seemed to affect them. I was used to taking groups to this part of the coast and was all too familiar with the havoc the winter storms bring to the community at Torcross.

5 Learning in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Role of Discomfort …

119

The following day, some of the students recounted to me how it made them feel to see the damage: …the seawall had literally started to fall away, and the massive crack that has appeared… You feel sorry for the people that are living, or used to live there in the cottages. It’s not nice. (Hamid)

The environment was new to them, yet it was not only the environment which stuck with them but the plight of the residents: And I think because we live right in the middle of the country we don’t see these coastal things like, it’s not a problem where we live because there is no coast. So… seeing all these things, it’s mad . (Cai)

Naturally this comment led to further discussion on climate change and sea-level rise. The witnessing of localised destruction of houses and sea defences in Devon prompted a widening of concern for those who live further from the sea, including the students themselves: It’s scary thinking about …sea level[s] rising at such a rapid rate. It brings home the whole climate change and global warming [stuff]… because we aren’t really affected by it at all. If this is going to happen, this is obviously going to have an impact on us, because if sea levels do rise more people have to, I suppose, come into our local area, inland. They will have to come into where we live… (Polly)

This vignette is significant because although for the group the environment is new and unfamiliar, it is not the environment itself which provokes feelings of discomfort, but the circumstances which surround their visit. Their shock at seeing storm damage was illuminating not only because the damage was noticed, but because it offered an opportunity for reflection on the difficulties faced by coastal communities and the plight of the residents at Torcorss. In Polly’s comment is a sentiment of recognition at the future importance of such debates and an

120

L. Winks

understanding of the uneven and unjust distribution of sea level rise and coastal storm damage. Taking the group to Torcross offered opportunities to discuss ecological justice, community reparations and climate change in new ways. As with the previous story from Slapton Woods, these experiences could not be accounted for in the planning which foregrounded the trip—the encounter with the damage to the buildings was surprising to the students, and offered learning opportunities which were not predictable.

3.3

The Rocky Shore

Field sites themselves often provide unusual and unfamiliar settings for young people on fieldtrips. In this final vignette this is demonstrated when one group visits the rocky shore for a biology trip to examine rock pools. The weather that day was intensely hot, which played a significant role in provoking the following reactions from students. For some the physical challenges presented themselves first: It was quite uncomfortable because the rocks themselves were uncomfortable and it was so hot. We couldn’t stand properly, so our feet were hurting, you can sit down because your bum with hurt, because you’re sitting on rocks. (Lola) It was just dangerous. I don’t do [the] outdoors as it is, and not slimy seaweed and rocks. Everybody was nearly falling over, I just thought it’s really not worth it. We were only taking one reading down there anyway, I just thought we would only have to trek back. So I thought there’s no point. (Sara)

As the day progressed, frustrations began to rise as the students became hotter and more uncomfortable in the sun. Many of the students that day commented that they felt that they had spent too long down at the rock pools, and that time seemed to be going by very slowly, as exemplified by Rachel and Lauren:

5 Learning in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Role of Discomfort …

121

I feel like the beginning was good because it was new, like we haven’t done it before, and we were learning stuff. But then after we had learnt stuff we just carried on and it was a bit of a long day even though it was only a couple of hours. It felt like we’ve been there from breakfast to dinner. The sun was a bit too intense to concentrate properly. (Rachel) I think it was just the sun… it wasn’t what we were doing. I think it was the fact that it was that hot. She was giving us a lot longer than we needed for the tasks as well . (Lauren)

Towards the end of the day, the students were clearly becoming upset and many of them simply refused to continue to work (they were monitoring salinity changes in a rock pool). Tensions began to rise, and it became clear that we would have to leave the beach, as detailed in my notes from the day: Chloe introduced the next part of the fieldwork which was to be the final part of looking at how seaweed distribution changes across the shore zones. This was met with considerable opposition by many of the students (although some of them got up and went to get their equipment without complaint). One of the students reacted (out of earshot of Chloe) "this is a joke now – who gives a damn about seaweed? It’s too hot and everyone’s burning". Another student complained she had a headache and I suggested she have some water to which she replied – “I don’t want to drink because then I will need to go for a wee”… not wanting to wee outside. (Author’s notes)

Additionally, two of the students who had initially refused to go to the further rock pools were becoming more and more restless and upset and were insistent that it was time to go back to the field centre. I sensed that this was due to more than just the heat down at the rock pools. I waited until later in the evening to ask them about this, to which Sara offered the following response:

122

L. Winks

Down there I felt a lot further away from life, although we were looking at life. I just felt away from the world. And we were low, I felt quite claustrophobic in a way even though was even the really big space. But just really on your own. I felt stranded . (Sara)

This example differs from the previous in that the discomfort experienced by the students stemmed from the conditions on the day—the reaction from students was intense rejection of the situation they were in. This example is included because it is an indication of a boundary crossed in which the students learning was perhaps compromised. The feeling of being ‘on your own’ and not being able to meet basic needs to drink water and to urinate make for challenging reading and provide us with a degree of warning at what might happen when we take groups into unfamiliar landscapes and push boundaries of comfort. It is clear that ethical challenges exist alongside the physical and learning challenges of working in such environments—something that educators wishing to harness the power of learning in unfamiliar settings need to be aware of and open to working with.

4

Signposts for Practice

The encounters detailed in the three vignettes all took place on residential fieldtrips where learning was focused on the acquisition of knowledge and the development of fieldwork skills. Nature connection and experiential encounters in the outdoors were implicit aspects of learning which are often assumed to happen, rather than promoted by such trips. However, as these vignettes reveal, such experiences offer more than it is promoted from an instrumental and curricula perspective. Indeed, detailed in these stories are encounters with environmental settings and moments which challenge, disrupt and cause discomfort. Such experiences sit outside of most programme overviews and plans, yet were core themes of student reflections and experiences in the field.

5 Learning in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Role of Discomfort …

123

From the accounts of these students, the ecological, material and unexpected encounters of the field are important components of outdoor and experiential learning. How then can we begin to practically understand the ways in which such emergent encounters with unfamiliarity and discomfort occur during programmes, and how they might be to some extent harnessed to provide deeper learning experiences? In an attempt to direct this chapter more usefully towards practice, here follows a number of observations as tentative signposts for practitioners wishing to make use of disruptive and uncomfortable moments in outdoor and environmental education.

4.1

Mutual Agreement and Brave Spaces

Stepping into uncertainty and unfamiliarity might occur explicitly, as proposed through a pedagogy of discomfort, or implicitly as spontaneous elements of learning and living in residential outdoor settings. Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort goes so far in suggesting that tackling social justice issues requires a challenge to underlying worldviews. Yet placing learners into uncomfortable scenarios, and presenting such overt challenge, demands new pedagogical approaches. Making use of a pedagogical approach which challenges, and causes discomfort and upset, necessarily moves away from the traditional mantra of ‘safe’ spaces. Applying a pedagogy of discomfort in outdoor and environmental education is no different, and requires of educators an appreciation of where learner boundaries are, and how best to work with groups to bravely challenge these boundaries. Arao and Clemens (2013) have some practical suggestions of how this might be achieved in a programme: We have found that the simple act of using the term brave space at the outset of a programme, workshop, or class has a positive impact in and of itself, transforming a conversation that can be treated merely as setting the tone, or an obligation to meet before beginning the group learning process, into an integral and important component of [learning].

124

L. Winks

A pedagogy of discomfort operating in brave spaces places, at the centre, issues of consent, fear and choice. Working with brave spaces and a pedagogy of discomfort is not simply another pedagogical mechanism involving a group agreement—going further it can be seen as a broader method of supporting and promoting a cultural shift in the learning environment at its best, but comes with a caution that at its worst it might be coercive, non-consent based and unethical, as was touched upon in the vignette on the rocky shore. Purposefully working with discomfort and developing agreements to work bravely builds into the learning approach a learner-led and consent-based process in which the group sets boundaries to be negotiated. This is important because the degree to which discomfort is felt as held or harmful is based on participant agreement, mutual recognition of subjective boundaries, and the ability to choose to opt in or out of experiences.

4.2

Retrace and Retell

Learning is not a straight line, and on many occasions we find ourselves retracing our steps, going over previous ground and stopping to take stock of situations before deciding how to proceed—especially when confronted with new and unsettling situations. Reflection has long been seen to be important in the well-established pathway to experiential and transformative learning. By reflecting, space is created for learners to sort and make sense of the experiences. Exact approaches and reflective exercises have been extensively covered elsewhere (e.g. Alterio & Mcdrury, 2003; Boud et al., 1985; Dummer et al., 2008; Moon, 1999; Young et al., 2010). Across each of the examples in this chapter student’s encounters with uncertainty, complexity and discomfort were given further clarity by reflection—a retelling of the story in a supportive group setting. In these examples, reflection time was achieved through a focus group which took place later in the evening or the following day. Initial reactions often subsided into wider-than-self appreciation and challenge to the previously regarded environmental worldviews. Reflection might be practically offered in terms of time and space to make sense and discuss the affective and visceral aspects of learning

5 Learning in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Role of Discomfort …

125

in unfamiliar environments—beyond the instrumental desires of the programme, and within both the lived and learning experiences of students. The moment of reflection does not need to be onerous—it might occur immediately following the experience, perhaps in the field, on return to school or field centre, or in the days and weeks which follow. Ideally this would happen as a combination of all of these.

4.3

Conspire and Listen

Conspire is typically reserved for describing plans made in secret. However, its Latin origins allow us to read it differently—‘to breathe together ’ [from con ‘together with’, and spirare ‘breathe’]. Developing group agreements to enter into new environments, situations and experiences with openness to confrontation and challenge, as outlined in the ‘mutual agreement and brave spaces’ section above, brings with it an invitation to take part as a conspirator. Not only in experiencing something new, but in doing this together as a group. Conspiracy is exciting, and invites unfamiliarity. Further, this conspiracy extends to the ways in which we choose to take part in experiences in unfamiliar environments alongside ‘other ecologies and rhythms of life’ (Conradson, 2005), as part of a more-than-human world. One of the most revealing aspects of a pedagogy of discomfort applied within environmental education is its potential to unveil new ways of seeing the more-than-human world as we take part in a collaborative learning experience not only as a group, but alongside other ecologies. Learning in new environments and with other rhythms of life presents an invitation to share collaborative experiences—both socially and ecologically. Learning in unfamiliar landscapes often entails a journey into the unknown, a sense that challenge, danger and potential discomfort which may lay ahead. By joining together in conspiracy, and by learning to listen to the more-than-human world, we raise the potential to deepen experiences to the point of sometimes altered perspectives.

126

5

L. Winks

Conclusions

In this chapter, I have discussed how laying the foundations for disruptive transformative moments entails a learner-led practice of working with brave spaces, offering moments of reflection and conspiring to enter into all of this together, including building our sensitivity to other ecologies, however unfamiliar they may be. The outdoor environment holds within it opportunities to meet aspects of the world which seem unusual and different, and occasionally difficult and uncomfortable. The inevitability of these observations is such that they need not always be designed into programmes and sessions, rather that they often arise spontaneously. The opportunity for educators is to become aware of the potential held within occasions which confront and challenge, and to work with learners to understand the feelings that these moments conjure up. Educators might begin to see a continuity between the formal and informal aspects of learning—complete with challenge, uncertainty and discomfort. This chapter has offered a view of how this has occurred in emergent and spontaneous ways, distinct from Boler’s (1999, 2004) deliberate use of discomfort in social justice education, yet imbued with some of the same potentials to disrupt and confront worldviews. Across the three field-based examples given here there are varying degrees to which participants felt secure—indeed questions concerning the ethical tensions in such work arise and confront us as educators in return. By illuminating the ways in which discomfort might operate in outdoor environmental learning, this chapter offers educators the opportunity to more purposefully make use of such disruptive moments in their programmes. However, in doing so we must place at the centre considerations of participant consent and choice. Making use of brave space, reflection and emphasising collaboration and attentiveness to more-thanhuman ecologies are some of the practical tools available for educators wishing to explore these ideas in their practice.

5 Learning in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Role of Discomfort …

127

References Alterio, M., & Mcdrury, J. (2003). Learning through storytelling in higher education: Using reflection and experience to improve learning. Routledge. Arao, B., & Clemens, K. (2013). From safe spaces to brave spaces. The art of effective facilitation: Reflections from social justice educators (pp. 135–150). Stylus Publishing. Aultman, J. M. (2005). Uncovering the hidden medical curriculum through a pedagogy of discomfort. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 10 (3), 263– 273. Bogner, F. X. (2002). The influence of a residential outdoor education programme to pupil’s environmental perception. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 17 (1), 19–34. Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. Psychology Press. Boler, M. (2004). Teaching for hope. In J. Garrison & D. Liston (Eds.), Teaching, learning, and loving: Reclaiming passion in educational practice. Routledge. Boud, D., Keogh, R., & Walker, D. (1985). Reflection: Turning experience into learning. Routledge. Capaldi, C. A., Passmore, H. A., Nisbet, E. K., Zelenski, J. M., & Dopko, R. L. (2015). Flourishing in nature: A review of the benefits of connecting with nature and its application as a wellbeing intervention. International Journal of Wellbeing, 5 (4). Carmi, N., Arnon, S., & Orion, N. (2015). Transforming environmental knowledge into behavior: The mediating role of environmental emotions. The Journal of Environmental Education, 46 (3), 183–201. Cialdini, R. B., Kallgren, C. A., & Reno, R. R. (1991). A focus theory of normative conduct: A theoretical refinement and reevaluation of the role of norms in human behavior. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 24, 201–234. Clinebell, H. (2013). Ecotherapy: Healing ourselves, healing the earth. Routledge. Cook-Sather, A. (2016). Creating brave spaces within and through studentfaculty pedagogical partnerships. Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 1(18). Conradson, D. (2005). Freedom, space and perspective: Moving encounters with other ecologies. In J. Davidson, M. Smith, & L. Bondi (Eds.), Emotional geographies. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

128

L. Winks

Coulter, S., Campbell, J., Duffy, J., & Reilly, I. (2013). Enabling social work students to deal with the consequences of political conflict: Engaging with victim/survivor service users and a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’. Social Work Education, 32(4), 439–452. Cranton, P., & Taylor, E. W. (2012). Transformative learning theory: Seeking a more unified theory. In P. Cranton & E. W. Taylor (Eds.), The handbook of transformative learning: Theory, research, and practice. Wiley. Cutri, R. M., & Whiting, E. F. (2015). The emotional work of discomfort and vulnerability in multicultural teacher education. Teachers and Teaching, 21(8), 1010–1025. Dettmann-Easler, D., & Pease, J. L. (1999). Evaluating the effectiveness of residential environmental education programs in fostering positive attitudes toward wildlife. The Journal of Environmental Education, 31(1), 33–39. Dummer, T. J., Cook, I. G., Parker, S. L., Barrett, G. A., & Hull, A. P. (2008). Promoting and assessing ‘deep learning’ in geography fieldwork: An evaluation of reflective field diaries. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 32(3), 459–479. Heimlich, J., Mony, P., & Yocco, V. (2013). Belief to behavior: A vital link. In R. B. Stevenson, M. B. Dillon, & A. E. J. Wals (Eds.), International handbook of research on environmental education. Routledge. Jickling, B. (2017). Education revisited: Creating educational experiences that are held, felt, and disruptive. Post-sustainability and environmental education. Palgrave Macmillan. Jickling, B., & Sterling, S. (2017). Post-sustainability and environmental education: Remaking education for the future. Springer. Kollmuss, A., & Agyeman, J. (2002). Mind the gap: Why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behavior? Environmental Education Research, 8(3), 239–260. Leibowitz, B., Bozalek, V., Rohleder, P., Carolissen, R., & Swartz, L. (2010). ‘Ah, but the Whiteys Love to Talk about themselves’: Discomfort as a pedagogy for change. Race Ethnicity and Education, 13(1), 83–100. Lumber, R., Richardson, M., & Sheffield, D. (2017). Beyond knowing nature: Contact, emotion, compassion, meaning, and beauty are pathways to nature connection. PloS One, 12(5), e0177186. Mezirow, J. (1997). Transformative learning: Theory to practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 74, 5–12. Moon, J. A. (1999). Reflection in learning and professional development: Theory and practice. Psychology Press.

5 Learning in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Role of Discomfort …

129

Nadan, Y., & Stark, M. (2016). The pedagogy of discomfort: Enhancing reflectivity on stereotypes and bias. British Journal of Social Work, 47 (3), 683–700. Pritchard, A., Richardson, M., Sheffield, D., & Mcewan, K. (2019). The relationship between nature connectedness and eudaimonic well-being: A meta-analysis. Journal of Happiness Studies, 21(3), 1145–1167. Robertson, M., Lawrence, R., & Heath, G. (2015). Experiencing the outdoors: Enhancing strategies for wellbeing. Springer. Selby, D., & Kagawa, F. (2015). Thoughts from a darkened corner: Transformative learning for the gathering storm. In D. Selby & F. Kagawa (Eds.), Sustainability frontiers: Critical and transformative voices from the borderlands of sustainability education. Toronto. Smith, G. A., & Williams, D. R. (1999). Ecological education in action. State University of New York. Taylor, E. W., & Cranton, P. (2012). The handbook of transformative learning: Theory, research, and practice. Wiley. Van Matre, S. (1990). Earth education: A new beginning. Institute for Earth Education. Wals, A. E. (2010). Message in a bottle: Learning our way out of unsustainability. Wageningen University. Wolsko, C., & Lindberg, K. (2013). Experiencing connection with nature: The matrix of psychological well-being, mindfulness, and outdoor recreation. Ecopsychology, 5 (2), 80–91. Young, J., Haas, E., & Mcgown, E. (2010). Coyote’s guide to connecting with nature. OWLLink Media. Zembylas, M. (2010). Teachers’ emotional experiences of growing diversity and multiculturalism in schools and the prospects of an ethic of discomfort. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 16 (6), 703–716. Zembylas, M. (2015). ‘Pedagogy of discomfort’ and its ethical implications: The tensions of ethical violence in social justice education. Ethics and Education, 10 (2), 163–174. Zembylas, M., & Chubbuck, S. (2009). Emotions and social inequalities: Mobilizing emotions for social justice education. Advances in teacher emotion research. Springer.

Part II The Unfamiliar Past: Negotiating Unfamiliarity in Heritage Spaces

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain: Mobile Technologies and Ecopedagogic Guardians Ria Ann Dunkley and Thomas Aneurin Smith

1

Introduction

The everyday and ordinary-ness of family life have been the mainstay of social research with families, highlighting the routines, negotiations and interrelations that sustain and reproduce the family in all its complexity (Tarrant & Hall, 2020). The focus on the ‘everyday’ in studies of family practices has tended to lend itself to domestic and ‘ordinary’ spaces of family life (Hall & Holdsworth, 2016), rather than to consider families visiting places that might be thought of as unfamiliar. We think of R. A. Dunkley (B) School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. A. Smith School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_6

133

134

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

‘the unfamiliar’ here as the places that exist outwith people’s everyday contexts. Increasing attention has been paid to children’s shrinking independent mobility, identified as a reason for a ‘child panic’, due to the implications for children’s connections to the natural world as well as in terms of negative impacts on mental health and wellbeing (Louv, 2008). It is perhaps as a result of this focus upon the loss of ‘independent’ childhood encounters that result in a lack of analysis of the mobile practices of families walking together in unfamiliar landscapes. Notwithstanding contributions that provide evidence that walking in ‘wild places’ during childhood can have a positive effect on the development of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours in adulthood (Wells & Lekies, 2006), there are few studies that consider the impact of walking as a family (although see Clement & Waitt, 2017), whilst none have considered the implications of exploring unfamiliar landscapes whilst using digital technologies to augment the experience. Within this chapter, we explore the ecopedagogic potential of using mobile technology to augment a family walk in unfamiliar landscapes. We draw on empirical data from video recordings of a family, with two young children, following a heritage app guide of a Roman fort in the Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales. We consider how the unfamiliarity of outdoor, rural landscapes is imbued in the ongoing production of the family, and how this in turn is mediated by mobile technologies. In doing so, we examine the oscillation between the familiar/everyday, and the unfamiliar/extra-ordinary, both in terms of landscape and the family. This brings us to consider how family organisation, and contemporary concerns around learning outdoors with technology, are focused through the negotiation of terrain underfoot, and the landscape itself.

2

Negotiating Unfamiliar Landscapes Together as Ecopedagogy?

Mobile technologies are pervasive in debates about family time, childhood roaming, access to, and experiences in, the outdoors and nature, and in relation to education and learning (Ergler et al., 2016). Electronic

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain …

135

devices are often perceived, particularly within popular media, as being harmful in terms of childhood development and for children’s wellbeing. For example, so-called ‘electronic addiction’ that is thought to result from excessive gaming in childhood in the Twenty-First Century is framed with the same moral panic as the use of illegal drugs in the latter half of the Twentieth Century (Louv, 2012). Experiencing ‘nature’, by contrast, is framed within such narratives as an enabler of childhood development and positive physical and mental health. Rarely are the now ubiquitous mobile technologies and electronic devices, such as mobile apps explored in a way that brings them together with nature experiences in a positive, or even neutral frame. Seeking to provide an alternative perspective to this discourse of harm present when linking technology and nature, we explore questions concerning the impacts of mobile app technology in terms of its ability to augment the ecopedagogic acts that parents might perform in family leisure time. We argue that mobile apps have the potential to open up unfamiliar landscapes to wider ranges of people—in terms of enabling a great appreciation of environmental history, as well as enabling childhood agency during encounters with the unfamiliar. Engagement with and through mobile apps in outdoor settings may facilitate learning in experiential contexts, thought to be a central tenet of ‘slow ecopedagogy’ (Dunkley, 2018; Payne, 2014). Slow ecopedagogy has been conceptualised as a process of place-based, and temporally ‘slow’, ecological conscientisation. Originally, slow ecopedagogy was conceived as the learning opportunities afforded from time spent dwelling in places during field-study visits (Payne, 2014), as opposed to more ‘rushed’ adventure sports or fast-paced pedagogic activities. We have previously extended this notion to include the micro-scale encounters within childhood home surroundings (Dunkley & Smith, 2019), which can play a predominant role in the development of an ecological consciousness, in terms of how children connect to their surroundings. In this chapter, we explore slow ecopedagogy further, challenging, in particular, how ‘slowness’ is defined in relation to families travelling together, and how learning is ‘done’ by the family.

136

2.1

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

Outdoor Learning, Independent Mobility and the Pedagogic Parent

We are interested in this chapter in the role that parents play, as guardians, educators and carers, when they take children to unfamiliar landscapes. The positive outcomes of being outdoors for the family (Cook et al., 2006; Vanaken & Danckaerts, 2018) have increasingly permeated into a moral geography of families ‘spending time outdoors’. Adult guardians are routinely conceived, in research and public media, as the primary restrictors of children’s access to outdoor space (Benwell, 2013), through curfews, boundaries and as the ‘chauffeurs’ between places (Rixon et al., 2019). The overwhelming focus on parental restrictions has overshadowed the need for research on the enabling role of guardians, and constructive negotiations between children and parents about mobility (Joelsson, 2019). Some children accept the spatial restrictions that parents impose, rather than actively resist them, and parents found to encourage children’s mobilities within these restrictions (Horton et al., 2014). Children are rarely completely ‘independent’ when mobile, such that relationships of care and responsibility may be important for family access to, and experiences in, ‘nature’. Previous studies have highlighted how, through repeated local walking practices, children can become familiar with their local environment (Horton et al., 2014), and later we consider how guardians positively facilitate children’s access to, and explorations within, unfamiliar landscapes through family walking practices. Few studies have considered the shared walking practices of families/family outdoors, which is perhaps symptomatic of the tendency to see parent(s) as ‘restricting’ freedom and mobility for children. We demonstrate in this chapter that, for guardians, visiting unfamiliar landscapes with children involves considerable shared work, and here we consider how this shared work is interwoven with ecopedagogic practices. Previous studies of family interactions have typically been in domestic settings, or in the family car, and have primarily focused on interactions where parents are attempting to get children to ‘do’ tasks, emphasising the power dynamics of parental control. Sirota’s (2006) study of parental performance of ‘bedtime’ as an everyday family routine

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain …

137

finds that children often ‘bargain’ to avoid immediately proceeding to bedtime, with parent’s counter-bargaining to get their children to bed. Embodied contact can also be important, such as the ‘shepherding’ of children towards a task, through tactile and non-tactile steering of a child’s bodily movement, often used by parents when verbal directives are unsuccessful (Cekaite, 2010). Keisanen et al. (2017) alternatively find that, in outdoor settings, such as when collecting berries in woodland, parents also bodily/body ‘shepherd’ their children. However, the activity of collecting berries is jointly accomplished with the child, such as children repeating phrases, or through parents highlighting their child’s agency. We are interested here in how guardians do the work of negotiating the unfamiliar landscape with children, but also how this ‘doing’ might be related to more than simply ‘getting the task done’. For example, in unfamiliar terrain, practices of family care may be all the more paramount than in familiar settings, and we wonder also how forms of slow ecopedagogy emerge, or don’t, through walking practices and use of technologies. Relevant to this focus on slow ecopedagogy is how guardians not only have to contend with heightened contemporary anxieties around risk, but also with cultural shifts towards ‘intensive’ and ‘attentive’ parenting, whereby there is growing expectation that guardians are accountable for all aspects of child development, including learning and socialisation (Rixon et al., 2019). As such, parents are normatively positioned as a ‘pedagogical figure’ (Ramaekers & Hodgson, 2020). Families are increasingly bound up in discourses of ‘quality family time’, often enacted through holidays, day-trips and visits, such that unfamiliar terrains are associated with ‘utopian family practices’, an explicit moral geography about performing what the family should be (Hall & Holdsworth, 2016). Although family leisure is almost always purposive (Hallman & Benbow, 2007), increasingly one of these purposes is for guardians to enable children to have contact with ‘nature’ to fulfil learning goals, which there is intensifying societal pressure to facilitate. If the parent is viewed increasingly as a ‘pedagogic figure’, in this chapter we consider how parental-led slow ecopedagogies might be recast away from instrumental assumptions about pedagogy as ‘delivery’ of societally directed educational and developmental norms. Instead, we

138

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

consider the experience of pace, and the ‘unfamiliar ground’, of family mobilities, alongside theories of slow ecopedagogy. Slow ecopedagogy is in principle counterposed to the instrumantalisation of nature and landscape as ‘passed through’ to be ‘experienced’ and in this way ‘learnt’. Instead, it emphasises on pausing and dwelling, to ‘slow down’ encounters to enable place attachment (Payne & Wattchow, 2008), highlighting the temporal attunement to place as radically transformative of environmental literacy (Dunkley, 2018). Whilst it is not our claim in this chapter that guardians intentionally deploy these pedagogical techniques, nor that they should, instead, we argue that thinking of guardians as emplaced within the wider ecopedagogies of a child’s life course provides a way to contextualise family learning that avoids the instrumantalisation of the ‘pedagogic parent’.

2.2

Mediating Technologies and the Family

We also consider in this chapter what carrying a mobile ‘tablet’ device to follow a heritage learning app brings to the practices of the mobile family. We are interested in how the app, embedded in a tablet device, comprising of visualisations, GPS map and audio-guide, is embedded in these practices. Recent studies have begun to consider how the material ‘stuff ’ associated with children (prams, toys, etc.) are shown to be embedded in discourses associated with parenting, such as ‘preparedness’ when out and about (Boyer & Spinney, 2016). Mobile digital technologies are increasingly a critical component of ‘family assemblages’, often directly imbued in relations of care, such as children remaining in contact whilst roaming independently (Horton et al., 2014), although perhaps more commonly causing concern around their surveillance and codification of childhood (Williamson, 2017), or the instrumentalising of parenthood through disseminating ‘good parenting’ advice (Ramaekers & Hodgson, 2020). The role mobile technologies play, for example in acts of care, may not, however, be pre-determined by the capacities of the technology. Price-Robertson and Duff (2019: 1039) argue that mobile devices are not passive in family life, they are often

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain …

139

deployed by guardians to ‘mitigate a child’s boredom, hunger, fatigue and frustration’. Mobile devices and apps have a muddled relationship with the wider discourses of connecting children to ‘nature’. Many apps attempt the ‘gamification’ of educational experiences (Williamson, 2017), which might run counter to attempts to engage children with nature-based experiences outdoors. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and portable games, commonly have a moral spatial geography in the family, for example, being ‘banned’ during car journeys by some, whilst deployed as a welcome distraction by others (Waitt & Harada, 2016). Whilst there is considerable moral debate about children’s use of mobile devices, children have been shown to engage actively, playfully and creatively with a range of technologies, rather than passively (Plowman, 2016). Later, we examine how children and adults alike interact with mobile apps in outdoor settings to counter these discourses of harm and the binary positioning of nature and technology.

3

‘Walking with Romans’: Navigating the Past

So far, we have queried how family mobility is ‘done’ in unfamiliar landscapes, and how this ‘doing’ might be connected to slow ecopedagogy. We have contrasted some of the moral panics around childhood, nature, and technology, with the relatively unexplored potential for mobile apps as interwoven with family mobile practices. We are intrigued by some of the assumptions of slow ecopedagogy: of dwelling and slowness in unfamiliar places, and what happens when we try to trace this idea onto how families walk together outdoors, whilst using mobile devices. We now turn to the app that is the primary focus of this chapter. Apps for outdoor settings are becoming increasingly prominent, including walking apps and citizen science apps. Yet aside from recent examples (Smith et al., 2020) there are few studies considering the impacts of apps on experiences of navigating and understanding unfamiliar landscapes, particularly those that are outdoors, rural or ‘wild’. The ‘Walking with Romans’ (WWR) app, which we study here, enables visitors to

140

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

navigate the land underfoot, whilst also gaining an appreciation of the history of the Roman occupation of South Wales. The app features a GPS map with numbered ‘stops’ where visitors can listen to audio and video-based interpretive material. The guide describes historical events and archaeological remnants using the historical present tense to depict a fictional conversation between a Roman-occupying soldier and a local Welsh man. The narrative adopts an entertaining tone, playing on caricatures of ‘Romanness’ as strict, humourless and sharp, whilst ‘Welshness’ is depicted through the character ‘Rory’ as the opposite of that. The WWR app was developed by the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority (BBNPA) and we conducted an evaluative project of the app. Our methodology took a video ethnographic approach (Smith & Dunkley, 2021), enabling us to gain a detailed insight into experiences of app use. We recruited eight groups, who navigated all, or more often part of the six-kilometre route over open moorland. Each group was equipped with on-body video cameras, mounted on chest harnesses, to record their journey without the researchers present, followed by a semistructured interview. We focus here on the experiences of one family of two adults, Rhys and Sarah, and two children, Sam (aged 5) and Davey (aged 4). Focusing on one family, as we do here, enables us to provide in-depth insights into their experiences, particularly how a single visit evolves within the dynamics of the family itself. In the rest of this chapter, we follow the experiences of the family as they navigate an unfamiliar landscape of a former Roman encampment using the WWR app. The landscape is unfamiliar at a rudimentary level, it is the first visit for the mother and two children, yet has elements of familiarity as the father, Rhys, is a National Park Ranger and visited the site before. We discuss this family hill walk with the app, below, as a unique experience that oscillates between the unfamiliar and familiar, shaped by the momentary configuration of place-specific, intangible, subjective and relational elements.

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain …

4

141

The Materials and Negotiations of the Family Visit

Mobile apps are often considered a disruptive technology that detracts from the experience of ‘the outdoors’. Yet Rhys and Sarah revealed how the WWR app was that ‘something else’ that was needed to keep children’s attention whilst walking. In the follow-up interview, they described how family walks are more successful, in the sense of making better progress, when there are other children present or if the children are involved in focused activity, such as Geocaching. They stated that the children would never have been ‘up for walking ’ through the sparse open moorland, without the app. Rhys viewed the app as something that made the walk on open moorland possible: To be able to show them, ‘We’re on the blue dot, the next one’s there, we’re nearly there…’ They’ll be like, ‘Right, let’s go... and actually they really wanted to stop and press the button and have it play…

Sarah also commented: I think once we got the first one and they listened to the first thing then it was a little bit ‘oh actually we’re doing something’ rather than ‘we’re just walking’ .

Here, the app is an enabling device that supports taking their children into an unfamiliar environment. Although Rhys comments that they would ‘show them’ the app, during the visit Sarah and Rhys repeatedly share the device with the children, giving the device to Sam or Davey for prolonged periods to ‘do’ the map-reading. This occurred most extensively as they walked along a track approaching the Roman camp, where the children took it in turns to ‘follow’ their progress on the screen and announce when they reached the next stop. The guardians took charge of the device, more commonly when the terrain became tricky for the children to traverse on the open moorland. However, at each stop, the device would be given back to the children to press the play button on the audio or video clip.

142

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

In this way, the device and the app acted, as Rhys and Sarah suggest, as a motivator for the children’s ongoing involvement. Indeed, Sarah comments how using the app differentiated the visit for the children as more than ‘just walking ’. Whereas previous research has highlighted how guardians use ‘bribery’, or embodied ‘shepherding’ for routine domestic tasks, which children are often resistant to (Cekaite, 2010; Sirota, 2006), here the passing of the device to and from the children, involving them in the work of the visit, is less directed than the terms ‘shepherding’ or ‘bribery’ suggest. The device is ‘used’ as a tool by the parents to ‘do’ the visit, but also to facilitate the children’s agency as part of the family. This facilitation is also done in response to the landscape itself, giving the children more or less time to hold the device depending on their sureness underfoot in different types of terrain. Yet the family visit was not quite as ‘utopian’ as these incidents suggest. The children, although engaged with the app, also became frustrated and bored. Partway onto the moorland, Sam’s boredom reaches a crescendo as he falls over, and remains sitting down on the moss, refusing to keep walking. The following transcript picks up just after Sarah asks if Sam is ‘ok’: Rhys: Sam:

You Ok? No:: (pause) Rhys: (points ahead with stick) That end bit is just there, d’ you see where that= Sarah: =Where the white flowers are Rhys: White flowers are, that’s the end (.) that’s number seven there (Pause. Davey asks mum for a drink) Rhys: ‘K? Sam: (still sitting on the grass) I’m not going there Rhys: Well you’re going to have to go somewhere Davey Sam: You’re going to have to carry me Rhys: I don’t think I can carry you Sam: Yes you are Rhys: I’ll carry you over to those white flowers, that’s as far as I’ll= Sam: =carry me all the way back to the car Sarah: (chuckles)

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain …

Rhys: Sam:

143

No chance! Yes yes yes.

This excerpt illustrates some of the classic elements of shepherding, bribery and bargaining noted in other family studies. Rhys and Sarah attempt verbal shepherding, working together to formulate the next step to encourage Sam. When Sarah’s attention is diverted, Sam refuses this first offer, and then begins ‘bargaining’ (Sirota, 2006) with his dad, which, initially, is successful, as Rhys presents a ‘bribe’, offering to carry Sam ‘over to those white flowers’. This bargaining ends in a goodhumoured way: when Sam responds to this by raising the stakes in the bargain, ‘carry me all the way back to the car ’, he does so with a ‘smile voice’, and both guardians respond with laughter. Even with the ongoing facilitation of the children’s agency by way of the app, ‘classic’ scenarios of verbal shepherding, bribery and bargaining are also components of this family walk. Rhys later described how completing the tour took twice as long as it took when he walked the route with a colleague previously, deemed to be the effect of visiting with young children. Rhys also referred to a kind of playfully ‘bribery’ in the post-visit interviews: an improvised battle en-route: That’s why I brought the shields and the spears, because I knew that would be a little game that we could play there. And because they knew there was going to be a little battle there, that helped them to keep going to get to eight. And, by then I thought they are just going to be silly and it’s not going to work, but it worked really well. And it went from there... I got them to advance and really have a go with the spear. And every time they and tried to walk forward, they turned and their shield went the other way. So, I’d poke ‘em with a stick… And, then I stood on the other side, and obviously, the shield being on the correct side, so they could hold the shield up and walk forward. They both understood the system of how they could avoid having to turn to the left then as well.

Rhys’s account, the ‘little game’ and ‘little battle’, somewhat underplays the significance of his and Sarah’s ongoing intervention to ‘bribe’, encourage, and then engage the children in a mock battle. At the start

144

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

Fig. 1 a The children are equipped with swords and shields and dad Rhys with a spear; b The mock battle at the entrance to the Roman camp

of the tour, they equip the children each with a stick as a ‘sword’, and a toy that mimics a ‘shield’ (Fig. 1a). Rhys carries a larger stick, the ‘spear’. These props are carried (sometimes by the children, sometimes the guardians) until they reach the opening to the Roman camp, where Rhys has planned the re-enactment. This is stop ‘eight’ that Rhys refers to. Having already visited the site, and knowing that a long walk is ahead to reach this exciting feature, Rhys has carefully planned this re-enactment as an incentive/bribe for the walk, as well as ongoing ‘distraction’ of carrying the props, which serve throughout as a reminder of the ‘Roman-ness’ of their visit, and of the mock battle ahead. All this ‘helped them to keep going to get to eight ’. The ‘materials’ carried by children and parents are significant here in constructing an ongoing imaginative unfamiliarity during the visit. Whilst Boyer and Spinney (2016) remark on the material ‘stuff ’ of motherhood, lugged around by new mothers as demonstrative of preparedness, here we see how material things are deployed imaginatively by guardians. These materials are not just ‘lugged around’ for their eventual use, they are an ever-present artefact of a kind of ‘shepherding’ that is jointly accomplished between guardian and child. Indeed, Sam and Davey continued to refer to the ‘sword’ and ‘shield’ throughout the tour, occasionally asking their parents to carry the items when they wanted to run around unencumbered. In the second part of Rhy’s recollection, he describes the battle reenactment. His description is of a lively, embodied experience: ‘I got them

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain …

145

to advance and really have a go with the spear ’, and ‘I’d poke ‘em with a stick’. We can hear the ‘smile’ in Rhys’s voice as he describes an activity that he enjoyed, enjoyment is also visible in the video footage shot by Sarah (Fig. 1b). As Rhys goes on, we also hear something of the ‘pedagogic parent’, as he explains how the activity revealed the importance of the positioning of the shield and the ‘system’ of defence at the camp. Learning about Roman history was clearly a motivation for Rhys, as he helped the children to understand how the camp was defended, using the armoury of the time. In addition, Rhys pointed out wildlife and plants to the children throughout the visit. He also took the primary role in deciding what was left out of the tour, omitting the last three stages on the basis that ‘you don’t learn a lot ’. His decision about the length of the walk was dictated by what was likely to be learnt, alongside the capacities of the children to keep walking, rather than completion of the tour itself. We also briefly comment here on the differentiated nature of this family work. In Rhys’s account, and in our video stills in Fig. 1, Sarah remains in the ‘background’ to the re-enactment. In Fig. 1a, we see Sarah checking the device whilst Rhys plays swords-and-speers with the boys, and later in Fig. 1b, Sarah holds the camera to film the battle re-enactment. This division of labour partly enables the family to accomplish the visit together, as Sarah checks the device to ensure smooth progress from the car, whilst Rhys preoccupies the children. Yet these roles mimic findings from other studies, that mothers commonly take the role of ‘organising’ (Hallman & Benbow, 2007), whilst Rhys adopts both a ‘playful’ and ‘leading’ role in engineering the battle re-enactment and ongoing ‘distraction’ of the props. Rhys’ recollections and evidence from the video footage, provide a nuanced picture of how shepherding/bribery, the imaginative, embodied, and playful and pedagogic parenting is woven together to achieve the visit. The use of the device and app as an ongoing motivator, the Roman ‘props’, and Rhys’s planning, reveal the in-the-moment, as well as the premeditating and preparedness of family mobility as embodied in ‘material stuff ’, but, significantly, these technologies and props also propel the family through an unfamiliar landscape, acting as ongoing distraction and incentive to reach a particular point on the tour. Rhys’s explication of the ‘pedagogic parent’ is also revealing. Contrary to research

146

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

concerned with the pressure for parents to act the ‘pedagogic figure’ (Ramaekers & Hodgson, 2020), instead these parent-led pedagogies are as equally important to ‘fun’, playful and embodied family activities (enjoyed by guardians and children alike), and the ongoing work of motivating children. ‘Doing learning’ as the pedagogic parent is not necessarily done begrudgingly, out of a sense of societal or moral obligation, it is a way of doing playful family time, and of engaging children with the subtle archaeology of a moorland landscape. The experiences of the family in this section sit uneasily alongside notions of slow ecopedagogy. Our family hardly ‘dwell’, and sometimes the kinds of ‘pauses’ that might constitute slowness emerge out of boredom and frustration on the part of the children, as we see in Sam’s stopping above. The app, alongside parentally invented battle reenactments, provided an occupation for the children through which they could engage with the landscape, and this leads us to question whether the kinds of ‘slow dwelling’ encouraged by slow ecopedagogy may be too utopian for family walking practices. The WWR app is used to engage the children as an activity in itself, which speaks to the potential for such apps to act as a conduit towards engagement with unfamiliar landscapes, rather than distract from unmediated contact with ‘nature’ and landscape. But we also note that the guardians in this family do not conform to conventional notions of pedagogy, if by this we mean simply ‘making familiar’ the unfamiliar. If anything, unfamiliarity (the new app and device, the mock battle, swords and shields) is harnessed, alongside the unfamiliarity of the landscape itself, as an ongoing motivation to keep the family mobile.

4.1

Terrain and Differentiated Care in the Mobile Family

We noted above some of the division of labour in the family, with Rhys preparing for and enacting the Roman battle, and his role-taking as the playful, pedagogic parent. Sarah, on the other hand, takes on other practical aspects of the visit. We noted Sarah checking the app, and how she

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain …

147

was distracted by Davey asking for a drink whilst Rhys negotiated with Sam. Throughout the visit it falls to Sarah to anguish over the children’s cleanliness, the risks of them falling over on unsteady ground: I was more worried they were going to fall over because they tend to look at it [the tablet] rather than where they’re going.

This recollection conveys Sarah’s own understanding of her ‘role’ during the visit. From the video footage, Sarah continually demonstrates her care for the children’s safety, encouraging them to look where they are going, reminding them to look at the app when appropriate, to remember to drink water, and not to damage either their clothes or the device. She remarks frequently on the ground underfoot and in doing so directs the children with care depending on the characteristics of the landscape. For example, at one point in the tour the family must leave a well-defined track and walk up onto open moorland. This conversation begins just as they prepare to move on: Rhys:

Can mummy have the map back now Davey because we’re going off the track? Sarah: And don’t want you to trip up ((Davey hands the device back to Sarah)) Rhys: K’ay so we’re gonna have ter- (pause) which way do we go mummy? Sarah: ((checks the device map)) Davey: I think up there ((points up the hill)). In this transcript, we hear Sarah taking on the ‘role’ of demonstrating concern for the children’s safety as they move from the easier terrain onto more tricky moorland. Note also that Sarah’s role as primary ‘map reader’ is referenced again by Rhys, where he repairs his own talk by turning his statement into a question directed at Sarah about where to go next. We showed earlier Sarah’s role in map-reading in Fig. 1a. In a second extract, Sarah is walking slowly just behind Davey as he walks along the track holding the device:

148

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

Davey: We’re there (pause) I think we’re there Sarah: Y’ think we’re there? (pause) No, a little bit further a little bit further ((Davey walks forward for two seconds)) Davey: WHOA ((tripping up)) Sarah: Oup watch where you’re goin’ . Here Sarah plays a supporting role to Davey as he attempts to locate the family on the map and to determine if they have reached the next point. Sarah carefully positions herself behind Davey, as if prepared to do physical ‘shepherding’ (Cekaite, 2010) should this be required, as Davey walks unsteadily along a rocky section of the track simultaneously studying the device screen. Sarah’s intervention is almost required when Davey trips over, and although she does not have to intervene as he recovers from the trip, she attends to his call with a response cry ‘Oup’ and then a reminder to Davey of the need to walk carefully. The excerpts above point to Sarah’s ‘supporting’ and caring role, and how this somewhat contrasted with Rhys’s role. These roles appeared relatively uncontested throughout the visit, although there were occasions where the division of care labour was made explicit. One of these examples occurs as the family is crossing boggy terrain. Davey is wearing wellies, whilst Sam wears trainers: Rhys:

((steps over small bog and looks back)) Right (pause) Davey’s going to be Ok (pause) Rhys: Sam Sam: What? Rhys: Come ‘ere (pause) stand on my toe ((Rhys puts his foot back into the bog, Sam stands on his foot and is helped over the bog)) Sarah: (to Davey) Go in front of Daddy ((Rhys steps away from the bog, ignoring Davey)) Sarah: Just leave him there then Rhys: ((turns back to Sarah)) eh- Sorry ((Rhys helps Davey across the bog))

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain …

149

Rhys: I th- he’s got his wellies on Sarah: Yeah I know but he’s gonna need help because it’s squashy. Sarah’s ‘just leave him there then’ is spoken with a light tone: it is not overly accusatory but still does the work of bringing Rhys back to help Davey across the bog, and reminding him of his caring duties, even though Rhys feels that Davey can traverse the bog independently because he is wearing wellies. But Sarah insists that ‘he’s gonna need help because it’s squashy’. This exchange serves to remind Rhys that he should also be contributing to helping the children across tricky terrain. Yet we might also notice that Rhys does perform a caring action here, as he initially, and unprompted by Sarah, helps Sam across the bog. By then turning away from Sarah and Davey, he seems to have dispatched his caring duties, and later produces an account of this based on the different footwear of the two children. In our first example, Rhys first asks Davey to hand the map back to Sarah, before Sarah then produces an account of why he should do so (they don’t want him to trip up). We do not want to make wider statements about the gender roles in this family from one single example. What we do want to highlight is how caring and more overtly ‘pedagogic’ roles are differentiated between guardians throughout the visit. Yet we also see how care for the children’s safety and other needs primarily falls on Sarah, consistent with other studies that examine gendered roles in families, particularly in terms of minimising risk outdoors (Cook et al., 2006; Joelsson, 2019). We note also the significance of how these roles are produced in relation to the terrain and the wider landscape, with consequences for family mobility. Others have commented on the importance of guardians physically managing transitions for children in outdoor environments (Keisanen et al., 2017), whilst more broadly care and responsibility for children partly involves mediating when children are in need of support and when they can tackle environments independently (Horton et al., 2014). Sarah’s supportive and caring role involves the ongoing and careful monitoring of the terrain, the children’s capacities to negotiate different terrains, alongside their capacities to handle the device whilst doing so. Her ‘tracking’ behind Davey as he walks with the device, and her monitoring of when the children might ‘trip up’, respond to the

150

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

different speeds and capacities of the children’s mobilities. The mobility of the family, and its speeds and capacities (Jensen et al., 2015) is therefore strongly mediated by Sarah’s continual assessment of the terrain and her children’s own aptitudes. Different assessments are formed of the same terrain, as Rhys and Sarah have a disagreement of the level of assistance Davey requires to walk over a bog. Sarah’s role is also therefore to monitor other adults in the family and draw their capacities in to assist with traversing tricky terrain. The unfamiliarity of the terrain to the children, in terms of their own skills and capacities, therefore, plays a critical role in work of the mobile family outdoors. This ongoing monitoring and negotiation of terrain is therefore also a critical facet of ecopedagogy, in the sense that it enables children to move through unfamiliar terrains, and in turn experience and learn about them, learning about what is underfoot (terrain itself ) as well as the landscape moved through.

4.2

Fluid Perspectives on App and Landscape

We now consider Sam and Davey’s experiences. Both children also took part in the post-visit interview, where we asked them what their favourite part of the visit was: Interviewer: Sam: Interviewer: Rhys: Interviewer: Sam:

Sam what was your favourite bit? Climbing up and down. Climbing. He had sweets. Did you have sweets? Haribo’s.

------Rhys: Davey what was your favourite bit? Davey: Seeing the lambs. Interviewer: Seeing the lambs…ooh. That Sam found ‘climbing up and down’ a highlight of the visit seems contradictory to the evidence in our video footage, where he complains

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain …

151

throughout the latter half of the journey about his tiredness. Rhys explains why this was Sam’s favourite part, because ‘he had sweets’, and Sam does not contradict this, only adding more clarification: ‘Haribo’s’. Davey on the other hand highlights ‘seeing the lambs’, and indeed Rhys and Sarah point out the lambs to the children on the visit. On the walk, the children were also excited by the more ‘mundane’ elements of the tour and app. One such instance occurred when Davey was holding the map and listening to the end of audio clips: Audio: Let us now go and explore the inner marching camp, that’s the red square on the map. (1.5 second pause) Rhys: Right, I think weDavey: (points skyward) Ye:a the red square! Rhys: (laughs). The ‘red square’ that Davey is excited about is simply a diagrammatic representation of the outline of the Roman camp on the map. Rhys’s laughter is a humorous response to Davey’s excitement about something which is somewhat ‘mundane’ in terms of what can be learnt from the app. We note in these reflections from the children, and evidence in the video footage, the differing perceptions of children and adults during and after the visit. Sweets, lambs and the ‘red square’ are not on the ‘pedagogic agenda’ of the app, instead these experiences draw on the incentives provided by their guardians (sweets), the animal life pointed out by Rhys and Sarah, and pick up, somewhat imaginatively, on more mundane elements of the app. What the children find pleasurable about the visit therefore somewhat disrupts the pedagogic agenda of the app: neither child reflected on ‘Romans’, and during the visit their attention was drawn to a variety of other landscape and ecological features that had little to do with the ‘intention’ of the journey. In the video footage, we see how the children’s attention could be fully focused on the app itself—Sarah and Rhys often got them to sit together to listen to or watch the audio and video clips—but thereafter might turn to something quite different: picking up stones, running through long grass on the moorland, jumping into or inspecting puddles.

152

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

Sarah described how Sam ‘was actually quite disappointed that there were no Romans there to fight ’. In the video footage, after listening to one of the audio clips, Sam asks Rhys: Sam: Rhys: Sam: Rhys: Sam: Rhys: Sam: Rhys:

When are we going to see them? See what? People We’re not going to see any people Aren’t we going to see the Romans? We’re not going to see any Romans What? (laughs) Romans were two-thousand years ago Sam.

Whether Sam’s question is intended playfully or serious is difficult to discern. Yet this exchange, regardless of Sam’s sincerity, suggests an imaginative engagement with the app material and landscape, which draws on the ambience generated through listening to the app, and perhaps on the anticipation of the Roman battle re-enactment which is yet to happen. Sam’s question, and Davey’s excitement over the ‘red square’ might represent an imaginative ‘blurring’ of the virtual with the landscape as-encountered, but may also be indicative of their response to how their guardians establish the framework of the trip. Although these kinds of imaginative and mundane engagements might be indicative of common perceived differences between adults and children in their perspectives, we also note some commonalities. Sam’s questioning over meeting Romans does not seem too dissimilar to Rhys’s playful approach to Roman re-enactment, whilst Davey’s favourite recollection being ‘lambs’ mimics his guardian’s ecological sensibilities and attentiveness to the creatures that currently inhabit the landscape. Yet their engagement with the app suggests a more fluid perspective on the disaggregation between app-as-representation and landscape-asreality. The role of mobile digital devices in childhood, and more broadly in families, has tended to drive a range of concerns at their core agenda, around the instrumentalising of ‘pedagogic’ family relationships (Ramaekers & Hodgson, 2020), ‘gamifying’ learning (Williamson, 2017), or more simply as ‘passive context’ (Price-Robertson & Duff,

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain …

153

2019). Although using the app for visiting the Roman camp clearly does carry with it a pedagogic agenda, this agenda is playfully realised by the guardians, and in turn, is imaginatively re-interpreted and sometimes disrupted by the children’s engagement with it, and their experience of the visit overall. We might also view these childhood encounters and interpretations as further contributing themselves to the ‘slow ecopedagogy’ of the visit. The children’s questioning, and disruption to the ‘smooth progress’ of the app’s pedagogic narrative, invariably ‘slows down’ (Payne & Wattchow, 2008) the landscape encounter, at least from the perspective of the parents. Indeed, Sam’s blurring of past and present through his question about whether they will meet Romans might itself represent a quite different ‘temporal attunement’ (Dunkley, 2018) to the landscape that adults recognise.

5

Conclusions

Within this chapter we have considered the role of childhood guardians in exploring unfamiliar landscapes, as well as mobile technologies, and theories of slow ecopedagogy. In untangling the ‘pedagogic parent’, we have reflected on affirmations made within environmental education, and specifically ecopedagogy, that parents and guardians, who want to encourage ecological awareness, need to ‘reveal’ unfamiliar landscapes to children. Early childhood encounters with unfamiliar landscapes are highly dependent upon guardians, yet children also have agency and capacity to direct encounters with unfamiliar landscapes. Ideas about slow ecopedagogy, we have found, come unstuck when we consider the different temporal attunements children have to landscape and mobility, compared to adults. Slowness and pausing emerge from child’s boredom and tiredness, whilst experience of landscape may ‘slow down’ for parents because children move relatively slowly through terrain which is tricky for them underfoot. Children may disrupt attempts at ‘doing pedagogy’, whether this comes from their guardians or mobile learning technologies. It is for these reasons that we wonder whether previous conceptualisations of slow ecopedagogy are too adultist in their assumptions about ‘dwelling’ and ‘slowness’, because of children’s different

154

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

temporal attunements to landscape and mobilities through it, but also that the ‘pedagogic’ elements may reinforce assumptions about adults as ‘revealers’ of the unfamiliar. Placing too great a focus upon the role of the adult in leading the child means that we might miss how unfamiliar encounters are to be had by guardians, and that such experiences may constitute a form of childled ecopedagogy for adults. An environment familiar to a guardian may become intriguing once more through explorations with child companions. Accompanying a gleeful toddler, bounding around a seashore, negotiating unstable stones underfoot in disorientated delight, experimenting with the sounds that pebbles, of differing sizes, make when thrown into water, and marvelling at features of tiny pieces of sea glass all have the potential to reignite interests in aspects of the landscape that may have become tacit for adults. In our data above we see how the children’s imaginative re-interpretation of landscape and app features create moments of amusement for the adults. The roman re-enactment is organised by the adult guardians for the children, but it is the presence of the children and their exuberant embracing of the swords, shields and the mock battle that also brings a child-like sense of fun to the adult encounter with landscape. Our analysis also speaks to caution against over-romanticism of unfamiliar landscapes, whereby the same challenges of boredom, tiredness and moods are present in both familiar and unfamiliar environments. During visits to unfamiliar places, ‘practices and habits of holiday and non-holiday are mutually reinforcing’ (Hall & Holdsworth, 2016: 288). In our study, we see the familiar, everyday functionings of the family, of shepherding, bribery and bargaining, play a part in successfully mobilising the family through unfamiliar terrain. Success, for parents, means reaching the end point in the tour and completing the visit, and to obtain this the parents in our study, at various points, became a shepherd, a cheerleader, a performer, a timekeeper, a sherpa, a medic, a support team, a monitor. Although unfamiliarity (with the landscape, technology, props and playful re-enactments) is harnessed as an ongoing motivator for the children, in other ways ‘doing the visit’ is grounded in well-established, highly familiar family relationships and roles, as we illustrate above with our focus on Rhys and Sarah. Within the notion of

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain …

155

slow ecopedagogy, it is suggested that dwelling and slowness are crucial to achieving a sense of familiarity with landscape, but we find that the familiarity of everyday familial relations is critical for navigating the unfamiliar. We have considered how these families are produced in relation to the terrain. Although we characterise Sarah’s role as one which exhibits ‘care’, with Rhys presuming a role as the ‘pedagogic parent’, Sarah’s caring ‘labour’ also works to coach Sam and Davey in engaging with the ground itself. How not to fall over, and how not to get lost, all form a pedagogy of grounding, which can only be learnt through engaging with the ground itself, with careful attention from a watchful adult. We see Sarah’s labour of care as a kind of ‘groundwork’, one that is not riskaverse, but facilitates encounters with unfamiliar terrains underfoot. The necessary slowed pace (for adults) of walking with children might potentially be conceived of as a form of slow ecopedagogy, but the parental-led pedagogies that Rhys instigates enact bursts of speed alongside longer durations of play and fun. Equally, what might feel ‘slow’ for an adult may be experienced quite differently by a child. Children necessitate sometimes slowed pace for adults, and sometimes adults deliberately pick up the pace to enliven the experience for children. These findings reinforce our concern about adultist assumptions behind slow ecopedagogy, when actually it is attentiveness to pace, and groundwork, in unfamiliar landscapes that may offer a more progressive way to conceptualise the ‘pedagogic parent’, away from instrumentalised, anxiety-fuelled, and overly romanticised assumptions. Our analysis also points to the implications of mobile app technology for enabling child-led ecopedagogy. Encounters with digital technology are increasingly ubiquitous to childhoods. There is an opportunity for ecopedagogy to be enacted for children and adults as they encounter unfamiliar landscapes via technology that is perhaps more familiar to them. Children, though unfamiliar with a particular landscape, may gain more out of the encounter through it being mediated by a familiar, ubiquitous device. Understanding how the device and app guide the experience also requires embedding the device within the mobile family, including how guardians augment and re-enact the app narrative. The

156

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

app and device support the ongoing mobility of the family, and this facilitation is less directed than ‘shepherding’ and ‘bribery’ suggest (Cekaite, 2010; Sirota, 2006), instead it promotes the children’s agency within the family. Managing the children’s device use also involves groundwork, the device being given and taken away again in response to the terrain. In this way too the device and app engender an attention to pace, necessarily moderating the pace to that of a child, and drawing attention to the terrain underfoot. Guardians and children alike also playfully reinterpreted the app material. Rather than superseding a guardian’s or child’s capacities to ‘reveal’ the landscape, as might be assumed, instead the interactions we observe reveal something of children’s imaginative interactions. The app opens up possibilities of centuries of history underfoot that might not otherwise have been accessible, augmenting the richness of place-experience, alongside (rather than replacing) some of the usual things that children do outdoors, like jumping in puddles, and picking up sticks.

References Benwell, M. C. (2013). Rethinking conceptualisations of adult-imposed restriction and children’s experiences of autonomy in outdoor space. Children’s Geographies, 11(1), 28–43. Boyer, K., & Spinney, J. (2016). Motherhood, mobility and materiality: Material entanglements, journey-making the process of ‘becoming mother.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34 (6), 1113–1131. Cekaite, A. (2010). Shepherding the child: Embodied directive sequences in parent-child interactions. Text and Talk, 30 (1), 1–25. Clement, S., & Waitt, G. (2017). Walking, mothering and care: A sensory ethnography of journeying on-foot with children in Wollongong, Australia. Gender, Place and Culture, 24 (8), 1185–1203. Cook, V. A., Phillips, D., & Holden, J. (2006). Geography fieldwork in a ‘risk society.’ Area, 38(4), 413–420. Dunkley, R. A. (2018). Space-timeScapes as ecopedagogy. The Journal of Environmental Education, 49 (2), 117–129.

6 Negotiating the Family in Unfamiliar Terrain …

157

Dunkley, R. A., & Smith, T. A. (2019). By-standing memories of curious observations: Children’s storied landscapes of ecological encounter. Cultural Geographies, 26 (1), 89–107. Ergler, C. R., Kearns, R., Witten, K., & Porter, G. (2016). Digital methodologies and practices in children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 14 (2), 129–140. Hall, S. M., & Holdsworth, C. (2016). Family practices, holiday and everyday. Mobilities, 11(2), 284–302. Hallman, B. C., & Benbow, M. P. (2007). Family leisure, family photography and zoos: Exploring the emotional geographies of families. Social and Cultural Geography, 8(6), 871–888. Horton, J., Christensen, P., Kraftl, P., & Hadfield-Hill, S. (2014). ‘Walking… just walking’: How children and young people’s everyday pedestrian practices matter. Social and Cultural Geography, 15 (1), 94–115. Jensen, O. B., Sheller, M., & Wind, S. (2015). Together and apart: Affective ambiences and negotiation in families’ everyday life and mobility. Mobilities, 10 (3), 363–382. Joelsson, T. (2019). ‘So that we don’t spoil them’: Understanding children’s mobility through parents’ affective practices. Children’s Geographies, 17 (5), 591–602. Keisanen, T., Rauniomaa, M., & Siitonen, P. (2017). Transitions as sites of socialization in family interaction outdoors. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 14, 24–37. Louv, R. (2008). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Algonquin Books. Louv, R. (2012). The nature principle: Reconnecting with life in a virtual age. Algonquin Books. Payne, P. G. (2014). Vagabonding slowly: Ecopedagogy, metaphors, figurations, and nomadic ethics. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education (CJEE), 19, 47–69. Payne, P. G., & Wattchow, B. (2008). Slow pedagogy and placing education in post-traditional outdoor education. Australian Journal of Outdoor Education, 12(1), 25–38. Plowman, L. (2016). Rethinking context: Digital technologies and children’s everyday lives. Children’s Geographies, 14 (2), 190–202. Price-Robertson, R., & Duff, C. (2019). Family assemblages. Social and Cultural Geography, 20 (8), 1031–1049. Ramaekers, S., & Hodgson, N. (2020). Parenting apps and the depoliticization of the parent. Families, Relationships and Societies, 9 (1), 107–124.

158

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

Rixon, A., Lomax, H., & O’Dell, L. (2019). Childhoods past and present: Anxiety and idyll in reminiscences of childhood outdoor play and contemporary parenting practices. Children’s Geographies, 17 (5), 618–629. Sirota, K. G. (2006). Habits of the hearth: Children’s bedtime routines as relational work. Text and Talk, 26 (4–5), 493–514. Smith, T. A., Laurier, E., Reeves, S., & Dunkley, R. A. (2020). “Off the beaten map”: Navigating with digital maps on moorland. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45 (1), 223–240. Smith, T. A., & Dunkley, R. A. (2021). Video ethnography. In N. von Benzon, M. Holton, C. Wilkinson, & S. Wilkinson (Eds.), Creative methods for human geographers (Chapter 23, pp. 297–307). Sage. Tarrant, A., & Hall, S. M. (2020). Everyday geographies of family: Feminist approaches and interdisciplinary conversations. Gender, Place and Culture, 27 (5), 613–623. TNS. (2014). Scotland’s people and nature survey 2013/14 (Scottish Natural Heritage Commissioned Report No. 679). Vanaken, G. J., & Danckaerts, M. (2018). Impact of green space exposure on children’s and adolescents’ mental health: A systematic review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15 (12), 2668. Waitt, G., & Harada, T. (2016). Parenting, care and the family car. Social and Cultural Geography, 17 (8), 1079–1100. Wells, N. M., & Lekies, K. S. (2006). Nature and the life course: Pathways from childhood nature experiences to adult environmentalism. Children, Youth and Environments, 16 (1), 1–24. Williamson, B. (2017). Decoding ClassDojo: Psycho-policy, social-emotional learning and persuasive educational technologies. Learning, Media and Technology, 42(4), 440–453.

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites and Their Timeful Exploration with Locals and University Students in Fuerteventura, Spain Elizabeth Rahman

1

Introduction

Caves capture the imagination. The darkness and unknowable depths, the confined and unceding rock surfaces, the stifled ambient atmosphere patterned only by the hermetic echoes of one’s “being there”, are all qualities that make cavernous spaces brim with incipient potential. Caves, lava fields and beaches constitute a vast desertscape with which the people of Fuerteventura, the Majoreros were, and to some extent still are, familiar. It is really only those who etched their livelihoods here, men and women now in their 60s, who herded goats, cultivated the land or sourced shellfish, who know those parts they’ve frequented with careful intimacy. They may be said to be literally familiar with, having seen and touched, but also handled and manipulated, the tangible matter of the land itself. Aspects of the coast are well-known to holidaymakers E. Rahman (B) Oxford University, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_7

159

160

E. Rahman

that populate the vast beachscapes, but the island’s inner landscapes are wholly unfamiliar to both the greater portion of the current generation of Canarian youth and adults, as well as to most researchers who work here. One question we—the researchers and some of our participants— wanted to answer was the extent, and particularly, the ways in which this landscape was known to the ancient Mahos, the much-debated autochthonous population of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote. This chapter is about a field school, attached to a multidisciplinary research project and focused on an archaeological dig: Villaverde’s timecapsule of a Cave. The field school took place in August 2019 in the Canary Islands, Spain. The research project and school were partly funded by the Canarian government and La Oliva Town Hall, spurred by a recent interest in Canarian heritage in one of the most neglected and equally least “developed” islands: Fuerteventura. With a specific focus on integrating the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology, the field school was the fruit of several years of collaboration with the University of La Laguna and the Canarian Association of Anthropology, the archaeological firm Arenisca and Oxford’s Educere Alliance. Oxford’s Teaching and Development Enhancement Award allowed me to pursue the project further. This chapter draws on experiences and diffractions (Barad, 2007) from this research-teaching initiative. I explore what caves mean—and how they are experienced—by the local people of Fuerteventura and their ancestors, as well as by the students and staff attending the school itself. My aim is to offer a multi-dimensional appraisal of the relevance of cavernous spaces and how we conceive of and engage with such spaces. For instance, while the interest and perceptions of some of the contemporary Majorarean population may well resonate with the ancient Mahos, some of whom are possibly their descendants, the context most certainly differs both physically and socially: we are speaking of a society diverse in its economic and political makeup and a time, around the fourth–twelfth century BC, when the landscape was reportedly greener and more humid than today. Certainly, locals are more familiar with the land’s potentiality (“affordances”, Gibson, 1979) than visiting researchers and students to whom it is comparatively far more unfamiliar. Indeed, this is what facilitates so-called “casual finds” by locals. Our interest, on

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

161

the other hand, is less orientated by potentiality, subsistence, leisure or pure adventure and is more structured by scholarly enquiry into the past and present perceptions of the landscape. Together, these myriad perspectives filter the perception and engagement of these various groups with the land and caves. In the first instance, I consider the curiosity and care that lead people to explore caves and find and reflect on the artefactual assemblages within and around them. I then consider the reformulation of cavedwelling as heritage for locals as part of one of the first archaeological campaigns on the island. I move on to the schooling of young adults familiarising themselves with caves for scholarly research and between the two, consider the changing landscape of outdoor learning in general, within a contemporary culture of risk. This enquiry forms the basis of an understanding of the overlaying of scientific and lay epistemologies of and for learning, and for sustaining life. Specifically, I wish to reflect on the modalities of training students in the field, by which I mean both the didactics and the conduct, comportment, manner, expression and experience of learning—and facilitating learning—and their implications for personal and professional development, including the importance of environmental awareness for personal and collective wellbeing (Sabini, 2016). Over the course of the chapter, I aim to unpick the implicit pedagogies and approaches of diverse groups to better understand and evaluate the means and ends of making unfamiliar landscapes familiar. The chapter affirms the value of wise, wide-angled attention (Bateson, 1972; Gibson, 1979) that is effectively as “correspondent” (Ingold, 2014) as it is “timeful” (Bjornerud, 2018). It also considers holistic and transformative learning to be facilitated by participative approaches to research-teaching; ones aimed at meaningful place-making (Clack & Brittain, 2011) and immersive exposure to land- and cave-scapes.

162

2

E. Rahman

A Note on Schools

Part of this chapter is about our interdisciplinary and interuniversity “field school”, a school that purposefully happens outside the classroom. Caves, in this project, constitute one of those “anomalous places of learning” (Ellsworth, 2011) that invite alternative modalities for learning to take place thanks to their specific qualities. However, caves in education have been represented as spaces of ignorance, from which we need to be led into the light, ideally with the help of a dedicated pedagogue. Jan Masschelein (2018), recurs Plato’s story (ε„κων—at ´ once an allegory, a fable, myth or parable) of the cave, underscoring how the cave-dwellers are not in a voluntary position, but rather are captive, chained, enslaved and encaged by the cave, a space that is limited and insufficient for life. If this is the “normal” state of existence of the cave-dweller, it is equally one which others know could be much improved. As a consequence, knowledge attained in the cave is voided by the pedagogue-philosopher, who has seen the truth outside of it and whose mission it is to instil knowledge in the ignorant pupil. Essentially, the story encapsulates the powerful liberatory potential of education, as defined by enlightenment thinking. Masschelein (ibid.: 1189–1190) however, urges us to consider the phenomenology of the cave and specifically “the spatial and temporal experiences related to entering a cave and dwelling in it as particular milieu or chronotope”. In caves, time stands still, there is an incipient potential that forms part of “being there” in the present, without preformulated ideas of what a cave is or means, what it represents or symbolises; it affords a space of suspended judgement without the obvious potential to objectivise at-a-distance, a “place without place” (2018: 1194). This power of the present (or Main-Tenant, as Masschelein explores the terms) is the now of the cave, a now that brings with it a crystallisation of past human activity—human history— drawing this into conversation with contemporary human presence and action. The cave-time–space as conceptualised by Masschelein is essentially one in which “the ongoing merging and co-mingling of diverse matter (include humans) rather than a more traditional anthropocentric understanding of human imposition of will and agency over things”, is

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

163

manifest (Govier & Steel, 2021: 308). As matter that matters, this cave is a place of contiguous conversation, authentic dialogue and belonging. It is this dialogue and the desire and courage to experience this encounter with oneself and the past in the here and now for both knowledge and companionship from and by the world and those in it, that requires a very real “vital effort” (Masschelein 2018: 1195) akin to an alive sense of curiosity, that compels us to enter the cave in the first place.

3

Heritage, Caves, Curiosity and Care: Tacit and Implicit Learning

The caves in Fuerteventura have been frequented for different purposes: as a refuge, a place to keep livestock, for parties and feasts, as a ritual space and for recreation and exploration by children and youth. These experiences have fostered an intimate knowledge of caves, fauna and geology. Learning to recognise ancestral traces has enabled many local, casual frequenters of caves, to find items of archaeological interest. On one occasion, Oxford undergraduate Marissa Gonzalez Scanlan and I, accompanied the cheese factory owner Pedro González and his 40something nephew Carmelo, in an area known as Guriamen. Knowing we had an interest in caves, we explored the lava fields and ancient ruins hidden from the unfamiliar eye in plain sight. Having not traversed the terrain for some time, both men would stop at what looked like random piles of rocks and begin picking and throwing them to one side. Their unearthing would cause a hole to gradually appear, and Carmelo or Pedro would then leverage themselves into the opening and call for us to follow. Sometimes, we would be overwhelmed by the thick stench of a still decaying carcass at their unearthing: lava field cave entrances are periodically “rocked off ” to prevent livestock from entering and not being able to find their way out. At each cave we unearthed, and at each we encountered that had not yet been, our hosts were careful to close and rock off these cavernous entrances to avoid any animal, mostly goats, but also the odd sheep, bird or dog, or small wandering child, from getting stuck down there. Really, only those who have the strength to unearth them should be visiting them. A casual observer would be none the wiser.

164

E. Rahman

In many caves we visited, we would silently follow Pedro, and when he noticed that we hadn’t noticed something, he would come back and point out to us an arch that had been constructed within the cave, that we had completely missed. On many occasions it seemed to me as if these men, thanks to their familiarity with such spaces, had developed some kind of sixth sense of where the ancient Mahos might have dwelled, of how they moved and frequented such cavernous spaces and of where they might have hidden their dead or stored their treasures of churned butter. They had indeed found ceramics and skeletal remains before, and while they obviously enjoyed navigating the tight and often stifling atmosphere of some caves, there seemed to be a sense of purpose as they carefully inspected certain areas—the most hidden crevices—above others. With us in toe, in one cave within a cave within a cave, they discovered fully intact, intricately designed ceramic vases surrounded by small piled rocks and with the typical white slate covering their otherwise open tops. Their sheer delight and excitement at finding them, their deliberations of possible uses and interpretations of the patterned objects themselves, was an inspiring and awesome sight to witness. What stood out was their care and interest in the vases themselves: they wanted to touch and handle them; to palpate their sense of connection to their ancestral past. They had a sense of ownership—without wanting to possess the objects themselves—over the past (Fig. 1). The exploration of caves is related to a wider sense of attentive curiosity to the intricate secrets of the landscape. Indeed, when walking (Ingold & Vergunst 2008) with many locals who are today in their 50s or above, they repeatedly explain that they entered caves out of sheer “curiosity”. This sense of adventure and exploration was bought home to me when one research participant, avid amateur astronomer Carlos Vera Hernández from La Oliva, stated that he had been in many caves, both with his friends and family, the first being la Cueva del Llano (also in Villaverde)1 which he was introduced to by his schoolteacher. During a series of interviews, he reflected on this experience noting: “that was very interesting for me, it awoke a spark that became a passion, a passion for 1

This is a much larger cave than the Villaverde cave, and has since been musealised as it is home to the only known living exemplar of a blind spider-like invertebrate (Maiorerus randoi ).

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

165

Fig. 1 Photograph taken by Marissa Gonzalez Scanlan during the first moments of our ceramics discovery

caving”. Responding to the question of whether this had enhanced his knowledge of the landscape, he affirmed that it was indeed thanks to this “natural curiosity”, to “know things…in the environment around us”. Carlos formed part of group of five friends who frequently spent time together, exploring the land. He notes “this was an important activity. Logically, during that time we had less distractions, no mobile phone, activities or training…what we were looking for were ways to enjoy our free time. But today, there are less and less young people who want to just explore”. During a focus group with other, now adult, members of their gang, another participant reflects, “we had the habit of going on excursions every weekend, and we used to climb mountains, enter into caves, and sometimes do a round tour of the island, walking from Corralejo [in the north of the island] to the end of Jandia [in south of the island] and the next year we would do the next phase, from Jandia and back again”. He goes onto state that “I think that as youth, we were risk-takers and we still are, because otherwise life makes no sense. Youthhood is a special time to discover, experiment and take risks”. The group recalls that each cave has its own specific difficulties. One important excursion they embarked on was to the cave in Esquinzo, also known as “the Witches Dancehall” (el Bailadero de las Brujas) which they visited on several occasions. One member explains: “on our first visit, it

166

E. Rahman

was pure exploration. To get to know the place. It really made a big impression on us, especially the difficult entrance, part of which is very narrow, unlike other caves which you can envisage from their entrance”. Manolo Fleitas, the former headmaster who formed part of this group remarks, “when you enter…there is the sunken lava tube (jameo), the collapsed part of the plain - this is part of the cave too- and you have to push and pull yourself along. You can’t just walk in, not even crawling”. Not one of the five expresses a sense of danger or fear: “it’s curious, I don’t remember being afraid”, Miguel Angel remarks, but rather they were guided by their great sense of adventure to be “walking in one place and to see a hole in the ground that connects to another area of the cave, it’s really beautiful”. Another of these childhood friend’s recounts: …But what I really recall is this anecdote – see, it didn’t really bother me that to enter the cave, you had to bend down or the darkness, because we had torches. At that time, we used to listen to Paul Simon’s “the sound of silence” and when we were in the cave and we got to a certain point and we made some tortillas for dinner as it was night-time. Then we turned the lights off, because Carlos said he wanted to hear the sound of silence. I remember this because I thought that he was going to put that song on, but what we did was listen to the silence that was in the cave - you couldn’t see a thing, even with your eyes open - for about five minutes or so. Then, each of us explained what they had felt. The typical feeling was tranquillity, inner peace. All you could hear was the sound of your heart beating…

Carlos Vera himself reflects “the atmosphere inside that cave is something that I have always noted. The absolute silence moves me; it is difficult to hear that in any other environment. If you stay in total silence, and hold your breath, you can even hear the sound of your own blood circulating”. Carlos’ reflections on the loss of a sense of time that accompanies these sensations captures the deep time facilitated by being in such deep spaces, echoing something of Bjornerud’s (2018) “timefullness”. Local children, young adults and adolescents did, and some local adults today still do, continue to explore just for fun, without their walks and adventures being integrated with their herding or other caring duties. The types of attentional habits that these native explorers’ experiment

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

167

point to a more holistic epistemology based on place-based experience and intimate proprioceptive capabilities. A vital boldness drives adventure and adventure itself seems to afford its own ethical stance. As Savransky and Smeyers (2016: 89), in their discussion of relevance describe it, “one is given over to an adventure by virtue of an encounter…it is out of the composition of a myriad of encounters that things come (in)to matter in specific and situated ways”. The greatest heritage is perhaps this timeful way of being, or this type of perception, that is closely entwined with proactive place-based ethics, that effectively care for the land and animals’ welfare. This is pure exploration, but one bound by an ethos of good-willed care and curiosity for what is found. It is also learning. Critiquing cognitive theories of learning, that isolate learning from other human activities and human development in general, Lave’s (2019: 36) work on learning and everyday life reflects that doing and knowing “are open-ended processes of improvisation with the social, material and experimental resources at hand”. This is precisely why the question of what, exactly, is being learnt is “always complexly problematic” (Lave, 2019: 32). Such “situated learning” (Lave & Wenger, 1990) appears to be intimately connected to experiences that nurture a more general open attentiveness, actively cultivated when children are present in subsistence-related tasks led by adults, and outside of these, have time to explore for themselves. These are processes that have a broad spectrum of learning outcomes. Perhaps this is what Jean Lave means when she says they are invisible. Indeed, Gaskins (2013: 4) writing on observational learning suggests that this is a “distinct, habitual way of taking in information from the present environment that is strikingly different from the common Euroamerican way of observing…[it] takes in information from the full environmental context (that is, it is wide-angled) and is sustainable over time (that is, it is abiding) …to what is happening in the immediate environment”. Being vitally awake to one’s surroundings and to others, with open curiosity, is what causes real discovery and authentic investigation.

168

4

E. Rahman

The Villaverde Cave as a Heritage Site

The Cave of Villaverde was an unexpected discovery. The result of a series of local infrastructure developments and house-building, its unearthing in the early 1980s marked the beginning of archaeological research and heritage studies more generally, in this otherwise “left behind” island. Evinced in the Town Halls’ archives, Antonio, a structural engineer, reported the incidental discovery of the cave in February 1979, after having carried out a controlled explosion to lay down waterworks that perforated the roof of the cave. In the report, he describes unearthing a volcanic tube of roughly one hundred meters in length, five meters in height and three meters width, noting that when descending into the depths of the cave, one end diminished to ever decreasing crawling space while the other end was completely blocked with earth. He also reports seeing animal bones, human skeletal remains, lithic material, stone walls and shellfish (Figs. 2 and 3).

Fig. 2 Outside of the Villaverde Cave archeological dig site and it’s contemporary entrance (2019)

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

169

Fig. 3 The interior of Villaverde Cave (2019)

Before the arrival of the first archaeological team, villagers and children entered the cave through the perforated roof entrance. Using a rope ladder, various adults are said to have explored the cave out of curiosity and in their search of ancient treasures, with reports of stones, ceramics and skeletal remains being removed. However, the local children were perhaps the most intrepid explorers of the cave. Having a cave, and especially one potentially full of ancient treasures, meant an exciting new playground on the doorstep. Now in his 40s, Ramon Alonso, who continues to live opposite the cave, has many fond memories of playing there and recounted how his brother, the local children and he played hide and seek within its obscure depths, passages and crevices. Sometimes entering the cave with flame torches and sometimes left in complete darkness, these children developed an intimate knowledge of the cave’s interior, leading them to discover the fractioning of the cave into two separate, but articulated, passages and discovering stone walls and hidden spaces. Above all, what lingers in their memories is retreating into the cave for some respite from the hot, dry sun when the school day was over. Taking cardboard boxes

170

E. Rahman

down with them to lie on, local children, boys and girls, would spend their afternoons soaking up the cool ambience of the cave. Curious exploration, by adults and children alike, came to a brisk stop when two female archaeologists, Maria Dolores Garralda and Maria Dolores Sanchez Velazquez, excavated the cave from 1979 until 1983. Financed by the Ministry of Culture in a more or less continuous manner, various press releases, between 1979 and 1981, document the discovery and excavation work with the first mentioning “Majoreran Troglodites” and another, “Majoreran prehistory”. The site indeed promised to reveal secrets about the island’s past, albeit hedging discoveries in this Linnaean proto-scientific language, one that would go on to inform the public eye of Canarian archaeology and locate the interpretation of Majoreran practices in a depreciated and distant past. In June 1981, the results are published in Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos (Garralda et al., 1981) and in 1983, the site is declared “Bienes de Interés Cultural” BIC, a Cultural Interest Asset (Real Decreto 3441/1983) and a national heritage site. There was something about the corroborated antiquity of the site, thanks to the archaeological campaign, that awoke a sense of curiosity other than pilfering and made local people’s attitude to the cave change. Juan Soto, who accompanied Lola (the affectionate diminutive for Maria Dolores Sanchez), the lead archaeologist at the time, together with a few employees of the Cabildo, recalls his initial responsibility being excavating tonnes of earth. He took this as evidence of habitation: “it was as if it had been swept [with a broom]”. He stated that the earth was “very fine indeed” and what seemed “most strange” was that “the earth was loose”, and it was easy to remove and transport. He is no doubt referring to the mysteriously vast quantities of ash found in the cave. Juan Soto recalls that there was a stone wall that reached the roof of the volcanic tube, which they were instructed to dismantle. He speculates, “It was surely used to separate off livestock”. Referring to the wealth of fauna remains he notes, “you could tell that they kept herds down there”. The discovery of “the guanche” in the cave of Villaverde, the generic term to refer to the autochthonous population of the Islands, attracted a lot of attention, capturing the imagination as to what the native population of Fuerteventura might have looked like. Most suspected that more

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

171

human remains would be found in the cave and indeed, many people suspected it was a mass burial site and the discovery of many more “Mahos” would surely reveal the truth about their past. Maho studies, more than one participant remarked, are part of “Canarian Pride”, as is the “authenticity to discover who you are: your identity”, as Juan Soto explained. The children who had once played with their marbles in this open agricultural space (gavia) and who had since become used to exploring the cave after its discovery underneath their play area, now became involved in the archaeological excavation itself. They followed the clear orders of “Lola the boss” and “did what she said”. Their main tasks were cleaning and completing “the puzzles” of broken ceramics, organising them into groups by following their designs. Despite having a restricted access to the cave’s interior, one of these now-adult children, Ramon Alonso, reports they had a close relationship with the archaeologists. People reflect in hindsight, that they “didn’t know it was important” and they lament what they perceive as their ignorance (“la ignorancia”) for having entered and touched artefacts, potentially damaging them. Two research participants recall how their now deceased fathers recounted finding a plaited cord which, when they reached out to touch it, disintegrated before their eyes. Working intensively with the archaeologists, day in day out for a year, Juan Soto recalls it a “very pleasant experience”, especially appreciating the “delicacy” with which Lola treated the site and its contents. When asked if he thought the archaeological work was important, Juan Soto summarises, “Yes, I thought it was important. I also thought it was important that Lolita was concerned to protect it” because the site was “beautiful and worthy of restoration”. The campaign caused a new sense of interest and respect for local heritage. When the archaeological campaign ended, the site was fenced off and the interest and care that the local people had come to demonstrate for the area dissipated with the reality that no one was any longer responsible for it. Those who were children at the time describe this as, “a moodkiller” (“nos cortó el rollo”), as they could no longer access the site and were actively forbidden from doing so. Whatsmore, Juan Soto expresses his dissatisfaction with the unkept promises of the early archaeologists, who had pledged him and others a copy of a book they were working on,

172

E. Rahman

reflecting “They tricked me”. Ramon now expresses his disappointment at the site not having been “developed” and opened to the public— particularly as a tourist attraction—and is disappointed that information about the cave is not more readily available. Ultimately, when the site was fenced off and abandoned, this became nothing more than evidence, in the eyes of the local population, of government incompetency and corruption.

5

Learning to Be in Unfamiliar Environments

There is something fundamentally different about the tacit familiarity of local people and the task of introducing young people, foreign to this environment, to the place for the first time. Perhaps one feature that may be said to frame the experience is the prior risk assessment that is a requirement to undertake research. We may consider this to be the first formal act of familiarisation with the research landscape; a requirement to enter a physical field site and one’s inquiry in it. A risk assessment is an abstract, but informed configuration of possible danger, which nonetheless prepares the (student) researcher to take a set of precautions, but which also can configure one’s experience a priori. Risk assessments include mention of normally common-sense basics, like using sunscreen, sunhats and taking water, avoiding hours of heat—basics, which are too often forgotten in today’s busy itineraries—but also includes more specific particulars like flashlights, back-up batteries, thinking about how one might feel in confined environments and following a protocol of graded emergency procedures. Situating risk in this way means considering a variety of factors; but it still has the capacity to directly effect, or project upon, the experiences themselves. Boholm (2003: 167), critiquing the statistical probability approach to risk, asks us to define the concept as a “framing device which conceptually translates uncertainty from being an open-ended field of unpredicted possibilities into a bounded set of possible consequences”. She clarifies that risk is “not as a phenomenon in itself ”, rather it is “a cognitive frame

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

173

that produces contexts which link an object of risk (a source of potential harm), an object at risk (a potential target of harm) and an evaluation (implicit or explicit) of human consequences” (ibid.: 175). In this way we can think of how “people identify, understand and manage uncertainty in terms of knowledge of consequences and probabilities of events” (ibid.: 166). Suffice to say, while capacitating those wholly unfamiliar with the environment with specific tools and reflections, the potential danger and fear is premediated in a way that it was not for young local explorers. In this sense, it may be said to condition future experience for some participants. After the relatively risk-free interviews and focus group, our group of student researchers went with Carlos Vera Hernández—the one who had spoken to us about the sound of silence—to explore the cave of Esquinzo for ourselves. José Antonio Lima Vera, a local government employee for the Department for the Environment, who was also familiar with the cave, and had found a Maho cranium there some years ago, also accompanied us. As we walked towards the site, José Antonio keenly pointed out a wealth of broken ceramics scattered around the surrounding earth—that none of us had noticed—mixed in with small stones and clay plates used for shooting practice. The ceramics had been triturated by the few cars that had neared the place. Among the ground finds were shells, ancient mud bee homes, stones of diverse colours, shapes and forms. These José Antonio would finger, examine and proceed to elucidate, often naming both the scientific denomination as well as the local appellation, including referring us to the appropriate epoch of their emergence and describing the processes of their formation. We listened, took notes, photographs and videos (Figs. 4 and 5). The cave entrance is curiously hidden by a deceivingly flat terrain and only visible when within meters of the collapsed roof and cavity. As one descends you can see parts of the volcanic tube network, some that probably led to the sea, some three kilometres off. In the left-hand caverns, José Antonio pointed out remnants of birds’ nesting places, disposed food containers, broken glass, stalactites, curious rocks formations and convergences, explaining the volcanic formation of the tube and highlighting certain areas with his flashlight. As a captive audience, we listened to a litany of anecdotes and ethnographic insights. Among

174

E. Rahman

Fig. 4 José Antonio Lima Vera pointing to triturated ceramics and other surface matter around the Cave of Esquinzo

Fig. 5 The fallen entrance to the main opening of the Cave of Esquinzo

them, how the name of the place could be a linguistic confusion, with bailadero (dancehall) being confused with ballar (bleating), and the noise that goats make. He’d heard of the practice of shutting goats up in caves

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

175

and leaving them bleating, in a bid to attract rain. We also learned that an abandoned car had been towed into this hollow, along with a whole heap of accumulated rubbish that used to litter the area, and that these had been incinerated in situ by the local authorities in an effort to clean the area. Antonio laments that this practice also destroys any potential finds, including ceramics. As our exploration of the cave’s leftward galleries came to an end, we turned to the right, where the cave presented a more challenging descent. At the limits of where daylight reached, you could see the nearly undecipherable hole to enter the larger cave network. It was in there that the focus group gang had once spent the night. With our local guides, and Silvia Zelaya, a researcher from La Laguna University, myself and seven students, the question was, who was going to enter the cave? Who was willing to take this risk? After Carlos scrambled through the hole, La Laguna student Nauzet Arocha Alonso, decided he was game. His stature and body shape prevented the leg-first descent. He was forced to retreat. It was far too tight, and from my point of view—too risky—for him to even try and press himself into the passage. I would go with Carla and Marissa, while the other students would stay behind with Silvia. After we’d made our way in, José Antonio was the last to enter. In caves, one loses a sense of time, and exploring, who knows where we might end up. With no phone reception, we synchronised our watches and gave ourselves a 45-minute cut-off point, after which the emergency protocol should be instigated by those on the surface (Fig. 6). Marissa recounts: One of the most extreme entrances was that of the Esquinzo cave – locally known as el Bailadero de las Brujas. It was a narrow, low entrance that required one to enter feet first and slide down. The person before me was not able to enter because the opening was too narrow. Going inside would have been terrifying, if it was not for a local guide having entered right before me. Instead, the experience was snug and exciting. It was like being swallowed whole by the earth, in the most gentle yet rocky manner. (Marissa Gonzalez Scanlan, 1st year arch and anthropology undergraduate)

176

E. Rahman

Fig. 6 Nauzet attempting to enter the narrow passage to the inner galleries of the Cave of Esquinzo

After passing through several meters of constricted, snaking passage we entered a huge gallery and a bare ground space. Further on, the ground was littered with giant boulders, fallen from its roof, and an interior landscape that needed nibble hands and feet to navigate. We clambered. “Here” José Antonio had found an ancient skull. “There” was where the military police had left their rations when they had camped here in the ’80s. Careful, “Watch your step here”. As we traversed this rocky terrain, Carlos signalled the spot where they had stopped to have their dinner, a slope of sedimented earth roughly halfway into the cave’s depths. The air was close, the atmosphere constrained, I felt short of breath. Was it just me? Marissa said she could breathe just fine. The most spectacular moment was nearing the end of this gallery, maybe 50 meters in, where Carlos signalled a hole in the ground that he assured us led to a deeper cavern. Less torturous than the first entrance, this second aperture involved a more marked descent, and we were told to watch out for the cave’s false bottom. We began a second adventure, in this lower, homelier cave, whose narrowing terminated in a wall of collected sediment. If we dug, we might reach the sea, our guides mused. Alert, attentive and observant, mindful of how far and how deep into

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

177

the cave we had voyaged, I wanted to go back. The others seemed quite relaxed, but I was also conscious those on top may worry. We’d had been gone 25 minutes. Carlos asked us to wait a minute, so he could take a photo of us all there together (Fig. 7). Anthropologists well know that every participant-observer has to get used to hanging around, patiently, for people. I anticipated finding the students to be keenly awaiting our return, perhaps exploring the upper surface and the deceptively “blank” landscape. Bedsides, in the words of Ingold (2017: 63) “waiting upon things is precisely what it means to attend to them”. When we surfaced, we found the students huddled in a group on the surface, in deep conversation about what they were going to have for dinner that night.

Fig. 7 In the depths of Esquinzo Cave, from left to right: José Antonio Lima Vera, Carla Peraza Hernández, Marissa Gonzalez Scanlan, Elizabeth Rahman and Carlos Vera Hernández, the author of this photograph

178

6

E. Rahman

Mixed Methods: Archaeand Anthr-Ontologies

The field school engaged many kinds of pedagogical practices and many different facilitators. The institutional need for risk assessment can be considered a form of learning, as can the orientation booklet, suggested prior readings on ethics and the code of conduct. Pedagogical methods employed during the school itself included talks and workshops by area specialists, who gave a mix of formal, lecture-hall talks and on-site elucidations. The site conserver, for instance, did the latter, pointing out areas of interest on the site itself and explaining them from her point of view, one different from the archaeologists (i.e. “excavation is the opposite of preservation”). Our geologist used both formats, giving a talk with slides to introduce students to the discipline and showing pictures of huge immovable apparatus, while also bringing along some tools, and then going to the site itself and pointing out areas in situ. I gave a training session to the students focusing on the question of “what is anthropology” to us”, where we discussed open attention and correspondent participant-observation as described by Ingold (2014) in Ethnography is not Anthropology. We also worked on data management, informed consent and ethics. All are forms of orientation, with the lectures offering framing devices, taxonomies, key concepts and digested data presentation, while the methods session provided pointers for practical engagement. Another modality engaged were the walking tours led by the archaeological team themselves. During a day tour, the first space we visited was the Vinculo, and what one immediately noticed was our positioning towards this site: at a distance, as observers of a site, rather than participants in and with a site. This is strikingly different to how local people interact with the archaeological sites around the island: they sit in it, place themselves, experiment. From here, we went as far as the car would take us before taking up a small path in the lava fields. On the way we are told, “we’re getting near to the site”, “it has difficult access”, “it’s a refuge”. Orientation is given for arriving, with the end in sight. On site, we are asked to observe how “all the space is made the most off ”. Visiting the Valle de la Cueva, we are told it is “a complex”, and

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

179

to look out for Maho patterns, such as the circular and teardrop corral formation and presence of megaliths. These directed attentions involved learning a particular, and selective, disciplinary gaze. Such casual indications nonetheless focused on utility, functions, limiting conditions and interpretations of the economy of man from our contemporary perspective, that of advanced, industrialised capitalism. In this sense, the training is that of a specific “codification of history” (Stewart & Strathern, 2003: 1) and a retrospective, offered by the embodiment of one position across a spectrum of disciplinary gazes. After this, there was a chance to explore the larger sites at one’s own pace, without either local or disciplinary guidance. Further modalities were evinced by our local guides. While José Antonio’s methods were definitely of the “stop and check” (Ingold, 2017: 42) variety, he also engaged in the more exploratory modality typical of curious local explorers. His mixed profile, local life experience coupled with keen amateur interest, meant that navigating the two pedagogies came easily to him. That is who is he is. Traversing the physical terrain, climbing or descending, he was perceptively adept and dexterously aware. Knowing the land so well, he would periodically draw our attention to a flower that indicates a good year for growing; a nest, evidence of roosting birds, a stone or unseen piece of ceramic, a footprint, José Antonio would nearly always fulfil the role of explaining, in vast detail, the providence, meaning and stories related to these minutiae places and objects of interest, often in interdisciplinary—or rather “antidisciplinary” (Ingold, 2001: 74)—spirit. His walking commentary was often too much to digest. Nevertheless, we clearly shared many “lines of interest” (ibid.) that fell neither into one discipline or the other—but rather were to do with the land and place we were exploring, and our conservation frequently turned to the ethics of our and others engagement with the land itself, during such timeful encounters. The other key modality was, to use Ingold’s term, “search and search again” fieldwork—the closest we might get to frank, openminded research. It involved the participant-observation that characterises anthropological fieldwork. Working with local guides, what was key about this aspect of research was how we joined “in correspondence with those among whom we study” (Ingold, 2001: 63), which

180

E. Rahman

also applies to joining with José Antonio and his minutiae observations and directed attentions, as well as with Pedro and Carmelo when finding those archaeological treasures. In this process, we attempt to engage the “beginner’s mind” in a contemplative pedagogy. Japanese Zen master Suzuki (1973: 21) clarifies, that a beginner’s mind “…does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few”. The key to this, then, is to develop curiosity and value uncertainty and puzzlement. This involves “non-judgmental, non-discursive thinking” (Brady, 2007: 374)—similar to the process of creative problem solving (CPS) known as “deferred judgement”, a practice that is markedly opposed to rational, analytical and linear thinking (also see Nisbett et. al. 2001). It is curious to think that the beginner’s mind is one that does not engage the habitual, “narrative mode” of mind, as it has been coined by Farb et al. (2007), that is understood to be the “default” mode of being, with more mindful open perception requiring more work, at least in advanced urban capitalistic society. Rather, this awareness of the present—the mindful mode—is prehistoric, in the sense that it doesn’t seek to tell itself stories about itself or anybody else, and it facilitates both research and personal development. When we relate this back to both an awareness of the ancient geology and the sense of care by local frequenters, learning from research may involve developing a sense of timefulness that relocates humanity on earth (Bjornerud, 2018). Perhaps this also enables a closer connection with “nature”, together with an appreciation of our mammalian heritage (Sabini, 2016).

7

The Students Reflect; the Facilitator Inflexes; Together, Can We Diffract? My field experience…was marked by the humanness that any field research has or can have. It was more vital than theoretical or even methodological….EVA provided me with a breath of fresh air…it was a hard dish to

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

181

chew...the spatial change [coming from Tenerife] was a real challenge for me: the arid land, the complete lack of water, and the presence of caves in the research was something really new for me, coming from fertile lands and a more terrestrial existence….I had never thought of coming to Fuerteventura. Without doubt, Fuerteventura and its caves were a new pedagogy for me, that completely changed my perspective… (Carla Peraza Hernández, 5th year undergraduate La Laguna University)

To recall Ellsworth’s (2011) “anomalous places of learning”, that is, atypical spaces (other than classrooms) that invite alternative modalities, caves emerge as one such space that awakes particular kinds of mind–body interactions and evoke particular kinds of consciousness (Lewis-Williams, 2004). This last modality then is learning for oneself, rather than, as Ellsworth (2011: 16) puts it, “learning as compliance” which hinges on “knowledge already gotten by someone else” and which “someone has deemed…to be in need of being grasped, passed on, and repeated”. This is clear in native pedagogies of exploration where interest is not bound nor conditioned by professional expectations, institutional codes of conduct or abstract categories of geneses, in which expectant discoveries could be placed and ordered. Rather, engaging such experientially grounded and sensorially perceptive “poor” pedagogies, to use Masschelein’s (2010a) concept, involves going for a walk and leading and reaching out (e-ducere) rather than actual teaching (educare) and involves being aware of how our gaze is bound by our perspective. Masschelein (ibid.: 50) clarifies that a poor pedagogy, “depicts no horizon, offers no tradition, offers no representation”. It is an uncomfortable, worldaltering place to be in, “a pedagogy which helps us to be attentive, which offers us the exercises of an ethos or attitude, not the rules of a profession, the codes of an institution, the laws of a kingdom…” (Masschelein, 2010b: 283). Building on a compelling literature on the culturally infused and partial perspectives of western scientific rationality, in science research in particular, and dispelling the myth of an a-cultural, value-free sciencefor-all, we must argue in favour of epistemic plurality in education. This attitude of inclusion supports holistic learning opportunities, where diversity—of people, knowledge, language, meaning and values—are

182

E. Rahman

clearly assets to learning, when framed by the key values of care and curiosity. Engaging these distinct modalities is a key means to critical educational work while still learning disciplinary tropes. Projected risk is an element that can condition the research experience, and interpretations of one’s own and other’s lived realities, while also offering safeguarding from dispersed attentional habits that characterise the default mode of contemporary thought patterns. Getting to know unfamiliar territory requires an unafraid attitude of openness and curiosity, and an equal openness and curiosity by those who are facilitating that “getting to know” in “an ongoing open process of mattering” (Barad, 2003: 817). Bold and vital alertness, and active bodily engagement, untarnished by disciplinary narratives, are key to this process. Indeed, this attitude may be quite contrary to the given wisdom of inherited paradigms, concepts and categories that we use to interpret phenomena. Largely, this difference depends on the place from which we are looking (our perspective), our respective epistemological conditioning and our commitment to them and our willingness to alter them. It also depends on how we are used to engaging ourselves in research. Ultimately, it begs the question of values in education and how new sets of values and implicit theories about the world and our place in it are critically and often implicitly, communicated to students, as well as to participants in research projects themselves. Wanting to uncover the truth about the past is a narrative that archaeology promises to deliver. However, like any good research, it often finds that it knows less than it thinks. The same can be said of any discipline. However, the research project, and the questions my students and I asked, caused participants to think about both their heritage and their learning. Maybe, for the first time, they became aware of the ethics of care tied up in their encounters, maybe it caused them to revalue their childhood experiences. Maybe, students of archaeology and anthropology came to revalue new moments for curious exploration and discovery beyond disciplinary gazes. Maybe, this will lead them to new appreciations, meanings and interpretations, and above all engender transformative learning moments. Maybe, corresponding with locals will cause new relations of appreciation and care. After all, it “is not about ‘enlightenment’ by the sun, but about the little light that enables

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

183

something to begin and that lets us attend to something in the dark (cave) that helps us to navigate, to make and find a way” (Masschelein, 2018: 1198). Our dialogue with those directly affected by our research is an important aspect of amplifying our terrain and offering the most equitable—and enjoyable—of engagements. Respected former headmaster Manolo Fleitas, one of the group who camped in Esquinzo cave, reflects on the question of learning, responding “the best way to understand something is to walk the land, investigate, discover, and so, I agree with you completely that we actually learnt an awful lot about the surrounding environment”. Personally, what has imprinted onto my memory is the delight of unearthing the “casual find” with our local guides, with their tactile and exciting interpretations literally animating that earthly ceramic matter. In our teaching, perhaps we can cultivate environments that enable learning about different ways of being in the world too. And perhaps these ways of being are what we should treasure. This local heritage is still alive and well. Acknowledgements Elizabeth would like to thank the editors and Jan Masschelein for comments on drafts of this chapter. She would also like to acknowledge the support of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and supporting colleagues, especially Elizabeth Ewart, Laura Rival and Peter Mitchell. Elizabeth acknowledges the timely support of the University of Oxford’s Teaching and Development Enhancement Project award (TDEP) which made this initiative possible. All images are thanks to Marissa Gonzalez Scanlan, unless otherwise stated. Thanks are extended to all participants, locals and students, for their involvement in the project.

References Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs, 28(3), 801–831. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chandler Publishing Company.

184

E. Rahman

Bjornerud, M. (2018). Timefulness: How thinking like a geologist can help save the world . University of Princeton Press. Boholm, Å. (2003). The cultural nature of risk: Can there be an anthropology of uncertainty? Ethnos, 68(2), 159–178. Brady, R. (2007). Learning to stop, stopping to learn: Discovering the contemplative dimension in education. Journal of Transformative Education, 5 (4), 372–394. Clack, T., & Brittain, M. (2011). Place-making, participative archaeologies and Mursi megaliths: Some implications for aspects of pre-and proto-history in the Horn of Africa. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 5 (1), 85–107. Ellsworth, E. (2011). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. Routledge. Farb, N. A., Segal, Z. V., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z., & Anderson, A. K. (2007). Attending to the present: Mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(4), 313–322. Garralda, M. D., Hernadez, F., & Sanchez, M. B. (1981). El enterramiento de la cueva de Villaverde (La Oliva, Fuertenveutra). Anuario De Estudios Atalnaticos, 27 , 673–690. Gaskins, S. (2013). Open attention as a cultural tool for observational learning. In Conference Proceedings of Learning in and Out of School: Education Across the Globe. Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, May 22–23, 2012. Gibson, J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton Mifflin. Govier, E., & Steel, L. (2021). Beyond the ‘thingification’ of worlds: Archaeology and the New Materialisms. Journal of Material Culture, 26 (3), 298–317. Ingold, T. (2001). From the transmission of representations to the education of attention. In H. Whitehouse (Ed.), The debated mind: Evolutionary psychology versus ethnography (pp. 113–153). Berg. Ingold, T. (2014). That is enough about ethnography. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1), 383–395. Ingold, T. (2017). Anthropology and/as education. Routledge. Ingold, T., & Vergunst, J. L. (2008). Ways of walking: Ethnography and practice on foot. Ashgate. Lave, J. (2019). Learning and everyday life: Access, participation, and changing practice. Cambridge University Press.

7 Familiar Matter? Cave Heritage Sites …

185

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1990). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. Lewis-Williams, D. (2004). The mind in the cave: Consciousness and the origins of art. Thames and Hudson. Masschelein, J. (2010a). E-ducating the gaze: The idea of a poor pedagogy. Ethics and Education, 5 (1), 43–53. Masschelein, J. (2010b). The idea of critical e-ducational research-e-ducating the gaze and inviting to go walking. In I. Gur-Ze’ev (Ed.), The possibility/impossibility of a new critical language in education (pp. 275–291). Sense Publishers. Masschelein, J. (2018). An educational cave story (On animals that go to ‘school’). In P. Smeyers (Ed.), International handbook of philosophy of education (pp. 1185–1200). Springer Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108(2), 291. Sabini, M. (2016). The earth has a soul: C. G. Jung on nature, technology & modern life. Joseph Henderson M.D.: Books Savransky, M., & Smeyers, P. (2016). An ethics of adventure. In The adventure of relevance. Palgrave Macmillan. Stewart, P., & Strathern, A. (2003). Landscape, memory and history: Anthropological perspectives. Pluto Press. Suzuki, S. (1973). Zen mind, beginner’s mind . Weatherhill.

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm Nadia von Benzon

1

Introduction

The 1854 Youthful Offenders Act allowed for the certification1 of reformatory schools, including reformatory farm schools. Run by voluntary organisations,2 reformatory farm schools sought to educate male, normally urban, youth who had engaged in criminal activity, or been suspected of, or considered at risk of, engaging in criminal activity. The 1

Public recognition, authority and associated public funding. Reformatories were private establishments and their building was privately funded—typically by groups of local philanthropists who would raise money from private donations. Once established, government subsidies offset some of the cost of accommodating the boys in their care who had been sentenced to time at the reformatory. Reformatories on occasion also accepted ‘voluntary’ cases—boys who were sent with the consent of their parents. In these cases, parents contributed to their subsistence.

2

N. von Benzon (B) Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_8

187

188

N. von Benzon

Act gave local magistrates the power to sentence boys, aged between about 11 and 17, to these farms, explicitly meant for education and rehabilitation. With alternative options for juvenile reform made possible through the Act, there was a clear narrative of reformatory farms as a new development in the improvement of criminalised urban young people, that relied on a newly harnessed use of the countryside environment (Ploszajska, 1994; Stack, 1979). This use of rural spaces in youth reform in the UK mirrored earlier and ongoing uses of the British countryside for therapeutic intervention and the removal of the physically and mentally unwell (Philo, 2012) and disabled (Philo et al., 2017), and contemporaneous use of rural space in the re-education of criminalised young people at Mettray, in France (Foucault, 1979). This chapter seeks to explore the reformatory farm school, and the rural environment in which it was situated, as an unfamiliar landscape for criminalised Victorian youth, contrasting to their lived experience in urban Britain. Drawing on case studies based on archival research from three reformatory farm schools in the North West of England, this chapter examines the way in which the cultural and geographical distance between urban and rural livelihoods was used as a tool for rehabilitation from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This chapter offers historical context to the contemporary interventions discussed elsewhere in this book, that seek to provide practical opportunities for urban and rural children and youth to engage with rural spaces for therapeutic and educational purposes. However, this chapter also challenges the notion, posed by authors such as Louv (2005), that children’s absence from free play in outdoor green spaces is a recent phenomenon. Rather, the chapter illustrates a centuries-long absence—and therefore unfamiliarity—of poor, urban, youth, from rural landscapes. In so doing, this chapter looks beyond contemporary concerns over ‘denaturing’ as a product of middle-class, overscheduled, bubble-wrapping or the role of technology. Thus, the chapter explores the deep-seated, and enduring social inequalities that have, since the dawn of the industrial revolution, driven a wedge between urban working-class children and access to nature-based environments. Moreover, this chapter explores the notion that the contemporary, twenty-first century, distinction between nature and the city—albeit

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm

189

ephemeral and hard to define—was carefully curated by the Victorian bourgeoisie—the wealthy, the middle classes, and those in political power (Gaskell, 1980). Imaginaries, alongside realities, of the city as a vitalist centre of industry and industriousness, and of the creation of intellectual outputs whether cultural, academic or technological, emerged in this period. As a bi-located opposing force, whilst centres of productivity and improvement, cities were also conceived as homes to an ‘underworld’ of vice and iniquity (Shore, 1999). Meanwhile the countryside was reified as a counterpoint to the urbane as a space of tranquillity, naivety and simplicity. The countryside was commandeered, both materially and in the imaginary, as a landscape of support for the city, providing resources for its consumption, and refuge—as therapeutic or leisure space—for the cities work-worn inhabitants (Snape, 2004). Thus, the countryside was ascribed with a particular moral role, separate from, and yet central to, the efficient functioning of the urban economy. Rural reformatory farms, whilst rarely explicitly acknowledged as a facet of this urban-rural relationship of Victorian Britain, provide an interesting lens through which to explore the nineteenth century positioning of the countryside as at once familiar and unfamiliar, perhaps even a site made unfamiliar through its concerted construction as a space of difference and removal from the familiarity of the urban. Meanwhile this chapter will also illustrate the work that reformatory farms themselves did in propagating this complex urban/rural relationship of co-constructed familiarity and unfamiliarity prevalent in Victorian Britain.

2

Case Studies

This chapter is based on documentary research utilising the archives of three rural reformatory schools in the North West of England: The Fylde Farm School (also referred to as the Manchester and Salford Reformatory, the Manchester Reformatory and the Blackley Farm School or Blackley Reformatory3 ), the Birkdale Farm School and the Liverpool 3

The various names refer to different iterations of the same institution that was initially founded in central Manchester, moved to Blackley—an out-of-city location north of Manchester in 1857,

190

N. von Benzon

Farm School. These three reformatories existed in broadly the same period and accepted children from across the Northwest of England and beyond (primarily Lancashire, Cheshire, Merseyside and the Fylde, which some children sent from Yorkshire and further afield). Children found themselves at reformatory farm schools primarily through sentencing by local magistrates as a result of interactions with the police.4 Young people, aged between 11 and 17, brought before the magistrates, could be sentenced to up to five years in a reformatory farm, as a result of being found guilty of a crime, of being suspected of a crime, or by dint of being deemed vulnerable to potential engagement in criminal activity. Those young people who were convicted of criminal activity first served their sentence in an adult prison, before being transferred to the reformatory farm for education and rehabilitation. This typically consisted of a sentence of up to three years’ agricultural training and academic education within the school, and a further two years on license in an apprenticeship role under the supervision of the reformatory school’s head teacher. These reformatory farms were all established in the northwest of England in the Greater Manchester, Liverpool and The Fylde area, following the 1854 Youthful Offenders Act. The schools were founded by boards of local philanthropists and funded through a mixture of government funding and private donations. As with any public institution of the time, there was Church affiliation—the Fylde Farm School and the Liverpool Reformatory Farm School were Church of England associated whilst the Birkdale Farm Reformatory was a Catholic institution. In its heyday, from 1867, the Liverpool Reformatory Farm School housed up to 140 boys up to 14 years old5 and the Birkdale Farm Reformatory housed 200 boys by 1884. The Fylde Farm School is the most modern of the three institutions, opening in 1905 with the capacity to accommodate 130 boys. In 1933 the Children and Young Persons Act and then moved to Poulton-le-Fylde, near Blackpool, in 1904, when the Blackley site became too urbanised. 4 In some instances, records illustrate parents enrolling children voluntarily at reformatory farms where they were concerned about their son’s behaviour and associations. 5 www.childrenshomes.org.uk provides a fantastic online repository of information relating to UK residential schools and juvenile care homes.

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm

191

resulted in reformatories being refigured as Approved schools. Through the twentieth century these sites passed through a variety of iterations of residential educational establishments, but all were closed by the last quarter of the century with the sites now either laying in ruins (Fylde) or having been redeveloped as housing estates (Liverpool and Birkdale). This chapter is primarily concerned with the Victorian and Edwardian histories of these sites, focusing on archival material from 1854 to 1910.6

3

Corrective Education and Child Protection

Reformatory farm schools sat in a broader context of youth reformatory options in Victorian Britain, also provided for in (although in some cases, also preceding) the 1854 Youthful Offenders Act. Reformatory ships were one alternative that presented significant competition in the landscape of corrective schooling in the northwest of England. Reformatory ships sought to teach fit young men and boys the necessary skills for working at sea, ideally shaping them for life in the navy or merchant navy. Life on board reformatory ships was considered particularly difficult—indeed it was the challenge of ‘life at sea’ that was particularly valued as a tool for reform by the organising committees— and so sentence to a reformatory ship was reserved for only the healthiest boys. This, in turn, meant that in the northwest of England, reformatory farm schools were viewed as a placement for less strong boys: The most robust boys are not sent to the Farm, but that some are wanting in physical development, are of comparatively feeble constitutions and subjects of inherited disease, and other approaching mental deficiency, it will not be at all surprising if our boys do not appear so bright eyed and manly as those in schools for which only boys of robust constitutions are selected . Liverpool Farm School Annual report, 1891 (21).

6 My apologies to historians as I use the term ‘Victorian’ throughout, as shorthand for this period.

192

N. von Benzon

By the late Victorian era a variety of other interventions also existed for young people who might, in contemporary terms, be considered ‘at risk’, but were not explicitly considered criminals or at risk of criminality. Murdoch (2006) explores the Victorian approach to child protection involving the complete removal of children from their parents’ care in order to provide them with a fresh start (see also, Holman, 1986). The removal of younger children was often on boarding-out terms with families in rural areas (Soares, 2014) reflecting a social understanding of rural areas of spaces of happiness and innocence (Swain et al., 2010) and of the recognised therapeutic potential of the countryside (Philo, 1987). However, and what is crucial to understanding the interconnections between the social construction of rurality and urban spaces in Victorian Britain, the removal of these children to the countryside was also seen as a way of ‘cleaning up’ urban environments and removing a threat to the social order of the city (Davin, 1996; Murdoch, 2006; Shore, 1999). The remainder of this chapter will consider reformatory farm schools as a fertile ground for unpacking and exploring the unfamiliarity of the countryside in Victorian Britain. Particularly this chapter explores the ways in which this unfamiliarity with the countryside was both constructed and then utilised by the urban elite as a way of reducing criminality and unproductivity in the Victorian city. The chapter will first explore the development and justification for the siting of reformatory farm schools and their activities, before considering the harsh reality of life for the young people incarcerated therein. This chapter therefore demonstrates that the construction and interpretation of the countryside as an unfamiliar landscape, is, despite the concerns of many contemporary authors (Louv, 2005), far from being a recent phenomenon.

4

Bucolic Countryside and Honest Labour

Whilst the 1854 Youthful Offenders Act may be seen to have paved the way for the development of rural reformatory farms, through providing structural support, and limited funding, their development reflects a

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm

193

philanthropic rhetoric that served to mobilise localised groups of the wealthy and middle classes to set about organising their establishment. As such, local archives—at Liverpool and Preston—contain rich data including minutes of committee meetings, reports of committee visits and annual reports for the institutions. There is plenty here to not only illustrate how the reformatories were established and run, but the ongoing experiences, practices and affects of their running. The following section of the chapter intends to explore the moral and practical justifications for establishing reformatory schools in rural locations. By the late nineteenth century there was a well-established discourse concerning the health, wellbeing and moral benefits of spending time in the English countryside (Swain et al., 2010). This thesis of the rural idyll was underpinned by a rhetoric of the therapeutic benefits of rural landscapes illustrated by the proliferation of countryside- and seasidebased sanatoria, retreats and asylums (Andrews & Kearns, 2005; Foley, 2016; Grose, 2011; Philo, 1987). Interest in the use of farming, horticulture and outdoor activity for treatment and rehabilitation, played into both Victorian belief in the inherent benevolent properties of rural and thus unfamiliar environments, but also belief in the virtue of labour— the idea that honest hard work was Godly, whilst being out of work, understood as synonymous with laziness—would lead to vice (see also Topp & Wieber, 2009). In 1904 the Blackpool Gazette published a short piece on the removal of the reformatory from Blackley (north Manchester) to Fylde (near Blackpool). The piece, focusing on the laying of the foundation school, opened with the lines: The excellence of the Fylde land for farming purposes, its charming surroundings, and its healthy conditions are responsible for the introduction of what will be a most interesting community…

Whilst couched in Victorian moralising discourse, there may well be some sense in this approach from a contemporary standpoint. Indeed, contemporary interventions, particularly Care Farming (Gorman & Cacciatore, 2017), demonstrate that therapeutic benefits may well transpire from engagement with productive agricultural activities, provided

194

N. von Benzon

they take place within a suitably nurturing environment (Leck et al., 2014). However, there is also some justification in the archives for the teaching and apprenticing of young men in agricultural trades in order to find useful employment on completion of their ‘sentence’. J.R. Beard, chairman of the board of governors of the Fylde farm school, quoted in the Blackpool Gazette 19.07.04: The plot of land would enable the boys to exercise themselves in the art of its cultivation; and as in the past, it was hoped that they would be able to let their boys out in time to the neighbouring farmers.

Elsewhere, the archives indicate this aim was not always met, as there is evidence that, particularly during the late nineteenth century, there was significant difficulty in placing the older boys either in training positions or in employment on completion of their period at the farm. Annual reports from the reformatory schools show only a minority of boys leaving to farm labouring positions, with more emigrating to North America or joining the armed forces. For example, the 1888 annual report of the Birkdale Farm School reports eight boys leaving that year to go into farm work, whilst 16 emigrated, 20 went into other trades and 23 were released into the care of friends. Through farming activities, therefore, the boys were to develop familiarity with agricultural environments and agricultural practices. The specific value afforded to working outdoors in the countryside both demonstrates an ideology of a difference between industrious activity that took place indoors, or in urban areas, such as factory labour, and that taking place in the countryside. In juxtaposition to urban labour, rural labour was deemed, by those urbanites in positions of power and control, to be clean and wholesome. Thus, boys from poor and largely urban areas were to learn farming as a means of improving themselves. This familiarity-through-labour was intended to have two potential outcomes: that of being overtly therapeutic in its own right; and that of training the boys to be productive labourers. If the former goal was successfully achieved, the boys would be in a position to return to urban life as

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm

195

reformed characters able to productively contribute to the smooth functioning of urban society. If the latter was achieved, the boys would be able to productively contribute to the rural economy, in turn, helping to feed (both literally and figuratively) the urban economy.

5

Remote and Moral(ising) Landscapes

A less picture-book-ready analysis of the siting of Victorian reformatory farms suggests that it was not just deference to the benefits of being in the countryside that pulled their founders to the development of rural reformatory farms as a tool for rehabilitation and education of young offenders (Gibson, 2017). The countryside was valued not just for what it was, or what it offered, but for what it was not, and what it did not contain. The poor neighbourhoods of the city in which there was most unemployment, ill health and crime were vilified. The poor urban landscape was considered to be characterised by poverty, dirt, sloth and vice. The environment was viewed as inextricably entwined with the lives and the livelihoods of the people who resided there—both produced by and producing a low quality of person who was viewed by the wealthier classes as incapable of self-improvement (Shore, 1999): As population grows and our great cities become more crowded, the need and usefulness of organisations for rescuing the young from their evil surroundings will become greater, and the necessity for them more fully realised . W.H. Houldsworth, one of the founders of the Manchester Reformatory, 1903.

The language used here is highly emotive and suggests a significant and degrading ‘othering’ of the working class from the everyday lives of the middle class and wealthy who were involved in the development and ongoing funding of the reformatory schools movement. However, Murdoch (2006) and Ash (2016) both reflect on the Victorian use of melodramatic language in order to generate attention and garner public sympathy to elicit philanthropic donations. At this time social interventions were primarily funded through voluntary giving from the wealthy

196

N. von Benzon

and middle class, rather than through public spending, and the reformatory farm schools were no different. As such, from a contemporary standpoint it is impossible to be entirely clear whether Houldsworth’s quote above, derived from a newspaper publication, is reflective of a genuine perception of inner-city neighbourhoods as ‘evil’ or rather draws on such hyperbolic language as a means of garnering sympathetic philanthropy. The case of the Manchester and Salford Reformatory provides a particularly interesting case study concerning the ways in which perceptions of public morality influenced the development and ongoing siting of reformatory farms. The Reformatory was initially opened in 1857 as a relatively small facility (with beds for 32 boys) in a semi-rural location at Blackley—now an area of Greater Manchester just inside the M60. Over the following forty years the surrounding land became increasingly densely populated and some of the nine-acre site was reclaimed for utilities and development. From the late 1890s, the governors of the institution became convinced of the need to remove the school from the increasingly developed surrounds to a more rural location: The school property is gradually being built round and the temptations placed in the lads’ way are an increasing evil. The strain to combat them is bound in time to prove too severe for the most devoted staff HM Inspetor Mr. J.G. Legge, 1900, regarding The Manchester and Salford Reformatory at Blackley.

Then two years later: The great increase of population already gathered together in the vicinity makes it most difficult to keep our boys from special moral temptation. J. Beard, T. Thornhill Shann and G.W. Rayner Wood, governors of the Manchester and Salford Reformatory at Blackley, c. 1902.

The sentiment then remained, of keeping the boys away from cities as hotbeds of corruption, after they have finished at the reformatory:

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm

197

berths on board merchant ships, farm service, in fact employments of any kind, which will take them out of Manchester, are what are specially needed . Fifth annual report of the Manchester and Salford Reformatory, 1860. (p. 9)

If we consider the broader narratives of the fear held by the middle classes, of unregulated working-class children and people living in poverty (Holman, 1986; Murdoch, 2006), then we might also wonder if behind this statement lies a concern for the impact on the city of Manchester should the boys be allowed to return there. Thus, whilst the primary motivation of removing young people to the countryside may have been about familiarising the boys with the countryside landscape, however that familiarity might be defined, we can also see a project therein of making the city strange, or at least, making the boys strangers to the city and urban ways of life. The boys were encouraged to establish lives outside the city, whether in farming or another rural industry and therefore physically remove the threat of a growing working-class city population. More likely, however, the motivation lay in breaking the ties between the boys and their home neighbourhoods. Thereby, the boys might either go elsewhere to establish their post-reformatory lives, or, the same boys might be ‘reintroduced’ to the city as newly reformed productive citizens willing to work hard for a living, rather than returning to communities and ways of life deemed as squalid, depraved and even ‘evil’. Whilst rural reformatories provided distance from urban centres and the boys’ former neighbourhoods, they also separated incarcerated young people from their own families and social networks. Visits home were typically not facilitated for any reason other than the death, or imminent death, of a close family member. Visits to the reformatory by family members were in many institutions not encouraged. The rural locations also meant that there was a time and monetary cost to the visit—working parents might struggle to find the time to make the journey, whilst outof-work families were unlikely to be able to afford the fare. Thus letter writing was often the only form of communication available. Whilst the boys were taught to read and write at the reformatory, it is likely that many of the boys’ parents would have had negligible levels of literacy.

198

N. von Benzon

Facilitating the disconnection between boys and their families and friends was recognised by the developers and overseers of reformatory farms as a key benefit of their rural location (Shore, 1999). For example, in a 1902 letter from the archives, J. Beard and G.W. Rayner, governors of Blackley Reformatory referred to the boys in the reformatory as having: ‘bad companions and ignorant and undisciplined homes’. Whilst the 1889 report of the Liverpool Juvenile Reformatory Association (p. 1) states: ‘the routine of the schools has been carried on with the quiet perseverance which indicates confidence in the efforts made to free a number of young persons from the degrading influences which attended their childhood.’ This attempt to sever the ties between boys and their families and friends largely occurred due to the potential positive nature of these relationships being overlooked, or the ability of the institution to replace the role of the family in providing long-term support and care, being over-estimated. This is very much in line with broader practice in terms of child welfare interventions in Victorian Britain, which sought to remove children from families, which were seen as the loci of neglect or abuse, and offer children a brand new start in an unfamiliar environment, without the perceived stranglehold that maintaining former familial relationships might present (Holman, 1986; Murdoch, 2006). However, on occasion there was a need to return to friends or family on completion of sentence at reformatory school. Discharges to family, or friends of the family occurred if no viable alternative could be found. For example: 1884 annual report of the Liverpool Farm School, Mr. Atty, headteacher, reports (p. 17): ‘Of the boys placed out, those returned to friends are (as they always have been) most unsatisfactory… The reconvictions of those returned to friends is 25 per cent; of those placed to service and kept from their friends 9.6’. Thus returning from whence they came was seen as a retrograde step for reformatory farm alumni, suggesting a key concern of reformatory farms was a moving onwards of boys to further unfamiliar environments rather than a return of a ‘reformed’ boy to a familiar community. Whilst facilitating permanent removal from their home communities might be deemed an important facet of the reformatory farm interventions, farms were unable to facilitate this through complete seclusion from urban environments. For the reformatory farm schools, accessibility

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm

199

was also key. Victorian Reformatory Farms could not be shut off from the outside world. Heavily reliant on donations from local philanthropists, reformatory farms typically made themselves open to visitors at the visitors’ convenience, with some hosting visits and lectures for groups of donors. For example, The Birkdale Farm School archive includes a press cutting dated 9 June 1887 detailing a conference held at the school for the Reformatory and Refuge Union. The HM Inspector of prisons was also required to visit reformatories once a year. Boys needed to be able to access the reformatory with relative ease following sentencing as did the doctors who were called on to examine new arrivals. Access to local markets was also important for reformatory farms because they hoped to be able to sell produce. Moreover, towns provided work opportunities which were essential for placing the boys out on license and finding them positions on leaving the school. For example, J.G. Legge, HM Inspector7 praised the Fylde Farm School for being ‘near to, and ease of access from a large and populous district, and is yet completely in the country.’ Whilst a letter from J.R. Beard, T. Thornhill Shann and G.W. Rayner Wood to the Mayor and councillors of Salford (1903) stated: Blackley, when the Reformatory was placed there, was a rural village, aside from the main roads of communication, and affording sufficient seclusion, combined with the advantages of contiguity, to Manchester.

There was clearly a fine balance to be made here—on the one hand there was the need to site reformatory schools in locations that were, at least metaphorically remote, removed from and distant to urban areas in the imaginaries of both the boys who were sentenced and the philanthropists who were funding their incarceration. However, this unfamiliarity, or disconnect, could not be complete, as the reformatory farms needed to operate within the same economic and social system as the city, with flows of goods and people required to move efficiently between the two environments. This need for compromise undermines the concept of an urban-rural binary, in which the urban was positioned as having the potential to be dangerous and corrupting (Shore, 1999) and the natural 7

Printed in the annual report of the Fylde Farm School, 1904.

200

N. von Benzon

environment as holding therapeutic potential (Swain, 2009). Indeed, whilst in the short term, the reformatory farms appeared to draw on rural imaginaries to underpin the logic of their practices, they fundamentally relied on co-location with urban areas as centres for services, funding, inmates and dispersal opportunities for graduates.

6

Nature Without Nurture?

Lack of adequate funding, discussed later in this chapter, alongside lack of protective legislation such as health and safety and safeguarding policies, had significant detrimental impact on the experience of the boys sent to reformatory farms. Life on the farm proved dangerous, and the young people’s health suffered as a result of illness due to exposure to pollutants, overcrowding and poor sanitation, and risk of injury due to lack of adequate supervision and faulty infrastructure and equipment. In the 1895 annual report of the Liverpool Farm School, the HM Inspector’s report (p. 17) contained the following: I was sorry to find fourteen boys suffering from sore eyes; if the boys were provided with separate towels, and something were done to make the playground less dusty, there might be a distinct improvement in this respect.

The 1885 annual report of the Manchester and Salford reformatory (p. 16) stated: About midsummer there began an outbreak of pleuro-pneumonia, which attacked four boys in succession… there was a low typhoid character about their cases which pointed to some unfavourable sanitary conditions. Dr Morgan then proceeded to say that, in his opinion, these conditions existed in the over-crowding of the dormitories, where the space between the beds was decidedly less than is generally allowed in similar institutions of more modern construction.

Most annual reports report the death of at least one inmate or staff member during the year. In one of the most extreme cases in the archives,

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm

201

the headmasters’ report in the 1884 annual report of the Liverpool Farm School contains the information (p. 17): The year past has been one of anxiety. In the first half of the year there was much sickness and four deaths among the boys. The Medical Officer for the Township reported to the Commissioners that the polluted condition of the Newton Brook was injurious to health, and it was only the high sanitary condition of the School premises that has prevented worse consequences.

In the same year the Inspector’s report mentions that seven or eight of the boys were suffering from Typhoid at the time of his visit, caused by the Earlstown drain in the vicinity of the school. Meanwhile, the boys also experienced questionable provision of food and clothing whilst at the reformatory farms, described in the following annual report: The school is divided into three classes, with two monitors. The 1st class consists of boys newly admitted, who are kept as much as possible apart from the other inmates, being secluded in the probation-room below stairs, and sleeping together in one dormitory, under the charge of a monitor. To these restrictions several minor ones are added, and the boys in this class are not allowed to assume the dress of the Institution, but continue to wear the clothes they came in, often of a very dilapidated appearance. Annual report of the committee of the Manchester and Salford Reformatory, 1857. (p. 9)

The minutes from a meeting of Governors at Blackley on December 16, 1896 (Lancashire Archives) note a complaint being made from a boy that there was insufficient food. The secretary had enquired into the matter and believed it was ‘frivolous’. Despite regular reformatory inspections, the health and safety standards of the day were so far behind contemporary legislation that illness and death—whether through disease or accident, was considered regrettable but part for the course. However, whilst the reformatory regime may appear uncomfortable and callous by contemporary standards, the worry at the time was that the farms might be seen as spoiling the young people they housed:

202

N. von Benzon

Some people criticized these reformatory schools on the ground of their luxuriousness. And what was this luxury to which they took exception? It was the perfect cleanliness that existed everywhere on these schools. J.G. Legge HM Inspector of reformatory schools.8

This extract reflects the difficulty of adequately evaluating the efficacy or morality of Victorian reformatory farm schools through a contemporary lens. This is further complicated when we turn to consider the interpersonal relationships that formed between the staff and the boys in their care. Contrary to what the discussion of illness, injury and restrictive diet might suggest, there is evidence in the archives that implies that some long-term good did come from incarceration within a reformatory, for at least some of the boys. There are numerous written comments from governors of the reformatories attesting to the positive impact on the boys, and the long-term relationship that some boys had with the school—returning to the school to visit, or keeping in touch through letter writing. The 1859 annual report of the Manchester and Salford Reformatory (p. 15) contains copies of letters from old boys who had emigrated to Canada, including: After my long and continued silence I guess you thought I had forgotten all the kind friends that I left behind me at Blackley, and cared no more about them, but I assure you that I have not, but on the contrary, they have been constantly in my mind, and I have always been thinking about them…. JR.

In the annual report of headmaster, Mr. Atty of the Liverpool Farm School, 1879, it is recorded that (p. 17): ‘Forty-two old boys have visited the School during the year, and many more have written.’ An extract from a letter sent by an old boy who had left the school 18 years previously9 is also printed:

8

Reported in the Blackpool Gazette 19.07.1904. Richard Atty served as headmaster for thirty years, dying in post at the Liverpool Farm School, in 1888. 9

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm

203

My dear Friend, I take the pleasure of addressing a few lines to you, to maintain an intercourse which, though slight now, I hope will be eternal… you have not experienced the actual feelings of a parent , although you have always appeared to me to have a great love for children … We had purposed calling our baby Richard… as a slight token of affection for one who was a second father to me….

Therefore, the extent to which reformatory farm schools provided a nurturing environment for criminalised boys is open to debate. It is clear that the policy and practical intention was a broadly therapeutic one, underpinned by the notion that engaging boys in an unfamiliar yet healthy and potentially productive environment, would lead to their selfimprovement. It is clear that there was the intention to harness some of the characteristics of the countryside to improve the long-term outcomes for boys but that the reality of the available resources, including the health of the landscape, equipment and knowledge, was often lacking. Indeed, what we find in the archives is an undermining of Victorian—and indeed pervading contemporary notions—of a clean and wholesome countryside and a dirty and polluted urban environment. Whilst the archives do not provide clear evidence of the risks to health from pollution the boys experienced in urban areas prior to arrival at the reformatory farm, it is clear that the exposure to land and water pollution and airborne particulates had a significant deleterious effect on the health of some of the boys who were sent to the countryside—at least in part— for its therapeutic potential. As such, the reformatory farm schools often fell far short of providing a therapeutic experience for the boys living therein. Nevertheless, for some boys, the schools still provided an experience of family and of structured education and activity, that was an improvement on the context from which they had come. The final section of the chapter explores the way in which reformatory farms were funded, and the challenges of funding what was ultimately a very expensive form of intervention for criminalised young people, as a key barrier to the efficacy of the Victorian reformatory farm project. This reflection on funding draws out the ways in which the rural siting of reformatory farms was

204

N. von Benzon

intended to be more than simply a therapeutic intervention or a strategy for removing boys from urban areas.

7

Funding Reformatory Schools

Annual allowances for each child incarcerated were paid by the government, whilst the establishment of the schools themselves was paid by local philanthropists, who also supplemented the government allowances for maintenance and upkeep. Previous sections have described the way in which the funding sources may have influenced the narratives that were presented about the lives of the boys prior to attending the reformatory farms, and the potential role of the countryside in improving the lives of these boys (Ash, 2016; Murdoch, 2006). In other words, the fact that reformatory farms were funded significantly through private donations may have underpinned some of the rhetoric that presented these interventions as a binary opposite to the communities from which most of the boys were coming. Hyperbolic and emotive language underpinned attempts to present the need for removal of boys from unsafe city environments to nurturing yet unfamiliar rural settings. However, whist the reformatory schools featured in this chapter were successful in raising private funds for the establishment of the farms, government funding and philanthropic donations proved insufficient to maintain them. Reformatory farms were expensive institutions due to the quantity and quality of land required, and the equipment and resources necessary. It is therefore unsurprising that management committees devised strategies to cut monetary spending and raise additional funds. The most popular source of supplementary income was through the production of surplus goods—agricultural, and otherwise—such as cut wood, matches and baskets that could be sold to raise additional funds: The committee have the pleasure of stating that the trades all show a small profit; that derived from farming amounts to £17, and the other industrial departments… give a profit of £28., making a total of £45. There is reasonable hope that the sum realized form these sources during the present year will be much larger: from the Basket-making especially, great things are expected,

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm

205

inasmuch as the materials are inexpensive, and the articles manufactured find a ready sale. Annual Report of the Manchester and Salford Reformatory, 1858. (p. 12)

Although, interestingly, the following annual report states (p. 8): Thus the farm shows a profit of £38. 9s. 8d. and the Carpenters’-work of £30. 14s. 4d. the other Trades have cleared their expenses, with a small balance of profit, - the Basket-making excepted, upon which there has been a loss of £11. 0s. 0d .

The basket-making was thus discontinued. Profit was also turned from the hiring out of boys: Nearly one half of the net profit of the Industrial Department, states in the current account at £116 has been realized from the hire of boys sent out to work during the summer months. Several have been from time to time engaged to assist in the gardens of gentlemen belonging to the Committee. Others have been employed by the neighbouring farmers. Annual Report of the Manchester and Salford Reformatory, 1859. (p. 9)

Where boys were hired out prior to being leased as apprentices on parole, this occurred locally, with boys travelling to nearby farms to support agricultural activities. It is clear that a moral distinction was made between hiring out the boys to participate in farm-based activities and other sorts of paid employment the boys might have been able to do in this period to raise funds. In other words, the boys were not formed into labour gangs to do other works such as that available in factories. However, the engagement in basket-weaving on site, discussed above, does illustrate that there were instances when income opportunities were prioritised over maintaining a focus on agricultural activities. Despite this variety of sources of revenue, income to the farms was highly inconsistent: Owing to the wet Summer and Autumn the profit upon the farm is merely nominal: but the first object, of giving wholesome employment to the boys, has been gained; and that it has been gained without a pecuniary loss is, under the circumstances, matter for congratulation.

206

N. von Benzon

Fifth annual report of the Manchester and Salford Reformatory, 1860. (p. 9)

Whilst farm sites with good quality soil might have provided the opportunity for healthy yields of crops and livestock, even good quality land requires significant investment to farm effectively. This includes initial investment in good quality products such as breeding livestock, seeds and feed, investment in technologies such as specialist equipment and tools, fit-for-purpose buildings, and investment in people—with knowledgeable farm hands and tradespeople required to teach the boys farming and related industries. However, the lack of government investment, and the difficulty of raising funds locally, meant that the potential income from the farms was curtailed by lack of initial, or ongoing, investment: It is however, impossible to deny that the buildings now for the most part nearly fifty years old – buildings which have been altered and added to repeatedly – are in poor condition, and of a structural character ill responding to modern requirements as to air space, light and sanitary conditions. J. Beard, T. Thornhill Shann and G.W. Rayner Wood, governors of the Manchester and Salford Reformatory at Blackley, c. 1902.

This lack of monetary investment provides a useful illustration in terms of understanding the role of reformatory farm schools as a form of education in Victorian and early twentieth century society, and the wider value that was placed on the reform of criminalised young people. It is clear from the archives that there was considerable support, in principle, both from members of the local community and from those in positions of power. Indeed the 1854 Youthful Offenders Act, outlined at the opening of this chapter, illustrates a legislative interest in offering more youthcentred approaches to managing youth offending. However, the lack of funding for these initiatives, corresponding to a lack of centralised organisation and a reliance on management and financial support of local interest groups, demonstrates a lack of centralised organisation and management of these schemes that is reflected in contemporary nature-based interventions. In other words, contemporary initiatives that similarly seek to provide nature-based interventions for young people

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm

207

deemed ‘at risk’ face similar challenges in securing fixed and reliable streams of funding. It is common for contemporary interventions such as care farms (Gorman, 2017; Leck et al., 2014) to get by on piecemeal funding from different public sources, or QUANGOs, charities and other private funders.

8

Conclusions

It is easy to critique the development and running of Victorian reformatory farms. Was the establishment and running of these institutions a well-meaning endeavour that failed due to structural problems, including lack of funding? Or was their ultimate failure a result of reformatory farms being a poorly developed idea, doomed from the outset? Either way, it is clear that life in these institutions was harsh. Lack of funding, and lack of adequate safeguarding procedures, resulted in illness and death at one extreme, and, in more pragmatic terms, the failure of reformatory farm schools to effectively educate and train criminalised young people, or to turn useful profit through productive activity. As such, reformatory farms clearly failed to provide a universally therapeutic experience, despite their positioning as a rural antidote to urban problems. The archives show that some young people did benefit from the interpersonal relationships they developed with staff and other boys at the farms, in spite of, rather than as a result of, the surrounding landscape. However, it is important to bear in mind the wider socio-political and economic context in which reformatory farms were situated. The farms were established at a point in history before free primary education and when Doctor Barnardos was finding young boys frozen to death in the street. Caring for children living in poverty was not considered a public concern and it is possible that for some of the incarcerated boys, the alternative would have been worse. Moreover, the use of reformatory farms as an intervention for educating criminalised Victorian boys fitted more broadly into a Victorian approach of removing children from their families and communities and removing them to the unfamiliar—a new environment for a new start (Holman, 1986; Murdoch, 2006).

208

N. von Benzon

A reflection on Victorian reformatory farms demonstrates the longevity of the notion of the importance of providing urban children with access to the countryside. Importantly it shows that lack of opportunities for young people to access outdoor green space (Louv, 2005) is not a phenomenon of recent decades and demonstrates a centuries-long tradition of adults attempting to address ‘unfamiliarity’ between children and nature. The notion of an inter-generational decline in outdoor green space access is a highly classed idea, reflecting the experiences of rural, suburban and middle-class children and not those of children growing up in poor inner-city neighbourhoods. For the Victorian middle classes, rural environments would not have provided the same unfamiliarity as they did for criminalised urban youth. We can see in the narratives of facilitating green space access and activities for criminalised boys, a clear ideology of the cleanliness and health of the countryside being held in stark contrast to the perceived deprivation and dirt of the Victorian inner city (Shore, 1999). We see, therefore, that Victorian Reformatory Farms were a product of a rural/urban social landscape in which the ‘clean’ and ‘healthy’ countryside was positioned as an unfamiliar landscape, with which boys were required to develop familiarity in order to achieve the perceived therapeutic, educational and ultimately economic benefits posited by Victorian protagonists of the reformatory farm movement. However, the farms themselves appeared to undermine the dualist orthodoxy. The siting of the reformatories within arm’s reach of urban centres demonstrated a necessary interconnection between these two environments. Moreover, the poor quality of the environments at some of the sites used by the case study reformatory schools, and the lack of adequate provisions—food and clothing—for the boys, demonstrates that the reality of life in the countryside, in a new and unfamiliar landscape, did not present a dramatic contrast to the boys’ former lives in urban centres. This chapter thus undermines the contemporary notion of the immediacy of children’s unfamiliarity with outdoor green space (Louv, 2005). In doing so, this chapter also points to the importance of more than simply putting children within a green landscape in order to achieve nurturing, therapeutic and positive educational outcomes for children and young people.

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm

209

Acknowledgments With thanks to Prof. Chris Philo for generous reflection and feedback on an early iteration of this work.

References Andrews, G. J., & Kearns, R. A. (2005). Everyday health histories and the making of place: The case of an English coastal town. Social Science and Medicine, 60 (12), 2697–2713. Ash, S. (2016). Funding philanthropy: Dr. Barnardo’s metaphors, narratives and spectacles. Liverpool University Press. Davin, A. (1996). Growing up poor: Home, school and street in London 1870– 1914. Rivers Oram Press. Driver, F. (1990). Discipline without frontiers? Representations of the Mettray reformatory colony in Britain, 1840–1880. Journal of Historical Sociology, 3(3), 272–293. Foley, R. (2016). Healing waters: Therapeutic landscapes in historic and contemporary Ireland . Routledge. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish. New York: Vintage Books. Gaskell, S. M. (1980). Gardens for the working class: Victorian practical pleasure. Victorian Studies, 23(4), 479–501. Gibson, O. (2017). Health, environment and the institutional care of children in late Victorian London. Doctoral dissertation, Queen Mary University of London. Gorman, R. (2017). Smelling therapeutic landscapes: Embodied encounters within spaces of care farming. Health and Place, 47, 22–28. Gorman, R., & Cacciatore, J. (2017). Cultivating our humanity: A systematic review of care farming and traumatic grief. Health and Place, 47, 12–21. Grose, M. J. (2011). Landscape and children’s health: Old natures and new challenges for the preventorium. Health and Place, 17 (1), 94–102. Holman, B. (1986). Prevention: The Victorian legacy. The British Journal of Social Work, 16 (1), 1–23. Leck, C., Evans, N., & Upton, D. (2014). Agriculture–Who cares? An investigation of care farming in the UK. Journal of Rural Studies, 34, 313–325. Louv, R. (2005). The last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature deficit disorder. Algonquin Books.

210

N. von Benzon

Murdoch, L. (2006). Imagined orphans: Poor families, child welfare, and contested citizenship in London. Rutgers University Press. Parr, H. (2007). Mental health, nature work, and social inclusion. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25 (3), 537–561. Philo, C. (1987). Fit localities for an asylum: The historical geography of the 19th Century “mad-business” in England as viewed through the pages of the Asylum journal. Journal of Historical Geography, 13(4), 398–415. Philo, C. (2012). Troubled proximities: Asylums and cemeteries in nineteenthcentury England. History of Psychiatry, 23(1), 91–103. Philo, C., Parr, H., & Burns, N. (2017). The rural panopticon. Journal of Rural Studies, 51, 230–239. Ploszajska, T. (1994). Moral landscapes and manipulated spaces: Gender, class and space in Victorian reformatory schools. Journal of Historical Geography, 20 (4), 413–429. Ramsland, J. (1987). The agricultural colony at Mettray: A 19th century approach to the institutionalization of delinquent boys. Critical Studies in Education, 29 (1), 64–80. Ramsland, J. (1990). Mettray: A corrective institution for delinquent youth in France, 1840–1937. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 22(1), 30–46. Shore, H. (1999). Artful Dodgers: Youth and crime in early 19th century London. Boydell Press. Snape, R. (2004). The co-operative holidays association and the cultural formation of countryside leisure practice. Leisure Studies, 23(2), 143–158. Soares, C. (2014). Neither waif nor stray: Home, family and belonging in the Victorian children’s institution, 1881−1914. Doctoral thesis: University of Manchester. Stack, J. A. (1979). The provision of reformatory schools, the landed class, and the myth of the superiority of rural life in mid-Victorian England. History of Education, 8(1), 33–43. Swain, S. (2009). Sweet childhood lost: Idealized images of childhood in the British child rescue literature. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 2(2), 198–214. Swain, S., Hillel, M., & Starkey, P. (2010). Child, nation, race and empire: Child rescue discourse, England, Canada and Australia, 1850–1915. Manchester University Press. Thompkins, M. (2007). The philanthropic society in Britain with particular reference to the reformatory farm school, Redhill, 1849. MA Dissertation, UWA.

8 Unfamiliar Rurality and the Victorian Reformatory Farm

211

Topp, L., & Wieber, S. (2009). Architecture, psychiatry, and Lebensreform at an agricultural colony of the insane—Lower Austria, 1903. Central Europe, 7 (2), 125–149.

9 Conversations with Practitioners 1: Dr. Sunita Welch Ria Ann Dunkley and Thomas Aneurin Smith

1

Introduction

In this first of our ‘conversations with practitioners’, we speak to Dr. Sunita Welch. Sunita has spent a long and varied career working in outdoor and environmental education. She is currently a Senior Specialist in Evaluation at Natural England, but prior to that worked at the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority for over 14 years, managing education and interpretation. In this chapter, Sunita reflects on themes drawn from the first two sections of this edited collection. Interviewers: Ria Dunkley (RD) and Thomas Aneurin Smith (TAS).

R. A. Dunkley (B) School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. A. Smith School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_9

213

214

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

Reflecting on her career and cultures of work in the outdoor education and activity profession, Sunita first discusses the role of race, gender and class in accessing work in this sector, and the effect this may have on young people who come into contact with it. She then raises questions about how outdoor ‘learning’ and ‘activity’ are framed, and why this matters, picking up on some of the arguments in Chapter 2 (HickmanDunne) We then move into a wider discussion, drawing on several of the themes of the chapters, about the difficulties of understanding longer-term impacts of residential visits (Chapters 2 and 3), and from this into how organised outdoor education and activity veers between frames of endurance and enjoyment, a theme relevant to all the chapters in the preceding sections. She also briefly reflects on how expectations of endurance might reflect the masculinist cultures of outdoor recreation. From this, we explore how care appears in outdoor learning and activity experiences, and the extent to which narratives of endurance might play into how young people feel senses of comfort and discomfort outdoors, drawing on Chapters 4 (Morgan and Freeman), 5 (Winks) and 8 (von Benzon). The theme of comfort is picked up again as we discuss the familiarity of technologies to children outdoors, from Chapter 6 (Dunkley and Smith). At the end of the conversation, we return to our earlier debate around organisational cultures and diversity in the outdoor and countryside management sectors, and the extent to which this plays into young people’s feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity outdoors.

2

Career Background

Sunita: In the outdoor learning sector my first job was as a countryside warden, in an urban fringe area. It was urban fringy enough that when the police came to get the truants out of the toilets, whilst they were doing that, somebody put their police car up on bricks and took the wheels. We started doing environmental education at that site. Nobody had done it before. The site had a fishing platform which we used for pond dipping. And it was absolutely fabulous. And that got me hooked.

9 Conversations with Practitioners 1: Dr. Sunita Welch

215

In the early 90s, if you wanted to do environmental education in the UK, basically you had to do a PGCE. And I did not fancy that at all. So I went to the States to do a master’s in environmental education, and then stayed to do a PhD. It was focused on education, interpretation, communication, connecting people, we’d say now ‘connecting people with nature’. After a bit of time in academia, I came back to the UK to work in the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority, as Education Manager. Now I’m with Natural England, as a Senior Specialist.

2.1

Barriers to Entering Outdoor Education: Race, Gender and Class

Through discussing Sunita’s career background, we began to touch on the lack of diversity in countryside management that she had experienced. SW:

What I would say is in the field of countryside management, and protected landscapes management, you’re only just starting to see more women. And you certainly don’t see people who aren’t white. For example, I went to the celebration of 100 years of John Muir in Perth (UK), and I think there was me and one other person who weren’t white out of all of those countryside managing delegates, and I think some of those people are just not connected to future generations now. And there’s going to be a massive gulf after Covid now. Because, you know, for want of a better word, the white middle class who have sat in their comfortable rural settings with their gardens, their low incidents of Covid, have had a relatively privileged experience. Compared with if you’re a family in a one-bedroom flat in London, and they had all those move on orders in parks, so that you couldn’t let your kids sit on the grass, or anything like that.

216

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

I grew up in the gap between Manchester and the Peak District. It looks like the countryside but you’re really only 20 minutes on the train from Manchester. I thought I wanted to be a vet. But I was never going to get the A level grades to get into veterinary school. And my school advisor was like, well, why don’t you do environmental studies or science? For my four-year degree I did a year placement. The year of full paid work experience just makes you so much more employable. Those sandwich degrees were absolutely brilliant for that reason. RD:

I think it’s something that you always hear of people who are in conservation that there’s really a barrier getting in because of the years of, of free work, it seems?

SW:

Yes, in fact in my master’s degree, I looked at significant life experiences of US National Park Service employees. Mainly education and visitor staff. We did this career path modelling, and it appeared that you pretty much had to have been a volunteer somewhere, unless you were a military veteran. If you can’t afford to be a volunteer, how would you ever crack that nut? And if your cultural background is that you need to earn money, this really wouldn’t be supported by your parents. So, there’s a massive cultural barrier, for black and ethnic minority groups, getting into outdoor education. National Parks are a really good example. Most people, a lot of people in National Parks have volunteered. So it’d be that they volunteered for the National Trust, the BTC, whoever it was, it’s seen as a rite of passage, but it really excludes people.

TAS: It’s interesting what you’re saying, Sunita, about countryside management, and in National Parks, and across all of those outdoor sectors, that it’s really not diverse at all. In many ways, the education sector as a whole is much more diverse. You are of working at the interface of those two things. SW:

There was a report into England’s National Parks called the Glover Review (Glover, 2019). And it’s got a table in one of the appendices about the makeup of the people who sit on National

9 Conversations with Practitioners 1: Dr. Sunita Welch

217

Park Authorities. So broadly speaking, the boards. And it’s just old white men. There’s lots of research out there about it’s hard to be in a role, or imagine yourself in a role, if you don’t see people like you in that role. I mean, academia is a bit like that. It’s a bit white middle class, isn’t it? TAS: Yes, you’re right. Coming back to your own experience, Sunita, what was it like for you being in your role and not being one of the vast swathes of white men that were in otherwise comparable roles to you? SW:

I think it’s quite difficult, but I think in part, it’s the gender split that may apply more pressure. You know, that it’s all white men. Of a probably certain background. And I think that’s quite difficult. But it’s actually that white male privilege, and it’s particularly how it manifests itself. It’s very rare to see non-white people in senior roles in large countryside management organisations. They’re gradually having a few more women. You’ve got to have a certain amount of privilege to go into that countryside management field. And then the people who are, they are mostly retired and basically just want to be on boards.

TAS: And is that reflected in the work that’s done in communities that may be more disadvantaged? SW:

I think some of this work more recently has been funding driven. If you can offer experiences to underprivileged groups, or groups that aren’t normally represented in the protected landscape, then you’re more likely to get the resources to do it. But there is also stiff competition for resources, for example within different areas of National Parks. There’s competition for which communities get more resources. But the flip side of that is, I would say that the hardest thing I ever had to deliver would be a free visit with free transport for an education group, because, if you look at all the willingness to pay research, what schools really like is for you to pay for the bus, and they’ll pay for the teaching. But I know that some schools or

218

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

groups worry that they get a substandard offer because they are being offered part of the package for free.

3

Themes from the Chapters

From this point, we moved on to discuss the various themes that emerged from the chapters which Sunita had reviewed.

3.1

Defining Outdoor Learning, Activity and Experience

We began by considering how outdoor practitioners define their activities, framed around outdoor learning and outdoor activities, and the ways in which this terminology might expose contestations around the use of outdoor spaces. SW:

This chapter (Chapter 2, Hickman-Dunne) highlights the importance outdoor practitioners associate with the terminology used to describe their work. In this chapter there’s talk about different formats of outdoor education, or environmental education, but actually some of these I would describe as outdoor activities. Practitioners see a big segmentation between outdoor activities and pursuits, and outdoor learning.

TAS: Do you feel there is an issue more broadly in terms of the type of work that the Outward Bound Trusts and similar organisations do, which is reflected on in Chapter 2 (Hickman-Dunne), and what other organisations do in the outdoors? SW:

Well, there’s a contested space isn’t there? For who’s offer is of more value, really. Most practitioners that I would know would put those big, outdoor activity centres in one box of outdoor activities, rather than outdoor education. And then all the stuff that the Field Studies Council do, National Parks do, the RSPB do, Wildlife Trusts would be in a different box.

9 Conversations with Practitioners 1: Dr. Sunita Welch

219

TAS: Is that something that’s particularly an issue in the broader field of what different groups of children end up doing? SW:

Yes, and it makes things difficult sometimes. It’s not quite a turf war, it’s a bit more like a labelling and a values debate. I see outdoor learning as mostly about environmental education. It includes that impartation of knowledge, to support education and learning, as opposed to outdoor activity centres, which are quite often about self and personal development and physical skill, not about, can you identify this? Do you understand how ecosystems and habitats work? Do you understand river processes? Do you understand climate change, nature recovery, biodiversity. That’s the outdoor learning and environmental education space. This is one thing Chapter 2 (Hickman-Dunne) could have looked at a little more: the differences between these two areas and how they are done in different sectors. I also think something in Chapter 2 (Hickman-Dunne) which will have more resonance moving forward is the bit about nature as escapism. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next. You know, a lot of outdoor activity centres, and outdoor learning centres have closed. And they’re not necessarily going to be coming back. So where will young people find those spaces?

3.2

Framing Residential Visits, Enduring Versus Enjoying the Outdoors, and Gendered Experiences

Sunita then discussed how residential outdoor visits are conducted, and how this can have implications for the degree to which children and young people either endure or enjoy their experiences in the outdoors, as well as the gendered connotations of these framings. TAS: One of the things that connects Chapter 2 (Hickman-Dunne) to Chapter 3 (Campbell-Price), is the focus on residential experience and being away. Is that something you could reflect on, maybe

220

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

how that relates to young people escaping from more familiar environments. SW:

For those kind of residential experiences, it really depends how it runs, how it’s done, doesn’t it? So sometimes, so I’ve felt that some outdoor activity centres, it’s not quite a military induction, but it’s got that element. One way of thinking about this is that some organisations present experiences in terms of: you’re here to conquer the landscape, you’re here to beat it into submission before it beats you into submission. Whereas there’s another version that’s much more about connecting young people to places and nature. It’s interesting to compare the experienced discussed in Chapter 2 (Hickman-Dunne), with the chapter Alan and Denise (Chapter 4) did about the kids going to Dorset. And that really was unfamiliar, but they’d seen pictures of, you know, Durdle Door and all in the textbooks, and they were going to see it for real. By comparison, some outdoor activity centres wouldn’t let you arrive to look at a specific thing and let you all sit on the beach and just be in the moment. I think residential stays have a lot to offer young people. But it really depends more on the framing, than the space in which it’s created. So those teachers in that chapter (Chapter 4, Morgan and Freeman) were, reflecting: ‘We’ve arrived, we adapted, and we’re flexible to young people’s needs’. Whereas some activity centres don’t always do that. You’ve got to beat this hill, you’ve got to make it across the scree slope, you’ve got to endure the canoe trip. And I remember, when the Duke of Edinburgh award turned 50, they had lots of people on the radio, and it was completely polarised. It either was one of your best ever memories, and influenced your love of the outdoors, or it was your most hated thing and you’ve never got a pair of walking boots out ever again. And there wasn’t much in the middle.

9 Conversations with Practitioners 1: Dr. Sunita Welch

221

RD:

It’s really interesting to hear you talk about this, Sunita, because it’s something that I’ve been like reflecting on over time. On the one hand there’s adventure tourism, and on the other there’s a slower, perhaps more reflective experience. And I’ve been thinking about the gender issue there, in terms of how historically that adventure space has been very male dominated. And then as things have adapted, and perhaps we’ve got more influences like eco-feminism, that outdoor learning can be much more connected to kindness and nurturing? Not in a very binary way, but wonder how much gender might play a role?

SW:

Probably quite a lot. I think it is because a lot of the time outdoor activity centres are broadly male dominated. There are women who work there, but the balance is probably male. And they’re all super fit, lean machines, aren’t they? [Laughter]. They don’t look like the kids who were going to those centres, you know, who might be a bit tubby, they’re not white, or whatever it is. And it’s that representation of: do I see me in this space?

RD:

I think there’s something in that adventure space, that’s about how fear inducing that environment can be, and that you’re going to be sent off into the hills. If you’ve never experienced it before, it’s not your every day and so…

SW:

Well, I always thought it would be fun for, a very urban, what we might describe as ‘tough’ schools, to invite outdoor activities and instructors to navigate their commute to school. One of the centres that’s now closed in Powys, the instructors always used to go to the schools before the visit. And not so much of that happens anymore. And it was Nature Scot or Young Scot did a really cool bit of work about how young people don’t necessarily want to be out there conquering the mountain. It’s just the grown-ups think they do. One thing I felt was missing from these chapters was that there was not much mention about the importance of enjoyment for the development and creation of meaningful experiences. As opposed to meaningless experiences, and how that enjoyment element potentially links to learning.

222

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

When I wrote the Education Strategy for the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority, I said that their main criteria was that people should have an enjoyable experience in the National Park. So that young people should enjoy their day, and if enjoying their day meant not putting your hands in the water, or being forced to put your hands in the river, or being forced to pick up bugs or whatever it was, that that was still okay. And it was about encouragement, and positive experiences, and an understanding that the place you were in was special. There’s only 15 National Parks in the UK. We’re a small, crowded Island. It really struck me after listening to that radio programme about the Duke of Edinburgh Award, in that it just really switched some people off. If the longterm aspiration is for people to care more about nature, climate change and the environment, if they’ve had an absolutely miserable day, then that’s a lost cause, potentially for the rest of their lives. So enjoyment is really important. TAS: I think that’s important in terms of some of the themes of this book. It’s interesting, you saying about that endurance experience of the outdoor activity setting. There’s many organisations that are based on that premise. That being uncomfortable is seen as almost a rite of passage to being a person who enjoys being in the outdoors. But actually, there needs to be some refocusing on that enjoyment from the perspective of children themselves. SW:

And some people will enjoy being soaked, and having cold hands and making it to the top. But not everybody. Most of the folk I work with, you know, get that. That a little nurturing and kindness goes a long way. How do we know the kid that’s been wearing shoes that are too small for them for two years? That’s not going to make for a great walk. So how do you then get to those enjoyable experiences that are then memorable and meaningful? Because we want people to care about National Parks, we want people to care about nature.

TAS: Perhaps there is a link here to Margie Campbell-Price’s chapter (Chapter 3), in terms of the longer-term impacts of a residential experience?

9 Conversations with Practitioners 1: Dr. Sunita Welch

SW:

223

That chapter interested me because it involved the community. Although I’d love to have known more about how the project did that. For the young people, that whole grasp of crikey, it’s hard work to live out there. But it didn’t come across in the same way as ‘I had a miserable time’. It was that immersion element which was really interesting. It’d be great to go back and find out more about those kids in 10 years’ time. Paul Hart did a big chunk of work in Saskatchewan on this. Tracing those connections in the longer terms is really hard. Do you attribute people’s beliefs, care, and the environment for their fantastic trip to an island in New Zealand or because they’ve back-to-back binge watched all of David Attenborough’s Blue Planet?

RD:

Everyone struggles with in the sector with this question of attribution, how do we say what’s the value of what we’ve done?

SW:

No. I worked to help the UK family National Parks think about how they measured and looked at education, other than bums on seats, or feet in the park. And actually, the construct we came up with was inspiration. So asking teachers, were your learners inspired? Being inspired, you can attribute that, and connect it to enjoyment. We all know what the image of a kid having a fab visit is. That smiley face, you know, maybe wet, a bit of wet hair, grubby knees, whatever it is, or sitting looking at the view, having a break from life, all of those things. And so we captured that as an idea around inspiration.

3.3

Endurance and Care, Comfort and Discomfort

Continuing the theme above of endurance in the outdoors, Sunita picked up on ideas around cultures of care and nurturing when working with young people. TAS: Let’s move on to the theme of the school trip, which both Lewis Winks’ chapter (Chapter 5), and Alan and Denise’s chapter (Chapter 4) write about.

224

SW:

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

First, I was thinking about the whole experience of the tidal pools. That’s back to our earlier discussion about learning and being outdoors being not enjoyable. And that’s about skill in managing your group. To me, the teachers who’d lead that Dorset trip, I think, we’re very good at this, and it clearly made a difference to the trip. But one thing I picked up on was that neither of these two chapters (Chapter 4, Morgan and Freeman; Chapter 5, Winks) particularly talk about the trust relationship between learner and educator. In contrast, when they went to the tidal pools, it more was like, right, here, we’re going to endure this, we’ve got these things to tick off on our list. So, I think this is about the important role of the teacher as a mediator.

TAS: Reflecting on what you said earlier about those differences in the sector, but also conceptually about activity versus learning. We were critical earlier of the activity-focused experience. But in the same way, there are issues with educational experiences that come out of these two chapters (Chapter 4, Morgan and Freeman; Chapter 5, Winks), and how they relate to being uncomfortable, and feeling discomfort. Where you’re forced to hang out on a rocky beach for hours and hours. SW:

In the blazing sun.

TAS: Yeah. SW:

When your mum back home would never have let you do that. There is something important here about caring for people in unfamiliar settings. But I imagine this is also a practical question, for example about cost. We can only afford X days on our residential trip, or we’ve got one day to do all of these things. And the government has said thou shalt measure things in order to get one’s A-Level.

RD:

I think it’s something that’s emerging from the conversation is that caring for people in unfamiliar settings and it certainly resonates with me as a parent. As a parent you want to know

9 Conversations with Practitioners 1: Dr. Sunita Welch

225

your child is being cared for, but also as an individual experiencing outdoor learning, at any point in your life. You want to feel secure in terms ofSW:

And nurtured?

RD:

Yes.

SW:

And I do wonder, are you better at caring, nurturing young people in unfamiliar landscapes once you’re a parent? In general, in many outdoor activity centres, where children can go climbing, abseiling, canoeing, gorge walking, activities are often led by young men who aren’t parents and who feel immortal. We all go through that phase, and then we grow out of it. How do you get that kindness, nurturing care? In terms of feeling uncomfortable though, there are many aspects to this. I’ve heard kids, when they stayed at the National Park residential, talking about ‘It’s really dark’, and ‘How will I find the bathroom, it’s really dark’.

RD:

So it’s caring for people, in a sense, when they’re potentially experiencing a kind of shock.

SW:

Yeah. And then also thinking about values. Everybody doesn’t love the countryside. Everybody doesn’t love the great outdoors.

RD:

Yes.

SW:

So how can you nurture, cajole, encourage, support somebody to have an enjoyable day in those circumstances? In terms of school trips, there are other ways children and young people can feel uncomfortable. If you’re going on a trip and the ALevel curriculum, in Geography, likes to torture young people by making them ask members of the public questions. That’s so hard for some young people. But there is also a wider connection about how young people connect to nature through these experiences. Is the end goal to pass in you’re A-Level exam? Or is it that young people are connected to landscape and place?

226

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

TAS: One thing we thought was interesting about Chapter 8 (von Benzon) is how it connected with some of what we’ve discussed and with the other chapters, is that the sense of children having to endure these kinds of situations. Although it’s a historical account, some of the themes of endurance, and feeling discomfort, are still there. And that makes me wonder more about what the kind of culture behind some of what we’ve talked about is, for some of the outdoor activity centres, and those kind of experiences. SW:

It made me think, 20 years on from then, you know, what will those young people be like? And there’s that male-dominated endurance thread that’s carried on from things like, that kind of reformatory process that sort of slides into how current centres run. Some leftover remnants of that culture. But, interestingly there are some elements about taking people out of their comfortable space, and putting them somewhere else, to sort of, not beat them into submission, that’s obviously not right. But… I tell you what’s interesting, so the project I’m working on, we’re looking at tree nurseries in prisons. As in, here’s how we can get rare tree species grown, and we’re going to talk about the social benefit to prisoners of growing things. It’s really turned around in terms of the idea is that it’s part of prisoner education. So that potentially people who have been in prison can go out and say, ‘I have worked in a tree nursery’. It’s a great space to safely grow trees in, but at the same time there are social benefits, people go out with a skill and into the workplace. It’s hard to make absolute links to the contemporary context. If you think about all the farm education trusts now, are just so different. But, they are still probably ‘targeting’ those populations that have had, you know, would now be called Adverse Childhood Experiences. But of course the manner of approaching them has changed significantly.

9 Conversations with Practitioners 1: Dr. Sunita Welch

3.4

227

Technologies as ‘Familiar’ Outdoors

As we moved on to discuss Chapter 6 (Dunkley and Smith), Sunita highlighted how technologies can play an important part in the family visit outdoors. TAS: We’ve spoken before about ‘dropping the tablet’: the ‘precious’ nature about technology in the hands of children outdoors. As well as, in some cases, the preciousness of certain things of children. SW:

Well at that point, those tablets were very expensive, weren’t they?

TAS: Yeah. SW:

And there’s been quite a lot about parents who’ve had school issued computers over lockdown being fearful because you have to sign something that says you’ll pay for it if it gets broken. So, there’s always this fear factor with using technologies outdoors. Well, I also think there’s important research to be done about how families do things together. I mean, my family also took out the same app you used for your research. We gave the kids some one the tablets in the roughty, toughty cases. And they kind of just listen to it all, and then after a bit, they were fed up of carrying the tablets and got on with the rest of the walk, but it made the massive difference of getting them out of the door in the first place. At the Park we bought tablets to use with school groups. And essentially, they weren’t a particularly good learning tool, but they were absolutely fabulous for getting kids who thought they didn’t want to be there, to leave the car park and join in. They were really good at getting kids over the hump. It’s the familiar for some children though isn’t it? Kids are used to walking around with tablets. So it is taking something familiar with you into an unfamiliar landscape? It’s a bit like having a comfort blanket at the start.

228

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

RD:

That is a really interesting, about that object, that allows them to focus their attention and therefore, it’s almost meditative, that you’ve got something to focus on and then suddenly the rest of the world might seem a bit more appealing than what’s going on in the screen.

SW:

Yeah. And it gets you out of the car and get you moving.

RD:

Yes.

TAS: One thing I wanted to also raise is the contrast with what we’ve discussed so far, which is largely institutional, or educational settings. The difference with this chapter (Chapter 6, Dunkley and Smith) is that it’s just the parents and kids, although admittedly, they’re being filmed. And I was wondering if you had any reflections on that. SW:

But it’s still based around learning, though, isn’t it? Actually, it doesn’t matter how, people do want to learn things about the places they go. But for some sites, particularly this one that the family visit, it can be really hard to share heritage, like Roman camps, which are just grassy hillocks in the landscape. It’s the field of interpretation and informal learning which is about bringing it all to life so that people can feel connected to that landscape, telling the human story and connecting people. And for that project we still see people downloading and listening to the Walking with Roman’s app now. It still is effective in terms of connecting people. So it’s about connecting people to a place that is unfamiliar, but you’re taking your familiar comfort blanket with you. There are some I’ve come across in my career who believe there should be no interpretation, no signage, nothing and people should just step out of their cars and see the landscape as it is. But how would people know if you don’t tell them the story? That app works well as an enjoyable experience, it works well because it brings a quite difficult or blank bit of grass to life, and it connects people to an unfamiliar place.

9 Conversations with Practitioners 1: Dr. Sunita Welch

3.5

229

Organisational Cultures and Diversity

Coming back to some of the earlier themes discussed in this chapter, around cultures embedded in outdoor learning and activity organisations and countryside management, Sunita reflected further on the ways in which these organisational cultures might impact on the diversity of young people who are able to access outdoor learning and activities. SW:

I also wanted to speak about the roles various organisations play in introducing young people to unfamiliar landscapes. And what kind of cultures exist in these organisations? So, a lot of these organisations don’t pay big salaries. And as a result their employees often have that, what I call groupthink, where you’re employed there because you’re like everybody else who’s there. And that makes it quite difficult for some of those organisations to be understanding, accommodating, kind, nurturing, and connected to people who aren’t like them. And I think many of them could do more. A lot of organisations, because of that groupthink are like ‘It worked for us when we were kids, so we’re just going to replicate it for you’. And this whole thing about the outdoors is good for you, or good for them and us.

TAS: I think that is really interesting, the idea that so many people in that very wide field come from similar backgrounds, upbringings, in a broad sense. That perhaps there is the sense of just replicating your own experience, but for another audience, another ‘target’ audience, when actually, that’s really not the case, perhaps something quite different is needed. SW:

Yeah. Even down to practicalities, for example, you have a group of Muslim children, and all you’ve got is what waterproof trousers for the girls. How does that work? Some companies now make rain skirts, for example. But people and organisations don’t use these because it’s not part of their, well they just get the waterproof trousers on and crack on.

230

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

TAS: Beyond that, is there anything that you’ve seen, whether it’s from your own work, or from others that you’ve been in contact with, that is more progressive in that direction? SW:

There have been a number of projects, for example the National Parks did the Mosaic project (Mosaic in Wales, 2021). But the problem is that a lot of them are just short-term funded. Often just for three years. So how do you then get that embedded? The Mosaic programme was fabulous. It ran across the family of National Parks, and it set up community ambassadors to help make that bridge between ethnic minority communities and National Parks. But then when the funding runs out, and then how do you then get that step into practice? But then you see, particularly with school groups where a teacher brings them, the influence and the skill of that teacher is also really important. That’s why I was impressed with the Dorset field trip (Chapter 4, Morgan and Freeman). To me that highlighted the importance of the teacher in mediating that space as an unfamiliar landscape. And the little things of good practice, like as I mentioned earlier, where some instructors would always go to a school before the trip out, so the kids knew who they were going to see. So I think the teacher is a really important mediator of unfamiliar landscapes. This point was perhaps skirted around in the New Zealand chapter (Chapter 3, Campbell-Price). They said that the teachers did the evening debriefs, whilst groups were assigned to an outdoor instructor. So the idea of the teacher as mediator, and exemplar and leader. But then it’s important to question how do you get the next generation of teachers? You know, the government is very worried about kids not being able to read and write. And rightly so. Following the pandemic, you know, how do you then get new teachers to understand and feel brave enough to go outdoors?

RD:

We know that some teachers can get quite passionate about it. But like you say, the attainment gap up here in Scotland and

9 Conversations with Practitioners 1: Dr. Sunita Welch

231

England, means that the focus is on literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing. SW:

When really, it could be that the guiding principle is to say, actually, if you’re outdoors, then kids are going to have something to write. But that’s our belief system, not necessarily others’ belief system.

References Glover, J. (2019). Landscapes review: Final report. UK Government Report. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/designated-lan dscapes-national-parks-and-aonbs-2018-review Mosaic in Wales. (2021). Available at: https://www.cnp.org.uk/mosaic-wales

Part III Embodying Difference in Unfamiliar Landscapes

10 Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow Jacqueline L. Scott

1

Introduction

How does race and place shape the experience of Black youth learning to ski in Canada? This chapter was prompted by people, both Black and White, smirking or looking puzzled when they saw a group of Black youth learning to downhill ski. A group of White youth also learning to ski as part of the same programme, rarely attracted any attention. All the youth were from parks and recreation community centres located in impoverished areas of Toronto. The one-off ski programme aimed to introduce poor youth to winter outdoor recreation, including skiing, snow tubing and snowboarding. The programme provided lessons, equipment and specialised clothing, and transport to the ski resort. Skiing is a quintessential Canadian winter sport and recreation. Yet from the recreational to elite levels, skiing is pretty much an all-White activity. J. L. Scott (B) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_10

235

236

J. L. Scott

There is an absence of Black people on the downhill ski slopes, on the cross-country trails, and in the advertising for ski resorts, clothing and equipment stores. In Toronto, Black and other people of colour are 52% of the population. Yet in the world of skiing they are as rare as a unicorn, or more appropriately as Quatchi, the sasquatch mascot from the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. Conventional explanations for the low participation rate of Black youth in skiing and outdoor recreation activities focus on barriers or constraints (Krymkowski et al., 2014). These could be due to cost, distance, lack of skills and equipment, fear of race-based violence, or a cultural preference for urban recreation. This chapter looks beyond the obvious explanations and demonstrates that other forms of constraint apply. “The meaning of the skiing landscape is not a fixed thing” (Stoddart, 2012: 4). In other words, how skiing is viewed is socially constructed, and as such it contains significant assumptions about nature, the environment and who belongs and does not belong on the downhill ski slopes and cross-country ski trails. I use Black geographies, and other critical theorising on race and place, to scrutinise the links between race and skiing (Finney, 2014; Lipsitz, 2011; McKittrick, 2006). These critical frameworks examine how skiing is racialised as an activity that occurs in a White space, where Black youth are seen as out of place (Harrison, 2013; Razack, 2002). And, as skiing takes place outdoors, and in winter, the season and the landscape are also racialised. Thus, Black youth learning to ski face a triple racialisation due to the perceptions of race, the landscape and the activity. In essence, I demonstrate that skiing is socially constructed, as a racialised and gendered activity, and takes place in a politicised landscape. Black youth learning to ski disrupt the expected narratives of these spaces and expose their inherent biases. It should be noted that skiing is not currently a popular topic of academic research—unless one is interested in the variety and severity of injuries among skiers and snowboarders. Outside of this small lens the research tends to focus on the marketing of skiing as a tourism activity. Thus, by necessity, the chapter draws on the literature from Black geographies, sports and leisure industry reports, youth studies and cultural studies, to assess how Black youth experience the unfamiliar terrain of

10 Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow

237

skiing. The chapter is in three parts. Section one considers Black geographies and sets the foundation for understanding how slavery and its after-life shapes where Black bodies are expected to be present or absent. It lays the groundwork for understanding why Black youth were seen as such a novelty on the ski slopes. Section two focuses on the image of Black bodies in winter sports and landscapes. It examines how race contours perceptions of which bodies are able to thrive in cold climates and activities. Section three is on skiing while Black and it examines how racial streaming in youth sports and recreation ensures that Black youth are excluded from skiing, and are destined to remain unfamiliar with the pastime.

2

Black Geographies

Surprise—Black people do live in Canada! This section examines how race and place, slavery and living in its wake, mould the experiences of Black youth learning to ski, an unfamiliar activity to them. Assumptions about race and place have a long history in skiing and outdoor recreation. These can be explicit, but most often they are implicit and hidden behind seemingly neutral language. For instance, cross-country skiing often occurs in national parks or conservation areas. Race and its links to place are foundational to the creation of these spaces. The parks are marketed on the myth of preserving a pristine wilderness, that was free of humans, and those who enter it do so only as temporary visitors (Marsh & Hodgins, 1998; Robbins, 2011). The very idea of a pristine wilderness, or terra nullius, erases Indigenous ownership of the land, and the role of genocide in their dispossession of it (de las Casas, [1552] 1992). Black geographies are conceptual tools that are used to critique and challenge how blackness and geography are intertwined. McKittrick (2006) argues that Black geographies show how space is socially produced, and is therefore raced, and offer new possibilities of imagining or reclaiming space that is centred on Black agency. Black geographies “locate and speak back to the geographies of modernity, transatlantic slavery, and colonialism” (McKittrick, 2006: 7). The Black

238

J. L. Scott

body is a symbol of how race and place are geographically linked. McKittrick contends that in conventional human geography the Black body is seen in two ways. It is usually absent, as conventional geography treats space as neutral or as a transparent backdrop, and as such, is therefore race-less. When the Black body is present, it is accounted for in terms of deficit, deviant or dispossession narratives. In other words, conventional geography either erases Black bodies, making them invisible as geographical actors, or when it notices them it tries to keep them “in their place” as subordinates. It conceptually limits Black place-making to these two binaries. McKittrick notes that expressions such as “in your place” or “know your place” ask us “to take seriously the ways in which spatial expressions are wrapped up in everyday struggles and critiques” (McKittrick, 2006: 23). Black youth learning to ski confounds these two geographic binaries. Their blackness makes them hyper-visible. They are not “in their place” in the expected and familiar urban landscape. They are seen as “out of place” due to the activity, and the fact that they are outdoors for leisure and not for work. But what specifically does blackness mean in Canada? Through the lens of Black cultural studies, Walcott (2003) analyses books, films and rap, to interrogate the construction of a Black Canadian identity. He argues that blackness in Canada is not fixed. Here, there is not a singular blackness but a “pluralizing of blackness” (p. 134). This plurality includes the Black community rooted in Halifax since the 1800s, and the waves of immigrants from the Caribbean in the 1980s and later those from continental Africa in the 2000s. Walcott (2003: xiii) argues that being Black in Canada is typically recorded as “an absented presence always under erasure.” He notes that “Canada’s continued forgetfulness concerning slavery here, and the nation-state’s attempts to record only Canada’s role as a place of sanctuary for escaping African Americans, is a part of the story of absenting blackness from its history” (p. 44). The auction block was real in Canada. McKittrick (2006) writes that it was also gendered, meaning that Black women’s experience of slavery included sexual assaults. Slave ships docked in Canada. They were not crammed with people, packed in as tight as salted cod in a barrel, as shown in that image of the slave ship. They arrived in singles or small groups as part of the byproduct of a wider trade between Canada and the rest of the

10 Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow

239

Atlantic world. This is how Olivier Lejeune arrived in Canada in 1624 to step on the auction block (Nelson, 2017; Winks, 1997). Almost a century later in 1734, Marie-Joseph Angelique arrived in Montreal, to meet her hanging (Cooper, 2007). Dionne Brand (2012) writes of her life in the Caribbean and Canada, and what it means to be Black in both places. At the heart of her experience—and by extension the Black experience—is the Door of No Return: a portal through which our ancestors walked, leaving Africa and entering the Diaspora. The book is a meditation on identity, belonging, and the search for home. As Brand (2012: 19) notes “The door is a place, real, imaginary and imagined. …The door out of which Africans were captured loaded onto ships heading for the New World.” Blackness is lived in the body. For both Brand (2012) and Walcott (2003) the Black body is culturally marked. Wherever Black people show up, their history and the meanings attached to that history follows them (Fanon, 2008; Spillers, 1987; Yancy, 2016). There is no escape from this and thus, in some ways the Black body is always captive. The profits of slavery were branded on Black bodies. The shackles of racism still chain the Black body. Slavery was abolished in Canada and the rest of the British Empire on August 1, 1834. Almost two centuries later, Black life is still shaped by the legacy of the whip. These include the high push out rate of Black youth from schools (Dei, 2000; McPherson, 2020); the disproportionate rate of incarceration and harassment from the police (Crichlow, 2014; Maynard, 2017); and the high levels of poverty that plague the community (Davis, 2017; Kazemipur & Halli, 2001). These are not accidental: this is “the afterlife of slavery – skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (Hartman, 2008: 6). Violence against Black people was a daily reality under slavery. Violence and Black deaths continue unbroken into the present (Spillers, 1987). Recent examples include Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Regis Korchinski-Paquet, who were killed by the police or died in their presence. Sharpe (2016) calls this “living in the wake.” Using a cultural studies lens, she examines the systems that ensure that Black lives continue to be disposable. Sharpe argues that resistance to the violence

240

J. L. Scott

was forged in the hold and in the wake of the slave ship. To do “wake work” is to resist and rupture the anti-Blackness that is embedded in the Diaspora. Fugitivity is the opposite of captivity. From the day the first slave ships docked in the Americas, Black people have run from the whips and shackles. Some were able to create maroon communities in hard to reach places such as forests, mountains and swamps. Others ran away, especially to the cities. Colonial Canadian newspapers, such as the Quebec Gazette and the Upper Canada Gazette, carried frequent adverts for runaway slaves (Mackey, 2010). Fugitivity was, and is, also psychological (Fanon, 2008; Garvey, 1986; Harney & Moten, 2013). Black youth learning to ski are trying an unfamiliar activity in an unfamiliar landscape. From my observations and experience of skiing, slipping, sliding, falling down and getting back up, are all part of learning how to control the skis. This is humbling at the best of times. For a group of Black youth there might be a thin line between humbling and humiliating. Their hyper-visibility means that they may become the spectacle, the entertainment, the farce of seeing blackness rolling in the snow and covered in whiteness—both physically and metaphorically. James Baldwin alluded to this in his classic travel essay Stranger in the Village. In 1955 he lived for a while in a hamlet in the mountains of Switzerland. He noted that “Some of the men drink with me and suggest that I learn how to ski partly, I gather, because they cannot imagine what I would look like on skis…” (Baldwin, 1984: 142). To participate in skiing, and other outdoor recreation, one must feel safe in the outdoors. One level of safety is concerned with how to deal with the weather, wild animals and mastery of outdoor skills. Black geographies indicate that for Black youth a more fundamental level of safety is intertwined with race and place. For instance, the Pan Am Path is an extensive recreation trail in Toronto. It is a legacy project of the city’s 2015 Pan American Games, built to encourage people to “get back to nature.” I attended a conference near the Path, where the agenda included the benefits of encouraging immigrants to use nature spaces in the city. A Black woman commented that the Black youth in her suburban area had given up using the Pan Am Path, even though it was in stepping distance of their homes. They had tried, but were now wary and weary of being harassed by the police.

10 Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow

241

Given the legacy of slavery, Black youth are not expected to be at leisure outdoors or to participate in skiing. Their presence invites questions of what they are doing there. The assumption is that Black youth should not be in that space as it is racialised as a White space. Black bodies are treated as pollutants in the space. And as pollution they must be surveilled, cast out or extinguished. For Black youth the fear of racebased violence in the outdoors is real. In urban areas there are witnesses. In the wilderness there may be none. Thus, Black youth may fear being trapped in the outdoors, with nowhere safe to run to, or to hide, from physical or psychological White violence.

3

The Image of the Black in Winter Sports and Landscapes

This section explores how Black and White bodies are represented in winter sports and recreation, and landscapes. In turn, these are linked to nationalist mythologies, and tourism marketing images of Canada, as the land of the Great Outdoors and the Great White North. Black youth learning to ski must contend with assumptions about their bodies’ ability to be in, and cope with, winter. And, ultimately their suitability for winter sports and recreation, from the recreational to elite Olympic levels. A great deal of skiing and outdoor recreation in Canada and the USA occurs in conservation areas and in national and provincial parks. These are public spaces, and as such are theoretically open to all. In practice, Black people are the least likely to visit such places (Finney, 2014). A Canadian newspaper, the National Post, published an article titled “Canada’s ‘adventure gap’: Why it doesn’t make sense for the great outdoors to be such a White space” (Brean, 2018). It generated considerable online comment on various social media platforms. Many people angrily disagreed that there was a link between race and outdoor recreation. One noted that “there are no barb wire or fences stopping Black people from going to the parks.” Physical barriers are not needed. Black geographies has demonstrated how race and place are intertwined, and

242

J. L. Scott

are just as effective in determining who is welcomed in national parks and who is not (Finney, 2014; Thorpe, 2012; Vander Kloet, 2009). Race and Black lives matter. Place matters too (Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017; Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). Racialised people are expected to be in certain places and absent from others. This Lipsitz (2011) calls the racialisation of space and the spatialisation of race. Black youth are expected to be, or are seen as “in place,” in urban landscapes. They are unexpected, and seen as “out of place” in natural or rural landscapes (Agyeman, 1990; Chakraborti & Garland, 2013; Kinsman, 1995; Neal & Agyeman, 2006). In Canada, Black youth being seen as “in” or “out” of place is tied to geographies of racism and othering (Baker et al., 2016; Peake & Ray, 2001). These geographies of absence and presence are ultimately tied to Whiteness as the norm in geography (Kobayashi & Peake, 2000; Pulido, 2002). Peake and Ray (2001) refer to this as the White gaze. It is the normalised racism that occurs in everyday life, and which assigns races to expected places and places to expected races. The White gaze is the power to see others as raced, while having the privilege of denying that White is also raced. Black geographies push back on this gaze, theorising back a different way of knowing and of being. In the White Canadian imagination, the “real” Canada lies outside of the multicultural cities: it is in the countryside and the small towns with their overwhelming White populations. These also happen to be the location of the mythologised Great Outdoors and the Great White North (Razack, 2002). Tourism and marketing images of Canada emphasise the Great Outdoors as the natural landscape of the country. In summer, it is the place for camping and canoeing, in winter, it is skiing or snowshoeing. These images dominate in tourism advertising, popular outdoor magazines, and adverts in national and international newspapers. In these idealised landscapes, the people shown participating in the rugged outdoor activities are overwhelmingly White. The Whiteness of the winter landscape serves to underline the Whiteness and its associated purity of the people (Baldwin et al., 2011). White people are the ones who are presumably the best suited to thrive in the cold, northern conditions, including winter sports, and hence, the nearly all White-skinned members of Team Canada in the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

10 Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow

4

243

Northern Landscape, Northern Identity

Canada is a northern country with an average temperature of zero degrees Celsius. Winter, snow and ice are a seasonal reality of the landscape. How these realities are interpreted, has politicised nature in the mythology of the nation, and in the formation of its identity (Kaufmann, 1998). In other words, the symbolic meaning which nations give to their landscape is not static, and depends on the particular cultural and political context. In the case of Canada, the emphasis on being a northern wilderness country was a crucial part of the politics of its birth as a modern nation (Baldwin et al., 2011). Northern-ness was used to distinguish the new country from its “softer” southern neighbour; to establish Canada’s racial identity as a White country with roots in Europe; and to erase the Indigenous ownership of the land (Mackey, 2000). The northern climate was seen as shaping the Canadian character, making its White citizens manly, hardy and proud. This is encapsulated in the national anthem, O Canada, where we are the “true north strong and free.” The quest for the Northwest Passage is another enduring myth of Canada as a northern land. The Passage was a potential short-cut to the riches of Asia. The Franklin Expedition and the search for its doomed crew celebrates the myth of the great White male explorers and their odyssey in a cold wilderness. Black explorers are absent from these sagas. Thus, there is no mention of Olaudah Equiano and his 1773 Arctic journey, nor of Matthew Henson the 1909 North Pole explorer (Equiano, 2001; Henson, 1969). Their presence disturbs the myth that Black people have no winter history and therefore do not belong in the cold Canadian landscape. The northern wilderness mythology influenced Canadian immigration policy, as only people from other northern climates were seen as suitable citizens. Thus, the policy prioritised White European immigrants, and excluded those from outside that region. The “keep Canada White” immigration policy was in effect for over a century until the 1980s (Bannerji, 2013; Boyd & Vickers, 2000). Scandinavian immigrants poured into Canada in the nineteenth century. Their enduring legacy is cross-country skiing, and it quickly replaced snowshoeing as a popular sport and recreational activity. Downhill skiing started in

244

J. L. Scott

Canada in the 1930s with a new influx of Nordic immigrants. Canadians were so strongly identified with skiing that they challenged the European dominance in elite downhill skiing. The “Crazy Canuks” ruled the international slopes for a decade from the mid-1970s. Thanks to its northern climate and guaranteed snow, Canada has hosted three winter Olympic Games. The Olympics have always been a showcase for the nationalist sentiments of the host country. “We the north” and the Great Outdoors are two of the dominant nationalist myths of Canada (Razack, 2002). This is encapsulated by an advert for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games by the Hudson Bay Company, a historic and iconic retailer of Canada. The advert is called “We were made for this.” Against a collage of people skiing, hiking, and tobogganing in a snow-laden wilderness, the opening voice-over begins with “We arrived 340 years ago to a land of rock, ice and snow.” The advert is problematic on many levels, but here I am concerned with how it created a link between race, place and outdoor recreation. All the people in the advert appear to be White. Canada is portrayed as a virgin country, empty of Indigenous people, and right for the taking and taming by the historic, adventurous and hardy White pioneers, and their latter-day descendants, the Canadians competing in the Olympic Games. The advert and the Canadian team reflected the centrality of Whiteness as the core of the Canadian identity (Kalman-Lamb, 2012; King, 2007). Black geographies challenge the dominant story and images encoded in the advert. The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics ceremonies did acknowledge that the Games were taking place on Indigenous territory. The Indigenous presence included mascots, entertainers and totem poles. The four cuddly Olympic mascots each came with an elaborate biography, including their favourite food and sports. Fittingly all liked winter sports: skiing, hockey and snowboarding. Tellingly, snowshoeing—a traditional Indigenous winter sport—was missing from the list. While the mascots sanitised and commodified Indigenous heritage, they ignored its traditional support while glorifying European ones. The Olympics was a classic case of the politics of recognition (Coulthard, 2014) as Indigenous people were showcased as part of the colourful, historical, past of the country without challenging their continuing settler-colonial

10 Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow

245

relationship with the Canadian state. Canada won 14 gold medals at the Olympics, including ones in skiing. The government had invested millions of dollars in athlete training to ensure that Canadians would “Own the Podium” and bring home the golds. Whether by accident, or by intention, most of the athletes were White. For Black youth watching the games, there were no Canadian role models to show that skiing was a welcoming space for them.

5

Skiing While Black

Canada is among the most popular ski tourism destinations in the world. This section examines how skiing is marketed, who is shown as the ideal participant and who is absented. It draws on skiing industry materials, as academic studies are few. Further, it assesses how racial streaming occurs in youth sports and recreation, as Black youth are channelled into basketball and athletics and White youth into hockey and skiing. When skiing organisations or the industry focus on Black participants, it is positioned as engaging an untapped market, rather than on the endemic racism that keeps Black people out of snow sports. The section ends with a brief review of the additional challenges Black female youth face in skiing. In 2018 a skiing industry publication, Snow Magazine, published an online feature article called “The top ten ski resorts in the world.” The number one spot went to Revelstoke in Canada. In fact, four out of the ten places were in Canada (Snow Magazine, 2018). Skiing in Canada is a $900 million industry, catering to about three million skiers and snowboarders (Ski Canada, 2016). The Ski Canada report gives a demographic breakdown of skiers by age, gender, language (French or English) and household income. Significantly race is absent from the demographic analysis. The report shows that skiing is an elite sport and recreation, favoured by university-educated women and men, who are at the top of the income bracket and own their own homes. This profile is identical to similar reports from the USA (Brown, 2017). The USA demographic profile tracks race, and shows that about 10% of skiers are Black and 70% are White.

246

J. L. Scott

An earlier study by the Canadian Ski Council (2008) analysed five years of data on skiers in Canada. It noted that about 90% of skiers are White among Canadian and international snow lovers. About 20% of skiers in Canada were visitors. Among this group there were significant racial differences. Black people were the third largest group of visiting skiers, after the Latin Americans and Japanese. The report noted that ethnic skiers are significantly younger than White ones, and tend to prefer snowboarding. The report also noted that Black Canadian and other ethnic skiers first learn to ski from friends or from going on school trips. White Canadian skiers are more likely to learn from family. Academic research indicates that Black people are the least likely to participate in outdoor activities including skiing (Johnson et al., 2001; Shinew et al., 2004). Black youth in Toronto are mainly secondgeneration immigrants (Scott, 2003). Sports and recreation are a way for immigrants to fit into a new culture and/or to preserve some links to their ancestral home identity (Field, 2012). It is a powerful tool for acculturating, whether through school trips or sports clubs. In Canada, the official immigration policy from the 1970s is based on multiculturalism and the valuing of diversity. Newcomers access sports through organisations such as schools, parks and recreation centres and local sports clubs (Pryor & Outley, 2014). Most of these institutions are funded by the state. Through the funding, the state acts as a gatekeeper controlling access to training, coaching and opportunities to play sports (Field, 2012). If sports and recreation were a level playing field, based on merit, talent and ability, one would reasonably expect them to reflect the multicultural and racial composition of the country. This is not the case, especially in cities. At the community level, Black youth are streamed into basketball, and White ones into ice hockey (Paraschak & Tirone, 2015). At the elite Olympic level, athletics is almost exclusively Black, and skiing remains exclusively White. The racial disparity indicates the role of the state in perpetuating racial stereotypes in sports and outdoor recreation. Some theorists refer to this as whitestreaming —the state’s role in determining which sports are legitimate, and who gets to play them (Paraschak & Tirone, 2015). By default, the state sponsors winter sports and recreation as White activities. Current hockey stars such as

10 Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow

247

P.K. Subban and Jarome Iginla are noticeable not just because they are brilliant players, but also because they were the only Black faces in the game (Subban & Colby, 2017). They were reminded of this by the volume of racist calls and tweets, and the bananas thrown in front of them on the ice, even after scoring winning goals. It is easy to dismiss these as pranks by boorish fans, but it points to a deeper issue of racism. Hockey, skiing and other winter sports reproduce hegemonic Whiteness as the norm and punish those who break the barriers. Segregation in hockey, skiing and other winter sports has a long tradition in Canada (Carnegie, 1996). Downhill skiing is among the top ten sports for children and youth in Canada (Kremarik, 2000; Canadian Ski Council, 2019). The Canadian Ski Council coordinates programmes to make skiing more accessible. Its goal “is to increase participation in recreational snowboarding, alpine and cross-country skiing in Canada” (Canadian Ski Council, 2019). A great number of children and youth featured on its website and social media posts. None of them were Black, at the time of writing this chapter. This contradicts its earlier recommendation that skiing should not be marketed as a White sport or recreation, as this misses the diversity among Canadian and international skiers on the slopes (Canadian Ski Council, 2008). The 2008 report also assessed the potential growth of the ethnic ski market in Canada. It noted that in Quebec the largest ethnic ski market was among Black people. In Ontario, Black people were the second largest ethnic market for skiing. Other research has shown that immigrants were interested in and want to play sports, but sports organizers have limited knowledge, involvement and interest in immigrants. The organizers had preconceived notions of which sports immigrants were interested in, and had concerns about how to accommodate diverse cultural and ethnic practices (Tirone et al., 2010). Critical theorists such as Alcoff (2007) argue that this ignorance is not simply a lack of knowledge and the faulty practices used to justify it. She identifies three types of ignorance: the first is based on the situation or standpoint of the knowers; second, is ignorance of specific aspects of group identity; and third, is how oppressive systems reproduce ignorance and its effects. In the case of immigrants and sports, all three forms

248

J. L. Scott

of ignorance combine leading to systemic practices that justify racial streaming. The skiing industry was marketed from inception as an elite White sport for those with the money and the physical fitness to enjoy it (Coleman, 2002). The image of skiers and skiing was based on a European ideal: the instructors, equipment and clothes came from Europe; the architecture and even the food served in ski resorts were directly modelled on those in Europe. In what she calls the whitewashing of the ski industry, Coleman notes that people of colour form an invisible army of service workers who keep the industry afloat. As the cooks, cleaners and maintenance crews they are too poor to pay the ski fees. They are discouraged from skiing in case they coloured the Whiteness of the physical and ideological landscape. An assessment of three outdoor magazines over a decade, found that few of them showed Black people in outdoor or wilderness settings (Martin, 2004). They were confined to urban settings, sending a clear message that outdoor recreation was a White space. Martin (2004) likens this to a visual apartheid operating in the great outdoors. Other media outlets, such as online magazines, also perpetuate images of skiing as “White” in Canada. For example, Pique Magazine focuses on the skiing and outdoor recreation industry. In 2005 it published a feature article subtitled “targeting the non-White population to cultivate a new market of skiers and snowboarders” (Forsyth, 2005). The story identified why and how the snow industry had to change to attract ethnic customers, as skiing was slowing down due to the greying of its traditional White market. The article was clear that the skiing industry must do outreach to change its image from that of an elitist, White sport and recreation to one that showed the diversity of Canadians. It stressed the examples of Chinese-Canadians and African Americans being forced to form their own parallel ski clubs due to hitting the White wall in the industry. Yet, in certain sections of the ski industry, diversity has shifted from addressing the endemic racism in the sport, to how to market to overseas tourists (Plummer, 2016). At the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics four Black men competed as the Jamaica bobsleigh team. Their presence was so exotic that in 1993 it was portrayed in the internationally successful film Cool Runnings. Its

10 Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow

249

racialised humour was based on Black people being out of place in a white landscape, season, country and activity. Nearly two decades later, two Black skiers competed at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. One was Errol Kerr, the sole member of the Jamaica Ski Team, and who finished ninth in the ski-cross competition. The other Black skier was Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong from Ghana. Nicknamed as the Snow Leopard, he finished the slalom race when half the skiers failed to complete the challenging downhill course. The men received a lot of media attention in the guise of being novelties, the under-dogs, the fish-out-of-water, hailing from tropical countries with no snow. The supposedly humorous reports were coded conversations about race, without mentioning the word race. Undergirding the media stories was the familiar trope of Black faces being unexpected, and thus out of place in a winter landscape. At 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics five of the six USA women bobsleigh team members were African Americans. The Black women won silver and bronze in the event, becoming the first Americans ever to do so. The bobsleigh is now being re-imagined and re-racialised as a Black winter sport. Will skiing undergo a similar transformation? Skiing is a segment of the larger tourism industry. Tourism is also a racialised activity which is dominated by one way of seeing the world— through the lens of the White gaze (Stephenson & Hughes, 2005). From a Black geographies perspective, the presence of Black people contests this lens and offers new ways of seeing and interpreting the experience of being a tourist (Carter, 2008; Lee, 1997). For instance, Black tourists are using social media to research and share their experiences of travelling while Black. Many of their experiences reflect the pain and hassle of being othered. This could involve unwanted touching of the hair or skin, or harassment from being photographed without permission. Social media connects Black travellers and gives them the space to create a counter-narrative to the White gaze (Dillette et al., 2019). Black skiers are using the same strategies to find each other, to raise awareness of Black ski organisations, such as the National Brotherhood of Skiers, and to promote annual ski trips such as the Martin Luther King Ski Weekend in Toronto.

250

6

J. L. Scott

Skiing at the Intersection of Race and Gender

Skiing is a racialised activity occurring in a racialised space. Skiing is also a gendered activity as women tend to participate more in cross-country skiing, while men participate more in downhill skiing and snowboarding. From a feminist perspective women’s participation in outdoor recreational activities is limited due to: fear of violence; constraints of time, money, lack of skills and limited knowledge; and the perception that outdoors is a gendered, male space (Henderson, 1996). Those who excel in physical prowess are seen as unique and somehow less feminine (McNiel et al., 2012). Stoddart (2010) argues that skiing occurs in a landscape that is constructed as masculine, with an emphasis on risktaking, especially in downhill and back-country skiing. The less risky areas, such as the beginner slopes in downhill skiing, and cross-country trails are constructed as feminine or gender-neutral (Coleman, 2003). As dominant feminist theory often ignores the racial experience of Black women, it is only a partial explanation of their under-participation in skiing and other forms of outdoor recreation. Intersectional theory better captures the interactions and consequences of the multiple identities and experiences of Black women’s lives. Outdoor recreation is not a neutral space, it is socially constructed as a racialised and gendered activity and space with a history of excluding Black women. Black women have a history of exclusion in all areas of their lives, and in this respect, outdoor recreation is no different (Finney, 2014; Hull et al., 1982). As a Black woman who can downhill ski, but prefers crosscountry, the male gaze and the White gaze always accompany me on the trails. Black female youth who participate in skiing are going against the stereotypes and expectations of both their gender and race (Roberts, 1996). Even if Black female youth are motivated to try skiing, they are unlikely to do so as they may not know anyone who skis, and they do not see themselves represented in media images of skiers (Scott, 2018). They can perhaps take inspiration from Seba Johnson. This Black female youth was the first Black female to ski at the Olympics and was the youngest ever Alpine racer. At the age of 14, she competed for the

10 Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow

251

US Virgin Islands in the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. Johnson is largely forgotten as the gender bias in sports erases or undervalues the achievements of women.

7

Conclusions

Skiing can be fun, exciting, aids socialisation, and enables many to enjoy outdoor and natural spaces, to the benefit of their wellbeing. This chapter explored how frolicking in the snow is not simply a pastime to get through the long Canadian winters. Skiing encapsulates the racialised hierarchy of power in Canadian society. It is almost exclusively an elite, White activity, where Black youth are noticeable by their absence. As this chapter has shown, the rarity of Black skiers is not accidental. Black youth learning to ski are trying an unfamiliar activity in an unknown landscape. This chapter used the lens of Black geographies to frame how race and space are linked. Neither are neutral. Thus, landscapes are socially constructed as racialised, gendered, and politicised spaces, with expectations of what types of bodies belong, and do not belong in those spaces. This chapter also examined how in Canada’s nationalist mythology, the winter landscape shaped the type of people who could presumably love the cold climate, and how our land of the Great White North was seen as best suited to White people. Skiing is partly an artefact of the mass Scandinavian migration to Canada. As skiing grew into a leisure and tourism industry, it was, and continues to be marketed as a White, European-styled activity. As a sport and as a recreational pastime, skiing is, in part, funded by the state through parks and recreation and community centres. In principle, the activity is open to all. In reality, at the elite and community level, White youth are streamed into winter activities such as skiing and hockey, and Black youth into summer activities such as basketball and athletics. Thus, race is factored into who gets to play which sports. The exclusion of Black youth from skiing perpetuates stereotypes about which bodies belong in Canada and in its winter landscape. Black youth learning to ski can perhaps take inspiration from the long Black history in modern Canada. That experience includes living

252

J. L. Scott

through centuries of winter, snowstorms and icy but beautiful landscapes. The youth may also be encouraged by the Black skiers who broke through the White wall in the skiing to represent their countries at the Olympic Games. Learning to ski is fun and a counter-narrative, a way to share some space in the Canadian snow.

References Agyeman, J. (1990). Black people in a White landscape: Social and environmental justice. Built Environment (1978-), 16 (3), 232–236. Alcoff, L. M. (2007). Epistemologies of ignorance: Three types. In S. Sullivan & N. Tuana (Eds.), Race and epistemologies of ignorance (pp. 39–57). SUNY Press. Baker, J., Price, J., & Walsh, K. (2016). Unwelcoming communities: Youth observations of racism in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Journal of Youth Studies, 19 (1), 103–116. Baldwin, A., Cameron, L., & Kobayashi, A. (Eds.). (2011). Rethinking the great White north: Race, nature, and the historical geographies of Whiteness in Canada (pp. 1–18). UBC Press. Baldwin, J. (1984). Notes of a native son (No. 39). Beacon Press. Bannerji, H. (2013). Geography lessons: On being an insider/outsider. In L. G. Roman & L. Eyre (Eds.), Dangerous territories: Struggles for difference and equality in education. Routledge. Boyd, M., & Vickers, M. (2000). 100 years of immigration in Canada. Canadian Social Trends, 58(2), 2–12. Brand, D. (2012). A map to the door of no return: Notes to belonging. Vintage Canada. Brean, J. (2018, May 24). Canada’s ‘adventure gap’: Why it doesn’t makes sense for the great outdoors to be such a White space. National Post. Brown, J. (2017). Bring more diversity to skiing. Powder: The Skiers Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.powder.com/stories/opinion/extend-thefamily/ Canadian Ski Council. (2008). Ethnic communities participation is skiing and boarding: Ethnic skier and boarder profile, report # 3. Retrieved from: https:// www.skicanada.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Report-3-Skier-SurveyData-Report-from-CSC-research.pdf

10 Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow

253

Canadian Ski Council. (2019). Retrieved from: https://www.skicanada.org/ about-us/organization-description/ Carnegie, H. (1996). A fly in a pail of milk: The Herb Carnegie story. Mosaic Press. Carter, P. L. (2008). Coloured places and pigmented holidays: Racialized leisure travel. Tourism Geographies, 10 (3), 265–284. Chakraborti, N., & Garland, J. (Eds.). (2013). Rural racism. Willan. Coleman, A. G. (2002). The unbearable whiteness of skiing. In J. Bloom & M. Willard (Eds.), Sports matters: Race, recreation, and culture (pp. 141–168). NYU Press. Coleman, A. G. (2003). From snow bunnies to shred Betties: Gender, consumption, and the skiing landscape. In V. Scharff (Ed.), Seeing nature through gender (pp. 194–217). University Press of Kansas. Cooper, A. (2007). The hanging of Angelique: The untold story of Canadian slavery and the burning of Old Montreal . University of Georgia Press. Coulthard, G. S. (2014). Red skin, White masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minnesota. Crichlow, W. (2014). Weaponization and prisonization of Toronto’s Black male youth. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 3(3), 113–131. Davis, A. (2017). “The Real Toronto”: Black youth experiences and the narration of the multicultural city. Journal of Canadian Studies, 51(3), 725–748. de las Casas, B. ([1552] 1992). A short account of the destruction of the Indies. Penguin. Dei, G. S. (2000). Anti-racism education: Theory and practice. Fernwood Publishing. Dillette, A. K., Benjamin, S., & Carpenter, C. (2019). Tweeting the black travel experience: Social media counternarrative stories as innovative insight on #TravelingWhileBlack. Journal of Travel Research, 58(8), 1357–1372. Equiano, O. (2001). The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano. Broadview Press. Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin White masks. Grove press. Field, R. (2012). Sport and the Canadian immigrant: Physical expressions of cultural identity within a dominant culture, 1896–1945. In J. Joseph, S. Darnell, & Y. Nakamura (Eds.), Race and sport in Canada: Intersecting inequalities (p. 29). Canadian Scholars’ Press.

254

J. L. Scott

Finney, C. (2014). Black faces, White spaces: Reimagining the relationship of African Americans to the great outdoors. The University of North Carolina Press. Forsyth, R. (2005, March 25). Bringing ethnic diversity to the slopes. Pique News Magazine. Retrieved from: http://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/whi stler/bringing-ethnic-diversity-to-the-slopes/Content?oid=2150009. Garvey, M. (1986). The philosophy and opinions of Marcus Garvey, or, Africa for the Africans (Vol. 1). The Majority Press. Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. Minor Compositions. Harrison, A. K. (2013). Black skiing, everyday racism, and the racial spatiality of whiteness. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 37 (4), 315–339. Hartman, S. (2008). Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. Macmillan. Henderson, K. (1996). Feminist perspectives on outdoor leadership. In K. Warren (Ed.), Women’s voice in experiential education (pp. 107–117). Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co. Henson, M. A. ([1912] 1969). A Negro explorer at the North Pole. Frederick A. Stokes Company. Hull, G. T., Scott, P. B., & Smit, B. (Eds.). (1982). All the Blacks are men, all the women are White, but some of us are brave: Black women’s studies. The Feminist Press. Johnson, C. Y., Bowker, J. M., & Cordell, H. K. (2001). Outdoor recreation constraints: An examination of race, gender, and rural dwelling. Southern Rural Sociology, 17 , 111–133. Kalman-Lamb, N. (2012). A portrait of this country: Whiteness, indigeneity, multiculturalism and the Vancouver opening ceremonies. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 27 , 5–27. Kaufmann, E. (1998). “Naturalizing the nation”: The rise of naturalistic nationalism in the United States and Canada. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40 (4), 666–695. Kazemipur, A., & Halli, S. S. (2001). The changing colour of poverty in Canada. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 38(2), 217–238. King, C. R. (2007). Staging the Winter Olympics: Or, why sport matters to White power. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 31(1), 89–94. Kinsman, P. (1995). Landscape, race and national identity: The photography of Ingrid Pollard. Area, 27 (4), 300–310.

10 Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow

255

Kobayashi, A., & Peake, L. (2000). Racism out of place: Thoughts on Whiteness and an antiracist geography in the new millennium. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90 (2), 392–403. Kremarik, F. (2000). A family affair: Children’s participation in sports. Canadian Social Trends, 58, 20–24. Krymkowski, D. H., Manning, R. E., & Valliere, W. A. (2014). Race, ethnicity, and visitation to national parks in the United States: Tests of the marginality, discrimination, and subculture hypotheses with national-level survey data. Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism, 7 , 35–43. Lee, E. (Ed.). (1997). Go girl!: The black woman’s book of travel and adventure. The Eighth Mountain Press. Lipsitz, G. (2011). How racism takes place. Temple University Press. Mackey, E. (2000). Death by landscape: Race, nature, and gender in Canadian nationalist mythology. Canadian Woman Studies, 20 (2), 125. Mackey, F. (2010). Done with slavery: The Black fact in Montreal, 1760–1840 (Vol. 21). McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP. Marsh, J. S., & Hodgins, B. W. (Eds.). (1998). Changing parks: The history, future and cultural context of parks and heritage landscapes. Dundurn. Martin, D. C. (2004). Apartheid in the great outdoors: American advertising and the reproduction of a racialized outdoor leisure identity. Journal of Leisure Research, 36 (4), 513. Maynard, R. (2017). Policing Black lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present. Fernwood Publishing. McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. University of Minnesota Press. McNiel, J. N., Harris, D. A., & Fondren, K. M. (2012). Women and the wild: Gender socialization in wilderness recreation advertising. Gender Issues, 29 (1–4), 39–55. McPherson, K. (2020). Black girls are not magic; they are human: Intersectionality and inequity in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) schools. Curriculum Inquiry, 50 (2), 149–167. Neal, S., & Agyeman, J. (Eds.). (2006). The new countryside?: Ethnicity, nation and exclusion in contemporary rural Britain. Policy Press. Nelson, C. A. (2017). Slavery, geography and empire in nineteenth-century marine landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica. Routledge. Nxumalo, F., & Cedillo, S. (2017). Decolonizing place in early childhood studies: Thinking with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies. Global Studies of Childhood, 7 (2), 99–112.

256

J. L. Scott

Paraschak, V., & Tirone, S. (2015). Ethnicity and race in Canadian sport. In J. Crossman & J. Scherer (Eds.), Social dimensions of Canadian sport and physical activity (pp. 90–115). Pearson. Peake, L., & Ray, B. (2001). Racializing the Canadian landscape: Whiteness, uneven geographies and social justice 1. Canadian Geographer/le Géographe Canadien, 45 (1), 180–186. Plummer, E. (2016, April 21). The changing face of snow sports. Pique News Magazine. Retrieved from: http://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/whi stler/the-changing-face-of-snow-sports/Content?oid=2754350 Pryor, B. N. K., & Outley, C. W. (2014). Just spaces: Urban recreation centers as sites for social justice youth development. Journal of Leisure Research, 46 (3), 272–290. Pulido, L. (2002). Reflections on a white discipline. The Professional Geographer, 54 (1), 42–49. Razack, S. (Ed.). (2002). Race, space, and the law: Unmapping a White settler society. Between the Lines. Robbins, P. (2011). Political ecology: A critical introduction (Vol. 16). Wiley. Roberts, N. (1996). Women of colour in experiential education: Crossing cultural boundaries. In K. Warren (Ed.), Women’s voices in experiential education (pp. 226–240). Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co. Scott, J. L. (2003). English language and communication: Issues for African and Caribbean immigrant youth in Toronto. In P. Anisef & K. M. Kilbride (Eds.), Managing two worlds: The experiences and concerns of immigrant youth in Ontario (pp. 96–117). Canadian Scholars’ Press. Scott, J. L. (2018). New ads ask, ‘Do White people dominate the outdoors?’ The Conversation. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/new-ads-askdo-White-people-dominate-the-outdoors-105566 Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press. Shinew, K. J., Floyd, M. F., & Parry, D. (2004). Understanding the relationship between race and leisure activities and constraints: Exploring an alternative framework. Leisure Sciences, 26 (2), 181–199. Ski Canada. (2016). Facts and Stats: Ski and Snowboarding Industry 2014–15. Snow Magazine. (2018). Top ten ski resorts in the world 2018. Retrieved from: https://www.snowmagazine.com/features/1208-top-tens/the-top-10ski-resorts-in-the-world-2018 Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. Diacritics, 17 (2), 65–81.

10 Black Youth on Skis: Race in the Canadian Snow

257

Stephenson, M. L., & Hughes, H. L. (2005). Racialised boundaries in tourism and travel: A case study of the UK Black Caribbean community. Leisure Studies, 24 (2), 137–160. Stoddart, M. C. (2010). Constructing masculinized sportscapes: Skiing, gender and nature in British Columbia, Canada. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 46 (1), 108–124. Stoddart, M. C. (2012). Making meaning out of mountains: The political ecology of skiing. UBC Press. Subban, K., & Colby, S. (2017). How we did it: The Subban plan for success in hockey, school and life. Random House Canada. Thorpe, J. (2012). Temagami’s tangled wild: Race, gender, and the making of Canadian nature. UBC Press. Tirone, S., Livingston, L. A., Jordan Miller, A., & Smith, E. L. (2010). Including immigrants in elite and recreational sports: The experiences of athletes, sport providers and immigrants. Leisure/loisir, 34 (4), 403–420. Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2014). Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods. Routledge. Vander Kloet, M. (2009). A trip to the co-op: The production, consumption and salvation of Canadian wilderness. International Journal of Canadian Studies/revue Internationale D’études Canadiennes, 39–40, 231–251. Walcott, R. (2003). Black like who?: Writing black Canada. Insomniac Press. Winks, R. W. (1997). Blacks in Canada: A history (Vol. 192). McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP. Yancy, G. (2016). Black bodies, White gazes: The continuing significance of race in America. Rowman and Littlefield.

11 Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through (Racial) Landscapes Tuva Beyer Broch

1

Introduction The mood among the four students is not top notch as they listen to activity leader Iver’s talk about today’s cross-country skiing excursion. He promises that they have neither to ski up any hills, nor to conquer lots of flat terrain. Since they will travel to the peak of Oslo west by subway, they’ll enjoy skiing down the hills until they can catch the subway back to downtown and Mimo, the outdoor education centre’s location. Alex makes sure we all know he is going home if he reckons the activity is not suitable for him. As Alex looks for skiwear in the Mimo- storage room, his tone changes. He is not putting on any such clothes, he is going home. “Cross-country skiing is fucked up”. When Alex refuses to join the trip and marches out of the Mimo- equipment room in protest, Chris (a fellow student) follows him. Chris touches Alex on

T. B. Broch (B) Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Lillehammer, Norway e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_11

259

260

T. B. Broch

the shoulder “Join in, we’ll bounce if it’s not cool,” “Hey, look at those shoes, dork! We can’t bounce anywhere with them ya’know”. Later Alex walks down to the subway with us. While waiting for the carriage, Chris states that he would have joined Alex in leaving if he had not had those shoes on “Damn ski-shoes, urgh!” He kicks into empty air.

Humans impose boundaries on and shape landscapes in ways that both constrain and allow certain mental and physical movements, which relate to our feelings of familiarity or unfamiliarity, belonging or alienation. In the current context, such “invisible boundaries” (Gullestad, 2002), are revealed by symbolic analyses. In Oslo, Norway’s capital, invisible boundaries include demarcations between the East and the West side of Oslo, between mountain biking and hiking trails, between Norwegians and foreigners. One way that symbolic boundaries are imposed on natural landscapes is through narratives. Hegemonic-defined landscapes take forms in that which Finney (2014) would term a one-fits-all narrative. Such metanarratives are so powerful that they can marginalize and alienate individuals who reject, challenge or seek to renegotiate the established borders. Nevertheless, people can also actively include or exclude themselves through affiliation to, or rejection from, particular landscapes. It is therefore important to explicate how historically constructed landscapes influence people’s conscious and unconscious emotion work. In other words, landscapes’ symbolic significance has a substantial role in humans’ identity-work and feelings of familiarity and belonging. Through empirical vignettes, this chapter seeks to illustrate how a certain landscape and a specific activity, namely that of cross-country skiing, reflects emotional, moral and national identities. It follows lower working-class students from the East side of Oslo’s inner-city with trafficpolluted snow, winter-grey pavements and city blocks, to the West side’s white houses and snow-covered landscape mapped by cross-country ski trails. In the passing scenery, the young people in this study can see both their imagined selves and imagined others. This becomes evident as they interpret, express and share their emotion work (Hochschild, 1979, 2003) when passing by and encountering landscapes and people. As humans impose boundaries on landscapes, they become symbolic

11 Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through …

261

reifications of these very boundaries. Landscapes are turned into mirrors. Whether or not the mirror reflects the image of the onlooker, or distorts it, such reflections call for thorough emotion work. Applying a psychological anthropology approach, I explore urban youths’ experiences mediated and inspired by Mimo, an outdoor education centre situated in Oslo. Through school collaboration and afternoon trips, Mimo offers no-cost activities for children and youths in inner-city neighbourhoods. I estimate to have met close to 2,000 Mimoparticipants over the course of two years doing fieldwork, 25 of them on a regular basis. This all lays the groundwork for the few young people that are the focus of this chapter. As fourteen-year-old David, Chris and Lea (Pseudonyms) attend Mimo-activities during school hours, they shed light on why so many Mimo-youth of colour thought cross-country skiing was “fucked up”, and why ski-shoes become a legitimate point of exit for Alex. Connecting these idiomatic and idiosyncratic experiences to a historical context that is reproduced in Norwegians’ everyday life, visualizes the effects of historical landscapes in the young people’s emotion work, constituting and building their identity, feelings of unfamiliarity and otherness.

2

Mirroring Landscapes

Landscapes are brought to life as people are filled with knowledge, through personal experiences, but also through making and listening to narratives. In other words, personal, relational and hegemonic narratives, together with experiences, turn space into landscapes and further on to particular places. In a way, space is transformed into places invested with emotional bonds by means of this narrative process (Broch, 2009). According to Bender (2002), a landscape is often recognized and denominated by its use. Cross-country skiing is one activity among many in a winter landscape. However, cross-country skiing seems to be closely connected to snowy environments, especially on the West side of Oslo. On a weekend with a clear blue sky, the woodlands ski tracks connected

262

T. B. Broch

to Oslo West are crowded with skiers. This needs to be taken into consideration, as landscapes are also defined and understood in relation to ideas about how they are used and by whom. Prominent in my empirical material, and my understanding of much of the “landscape literature” (Basso, 1996; Bender, 2002; Gupta & Ferguson, 1992), is an emotional link between people and their surroundings. To fully grasp the significance of these emotional landscapes, or rather human emotions connected to different landscapes, we need to incorporate the sociopolitical landscapes from which people’s emotions arise. In Norway, it has been customary to see oneself cut off from any colonial past or heritage because Norway was not a colonial power, had no history of slave trade or statutory segregation. Thus, Norway has a different social structure and heritage after the colonial period than the United States and former colonial powers (Kyllingstad, 2012, 2017). Also, a predominantly homogenous White Scandinavia stands in contrast to countries such as the United States, Australia and Canada. In other words, the link between race or ethnicity and national identity in the Scandinavian nexus is strong. Ben-Zion (2014: 9) states that: “Since Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are small, ethno-nation states with long histories, national identity is inseparable from an ethnic identity based on blood ties and biological connectedness that implies physical resemblance”. To be ethnic Norwegian is thus highly connected to White skin (Gullestad, 2004; Rysst, 2012a, 2012b, 2017; Sandset, 2019). An understanding of how deeply cross-country skiing is attached to a White Norwegian national identity broadens our understanding of Alex, Chris, David and Lea’s interpretations of the activity, as well as the winter landscape surrounding it. Thus, the study adds to research (Bangstad & Bjørn, 2020; Ween & Lien, 2012) stating that Norway carries a colonial legacy that contributes to feelings of unfamiliarity and otherness.

11 Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through …

3

263

Moulding Cross-Country Skiing and Its Winter Landscape

Today, cross-country skiing is portrayed as Norway’s national sport (Goksøyr & Olstad, 2002), and a national leisure activity (Broch, 2020). However, the perception of Norwegians as “born with skis on their feet” has been and still is contested. Not all Norwegians feel at home on the ski trails, or agree with the narrative that Norwegian identity is connected to cross-country skiing. Henriette Lien (2015), a professional dancer and actor, as well as a TV and radio anchor in Norway wrote “Do I really not have a choice?” as she apprehended the Norwegian winter landscape as being filled with social pressure to cross-country ski on her blog in 2015. However, as much as the skiing identity is contested, there exists a hegemonic “truth”, and soon newcomers to Norway acknowledge that Norwegians master the activity and ascribe it a part of their national identity (Andersson, 2008; Sandset, 2019). Even though our experience carries the colour of hegemonic power structures, they are still individually felt. Knowledge of places is closely linked to knowledge of the self, to grasping one’s position in the larger scheme of things, including one’s own community, and securing a confident sense of who one is as a person. Because so much of our attachment to, familiarities with, and emotional investments in places are partly unconscious; in an analysis of familiarity or otherness it becomes important to explore spatial distributions of hierarchical power relations. Such hierarchical structures usually gain power with its common sense. As Basso (1996: xxii) points out, humans’ sense of place is “as natural and straightforward as our fondness for certain colours and culinary tastes […] Until, as sometimes happens, we are deprived of these attachments and find ourselves adrift, literally dislocated, in unfamiliar surroundings we do not comprehend and care for even less”. This is exactly what happens on the students’ journey. Crossing narrated invisible borders, both ascribed to landscapes and minds, they literally find themselves dislocated in unfamiliar surroundings.

264

4

T. B. Broch

Going West, Going White I sit on the subway, across from Lea. On the other side, the boys are gathered. Among them is their Norwegian-American schoolteacher Charley, and Mimo’s activity leader Iver. I hear Chris say that the ski-shoes make him uncomfortable. The teacher answers him “Just wait until we get past the National Theatre [the last stop before the subway starts on its way up to the hilly West side], then it is all about ski-shoes”. “Whatever, for the Norwegians, that is” Chris replies. Not unexpectedly, at the next stop, three minutes from the National Theatre, several men and women get on, carrying their cross-country skis; White skinned like Charley and Iver, wearing all the right gear and shiny ski-shoes. A lady sits down beside me. Chris stresses, again, that it is only Norwegians entering into the carriage, no foreigners – so to him, it does not matter that they all possess ski-shoes. More and more skiers enter, and then a group of boys and girls, with snowboards and slalom-skis join our wagon. Lea raises her eyebrows and declares with laughter “Whatz up…? Is it the national skiing day today?” “What are they all doing here?” We laugh together. Lea starts to talk about how she loves living downtown with her mom.

At this moment, these young students are about to explore the relationship between the White majority and the melanin1 rich minority population in Norway. Interpreting and analysing the empirical material from this specific journey, I follow Gupta and Furguson’s (1992) proposal. They argue that any analytical starting point in the investigations of meaning-making related to outdoor social relations should be that every landscape holds hierarchical connotations. Part of this hierarchy is based on skin colour. Kobayashi and Peake (2000: 393) uncover the need to understand that racialization is part of the normal, and normalized landscape needs to be analysed as such. Further, they highlight the importance of the ability to grasp and become aware of “the 1 Melanin is the pigment that contributes the most in giving human skin a wide range of brown hues (Jablonski, 2012). Recently, in Norway, vivid discussions arose connected to how to best talk about and refer to people with melanin- rich skin. The Norwegian author and slam poet Guro Sibeko (2019: 19) argues that we need a language community that frees us from «words used for other realities». She promotes melanin- rich as such a term without historical negative connotations.

11 Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through …

265

absence, rather than the presence of racialized faces”. On the subway we observe the students’ internal interaction and how they comment on their surroundings: how they are analysing encountered and imagined representatives of the White population. The students in this context do what I as a White researcher did not: they verbalized the absence of “racialized faces” on the subway, dressed up for a day of cross-country skiing. Loftsdóttir (2009: 7) is careful when she claims that for some people “the power associated with their own whiteness is probably invisible and normal”. As part of this colour-sameness, reflections about its taken-forgranted meaning are unnecessary other than for the purpose of observing “otherness”. This is also what happens on the subway heading towards a major tourist attraction point, Frognerseteren. This place is generally regarded as the foremost scenic viewpoint sited on the West side of Oslo, from which to look down on the city and its Fjord. For the majority of Oslo citizens who get on the subway on such a winter’s day, crowds of people with their skis is an ordinary affair. No reflection about the self or others is needed to assess what is going on, nor is the fact of crossing the invisible fence between East and West. The schoolteacher tells Chris to just wait until we have passed the station, National Theatre. This is in fact historically known as the town boundary between the East and West sides (Andersen, 2014). I do not know if the comment is based on this historical knowledge, however it demonstrates that there may be a common awareness of such a boundary. Crossing the border between East and West brings the students, according to their teacher, into a landscape of sameness by virtue of their outfits. For the teacher, sameness is here established through materiality, which is not the case for the youth: their statement clearly express that they do not share or feel belonging in their teacher’s narrative. The extract above illustrates one example of how the students ponder their surroundings, and force their teacher to do the same when rejecting his analysis of place, belonging and sameness. Similarly, the smiling woman sitting next to Lea and me takes in the scenery differently than she would if the Mimo-youth were not there. This episode represents a borderland experience, or a surprise that broke with the habitual ideas

266

T. B. Broch

of, at least, some White persons on the subway. The majority of WhiteNorwegian passengers noticed some few melanin-rich skiers, however reflection on Whiteness is likely left up to the few. For the Mimo-youth the subway ride towards Frognereteren seems like an “out-of-place” experience. Lea’s ironic expression: “Is it the national skiing day today?” signifies that she knows skiing is connected to a Norwegian identity. As Lea and Chris play out their reactions when they enter this cultural borderland, cultural models become strengthened, in terms of skiing as informing national identity, both for the students, and for those listening in. The distinction of us versus them is verbally played out, and serves a double purpose. They strengthen their own and other passengers’ models of White-Norwegian identity versus a non-White identity foreign to the white landscape they are about to enter, escorted by their White mediators. Forsyth (1988) explains how it is through deviance, or defining outsiders, that we strengthen an ingroup sameness. The way Lea and Chris’ identity is challenged by forced reflection influences their emotion work, and makes otherwise invisible social and cultural fences visible for the anthropologist. Now we need to take a step back to get behind the symbolic fences. Let us take a closer look at the ski-shoes discourse. According to Belk (2003), shoes affect humans’ perceptions of the other and the self. Based on a study of Americans, he found that not only are shoes an extended expression of self, they are also ascribed with magical transformative attributes, as well as serving a repository of memory and meaning. What this heavy symbolism represents is especially verbalized among young adults. Belk states that footwear among youth seems to be a key signifier of individualism, conformity, lifestyle, gender, sexuality, ethnicity as well as personality, and to an even greater extent than among the general population. It is worth noticing that shoes may play a transformative role. However, in Belk’s (2003) narratives, the shoes generated positive transformations much like in the Cinderella story. From normal to supernatural, sneakers contribute to performativity and status, or high heels transform from invisible to attractive, leather shoes from boy to man. However, the skiing-shoes seem on the contrary to transform or transmit

11 Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through …

267

an unwanted identity, or an unwanted form of Norwegianness for the youth. As we saw, the ski-shoes became an issue even before the trip started. Alex dropped out, and Chris kicked into the empty air proclaiming that he was trapped by the shoes. Alternatively, he used the shoes as an excuse to continue the journey. Nonetheless, he brings the shoe issue with him onto the subway. The ski-shoes symbolize negative feelings that bother both Chris and Alex. Besides the strange feeling of actually having such footwear on, ski-shoes are not good for walking—although my observations suggested that this is not the issue here. If so, most of the youth would not put on slalom-boots either. The resistance seems connected to an identity threatened by hegemonic Norwegianness, and an activity that does not coalesce with how they define themselves, how they wish to be defined or how they feel a need to be ascribed a fitting identity. The question this poses is why ski-shoes appear to be even more important than ski-garments in this setting. The people getting on the subway for Frognerseteren look much like professional cross-country skiers. The Mimo-youths are not dressed accordingly. Having grown up in Norway attending outdoor activities at school, they know all too well how cross-country skier’s dress. Actually, the youth are not really dressed in “skiing-gear” at all, they just have warmer clothes than they would normally wear in the city. Resisting a hegemonic clothing code—by rejecting ski-clothes from the Mimo-storage—is also a way of empowering oneself, stating that they resist being absorbed into the Norwegian skiing identity. Only the shoes inform and reveal to their co-passengers about their mission. The shoes prohibit their silent resistance. The other passengers wearing the same ski-shoes do not look like them, as Chris stresses, “There are only Norwegians coming into the carriage, no foreigners”. Ski-shoes in this context become a national identity marker, and they confront the youth in ways in which they feel uncomfortable. As Choen formulated some time ago: “People become aware of their national identity when they stand at its boundary” (1982 in Ben-Zion, 2014: 45). The ski-shoes are a marker of this boundary. Wearing such a national marker is challenging when your external presentation does not confirm a hegemonic “white skin national image”.

268

T. B. Broch

During the confrontation we observed on the subway, Lea and Chris both take a stand. They visually and verbally express feelings of alienation and non-belonging. Lea ends her reflections on her surroundings by bringing in her mother, and clarifying her love for her home, downtown Oslo. Her narrative of place incorporated identity, insecurity and security. This way to create distance is strengthened further as her reflections take off as the subway moves upwards. Leas statements can be attached to what Taylor (2010) terms the born-and-bred narrative. According to Taylor, where we grow up always forms the raw material of our identity. Home is connected to safety and familiarity, alienation to unsafe and unfamiliar conditions and can be expressed through a nonbelonging narrative. The further away from home, the more explicit this non-belonging narrative becomes, and not only for Lea.

5

Moving Up, Moving Down We feel and see the subway moving upwards now. Lea peeks out of the window. I look at the huge houses, and discover that her eyes are focused on the few apartment buildings placed on this hilly landscape. She says “Oh why can’t they move those downtown? The other houses and their like can remain here in the forest, but those apartments, I want them downtown. Why don’t we have apartments like that downtown?” The apartment buildings stand tall and softly coloured among mostly white, extravagant houses. Further up the hill, she looks out of the window once again, and bursts out “OOOOHHH”. I look her way and am sure she is taken by the view. We throne over the city, and are looking down on a glistening blue Oslofjord through large trees bowing under heavy loads of snow. The fjord looks so bright, surrounded by darker spots that must be apartment buildings, traffic lights and stores. It is indeed a stunning view. Then Lea exclaims, “Are we going all that way down to town again or what!?” I burst out laughing, and ask if that is what she was screaming about. She confirms my question and nods with a smile. Chris looks out on the white snow-covered trees, houses and terrain “Can you imagine living here! It is only forest.” Their teacher, Charley, asks: “isn’t it beautiful?”. “It is fucking cold right, a lot colder than downtown.” “Not that

11 Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through …

269

much colder,” Charley comments. Chris is not convinced. Lea and I laugh again. The lady sitting next to us is smiling repeatedly, and holding back a giggle in response to David who now sits with us and spots a group of firstgraders: “Look, there’s all my children. I want 83 children”. I ask if he dreams of having a palace. He replies by telling me he is going to have four wives. Lea spots a housing complex that she thinks would be perfect for David and his imagined family. The lady is still next to us, and again she observably struggles not to burst out laughing, just like she managed when Lea wondered if it was the national skiing day earlier. Lea goes on to comment that almost all the houses are nice around here, but she does not like the red and black ones. We pass by an orange house. She does not like that either. The white ones are nice “But there are too many of them though”.

There are many nuances to these raw moments of awakening, at least for the researcher. The taken-for-granted city-view experience is one. It is well known that most human preferences are socially constructed. In spite of this, what is beautiful appears so commonsensical. Right there, on the subway, Lea de-naturalizes the beauty. She made me aware of how easy it is to over-empathize, taking one’s own emotional experiences as a given, and represent general values. Growing up in Norway, many children are socialized into the outdoors as a way of being, it becomes embodied and not necessarily articulated. It is through parents and other caretakers and institutions children learn to see and experience nature in specific ways (Broch, 2020). It seems like Mimo-leaders, myself included, also play a part in this upbringing—teaching Mimo-participants to appreciate what we (representing a Norwegian hegemonic worldview of nature) define as beautiful sceneries. Lea and I are both caught in awkward moments, and learn that we pay attention to different details and see the landscape from the vantage point of different backgrounds, distinctive associations and experiences. So does Chris: he comments on the white-shrouded forest landscape and is challenged by his teacher’s question “But isn’t it beautiful?”. The response is again full of resistance: “Fucking cold”.

270

6

T. B. Broch

Warm and Grey, Cold and White

In retrospect, these comments and reactions illustrate that we are not only taught how to feel about our surroundings, they also illuminate the distance between East and West of Oslo. The districts appear as separate worlds. If you lack an intermediary, be that friends, family, parents or Mimo-personnel who may give you the experience of border-crossing, it is unlikely that you would cross. The statement “choosing place, choosing identity” (Taylor, 2010: 15) is relevant here. The fact is that few are able to choose where to grow up, and most end up creating born-and-bred narratives that highlight and explain why they feel attached to specific neighbourhoods. This narrative is attached to feelings and framed by hegemonic discourses on place. This hegemonic discourse is picked up, and digested, by city youth. Challenging this hegemonic discourse are the lyrics of the Norwegian rap duo Karpe Diem, who provide poetic social critique about Norwegian society at large and about Oslo’s East and West in particular. Through several years and albums, they take the listener into their world of growing up Black on the West side of Oslo. With their melodious lyrics, they voice issues such as skin colour, national identity and class. Most importantly, they have given Norwegian children and youth of colour a voice, they verbalize the unspoken. They also familiarize and take to heart the inner-city: “My grey hoodie is a match for the mud. The concrete here is numb. And the blocks we live in are choked in fog”.2 In another song3 they describe the music of the streets as city bicycles passing by, pigeon’s morning melody and an apple falling from the street light. Such “city-streets descriptions” fit into recent political rhetoric about making Oslo green: the importance of green lungs over grey streets, promised by area facelifts, seem somehow to shine through. When Lea and Chris are talking about the same grey streets and apartment buildings, they are described, in line with Karpe Diem, as warm, safe and enjoyable. Their talk might be framed in binary oppositions. The West side is white and cold, in this case it represents something 2 3

Vestkant svartinga (2008). Byduer i bur (2010).

11 Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through …

271

deviant and unfriendly. High-rise buildings and city streets are familiar, it feels like home. During the subway ride the students learn about themselves, their friends and acquaintances, families and homes in fresh ways. Lea observes these different worlds, and starts to work on what she discovers, wondering about what she experiences. In this process, she makes the unfamiliar familiar and the familiar strange through moving and commenting on objects and colours. She loves the Westside’s apartment buildings, she wants to bring them home, in other words, as she physically moves up, what she finds familiar, she mentally moves downtown, home. Some houses are nice: she likes the white ones, but there are too many of them. In other words, the white houses are nice, but they can stay put in their unfamiliar landscape. After a while, she takes the opportunity offered by David, who also plays a similar game. He seizes the strange and turns it familiar in a humorous way. He imagines himself living here, with 83 children and 4 wives. Lea jumps in and starts looking for houses where he could accommodate his fantasy family. In this game, we are witnessing how the youngsters play with and at the same time challenge stereotypical ways in which they think others see them. They overplay what they regard as the fact that “they do not really belong here” and they challenge their fate through imaginative play. In other words, they are engaged in identity-work, letting me know where and how they relate to the passing landscape. This continues as they leave the subway.

7

Painting Landscapes It feels cold getting out of the subway. The boys follow the other passengers. They repeatedly comment about being surrounded by White people, even though we are clearly not. On the contrary, there are several melanin- rich tourists headed towards a sledding hill. The boys and I stand together fixing our shoes into the ski bindings. Right behind us, it is a group of maybe seven melanin- rich people, speaking Spanish. They go unremarked by our little group. Chris, however, comments, “This is so much not a place for us. Look

272

T. B. Broch

around, everyone is White!” I think to myself, at least many or most things are white, but certainly not everyone!

Basso (1996: 7) asserts “We are in a sense the place-worlds we imagine”. It is the imaginative Mimo-youth world that I became a part of this particular day. The fact that all around Lea people are heading for the ski-tracks might strengthen the feelings of national skiing celebrations she proposed on the subway. The students paint the landscape white, a whiteness that confirms their cultural models of what hegemonic Norwegians do and look like, and how they prefer and manage to live. This symbolic whiteness, which seems to be everywhere, also defined their selves as “other”. Basso (1996) argues that the way we make sense of places is closely related to how we understand ourselves as members of a certain society. In this construction work, or creative artwork, our youth also contribute to others’ understanding of them. They simultaneously construct a personal and social identity, in these meetings with the winter landscape and its people. Frognerseteren’s old dark tar-coloured buildings and people dressed in colourful ski gear, are familiar to some, and exotic to others. The colours are almost like those of an assorted paint box pallet. In the present context, the actual colours do not carry significant meaning because the landscape is symbolically but also predominantly white. We are witnessing how active and emotional identity-work is carried out when related to landscapes and places. The youth make and attempt to control or add to the landscape; they appropriate it with their own creativity and assisted group support. By manoeuvring the paintbrush, by holding it, they are actively painting instead of solely being painted themselves. At least, that is what they are up against, because when traveling through racialized landscapes, you risk losing your own colour, or identity connected to skin colour (see Sandset, 2019).

11 Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through …

8

273

Colour Contrasts in a Winter Landscape The boys hit the slopes. It takes a while before Lea and I get started. Lea looks around, she is worried all those skiers seemingly everywhere may laugh at her. This is perhaps important for Lea, as she observes that no one besides herself is being taught or learning to ski here on these tracks. At least this is so now, as she looks around. I see it too – skiers, men and women, young and old, rushing back and forth, passing us on seemingly all sides. Lea is surrounded by symbolic whiteness where she is standing in a motionless, solid, manmade ski track landscape. Whiteness is endlessly parading by Lea, bypassing with confidence and self-secure speed. Finally, she sets off a little shakily, so I steady her. At our first tiny downhill slope, she stops, whining, but I persuade her to try. She falls on her behind, seemingly unable to get up. An elderly couple passing her stop to ask if she is doing ok and state matter-of-factly “We fall too you know”. They smile and continue their journey. At the next hill, Lea takes her skis off and walks down. We continue for quite a while. People pass by and I notice how they smile at Lea. Then we are left to ourselves for an extended time, and Leah wonders if I am bored of her. Am I bored having to help her all the time? She says she feels sorry for me. I laugh and try to convince her that I am enjoying our time together. Iver saves the day when he returns just as we have reached the edge of yet another hill, this one even a little steeper than the first. Iver teaches me how to hold Lea’s poles in order for her to safely ski down the slope. Lea bends her knees and leans forward, holding her poles tightly underneath her armpits. I grab the end of her poles to secure the speed. Lea is super happy and a tiny bit bummed “Why did you not know this Tuva? We should have started doing it this way before!” I hold her poles and plow behind her for a long time. Occasionally we ski beside each other, exchanging small talk. We are in the moment. During lunch, the boys are talking and say they wonder why Norwegians do this skiing thing. Chris is thankful for the trip and all that, but he will never ski again. They all cheer when Iver tells us that they will be picked up by the Mimo- van at our destination point. The students talk about getting home and wanting to take a hot shower and watch TV in bed. Iver replies quickly “You know why we all love trips like these? Exactly for that reason: to

274

T. B. Broch

go back home and enjoy a warm shower or bath”. Some big smiles light up the students’ faces. Iver suggests that Lea and I ski ahead while they clean up the leftovers from lunch. The two of us manage the steep downhill slopes towards our end destination. Unknown skiers pass us, giving Lea more big smiles as she concentrates and commands me into what she feels is the right speed when I take charge of her poles. In the end, Lea is tired. She makes it plain to me that she notices how everyone is gazing at her and she does not like that. I ask if she would rather have stayed back in the city doing math at school . She quickly says NO! At the same time, she is nearly dead, exhausted, and this is by far the worst day of her life (she informs me laughingly).

The term postcolonial relates to the power and effects dominant discourses in society have on its inhabitants. Such a perspective should shed light on how people are colonized through discourses that can lead to the suppression of deviant behaviour and understandings. This happens when groups of people express or symbolize a worldview other than that held in common by a majority population. This is where the Norwegian anthropologist Gullestad’s (2004) critical voice becomes important. She proposes that the well-documented Norwegian equality as sameness discourse serves as a hindrance to seeing these power relations hidden in a racialized social environment. Sameness in this discourse, thus not directly uttered, also links to visual sameness, and this is a problematic outcome. Skiing beside Lea we laughed a lot. In my opinion she made good progress, given that she had started out holding my hand on flat terrain, and at the end was skiing down some slopes on her own. It was not before the elderly couple commented “We fall too” and seeing their big, warm smiles that I seriously started to reflect on our surroundings. It was then I realized that not only was Lea the only one with melanin-rich skin, she was also the only one learning to ski. That day Lea was unique in the cross-country tracks at Frognerseteren. Lea improved her skiing technique during the trip, and so did I after Iver told me how to support Lea down the slopes. This setting gave Lea control over me, telling me how to help her by finding the right speed, instead of me explaining or trying to rescue her at any moment. The

11 Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through …

275

smiles from passing skiers continued to shine towards the two of us as we made our way along the trail. I had started to reflect on the reactions we received from other skiers before Lea made it clear that she was well aware of it too. Gullestad (2004: 184) asks “Is it ok to stare at a Black man running in the forest?” What is the main focus of the gaze, the Black man or the context in which he is embedded? In other words, is it the activity or the place? She continues that staring usually represents bad manners. No one stopped and stared at Lea or myself, no one laughed or pointed, no one asked any questions. Their smiles as I interpreted them said “Welcome, you can do this”. In Norway most people are frugal with both looks and smiles in everyday contexts, with the exception being on the hiking trails or in the ski-track where both smiles and greetings are common (Halvorsen, 2017; Hansen, 2015). However, as Gullestad argues, the well-meant smiles or gestures do not necessarily imply positive attitudes. What Gullestad refers to here is important, but not easy. Can the smiles be a manifestation of racism? According to Gunaratnam (in Berg, 2008), researchers should work with and against racialized categories, and make connections between lived experiences, political relationships and knowledge production. Quickly linking such experiences to racism becomes problematic in this regard, because situations like the ones I just described are complex and need to be carefully analysed. In my opinion, the research participants’ experiences are always more important than theory. If not, any act or interaction between different cultural groups may become examples of racism. If most are defined as the rash of racism, the fences between the majority and minorities will only be further strengthened. The dividing lines can easily be described as racism regardless of communicative content or intention. If we follow Gullestad (2004) we can designate the looks Lea gets as colonial or racialized, but it may be distinguished from those given by a racist. Racialization is here understood as racism incorporated into a social practice, the analytical focus is moved from individuals and over to socio-cultural structures (Midtbøen & Rogstad, 2010). Lea herself does not express a connection between the smiles and the term racism. However, by turning to Sandset’s (2019) descriptions of the racialized gaze we are offered a deepened understanding. He argues that such meetings are not necessarily

276

T. B. Broch

racist, nor discriminatory. Yet, such encounters repeatedly rewrite the feelings of racialized and/or ethnic divides, boundaries that touch on specific ways of thinking or reflecting on who belongs and does not belong. Power structures are played out in “all” settings and contexts. Landscapes strengthen and add meaning to the messages behind the smile, intended or not. Indirectly and repeatedly through smiles, gazes and comments, Lea is told that she is “Cute”, “She just needs to practice” and that “She is different”. So, the “We see you, you are doing well, we are enjoying seeing you here” could have two analytical starting points: (1) Creating sameness requires an effort (“We fall too”); however, the effort of learning (2) maintains and creates a hierarchy. The learning process verifies who is in control of the landscape and who is not, who belongs and who is new. Both sides of this communication line are of importance, but let us start with the latter. Lea’s experience mirrors a young minority girl’s meeting with one version of Norwegian national identity, materialized through landscape, sports-gear and friendly faces. Lea’s identity as non-White, thus nonNorwegian in an unfamiliar landscape is reinforced. Feelings of alienation are brought up and out through the smiling strangers’ and her own verbal utterings. What if we turned it all upside down? What if no one paid attention to Lea, no hello, no smiles? This does not exclude certain landscapes in Norway from being racialized, but even racialized places and landscapes can be interpreted differently by individuals. In Lea’s case, there is reason to anticipate that being completely ignored on the ski trails, where smiles and greetings are highly common, might have had the same effect (in the present context) as the smiles. A feeling of alienation would occur, not necessarily connected to skin colour, but perhaps equally to lacking competence and preferences. Cross-country skiing has become a marker of significant skill and social position in Norway, to the extent that White Norwegians at times are also challenged when it comes to belonging, or even achieving successful integration (Broch, 2020). The Mimo-youth, except Alex who left, do not have to worry about others assuming they are not brought up as good Norwegian citizens (as journalist Lereng [2016] and others

11 Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through …

277

express), by the tone of their skin they are already marked by others as foreigners. This is what we could call White privilege: White-Norwegians can take on roles adapted to the situation. Lea has no way she can hide or transfer her appearance if she in these situations wanted to be regarded as a “Norwegian”. The question then becomes: when Lea and Chris already stand out because of their skin colour, why do they, seemingly, have to underscore their resentment, stating in multiple ways that they do not belong? They might be preparing for possible gazes and smiles, but they may also need to make certain that no one actually believes they truly want to belong. It is a relevant question as to who they would become if they suddenly felt at ease with this proto-Norwegian activity in the winter landscape.

9

A Colour-Transmitting Landscape

An activity cannot be “White” in and of itself; the winter landscape in Oslo West is neither solely white, nor are all the faces White. In times when generations of skiers only met other White Norwegians along the many snowy trails, nobody had to or found any reason to equate skiing with Whiteness. It is from this perspective that we need to see the resistance of the inner-city Mimo-youth towards the ski-shoes and cross-country skiing. Here there are strong associations that make the youth uncomfortable. They take a large step into a symbolic white landscape, and further into a practiced Norwegian national identity ritual. Even skiing does not allow them to be fully Norwegian. Karpe Diem4 explicitly visualize how skiing and a winter landscape carry a very real potential of whitewashing: I’m so White I could’ve been on a postage stamp on skis. With these lyrics, Karpe Diem tells us they have become White, they do everything society wants of them, even skiing. However, it is not enough. They are still treated differently. Youth with cross-cultural backgrounds and melanin-rich skin do not just juggle friends, family, school and—let us not forget—national identity, they also juggle their skin colour in relation to all the other 4

Hvite menn som pusher 50 (2015).

278

T. B. Broch

junctures. This is why it is extremely important to apprehend the framework of youth movements and self-understandings. As song lyrics can show how youth are longing for a place within the Norwegian national identity, the same texts also illuminate struggles opposing that identity, and how others define them in and out of them. Whose moral codes are most important for the youth we have in focus? When they are skiing, who and what do they represent: Whiteness or Blackness, Norwegianness or otherness?

10

Transforming Landscapes with Colours

In this chapter I have tried to visualize and bring forth how places are shaped by experiences, expectations and emotion work. Identity is created in the spaces we live in every day. Debates about national identity contribute by producing new landscapes as well as reproducing existing images. In bringing forward these structural frameworks, the goal has been to expose power relations between landscapes (who defines landscapes and gives them colour) and individuals (who is painted by and paints the landscapes). Following Gupta and Ferguson (1992), we need to start with the premise that space has always been hierarchically interconnected. I argue that this is confirmed by Lea, Chris and David’s actions and social reactions. The interpretations of demarcations, familiarity and unfamiliarity, demonstrated above are certainly not universal, but emerge in a historically specific timeframe, as the youth invest their surroundings with meaning. This meaning is specific and culturally produced and reproduced through shifting negotiations. I further argue that a transformation takes place, and is partly possible to observe, as we follow the youth on their journey. They assess the landscape, feel it and work it, both placing themselves and distancing themselves in relation to shifting sceneries. They are entering unfamiliar landscapes both influenced by in-group discourse and ongoing public debates about national identity. Debates that narrate the good Norwegian: what he and she are, supposedly, like. What happens then, when the youth start their journey on the ski-tracks? The youth demonstrate

11 Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through …

279

an awareness of both the hegemonic narrative about Norway as a moral skiing nation, and the counternarrative, the West side of Oslo as filled with money and prejudice. To deny that these narratives reveal a racialized map of Oslo would be naive. However, it needs to be emphasized that exclusion—in this instance in the winter landscape—is produced and reproduced by both the historical structures that racialize skiing, and the young people themselves. Fangen (2010) argues that many young people of colour choose not to cross the city borders and do not aspire to reside there in the future. Black skin gets imprisoned by discourses (Tate, 2004), by stereotypes that are in turn reproduced by Black young people themselves. Lea and her classmates risk being perceived as deviant in the winter landscape when they are observed by others. They confront this risk through colour talk. As Tate (2004) argues, a border can be formed and re-formed by talk, and I add through skin. Both metaphorically and symbolically, the skin contributes to opening up of a landscape: Mimoyouth are painting and being painted when they use particular words and participate in a signifying activity, moving about in a pre-defined landscape. Colour adds another identity layer to the city border, and to the national identity. A melanin-rich skin colour visualizes already existing invisible fences. The young people are contributing to a reframing of a landscape, and in any reframing, lies the potential for violence. In our case, the violence is the confrontation of “Who are they?”, “Where do they (really) belong?” and “Where can they imagine their future?” Through talk and actions Mimo-youth create distance from Whiteness, and this strategy can be seen as a critique of Whiteness as a point of identification. The skin is used to “build a version of the self in which one becomes radically other, through establishing one’s own Black particularity that is both within and outside of it” (Tate, 2004: 220). Following Ahmed and Stacey (2004: 2), I argue that in such moments the skin comes “to inhabit, as well as inhabiting, the space of the nation and the landscape”. Skin, along with history, and landscapes, are produced and reproduced. In this manner, place is here claimed through experiences through the skin. At that precise moment, when ordinary perceptions begin to loosen their hold, a border has been crossed and the landscape starts to

280

T. B. Broch

change. Some argue that Black gold-winning winter sports heroes are needed to break down stereotypes (Andersson, 2008) and open up or transform landscapes enshrined in national, White myths. This chapter has demonstrated that participating in Mimo-activities and making traces in everyday life contributes too. Hegemonic narratives form the framework that societies think within, but by crossing invisible fences, confronting colours, power relations and imagined communities—that is where change begins. Based on their own experiences, new narratives may be formed. Whether Lea will travel more times to Frognerseteren or cross over to the West Side is not the focus here, rather it is the fact that she did it. She has created her own story and achieved her novel experiences. She had to confront her own and others’ stereotypes; she experienced that she can manoeuvre a (double) White landscape and she knows it will be there, if she wishes to return. Acknowledgements Thanks to the editors for considerate and insightful comments and suggestions. Saiba Varma, Lena Gross, Aleksandra Bartozko and Cecilia Salinas thank you for comments and conversations on an earlier version of this text, and for persistent generosity and support!

References Ahmed, S., & Stacey, J. (2004). Thinking through the skin. Routledge. Andersen, B. (2014). Westbound and Eastbound: Managing sameness and the making of separations in Oslo. Doctoral thesis, University of Oslo. Andersson, M. (2008). Flerfarget Idrett: Nasjonalitet, migrasjon og minoritet. Fagbokforlaget. Bangstad, S., & Bjørn, B. E. (2020, 20. mars). Koloniale trekk ved French og Moland-dekningen. Morgenbladet. Retrieved from: https://morgenbladet. no/ideer/2020/03/koloniale-trekk-ved-french-og-moland-dekningen?fbclid= IwAR0mDsAKWn-KfhNGsmYvyVCR6gOOXorZCL0nqtvCCGBnD1S aVE-wvBre8NU Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. University of New Mexico Press. Belk, R. W. (2003). Shoes and self. ACR North American Advances, 30, 27–33.

11 Painting Nature: Travelling Within and Through …

281

Ben-Zion, S. (2014). Constructing transnational and transracial identity: Adoption and belonging in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Palgrave Macmillan. Bender, B. (2002). Time and landscape. Current Anthropology, 43(S4), S103– S112. Berg, A. J. (2008). Silence and articulation—Whiteness, racialization and feminist memory work. NORA—Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, 16 (4), 213–227. Broch, H. B. (2009). Tracks that matter: On space, place and Hare Indian ethnobiology with special reference to the Marten (Martes americana). Acta Borealia, 26 (1), 77–95. Broch, T. B. (2020). Urbant ungdomsliv, natur og følelser. Cappelen Damm Akademsik. Fangen, K. (2010). Social exclusion and inclusion of young immigrants: Presentation of an analytical framework. Young, 18(2), 133–156. Finney, C. (2014). Black faces, white spaces: Reimagining the relationship of African Americans to the great outdoors. UNC Press Books. Forsyth, D. W. (1988). Tolerated deviance and small group solidarity. Ethos, 16 (4), 398–420. Goksøyr, M., & Olstad, F. (2002). Fotball!: Norges fotballforbund 100 år [Football! The Norwegian Football Association 100 years]. Paper presented at the Norges fotballforbund. Gullestad, M. (2002). Invisible fences: Egalitarianism, nationalism and racism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8(1), 45–63. Gullestad, M. (2004). Blind slaves of our prejudices: Debating ‘culture’ and ‘race’ in Norway. Ethnos, 69 (2), 177–203. Gupta, A., & Ferguson, J. (1992). Beyond “culture”: Space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology, 7 (1), 6–23. Halvorsen, B. E. (2017, December 4). Hvorfor hilser vi i påskefjellet, men ikke i byen? Aftenposten. Retrieved from: https://www.aftenposten.no/ama gasinet/i/Po0X/Hvorfor-hilser-vi-i-paskefjellet_-men-ikke-i-byen Hansen, B. G. (2015, March 1). Nordmenn er hyggeligst ute i naturen, News. NRK.no. Retrieved from: https://www.nrk.no/troms/_-nordmenn-er-hyggel igst-ute-i-naturen-1.12232529 Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85 (3), 551–575. Hochschild, A. R. (2003). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling (2nd ed.). University of California press. Jablonski, N. G. (2012). Living color: The biological and social meaning of skin color. University of California Press.

282

T. B. Broch

Kobayashi, A., & Peake, L. (2000). Racism out of place: Thoughts on whiteness and an antiracist geography in the new millennium. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90 (2), 392–403. Kyllingstad, J. R. (2012). Norwegian physical anthropology and the idea of a Nordic master race. Current Anthropology, 53(S5), S46–S56. Kyllingstad, J. R. (2017). The absence of race in Norway? Journal of Anthropological Sciences, 95 (1), 1–9. Lereng, A. (2016, March 25). Det verste med å hate ski, er at alle andre nordmenn ser ut til å elske det. Aftenposten, 11–18. Retrieved from: https://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/sid/i/BJRPv/Det-verste-med-ahate-ski_-er-at-alle-andre-nordmenn-ser-ut-til-a-elske-det Lien, H. (2015). Har jeg virkelig ikke noe valg? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.henriettelien.no/blog/har-jeg-virkelig-ikke-noe-valg Loftsdóttir, K. (2009). Invisible colour: Landscapes of whiteness and racial identity in international development. Anthropology Today, 25 (5), 4–7. Midtbøen, A. H., & Rogstad, J. (2010). Den utdannede, den etterlatte og den drepte: Mot en ny forståelse av rasisme og diskriminering. Sosiologisk Tidsskrift, 18(01), 31–52. Rysst, M. (2012a). ‘Colour-blind childhood’?: Living racialised ethnicities in a primary school setting in Oslo, Norway. In O. C.-B. Nicky Falkof (Ed.), On whiteness (pp. 325–334). Brill. Rysst, M. (2012b). “Lyden av hudfarge” blant barn i Groruddalen. In S. Alghasi, E. Eide & T. H. Eriksen (Eds.), Den globale drabantbyen: Groruddalen og det nye Norge (pp. 74–89). Cappelen Damm Akademisk. Rysst, M. (2017). Always a foreigner? Ethnic identity construction and belonging among youth of immigrant origin in Norway. In M. EspinozaHerold & R. M. Contini (Eds.), Living in two homes (pp. 167–199). Emerald Publishing Limited. Sandset, T. (2019). Color that matters: A comparative approach to mixed race identity and Nordic exceptionalism. Routledge. Sibeko, G. (2019). Rasismens poetikk. Ordatoriet. Tate, S. (2004). This is my Star of David: Skin, abjection and hybridity. In S. Ahmed & J. Stacey (Eds.), Thinking through the skin (pp. 209–221). Taylor and Francis e-Library. Taylor, S. (2010). Narratives of identity and place. Routledge. Ween, G., & Lien, M. E. (2012). Decolonialization in the Arctic? Nature practices and land rights in the Norwegian High North. Journal of Rural and Community Development, 7 (1), 93–109.

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’: Encountering and Producing Unfamiliar Bodies and Landscapes Thomas Aneurin Smith and Hannah Pitt

1

Introduction

We might think of being unfamiliar as ‘not knowing’. But unfamiliarity is also experienced and experiential. Feeling discomfort, whether emotional or corporeal, is, we argue, a facet of unfamiliarity that could be better understood. We counter how discomfort is typically woven into narratives of outdoor, experiential learning, in ways that valorise it as a necessary step towards familiarity with certain environments or recreational activities. These narratives are troubling when we begin to consider how discomfort can be experienced by young people in outdoor T. A. Smith (B) · H. Pitt School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected] H. Pitt e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_12

283

284

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

environments, and particularly how discomfort, often linked to unfamiliarity, is produced through injustices that perpetuate unfamiliarity between certain groups and spaces. Drawing on research from Leicester, UK, that enabled young people of Somali heritage to access waterways, we explore three types of discomfort, and how these interpolate. We question narratives of ‘necessary discomfort’ in the outdoors, and explore how feelings of discomfort expressed by young people and parents reflect racialised space and injustice.

2

Discomfort and Unfamiliarity

Outdoor leisure often has elements of risk, meaning that emotions and experiences otherwise regarded as dangerous are deliberately sought and celebrated (Burns et al., 2013). Thrill seeking, or risky activities are seen to result in positive feelings of escape and self-actualisation which make the risk not only palatable, but desirable (Creyer et al., 2003). The personal challenges of ‘suffering’, enduring pain, and risking the body in the ‘wild’, are closely associated with adventurous sports, with such discomforts necessary for connecting to nature, or, in more elaborate terms, offering personal transcendence (Ray, 2009). Such discourses have roots in White, masculinist cultures of nature and wilderness experiences (Ray, 2009). What counts as ‘edgy’ has typically been regarded from a perspective of White male privilege, neglecting variations between social groups and bodies (Lyng, 1990). Emphasising risk excludes disabled people (Burns et al., 2013), and fuels dangerous masculinity (Moran, 2011). Leisure management which seeks to please thrill seekers by avoiding making outdoor spaces ‘totally safe and bland’ (Lipscombe, 2007: 22) apply normative assumptions of risk which alienate people who make alternative assessments of what is safe or desirable. For some people bland is good, or safe. Risky pursuits need not be the adventure or extreme activities focused on by leisure studies (Lipscombe, 2007). For some, more mundane activities and spaces present equally fraught affects: walking in unknown landscapes and getting lost; urban green/bluespaces perceived as dangerous; cycling/walking on canal paths with potential to ‘fall in’; or adverse

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’ …

285

weather (wind, rain, or snow) and inadequate clothing. Discomforts experienced in the outdoors are more than an individual facet or matter of personal taste, being relational outcomes of interactions between person, landscape, activity and wider social context (Askins, 2009). Narratives of endurance, of tackling the unfamiliar, and celebrating risk, valorise the pursuit of discomfort, assuming one must endure the bad to achieve the good. For outdoor education, this means encouraging children to experience sensations such as icky mud or scary bugs, to encounter environments they find ‘disgusting’, and thus learn about nature or sustainability (Mycock, 2019; Winks, 2018). Such discomforts may have positive outcomes, but these should not be pursued without reflection on how someone comes to feel discomfort, because how a person experiences unfamiliar landscapes or activities is never wholly sensorial or psychological. Social and political factors result in some being more likely to feel uncomfortable entering spaces of outdoor leisure. Some forms of discomfort go deeper than individual, momentary sensorial experiences of getting cold and wet, being rooted in social inequalities, exclusions and racism. We begin by examining how discomfort has come to be valorised in experiential and outdoor learning, before considering how young people experience discomfort outdoors, and how discomfort is produced through patterns of spatial injustice, with particular reference to race. We then outline our empirical study: an intervention in Leicester, UK and reflect on encounters with discomfort, of young people, their parents and the project team. These show discomfort is never straightforwardly positive or negative, as individual and structural factors interact to shape spatial experiences. We conclude by reflecting on how such projects might progress understandings of discomfort and unfamiliarity, and their broader significance.

2.1

Valorising Discomfort, Unfamiliarity and Experience

Discomfort is woven into discourses on young people, nature and outdoor leisure. Some argue that in education for sustainability, ‘both learners and educators must be prepared to work on the thresholds of

286

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

certainty, comfort and knowledge’ (Winks, 2018: 390). Here, discomfort is associated with ‘confrontation’, ‘uncertainty’ and being ‘challenged’, with experiences that can be ‘disconcerting’ and ‘uncomfortable’ (Winks, 2018), to challenge norms and raise sensitivity to ‘nature’. In other spheres discomfort is replaced with ‘risk’, such as purported benefits of unstructured, outdoor play which enhances childrens resilience (Tremblay et al., 2015). ‘Exposure to unfamiliar environments’ defined by the ‘disequilibria’, ‘imbalance’ and ‘challenge’ is central to constructing the outdoors as a therapeutic space (Harper et al., 2018: 156). Discomfort is therefore deeply ingrained within unfamiliarity as justification for therapeutic, educational and adventurous activities. Discomfort and unfamiliarity also run through discourses of ‘experience’. Young people’s supposedly reduced contact with the outdoors and nature has been dubbed the ‘extinction of experience’ (Soga & Gaston, 2016). Here ‘direct experience’ is valorised as important for education (Nairn, 2005). Those who champion ‘experience’ as self-evident form of knowing assume ‘direct experience’ can ‘challenge norms’ when exposure to the unfamiliar prompts discomfort (Nairn, 2005). This discomfort can take various forms: from physical discomfort when exposed to the environment (smells, mud, moisture) to psychological discomforts at seeing ‘poverty first hand’ (Nairn, 2005: 296). Advocates for a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ (Boler, 1999) argue that individuals should have their social, cultural and political assumptions challenged, as ‘discomfort’ is necessary for transformation (Wolgemuth & Donohue, 2006). The therapeutic values of green, blue, or ‘wilderness’ spaces are often assumed, rather than interrogated (Harper et al., 2018), underplaying negative qualities (Pitt, 2018). Spaces with therapeutic qualities, such beauty, quiet and calm, are also imbued with physical challenge, risk and discomfort (Pitt, 2019). Experiences of such spaces may therefore be ambiguous, as for refugees and asylum seekers (Rishbeth et al., 2019), who describe finding ‘nuanced’ familiarity and comfort in parks, alongside experiences of racial abuse discussed in detail below. Bodily discomfort is one of many sensorial spatial experiences, particularly when considering ethnic diversity (Askins, 2009). Next we provide contextual

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’ …

287

insight into how different bodies are perceived to experience outdoor landscapes, and how some bodily types are more likely to remain unfamiliar with them.

2.2

Un-Comfortable Young People in Nature and the Outdoors

As highlighted in the introduction to this volume, there has been something of a moral panic about children and young people’s lack of familiarity with natural environments (Dickinson, 2013). But children’s and teenagers’ understandings of nature are inevitably distinct from those of the adults urging them into the outdoors (Freeman et al., 2016). We suggest these attitudes include feelings of discomfort, not just because of unpleasant sensorial experiences of unfamiliar things and places, but through being deeply uncomfortable stepping into landscapes dominated by the ideals of White western men (Dickinson, 2013), and more directly where there is the threat of racial abuse (Rishbeth et al., 2019). There is a pressing need to consider the social and political contexts determining children’s access to the natural world: Human-nature estrangement is exceptionally complex and involves underlying issues of power that result in environmental destruction, classism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. (Dickinson, 2013: 322)

Young people’s social worlds determine which landscapes they can(not) experience, and where they feel (un)comfortable and (un)familiar. In countries like the UK children have been kept out of outdoor public spaces by adults’ fear for them because of ‘stranger danger’ (Pain, 2006). Conversely, young people have been squeezed out of public spaces by adults’ fears of them as anti-social presences that cause discomfort (Neal et al., 2015). Teenagers themselves are deterred by fear of other people—bullies, gangs, criminals or drunks (Bromley & Stacy, 2012). These fears are sometimes founded in experiences of unsafety particularly in more disadvantaged areas or for young people of colour (Pain, 2006).

288

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

Young people identify parental concern as one barrier to them accessing the outdoors (Natural England, 2010; Pitt, 2019). Parents tend to limit their offspring’s independent access, resulting in tension with young people’s desire for freedom outdoors (Bell et al., 2003). But young people also perceive environments such as woodlands and waterways as risky and scary (Bell et al., 2003; Pitt, 2019) and expect corporeal discomfort around nature. Young people found English inland waterways smelly, dirty and unclean, and were fearful of falling into the water so avoided them (Pitt, 2018). They also regarded them as not age-appropriate, describing waterways and associated activities such as walking, as boring and not for them or their peers (Pitt, 2019). Research with Australian teens found home their favourite place, offering privacy, familiarity, safety, tranquillity, comfort, and a place ‘to be myself ’ (Abbott-Chapman & Robertson, 2001: 493). The potential for young people to experience discomfort away from home has important implications, given high levels of mental health problems amongst young people (ONS, 2017). Natural spaces may offer not stress release (Uzzell et al., 2005), but discomfort.

2.3

Discomfort and Injustice

Data on access to natural environments in the UK shows that children from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME)1 households were less likely to frequently visit (Hunt et al., 2016), with similar patterns in North America (Byrne et al., 2009). Correlations between socioeconomic status and race are often cited as explanations: higher income households are more likely to frequently visit, whilst areas of social deprivation typically have less access to quality greenspaces (Roe et al., 2016). Many outdoor leisure activities have high costs which exclude participation of low-income households (Harrison, 2013). But accessibility is not wholly a product of distribution of space or wealth (Bell et al., 2014). 1 Although we are uncomfortable with the term, BAME is commonly employed in British policy making and public bodies, and is used to classify the data referred to here. Additionally, in the UK, ‘ethnicity’ is commonly used in policy, media and public discussions, over ‘race’, and hence why our participants also referred to ethnicity.

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’ …

289

Communities of colour are poorly served by communications promoting access to greenspaces (Roberts-Gregory & Hawthorne, 2016). Injustices have long been a concern for outdoor leisure, more recently for environmental education (Maina-Okori et al., 2018). Studies across several decades suggest multiple barriers prevent people of colour accessing outdoor recreation. Some find ethnic minorities feel low affinity with the outdoors, or lack confidence to visit (Morris & O’Brien, 2011). Others demonstrate that minority ethnic groups have high affinity for outdoor spaces, and express greater concern for their local environment than White people (Askins, 2009; Floyd & Johnson, 2002; Harrison, 2013). The suggestion that people of colour may have a more ‘functional’ view of landscape (Gentin, 2011; Roberts, 2015) is challenged for reinforcing essentialised racial differences (Byrne, 2012; Hickcox, 2018), or homogenising minority groups (Askins, 2009). However, the UK’s White population represents a disproportionate majority of visitors to natural environments (Boyd et al., 2018), and ethnicity does seem correlated with recreational greenspace use (Byrne & Wolch, 2009; Roberts, 2015). Immigrants who frequently visited rural spaces in their home countries do not do so in the UK (Rishbeth, 2001). Fear of racist abuse or hostile environments—e.g. abusive graffiti— present barriers (Byrne & Wolch, 2009; Madge, 1997). Marginalised social groups can be more fearful in public spaces because fear is in part a product of their social exclusion and oppression (Bromley & Stacy, 2012; Brownlow, 2006). Across Europe and North America, inaccessibility to quality environmental amenities, from urban parks to ‘wilderness’ areas, constitutes environmental racism (Byrne & Wolch, 2009; Hickcox, 2018). Floyd and Johnson (2002) and Rishbeth (2001) argue that colonial, European and White ideologies of nature underpin environmental management, marginalising the concerns of people of colour. Design and use of public open space are culturally embedded, neither neutral nor universal (Rishbeth et al., 2019) but are often managed as such by managers— predominantly White in the UK—blind to other people’s social markers (Gentin, 2011; Rishbeth, 2001).

290

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

Many outdoor leisure sports in Europe and North America are dominated by White people (Hickcox, 2018; Hunt, 2019; Pitt, 2018). Scott (Chapter 10) and Broch (Chapter 11), in this volume, argue that in the case of skiing, this shapes symbolic forces which confound structural constraints, maintaining specific activities and their spaces as White. This ‘racial spatiality’ makes the presence of ‘other’ bodies disruptive, an ‘everyday racism’, in which racial difference, exclusion and spatial practices are mutually reinforcing (Hickcox, 2018; Johnson et al., 2001). White masculinity is closely associated with ‘wilderness’ spaces, whilst racialised bodies are associated with ‘inferior’ polluted and dangerous urban environments (Brahinsky et al., 2014). Certain rural spaces carry resonances of racial segregation, slavery and exploitation which deter people of colour from visiting (Hickcox, 2018). Segregation between White rurality and multicultural urban space persists across the UK (Askins, 2009). Racially coded bodies are therefore marked out as unfamiliar in outdoor spaces and activities, perpetuating historic patterns of exclusion. Discourses around ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ (Louv, 2005) obscure these environmental injustices by reproducing middle-class White European and North American norms which portray a ‘return’ to ‘wilderness’ as universally desirable and uncontroversial (Brahinsky et al., 2014; Dickinson, 2013; Maina-Okori et al., 2018). These ethno-centric discourses ignore the ‘Black countryside’, particularly in the USA, as documented by Black authors since the early twentieth century (DuBois, 1903). bell hooks describes histories of Black rural life which are often forgotten, and cultures of connection to nature deliberately severed by White supremacy (2009: 39). She sees deep ‘connections between black self-recovery and ecology’, herself rediscovering belonging by returning to the rural Kentucky of her childhood. These narratives highlight how in post-colonial states, countryside spaces such as national parks were and remain spaces of exclusion, injustice and slavery (Byrne & Wolch, 2009). We have to consider how race and ‘nature’ are discursively entwined, without over-simplifying dynamics of race and outdoor recreation: ethnic communities are highly diverse in socio-economic status and recreation habits, as are the spaces masked by categories such as ‘greenspace’ (Pitt, 2018).

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’ …

291

To summarise, previous research highlights that age, race and ethnic identity influence how people relate to and experience outdoor spaces and recreation. Different bodies identify and feel different spaces as unfamiliar and uncomfortable. The discomforts of being a racialised body shape experiences in particular spaces. Racial injustice is also reproduced through management and use of outdoor spaces which excludes people of colour. Finally, idealised visions for how people should relate to the outdoors are dominated by narratives embedded in White history and culture, suppressing other perspectives. Each of these tendencies is associated with discomfort as an undesirable dimension of experiencing unfamiliar landscapes.

3

The Study: Leicester Young Ecology Adventurers

This chapter draws on research evaluating the ‘Leicester Young Ecology Adventurers’ (LYEA) project, from 2017 to 2019 (Pitt & Smith, 2019). Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and managed by the Somali Community Parents Association (SOCOPA), the project aimed to provide opportunities for young people of Somali heritage to access Leicester’s waterways. Working with the Canal and River Trust (CRT) and the Leicester Outdoor Pursuits Centre, a 12-week programme was offered of water-based activities for 11–14-year-olds in evenings and school holidays. Participants learnt to canoe, and explored waterway heritage and ecology. Most participants lived in St. Matthews, a relatively deprived inner-city neighbourhood. Across three cohorts 50 young people took part and six parents volunteered as project assistants. As independent evaluators we undertook qualitative, participatory and ethnographic research: pre- and post-programme participant questionnaires; peer-interviews between young people; interviews with staff, volunteers, youth workers and parents; qualitative reflection sessions; film making by the young people; and participant observation. Leicester is one of England’s most diverse cities, its 330,000 population being 50.5% White, 37.1% Asian/Asian British, 6.2% Black/Africa/Caribbean/Black British, 3.5% mixed/multiple ethnicity

292

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

and 2.6% ‘other’ ethnic groups (ONS, 2011). Ethnic and religious groups tend to occupy distinct regions of the city (Comber et al., 2008). Perhaps because of this diversity, Leicester has attracted several initiatives to encourage ethnic minorities to use outdoor spaces (Rishbeth, 2001). Whilst Leicester as a whole has good amounts of greenspace, there is poor provision of small, local greenspaces, and minority ethnic communities have less access to larger greenspaces (Comber et al., 2008). The city and its surroundings include waterways typical of those in England which run through rural and urban areas. These spaces are associated both with ‘pristine’ therapeutic bluespace, and post-industrial dangerous, dark, dirty and hidden urban areas and therefore occupy an ambivalent position in public imaginary (Pitt, 2018, 2019). Next we explore experiences from LYEA as three forms as discomfort arising from this attempt to introduce young people to unfamiliar landscapes.

4

Three Encounters with Discomfort

4.1

Sensorial and Emotional Discomfort: Young People on the Waterways

Overall young participants were positive about experiences of the project, but described significant discomfort being on and in the water, and through contact with the canal environment. When asked what the project’s ‘worst things’ were, responses were predominantly associated with the bodily discomfort of the water: When I get wet. Being splashed by someone else. When you fall in the water and it is too cold. I was scared. Then I realised I had a reason to be scared because I couldn’t canoe properly, and I drowned. I’m not working with boys. They’re annoying. They splash and keep wobbling the boat.

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’ …

293

In early sessions young people fell in the water. Splashing was common. Some young people used canoe paddles to splash others, meaning that by the end of each session, many were wet and cold. The instability of canoes was also uncomfortable for them, including deliberate ‘wobbling’ typically blamed on the more boisterous boys. Other discomforts included: Seeing bugs on my body. Stinging nettles. Stinky changing room. And the water… is not really that clean, because lots of animals in there, and there’s a lot of, like, plants in there… so then you shouldn’t… fall in the water.

Aesthetic, corporeal and olfactory discomforts conveyed here suggest young participants found the waterway environment uncomfortable. Activities such as bug hunting and foraging involved moving around canal- and riverbanks, putting their bodies into and around mud, bugs and plants, leading to uncomfortable encounters. Features of the ‘natural’ environment identified as causing discomfort, included unclean water, animals, plants and damp rooms. The young people’s discomforts were observed by adults, for example a canoe instructor: [Be]cause for some of them just getting into a boat was a big nerve-racking experience so trying to teach anything straight when the mind is not in the right place is a difficult thing to do, so the first few sessions were just getting used to being in the boats, especially in the smaller boats just one little movement, straight into panic mode for some of them.

The instructor described how the discomfort of getting into a boat was scary, and caused panic, clear signs of young people’s discomfort around waterways. Several participants were not competent swimmers prior to joining the programme, and the majority had never been in a canoe. The instructor noted that the group needed time to get ‘comfortable’ being in boats and on the water, before they could focus on anything such as wildlife and heritage. Discomfort meant ‘their emotions being everywhere’, so some could not concentrate:

294

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

But by the time we did the camera traps, some of them were at a point where they were happy and comfortable, the ones that progressed with the canoes were able to do that really well. The others were still going round in circles.

Here discomfort inhibited learning, whilst becoming familiar with canoeing allowed learning. The novelty of canoeing was evidently linked to their discomfort: Interviewer: “I get the sense that for most of them it’s the first time they’ve done anything like that… maybe not used to being around the water…”. Instructor:

“No, well my thought was we don’t know where their background is. If they come from a background where water and boats is normal, then this was a whole new big learning for them, and it also does take them out of their comfort zone. To learn to become comfortable being on the water it takes time. Sometimes, third or fourth session in, they’re getting to the water but still they’ll be so excited and so nervous and so on edge that to try to teach them something straight away, takes a while to actually just be in a boat, and then once they are comfortable then future learning […] Other groups of the same age range may have been in a boat or seen a boat or done that a few times before, or in the past when they were growing up, so they get used to the comfort of being in a boat, and all of that stuff straight away. Whereas the feeling I got was that it was the first time, like ‘oh I’m in a boat, it’s moving around, why is it moving underneath me!’. All of this stuff. And getting all that out the system again is… takes time. […] We did have a couple that fell in and I guess after a couple of fall-ins they were getting comfortable…”.

This discussion begins to entangle bodily and emotional discomfort, experience, learning and ‘background’. The process of being pushed out of one’s ‘comfort zone’, ‘getting all that out of the system’ and ‘a couple of fall-ins’ to ‘become comfortable’ is seen as essential for

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’ …

295

achieving the next step: learning about the environment. The discomfort of canoeing—of uneasy movement—made young people nervous and excited, illustrating two processes. First, experiences of discomfort are valorised as necessary to achieve a desired outcome, whereby cumulative experience leads to comfort, then achievement. The second begins to complicate the narrative of discomfort, as being both excited and nervous. Whilst young participants cited discomfort associated with being on the water and getting wet, the most reported ‘best thing’ about the project was canoeing. Several also identified ‘splashing’ as their best thing. One young participant stated: ‘The most enjoyable thing was when we all had water fights with each other’. Others found ‘falling off ’ and ‘people falling in’ as the most exciting, or exaggerated the experience of falling in: Drowning is my number one thing. That one week I drowned twice. That week was fun.

Some sessions ended with the opportunity to jump in and swim in a safe part of the waterway. This was near-universally embraced by the young people, including those who had previously flinched at being splashed or complained about falling in, being wet and uncomfortable. Discomfort was therefore more than simply the material conditions of the environment and canoe, as these same bodily experiences and environmental affects prompted excitement and fun. The mundane space of the canal presents fraught affects for these young people, but not in straightforward ways. Young participants did experience the waterway environment and the bodily experience of canoeing as sensorially uncomfortable, and this could be entangled with social discomforts—such as the gendered discomforts of ‘annoying boys’. Embodied discomfort (Askins, 2009) was therefore tied up with more immediate social relations. The ‘negative’ embodied experiences of bluespaces identified by previous studies (Pitt, 2018, 2019) are not always ‘overcome’ by young people. By the end wetness and splashing were still ‘the worst’ and some still went ‘in circles’ in their canoes. It is not inevitable that ‘experience’ and ‘discomfort’ lead to greater learning, as some suggest (Winks, 2018; Wolgemuth & Donohue, 2006). Nor

296

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

are positive trajectories guaranteed as ‘experience’ may reinforce the ‘otherness’ of certain spaces (Nairn, 2005), such as the ‘dirtiness’ of bluespaces and associations of being wet and cold. Yet some young people embraced this same discomfort as exciting, as embodied, emotional feelings of discomfort mixed with excitement. Young people did not identify these discomforts as barriers to achieving learning, yet to the instructor, discomfort on the water, coupled with excitement, prohibited learning throughout the programme. To briefly return to the quote from the instructor above: he notes the young people’s ‘background’. He assumes experiences of the water and boats are unfamiliar to them. Whilst not referring to ethnic or socioeconomic characteristics, the young people’s inexperience with being on water, is assumed a product of their ‘background’. The young people did not explicitly address their ‘background’, or mention racial or religious identities. Although when asked how the project could be improved, two mentioned a desire for more diversity in the group, which might have referred to the fact that all the young people were from the same Somali community. Whether the young people felt their ethnicity or other background characteristics affected their experiences of the waterway is impossible to discern from these statements alone, nor do we imply that the instructor’s statement points to an instrumental understanding about background and experiences of discomfort. What we notice here, is how overcoming discomfort is tied up with a narrative of inexperience, which reaches beyond the individual into their background, and how discomfort and inexperience are positioned as impediments to learning. Perhaps the ambiguity of the instructor’s comments is telling as ‘background’ bundles together inexperience at watersports, unfamiliarity, and perhaps socio-economic and ethnic characteristics.

4.2

Working to Negotiate Discomfort: Parents and Families

The parents of the young participants were more explicit about feelings of discomfort in outdoor spaces related to ethnicity. Some commented that they had felt unwelcome in certain outdoor spaces, or that they

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’ …

297

might be more generally concerned about visiting particular places as a Somali Muslim family. One mother commented: We are very conscious about going places where we can be... I don’t want to sound paranoid, but I’ll tell you how people think. If you go places where you might not feel welcomed, because of the way we look and the way we dress, and we just want to have fun with the children. Children don’t notice those things… That’s why I am very self-conscious about what time of the day we go and with whom and is it like a normal place where a lot of people are, for example, Bonfire Night, it was full of Somali people so it was okay… but there are places where…, [we] don’t go there.

This mother expresses heightened consciousness to ‘where we can be’. Potential for discomfort includes not feeling ‘welcomed’, and being ‘self-conscious’, because of ‘how people think’, how they might judge appearance and dress (note that all female parents involved in the project wore a niqab or hijab). Crucially, she evidences the ongoing work of carefully negotiating spaces so embodied difference is not treated as unwelcome, and the continued concern to avoid problems. Certain places in Leicester make her family feel unwelcome, so they stay away. Being with others of a similar background feels more comfortable. In her mind children do not notice racial dynamics or racism, so parents negotiate discomfort to enable them to have fun outdoors. The conversation continued to discuss other destinations for family recreation: Interviewee: “Yeah, but would it be okay if we go on those Butlins holidays, or what is it called?” Interviewer: “Yes, Centre Parcs.” Interviewee: “I would love that, but would we be the odd family? And those sorts of things, but again as much as it might ´ lessons experienced made me think how that... sound cliché, “Okay, maybe we can go, just be ourselves...” I think it’s not dangerous, just getting those funny looks from people, and because we speak our language… we don’t want to be looked weird at or feel uncomfortable.”

298

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

The potential discomfort of being ‘the odd family’, because of visible and audible differences from the ‘White norm’, prevents families attending some destinations. The outdoor recreation space of Centre Parcs (a chain of UK woodland holiday resorts targeting families) is identified as a White space, creating potential for discomfort which inhibits her desire to feel comfortable there. This place is identified as White through positioning other families as ‘odd’, based on past experiences of being looked at, noticed as different and made to feel unwelcome. Such observations point to the ongoing work parents do to negotiate racialised spaces where they are made to feel discomfort. Choices of destination and activity are influenced by parents’ attempt to minimise discomfort during leisure. Parents in this study presented a mix of reasons why young people and those of Somali heritage might find waterways uncomfortable. One suggested going there is atypical for them: You know, a lot of ethnic minorities or ethnic communities, going to the canal and waterways isn’t something… they are going to regularly do, especially if they don’t feel like it is something that is the norm in their culture.

Parents did not specify why, other than commenting it was likely that as mostly first-generation immigrants, they lacked familiarity with such environments. Some mentioned that canoeing has no meaningful place in their previous experiences. At the outset of the project, parents voiced strong concerns about their children’s lack of swimming ability. This worry, compounded by unfamiliarity with the canal and canoeing, made many parents initially uncomfortable with allowing their children to attend. Parents of subsequent cohorts expressed less concern, suggesting that a degree of familiarity with the safety of canals had been communicated amongst the community—a sort of collective increase in comfort. No parent directly addressed waterways as White spaces, rather describing feeling unwelcome, or the cultural appropriateness of activities in general. Families’ current lives were compared to rural lives in Somalia where certain sports, farming and learning about animals are celebrated outdoor activities. One said: ‘I think things like archery or horse riding [or that] is highly valued in our culture and our religion’.

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’ …

299

The stand-out outdoor activist—a forest school leader and archery coach involved in outdoor initiatives for young people—identified the roots of this in her heritage: Even I am from an ethnic background where my parents lived a village life, and I got to experience some of those things because my mum was very traditional. And some of the parents, they came from a setting where they experienced the outdoors and they loved it. So they want their children to experience the outdoors… The only issue is it’s a very different setting that their children are in now, and they do want their children to go outdoors and experience these beautiful things… in nature, the plants, the animals, and everything… whether it’s their lifestyle or whether because of the accessibility or not being able to go out there, or whether they are not comfortable.

She associated enthusiasm to get children outdoors with past experiences and upbringing outside the UK. Village life contrasted with inner-city Leicester is associated with changes in lifestyle, accessibility, or not feeling ‘comfortable’, as an ‘out of place’ body. Some made comparison with other European cities, where they lived as asylum seekers. For example, the Netherlands was: Much better… everybody lives in this neighbourhood… they don’t allow one ethnic group to make some ghetto… So you integrate and assimilate to the country, to the Dutch people… when you live in the Netherlands you feel safer for children… even year six… he goes alone to school .

Such comparisons were common, with some parents expressing regret at moving to the UK because elsewhere in Europe children were safer outdoors. Consistent with previous research, parents identified economic constraints and lack of information as barriers to outdoor recreation. They praised LYEA for being free, and described having to limit activities their children took part in on grounds of cost. Most heard about the project through word of mouth, and were unclear how they would find information about other opportunities. These adults did not reflect the suggestion that minority ethnic communities feel a low affinity with outdoor recreation and spaces (Morris & O’Brien, 2011), or culturally

300

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

derived ‘functional’ views of landscape (Gentin, 2011; Roberts, 2015). To the contrary, many parents were enthusiastic about getting their children outdoors, sometimes linking this to past outdoor experiences in their birth country. This suggests a degree of comfort and familiarity in rural, outdoor and green-bluespaces. However, concerns about water safety may have been compounded by more general discomfort associated with racialised spatialities in Leicester and the UK, making parents uncomfortable as visibly other bodies in White spaces. Culture, sometimes simplistically associated with ethnicity, is not a barrier to getting outdoors for these parents. As Rishbeth et al. (2019) also find, it is broader discomfort as racialised, unfamiliar bodies in outdoor spaces, that brings discomfort and hesitancy in enabling children to explore the outdoors. Unfavourable comparisons with outdoor experiences in other European countries and Somalia reveal causes of discomfort specific to the UK. Racialised spatialities and associated discomforts are continually monitored and negotiated by parents, to fulfil their desires to enjoy the outdoors as a family.

4.3

Project Whiteness: Contributing to Discomfort?

The third aspect of discomfort in the LYEA project was that of those staffing the project, including us as the researchers. Parents and young participants did not remark on discomfort as racialised bodies around the waterways, though certain comments imply this. Yet the project deliberately brought first and second generation Somalis into environments dominated by Whiteness. Whilst the SOCOPA organiser and parent volunteers were all of Somali heritage, the project coordinator, staff of partner bodies, and most canoe instructors were White British. Activity sessions took place on sections of the waterway where we observed the vast majority of users—including other canoeists—as White. Local CRT volunteers who delivered sessions on canals heritage were older White men. During the programme, the young people completed the John Muir Award (JMA), a programme which does now include a focus on spaces closer to home and urban contexts, but was originally conceived

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’ …

301

around John Muir’s vision of wilderness founded in White, male European discourses of nature. As noted above, some foundations of the JMA movement are problematic and perpetuate exclusion of people of colour from outdoor recreation. The original conception of the LYEA project was driven by concern for the very exclusions and environmental injustices common in the UK and other post-colonial countries which we outlined above, as the project coordinator described: I feel really strongly that we need to find ways to open up rural areas to non-White people and people of different heritages need to feel it’s as much theirs as anyone else’s.

Yet the project’s racial dynamics were a significant silence across delivery and reflection on it during our research. Certain conversations skirted these issues, for example this comment from the project coordinator: For the parents of the children who attended, what they needed was to know that there were Somali parents there, being around and present. Their presence there was important in order for parents to feel comfortable letting their children come along.

The presence of White adults would not dissolve discomfort, as the parents’ comfort came through known, familiar bodies like them. As noted above, some young people reflected on the ‘lack of diversity’; to an extent the project represented a ‘parallel integration’ strategy (Harrison, 2013), whereby young people of Somali heritage took part in a prescribed activity with members of their own community. Measures were taken in the second phase of the project to surround the young people with adults who might be more ‘familiar’ to them. Two youth workers of colour were employed on the project, including one of Somali heritage. This change in staffing had a positive effect on the young people in subsequent phases of the project, although this may have been due to specialist youth work skills they brought to the team. As the project evaluators, we increased the presence of White adults. Reflecting on our participant observation to prepare this chapter, we both found this presented various forms of discomfort. Our roles placed

302

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

us as external experts, writing about a community we were not part of and experiences unfamiliar to us. Research training and experience of working with various communities prepared us to approach this in a way we hope was sensitive and respectful. Still, we felt unease at being in a position of evaluating activity centred on a group different from us, where we contributed to the project’s Whiteness and could not comfortably challenge narratives which intellectually we found problematic. Researchers contribute to the production of a landscape of ‘Whiteness’ (Dickinson, 2013). We should be very clear here that we do not equate our privileged discomforts with those of the marginalised parents and young people described above. Rather we acknowledge our feelings of discomfort as signals of the inequalities, injustice and racism which create the need for projects like LYEA. Secondly, we have to acknowledge our contribution to the ‘Whiteness’ of the project, which shaped participants’ discomfort. And relatedly, we want to highlight that explicitly exploring these dynamics is an important but uncomfortable task. The programme team was markedly different from the young participants and their families, but our history as people with settled status, not victims to racism, did not feature as pertinent ‘background’ to our experiences of the project or waterway spaces. Such silences may be due to discomfort talking about race and racism, particularly discussing it across racial differences. Perhaps young Black men did not feel comfortable talking about their racial identity or experiences of racism to a White woman, just as our own discomfort prevented us asking whether a volunteer preferred not to be addressed by unknown White males after removing her niqab. These layers of discomfort are important to acknowledge, and in the shadow of the problematic fact that here we are using our position as privileged White academics to talk about the experiences of people of colour. The LYEA project addressed environmental injustices by enabling access to waterways and activities for people otherwise unable to do so. Participation targeted a deprived neighbourhood and community of colour as people particularly excluded from outdoor recreation. However, the project did not directly address how prevailing injustices might affect the project or participants’ experiences; no one questioned how the Whiteness of the team and canal spaces might cause discomfort. There

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’ …

303

was limited reflection on the effects of White canal volunteers interacting with young people of colour, for example, despite such encounters holding potential as spaces for ‘curated sociability’ (Rishbeth et al., 2019), although one CRT manager noted that without the project CRT volunteers were unlikely to otherwise meet Somali young people. What was lacking was a period for all to critically reflect on these encounters, and the wider implications of a time–space-bound project offering young people of colour access to ‘White’ bluespaces.

5

Conclusions

We have explored how those involved in the LYEA project came to feel discomfort, and reflected on the discomforts of others. We want to argue that discomfort is a critical part of producing and reproducing unfamiliarity with space, and of the unfamiliarity of different bodies in certain spaces. The uncomfortable encounters we have discussed here reflect how discomfort is experienced in complex and nuanced ways, as Bell et al. (2014) and Rishbeth et al. (2019) also point to. Young people identify corporeal, olfactory and aesthetic discomforts as significant on waterways. Instructors bundled their observations about young people’s discomfort on the water with their ‘backgrounds’, whilst also valorising the experiencing of discomfort as a necessary to achieve comfort, then learning. Yet we, and the instructors, identify these discomforts as more than simply feeling ill at ease. Discomfort could be exciting for young people—being splashed and getting wet were both the best and worst things. Parents’ expressions of discomfort were related to visible bodily differences, requiring ongoing work to negotiate their family’s presence in outdoor spaces. As parents are significant gatekeepers for young people’s access to outdoor spaces, it should be significant that physical discomforts of being on (and in) the water, are preceded by emotional and social discomforts caught up in the racialisation of unfamiliar spaces. Despite the project’s well-intentioned goals, such discomforts may be unintentionally reproduced through its ‘Whiteness’. How paradigmatic narratives of discomfort are reproduced in association with outdoor activities is significant. The discomfort of bluespaces

304

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

is, for some families, layered onto prior and ongoing discomforts of being present in unfamiliar blue and greenspaces, and the work that must be done to negotiate majority White environments. Narratives of ‘necessary discomfort’ may simplistically compound how parents must negotiate discomforts to enable their children to access certain spaces and activities. Similarly, standard narratives applied in judging young people’s reticence to ‘get messy’ outdoors as evidence of dis-engagement from nature (Dickinson, 2013), are complicated when, firstly, parents have very different experiences of rurality and may make different assessments of what are valuable outdoor pursuits. Second, ‘discomfort’ is a nuanced and complex experience for young people and parents alike. Young people find discomfort in and on water, but sometimes embrace this discomfort as excitement. Whilst instructors view excitement and discomfort as a barrier to learning to be overcome, the accompanying enjoyment is important for maintaining young people’s engagement. Our research provided limited space for young people, parents and the project team to reflect on these discomforts; what might have been missing was a ‘critical engagement with place’ (Winks, 2018: 391). In particular, reflection on how spaces are racialized and how injustices exclude some bodies from outdoor recreation would have been valuable. Our research raises concern that even interventions aimed at redressing socio-spatial and racial injustices may (if unintentionally) reinforce bluespaces as ‘White spaces’. A single intervention cannot fully redress such injustice, but young people, parents, staff and researchers could be enabled to reflect on experiences across the project, and how these specific encounters connect to broader spatial and racial injustices, and how, in turn their unfamiliarity might be redressed in sustainable ways.

References Abbott-Chapman, J., & Robertson, M. (2001). Youth, leisure and home: Space, place and identity. Loisir Et Société/Society and Leisure, 24 (2), 485–506.

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’ …

305

Askins, K. (2009). Crossing divides: Ethnicity and rurality. Journal or Rural Studies, 25 (4), 365–375. Bell, S., Thompson, C. W., & Travlou, P. (2003). Contested views of freedom and control: Children, teenagers and urban fringe woodlands in Central Scotland. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 2(2), 87–100. Bell, S. L., Phoenix, C., Lovell, B., & Wheeler, A. M. (2014). Green space, health and wellbeing: Making space for individual agency. Health and Place, 30, 287–292. Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. Routledge. Boyd, F., White, M. P., Bell, S. L., & Burt, J. (2018). Who doesn’t visit natural environments for recreation and why. Landscape and Urban Planning, 175, 102–113. Brahinsky, R., Sasser, J., & Minkoff-Zern, L.-A. (2014). Race, space, and nature: An introduction and critique. Antipode, 46 (5), 1135–1152. Bromley, R. D. F., & Stacy, R. J. (2012). Feeling unsafe in urban areas: Exploring older children’s geographies of fear. Environment and Planning A, 44 (2), 428–444. Brownlow, A. (2006). An archaeology of fear and environmental change in Philadelphia. Geoforum, 37 (2), 227–245. Burns, N., Watson, N., & Paterson, K. (2013). Risky bodies in risky spaces: Disabled people’s pursuit of outdoor leisure. Disability and Society, 28(8), 1059–1073. Byrne, J. (2012). When green is White: The cultural politics of race, nature and social exclusion in a Los Angeles urban national park. Geoforum, 43, 595–611. Byrne, J., & Wolch, J. (2009). Nature, race and parks: Past research and future directions for geographic research. Progress in Human Geography, 33(6), 743–765. Byrne, J., Wolch, J., & Zhang, J. (2009). Planning for environmental justice in an urban national park. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 52(3), 365–392. https://doi.org/10.1080/09640560802703256 Comber, A., Brunsdon, C., & Green, E. (2008). Using a GIS-based network analysis to determine urban greenspace accessibility for different ethic and religious groups. Landscape and Urban Planning, 86 , 103–114. Creyer, E., Ross, W., & Evers, D. (2003). Risky recreation: An exploration of factors influencing the likelihood of participation and the effects of experience. Leisure Studies, 22(3), 239–253.

306

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

Dickinson, E. (2013). The misdiagnosis: Rethinking “nature-deficit disorder.” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 7 (3), 315– 335. Dubois, W. E. B. (1903 [2007]). The souls of black folk. Oxford University Press. Floyd, M. F., & Johnson, C. Y. (2002). Coming to terms with environmental justice in outdoor recreation: A conceptual discussion with research implications. Leisure Sciences, 24, 59–77. Freeman, C., van Heezik, Y., Stein, A., & Hand, K. (2016). Technological inroads into understanding city children’s natural life-worlds. Children’s Geographies, 14 (2), 158–174. Gentin, S. (2011). Outdoor recreation and ethnicity in Europe—A review. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 10, 153–161. Harper, N. J., Gabrielsen, L. E., & Carpenter, C. (2018). A cross-cultural exploration of ‘wild’ in wilderness therapy: Canada, Norway and Australia. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 18(2), 148–164. Harrison, A. K. (2013). Black skiing, everyday racism, and the racial spatiality of whiteness. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 37 (4), 315–339. Hickcox, A. (2018). White environmental subjectivity and the politics of belonging. Social and Cultural Geography, 19 (4), 496–519. hooks, b. (2009). Belonging: A culture of place. Routledge. Hunt, A., Stewart, D., Burt, J., & Dillon, J. (2016). Monitor of engagement with the natural environment: A pilot to develop an indicator of visits to the natural environment by children—results from years 1 and 2 (March 2013 to February 2015). Natural England Commissioned Reports, 208. Hunt, R. (2019). Historical geography, climbing and mountaineering: Route setting for an inclusive future. Geography Compass, 13(4), e12423. Johnson, C. Y., Bowker, J. M., & Cordell, K. (2001). Outdoor recreation constraints: An examination of race, gender and rural dwelling. Southern Rural Sociology, 17 , 111–133. Lipscombe, N. (2007). The risk management paradox for urban recreation and park managers: Providing high risk recreation within a risk management context. Annals of Leisure Research, 10 (1), 3–25. Louv, R. (2005). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Algonquin Books. Lyng, S. (1990). Edgework: A social psychological analysis of voluntary risk taking. American Journal of Sociology, 95 (4), 851–886. Madge, C. (1997). Public parks and the geography of fear. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 88(3), 237–250.

12 ‘But, Would We Be the Odd Family?’ …

307

Maina-Okori, N. M., Koushik, J. R., & Wilson, A. (2018). Reimagining intersectionality in environmental and sustainability education: A critical literature review. The Journal of Environmental Education, 49 (4), 286–296. Moran, K. (2011). (Young) Men behaving badly: Dangerous masculinities and risk of drowning in aquatic leisure activities. Annals of Leisure Research, 14 (2–3), 260–272. Morris, J., & O’Brien, E. (2011). Encouraging healthy outdoor activity amongst under-represented groups: An evaluation of the active England woodland projects. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 10 (4), 323–333. Mycock, K. (2019). Playing with mud-becoming stuck, becoming free?... The negotiation of gendered/class identities when learning outdoors. Children’s Geographies, 17 (4), 454–466. Nairn, K. (2005). The problems of utilising ‘direct experience’ in geography education. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 29 (2), 293–309. Natural England. (2010, May 30). Wild adventure space: Its role in teenagers’ lives. Neal, S., Bennett, K., Jones, H., Cochrane, A., & Mohan, G. (2015). Multiculture and public parks: Researching super-diversity and attachment in public green space. Population, Space and Place, 21, 463–475. Office for National Statistics. (2011). National Records of Scotland; Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (2017): 2011 Census aggregate data. UK Data Service (Edition: February 2017). https://doi.org/10.5257/census/ aggregate-2011-2 Office for National Statistics. (2017). Young people’s well-being. https://www. ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/youngpeop leswellbeingandpersonalfinance/2017 Pain, R. (2006). Paranoid parenting? Rematerializing risk and fear for children. Social and Cultural Geography, 7 , 221–243. Pitt, H. (2018). Muddying the waters: What urban waterways reveal about bluespaces and wellbeing. Geoforum, 92, 161–170. Pitt, H. (2019). What prevents people accessing urban bluespaces? A qualitative study. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 39, 89–97. Pitt, H., & Smith, T. (2019). Leicester young ecology adventurers: Evaluation Report 2: Final . Cardiff University School and Geography and Planning and Sustainable Places Research Institute. Ray, S. (2009). Risking bodies in the wild: The “corporeal unconscious” of American adventure culture. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 33(3), 257– 284.

308

T. A. Smith and H. Pitt

Rishbeth, C. (2001). Ethnic minority groups and the design of public open space: An inclusive landscape? Landscape Research, 26 (4), 351–366. Rishbeth, C., Blachnicka-Ciacek, D., & Darling, J. (2019). Participation and wellbeing in urban greenspace: ‘Curating sociability’ for refugees and asylum seekers. Geoforum, 106 , 125–134. Roberts, N. (2015). Race, ethnicity and outdoor studies: Trends, challenges and forward momentum. In B. Humberson, H. Prince, & K. A. Henderson (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of outdoor studies (pp. 341–350). Routledge. Roberts-Gregory, F., & Hawthorne, T. L. (2016). Transforming green walls into green places: Black middle class boundary work, multidirectional miscommunication and green space accessibility in southwest Atlanta. Geoforum, 77 , 17–27. Roe, J., Aspinall, P., & Ward Thompson, C. (2016). Understanding relationships between health, ethnicity, place and the role of urban green space in deprived urban communities. International Journal of Environmental Resources and Public Health, 13(7), 681. Soga, M., & Gaston, K. J. (2016). Extinction of experience: The loss of humannature interactions. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 14, 19–101. Tremblay, M. S., Gray, C., Babcock, S., Barnes, J., Bradstreet, C. C., Carr, D., Chabot, G., Choquette, L., Chorney, D., Collyer, C., & Herrington, S. (2015). Position statement on active outdoor play. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 12(6), 6475–6505. Uzzell, D., Leach, R., & Kelay, T. (2005). “What about us?” Diversity review evidence changing perceptions: Provider awareness of under-represented groups. Winks, L. (2018). Discomfort in the field—The performance of nonhuman nature in fieldwork in South Devon. The Journal of Environmental Education, 49 (5), 390–399. Wolgemuth, J. R., & Donohue, R. (2006). Toward an inquiry of discomfort: Guiding transformation in “emancipatory” narrative research. Qualitative Enquiry, 12(5), 1022–1039.

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Necessity of Non-Hegemonic Femininities Sara MacBride-Stewart

1

Introduction The familiar is always where the uncanny lurks. (Haraway, 2012: 93)

Broaching the concept of girls and women’s safety outdoors is a sensitive matter, due to the deeply rooted and normative gendered discourses that have constructed women and girls as in need of protection, while assuring their right to access the outdoors for leisure, recreation and sport. Although equity has been central to arguments supporting access to the outdoors for women and girls, less is understood about what this means for their access to—and identity in—unfamiliar environments. An unfamiliar landscape in this context is understood as evoking new cultural, social or embodied experiences when encountered by a group S. MacBride-Stewart (B) Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_13

309

310

S. MacBride-Stewart

or individual (Rockman & Steele, 2003). More commonly it might refer to what is new and is potentially frightening (Freud, 1919). Yet feminist researchers assert that safety discourses can be contradictory when including diverse experiences (Krenichyn, 2006) or celebrating female adventures, pioneers, and explorers (Doran, 2016). The concept of unfamiliar landscapes belongs to two sets of gendered ideas about safety: on the one hand unfamiliar landscapes are experienced as dangerous and unsafe, or, alternatively, they connote spaces that are culturally potentially significant as new sites for exploration or domination, suggesting familiarity and even security (Doran, 2016). This latter perspective emerges from literature on decolonisation, where the concept of the unfamiliar landscape is a position of critical debate, rather than an accepted geospatial location (de Lima Costa, 2000). This in turn supports the understanding that unfamiliar landscapes potentially belong to wider circuits of meaning and opportunity for women, rather than straightforwardly associated with a singular narrative of safety and risk. In framing the discussion about unfamiliar landscapes around gender, understandings are constructed in ways that can generate new forms of inequality (Scharff, 2012). This can occur when legitimating girls’ need for access to the outdoors as a genuine issue, focusing on gender as a shared identity where safety is a common right for girls across their social and classed differences (Fraser, 1989). In this perspective, the entanglement of a politics of identity and a politics of access may misrepresent the heterogeneous nature of what is unfamiliar or unsafe. It may make ‘safety’ a necessary condition of girlhood and ignore how some spaces are more accessible to some girls than others, rather than interrogating the conditions that establish differential access to outdoor space in the first place. This chapter builds on these ideas to explore young girls’ encounters with unfamiliar, ‘wilderness’ landscapes and seeks to understand their experiences of safety and access. I argue that there is potential here to learn about how their encounters with the unfamiliar shapes girls’ engagement in these spaces in ways that emphasise both new and traditional ways of doing gender (McDowell & Sharp, 2016). Findings from this research highlight how enjoyment found in unfamiliar landscapes helps reframe the safety discourse in relation to gender.

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

2

311

Gender, Outdoor Space and the Discourse of Safety

The body of research that has focused on gender differences in the access to and use of outdoor space has identified a range of internal (personal experience, familiarity) and external (type of environment) factors that influence the experience of feeling safe or unsafe (Hidayati et al., 2020; McDowell, 1993). This section focuses on a less prominent body of literature that explores how gender affects mobility and shapes access to outdoor spaces (Squires, 2007), and how changing understandings of gender are shaping these spatial perceptions. Gendered understandings about outdoor space are underpinned by efforts to protect young women relative to men (Ivinson & Renold, 2013). Girls are largely positioned as vulnerable and at risk to the dangers of being female in public outdoor space (Hyams, 2003). Clark (2015) commenting on studies from North America and Europe note how regulatory forces on girls mean that they are more likely to be supervised when in public, risk being positioned as either ‘victims’ of undesirable male attention, or as sexual ‘vixens’ if they decide to exercise their freedom (Pain, 1997). As women age, they may have less available personal leisure time to spend in outdoor space, and report accompanying children and others through care-taking activities (Krenichyn, 2006; Kwan, 1999). Research has drawn attention to the types of spaces preferred by women and girls, and the potential for them to feel vulnerable in outdoor spaces relative to men (Clark, 2015; MacBride-Stewart et al., 2016). Tucker and Matthews (2001) show that by the teenage years the organisation of recreational and sports grounds also means that these outdoor spaces are largely associated with males. Other research confirms young women equate home spaces with safety (Harden et al., 2000), prefer managed outdoor public spaces, and avoid spaces with social problems (i.e. drug use), poor services, or amenities for rubbish, lighting and public toilets (Stafford et al., 2005). However, it would be wrong to assume young women do not spend time outdoors; rather research has shown a preference for young women to meet with friends outdoors

312

S. MacBride-Stewart

because it generates a sense of personal safety (Sackett et al., 2018; Virden & Walker, 1999). The fear, physical violence or feelings of discomfort experienced by women mean that their enjoyment and time spent in various types of outdoor places are reduced (Jin & Whitson, 2014). As girls tend to be less physically active than boys (Riemer et al., 2014) and interest in physical activity seems to decrease with increasing age, by the late teens, girls are less likely to spend time interacting with their peers outdoors than boys (Mitchell et al., 2016). There are geographical differences—girls in northern Europe spend more time outdoors recreationally or participating in outdoor activities than girls or boys in the UK (Bjerke & Krange, 2011). Economic as well as ethnic marginalisation may explain why some groups remain under-represented in outdoor activities (Fernandez et al., 2021). Analyses of gender asymmetries in relation to public space are not straightforward. New feminist environmental and ecofeminist movements have sought to reallocate gendered understandings of public space as nature space (Rezeanu, 2015; Sorenson & Dahl, 2016) and feminine space, linking nature spaces to femininity, and to symbols of nature as feminine and fertile. These representations highlight dynamic and diverse notions of femininity (Whittington, 2006). They coincide with the refusal in Iris Marion Young’s terms to ‘play like a girl’, and the incitement for girls to take up more physical space. As such, the participation of young women in physical outdoor sports, from rugby to snowboarding to pelota (Fernandez-Lasa et al., 2020; Thorpe, 2008) reflects new opportunities for non-traditional or nongender play (Änggård, 2011; Brunelle et al., 2018). The emergence of a body of work on new femininities and postmodern gender identities in the late 1990s signalled a shift in understandings about gender that sought to break down existing binaries (male–female; public–private, nature-nurture) (Massey, 2013). The archetypal feminine space of the home was reconstituted, in favour of the idea that women are mobile and active (McDowell & Sharp, 2016). The myth of the home as a safe space for women was also largely disputed by research that highlighted the extent of violence and abuse

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

313

suffered by women in familiar spaces and from people that were largely known to them (Mooney, 2000). As the concept of femininities has developed, it has expanded beyond an account about new opportunities for mobility and spatiality. There is a recognition that contemporary gendered lives are fragmented and that new forms of femininity are still resisted by institutions and individuals (Rezeanu, 2015). Rather than transforming our understanding, new kinds of actions may be considered unconventional (Finley, 2010), so that women who present themselves as ‘fearless’ or ‘active’ are associated with authority, athleticism, or defiance, and yet still risk being stigmatised or considered socially undesirable (Martin et al., 2006). Schippers (2007) refers to these as ‘pariah femininities. Authors such as Nguyen and van Nes (2013) highlight the challenge of responding to new opportunities for gender in public space because, in practice, aspects related to the quality of the environment and the spatial shaping of gender relations should be considered. Research on adolescents has tended to agree with this viewpoint, finding that the time young people are spending outdoors is decreasing (Valentine & McKendrick, 1997). Time spent outdoors is also influenced by the quality and context of outdoor space, including wanting to avoid poor weather or other antisocial teenage behaviour, and the wider impact of social regulations that exclude adolescents from public space in the first place (Brunelle et al., 2018). This is typically through bans directed at adolescent activities like ball games/skateboards or using antisocial/public disorder orders against young people (Muñoz, 2009). For girls, heightened concerns about personal safety constrain their mobility and time spent outdoors, contributing to involuntary social exclusion, and further limiting the possibilities for transforming gender relations (Hidayati et al., 2020). At the same time, teens are very creative in the use of disused public space (carparks, underpasses, etc.) for playing (e.g. skateboarding) and for socialising (Brunelle et al., 2018; Gehl, 1987).

314

3

S. MacBride-Stewart

Gender Trouble in Unfamiliar Landscapes

Rockman and Steele (2003) use the concept of the unfamiliar landscape to refer to spaces that people cannot experience due to a lack of access, face challenges in accessing, or because they are not familiar with traversing it. In a context where wariness about access for girls to outdoor space exists, perceptions about safety and familiarity and the role that this plays in contemporary gender identities is rarely acknowledged. Yet if women associate public space with a lack of safety or they have had previous negative experiences, they are more likely to judge the space as unsafe (Hidayati et al., 2020). Women are more perceptive than men to the social problems and aesthetic conditions of their local areas, while Beil and Hanes (2013) contend that women are more affected by negative environmental conditions in general. Women were likely to avoid particular outdoor spaces (i.e. that were absent of people or showed negative human impacts), report reduced enjoyment of them, or are positioned as being more at risk and more likely to be potential victims within such spaces compared to men (Krenichyn, 2006). Yet, women report less safety concerns if they are active users of a particular space, since they perceive spaces as less concerning when they become familiar with them (Nguyen & van Nes, 2013). These spatial features affecting gendered behaviours are often translated into efforts to improve women’s safety, including through encouragement for women to avoid spaces and situations which are unfamiliar (Greed, 2019). Through their positioning as neoliberal responsible subjects, young women are actively encouraged to manage their risks and physical pleasures in ways that ‘are deemed “safe”, responsible and preventative’ (Clark, 2015: 1013). This suggests that young women are actively encouraged to know what constitutes a safe environment, be capable of distinguishing unsafe environments, and shape their actions accordingly (Hanson, 2010). Yet meanings about the familiarity of outdoor space (and gender) are constantly assessed, leaving open the possibility for what is constituted as safe to change (Foster & Giles-Corti, 2008; Gobster et al., 2007). The opposite is also true; familiar landscapes may also become unfamiliar

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

315

when new forms of learning are encountered, for example, about ecology or heritage. Undoubtedly these processes of learning and responding to unfamiliar landscapes are aligned to shared, changing, gendered experiences of inclusion or exclusion (Cosgrove, 1998; Kempf, 2020). These unfamiliar landscapes (Gobster et al., 2007; Taylor & Hochuli, 2017) align too, to wider discourses and practices about safety (Clark, 2015). There is no such thing as universal inclusion or exclusion, but an analysis of gendered experiences of unfamiliar space and safety does allow us to understand how their entanglement consequentially shapes access to, and use of, outdoor space and may reconfigure gender for some.

4

Case Study

In this case study, the unfamiliar landscape is the Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales, UK. It is unfamiliar to the participants—young women aged 13–17 years—as they had never been in the National Park before, despite living in a town at its periphery only 20 minutes away by car. The Brecon Beacons National Park Authority had identified the participants as potentially benefiting from a geocaching programme (using Global Positioning System/GPS devices to locate hidden ‘cashes’ or treasures), to improve physical activity levels and engage young people in the outdoors (MacBride-Stewart et al., 2021). The National Park was an unfamiliar landscape in other ways. A recent visitor survey recorded the lowest attendance in the Park for communities at the periphery, while residents from affluent communities either residents within the Park or neighbouring cities were recorded in much higher numbers (BBNPA, 2017). The area the young people were from (commonly known as ‘the Valleys’, a former coal mining area in South Wales) is a post-industrial landscape without the same environmental protections as the Brecon Beacons National Park. These same local authority areas have the nation’s lowest average wellbeing, and highest wellbeing inequality scores (ONS, 2021). The young women who participated did not generally arrive with footwear and waterproofs for walking; these were provided by trained community group leaders who facilitated the ‘safe’ exploration of the Park, along with providing

316

S. MacBride-Stewart

necessary transport to and from the Park, GPS devices to navigate the route, backpacks to carry gear and sometimes even snacks and drinks.

4.1

Methodology

The fieldwork took place between June and August 2018 during which time 62 young people aged 11–25 years, in mixed gender groups of similar ages, participated in the geocaching activity. This included 40 females and 22 males accompanied by their parents, carers and leaders from youth and community groups. This chapter is based on the analysis of data related to young women aged between 13 and 17. Mobile methods, also known as go-along, ‘accompanied nature journey’ or walking interviews (Garcia et al., 2012; Hein et al., 2008) were used to conduct informal interviews and record observations as the groups navigated between geocaches. Walking interviews are well-suited to capturing novel or new experiences, and ‘in-the-minute’ encounters (Evans & Jones, 2011; MacBride-Stewart, 2019), with the young people encouraged to talk about feelings, experiences and prior interactions with nature (O’Brien & Varley, 2012). The mobile interviews had a noisy yet dynamic and rich quality, being held outdoors, with the potential for multiple voices. Participants were able to verbalise feelings as they happened or as they noticed new things along the way (Evans & Jones, 2011). Participants moved in and out of range, including themselves in the conversation or escaping from the proximity of activity leaders or parents when they wanted (Garcia et al., 2012). The study used an opt-out, rolling consent process. A handheld recorder was visible throughout the mobile interview, and each new discussion included a re-confirmation of consent given before arrival at the Park. At the end of the day, in-depth interviews with the activity workers collected reflections that contributed to the data richness. Following Hollway and Jefferson’s (2000) psychosocial approach, the transcribed data was analysed through the lens of a politics of gender. Three ‘common-sense’ themes emerged: (1) Culture and societal expectations (parents/teachers’ role in constructing girls’ access to/use of outdoor

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

317

space); (2) Girls observe nature, boys play in it (girls’ different experience/use outdoor space to boys), and (3) Resistance (girls’ novel ways to manage protection and lack of access). A second stage of analysis assessed the mediating role of ‘unfamiliar landscapes’ in girls’ experiences and perceptions of outdoor space, within which novel understandings about ‘safety’ and ‘gender’ formed. Taking Haraway’s (2016) invocation to ‘stay with the trouble’, which encourages thinking with rather than, about ideas, the second analysis stage used the conceptual lens of the ‘unfamiliar’ as a process for thinking with learning and being when navigating new spaces for these young women.

5

Where’s the Trouble? Girl’s Just Don’t Like the Outdoors

Participants communicated the sense that by their early teenage years being active outdoors is normal for boys and not for girls. When asked, the girls made indirect references to the relative lack of opportunity to be outdoors in comparison to the boys, as the following discussion illustrates (note: G = girl; B = boy; AW = activity worker; I = interviewer): I: G1: AW: G1: AW: G1: AW: B1: AW: B1: I: G2:

What […] did you like about being outside today? I’d rather do gymnastics Do you get a lot of chances to be outside then? No. That’s why I don’t like it. That’s why. Are you scared of it then, are you? No. What about you [name]? Do you get a chance to play outside? Always! Who with or on your own? Cousins! So do you girls like being outdoors or in nature? No I don’t like flying things.

318

S. MacBride-Stewart

The girls construct the outdoors as undesirable, unlikeable or unfamiliar. Nature, for one girl, meant ‘flying things’ i.e., bugs. Dislike of the outdoors was positioned against a preference for indoor activities (gymnastics) or a sense that the outdoors was not for them. This contrasted with the boys, who had the opportunity to play with others. This lack of opportunity and dislike provided the overriding context within which outdoor spaces for girls were regarded as unfamiliar and hostile. Yet, these experiences were minimally expressed and elaborated on. Partly this is the nature of walking interviews, where young people can express themselves briefly as they move through the outdoor space and around the interviewer. Other verbal (and nonverbal) cues contributed to this normative account of the girls’ exclusion from outdoors, expressed through repeated phrases like “I don’t like [it]’ that were not questioned by others and not elaborated on. The truncated discourse about the girls’ dislike of the outdoors, is in contrast with the discussions had by the support (SW) and activity workers (AW) when talking about the girls’ relationship to more familiar aspects of outdoor landscapes (related to sports or clothing). Below, they note that while the boys have numerous opportunities to be active outdoors, the girls were more passive, preferring to ‘watch’ rather than play, and they were more self-aware. This self-awareness was mobilised by the girls as part of their refusal to participate, by initially rejecting clothing and boots offered by the activity workers. This rejection is encapsulated here in one girl’s mock ‘horror’ when offered waterproofs: I: The group here are pretty active. The boys are doing a bit of… SW: Football, rugby, and all that. […] And the girls wanna watch the boys playing football. I: The girls want to watch, they don’t want to play? Do you know what that’s about? SW: […]. They just become a bit self-aware and they don’t wanna… as they get that little bit older… I think if I told them they were gonna wear wellies they wouldn’t have come either. AW: And [the girls’] won’t want to wear waterproofs. She was tiny, we offered her a bit of string to hold her trousers up, she was horrified

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

319

and she screamed- I look like a farmer’s daughter! She was horrified. I said look…how often do you get to look like a farmer’s daughter when no one who sees you cares about it? Just enjoy the freedom that it brings. This self-awareness in public or outdoor space informed the girls’ understandings about what was expected of them by their adults and peers too. The girls referred to these expectations constantly in conversations about organised sports, returning at different points to what they were able to do and the nature of the restrictions placed on them relative to boys. The narrative below highlights the main points expressed by the girls—that even if they were good at sports, their capacities were not recognised, they were not put on the best teams, and they often faced parental as well as peer stigmatisation: I: G3: G4: I: G4: G3: G4: G3: G4: G3: I: G4: G3: G5: G4: G3: I:

So what would happen if you got involved with the football, you just wouldn’t bother… It’s just not worth it They take football seriously, so serious So a girl playing is like… yeah [girl] she used to be on a team and that’s how she knew how to play And [girl] is a proper Tomboyif they let us play they’d just take advantage of us, put us on a crap team and then justMy mam don’t want me to [play rugby] [...] My mam would. My mam is one of them people, that say rugby is more of a boy sport What chance would there be for you, to do sports, while you are still at school? nothing now […] like we can’t join the netball team or anything now I had to leave so didn’t play last year yeah same I’ve been playing netball since like year 4 Same. Can’t play any more now. So why do you think that was?

320

S. MacBride-Stewart

G3: It’s because [there is no] extracurricular PE [for] girls. They don’t really do much… they’re more like reluctantI: So you can’t do it unless you’re doing the GCSE PE? […] G4: yeah- if the boys don’t take GCSE they’re still allowed to join the rugby team and that. G5: […and] they have two teams, A and B team. Using the more familiar space of organised sport, the girls are therefore able to express their understanding of a normative feminine identity so commonly described in the literature. Their account provides a critical insight into the construction of this normative identity through institutionalised practices like the school curriculum and other discursive restrictions and boundaries set for them (i.e. ‘my mam don’t want me to’). In addition, as contemporary gender politics reflect and are constituted by multiple and often conflicting expectations, it followed that the girls’ experiences coalesced around conflicting perspectives—the need to be good at sports, the labelling of good players as tomboys, being picked for the weaker teams regardless of skills, or having no sports provision at all. Its narrative consequence is the expressed view that these sports are for boys anyway, or that girls’ participation needed to be sanctioned by an appropriate adult. While the girls agreed that it was possible to participate and be taken ‘seriously’, this was presented mostly as a possibility for their friend who is ‘a proper Tomboy’. Remembering that the girls were interviewed in the unfamiliar space of the National Park, they accounted for their use and access to outdoor spaces through more familiar experiences related to ‘everyday’ organised sport-based activities and opportunities, and traditional constructions of gender. Both served to illustrate their complicity and passivity in remaining with what was known and familiar. Yet the girls too, signalled their frustration at the limitations placed on them relative to the opportunities for boys. This aspect is explored in the next theme.

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

6

321

Staying the With Trouble? Changing the Rules—Girls Who Do Boys Things

Having discussed how their activities and lives were regulated and managed, the girls went on to describe complex performances that enabled them to have positive relationships to outdoor space. Above, the regulation of girls’ actions and behaviours normalised their lack of desire to spend time outdoors. The girls identified some dissonance too, between their own capabilities and expressed pleasure when describing their sporting achievements, and the previously expressed restrictions and regulations that they encountered relative to the boys: G6: G7: G6: I: G6: G7: I: G7: B2: I: B2: B3: I:

I do sport outside school. I’m a cheerleader. I do it as well. She’s my flyer. What’s a flyer in cheerleading? She goes up in the air [I] like racing running! Are you good at it? What do you like about it? You get to go fast and beat people, you know, you break, uh… I run… I run three miles yesterday. Did you? Where did you run from and to? Up a mountain and I won. He’s really good at football as well. I can’t keep up with him. So these guys are really complementary of your… that’s quite nice, what good mates you’ve got. What are these two good at? B2: He’s good at football and rugby… he’s good at running, football and everything. Here, both girls’ and boys’ express pleasure and enjoyment at their sporting achievements. Complimenting their friends’ capabilities suggests this was a shared pleasure. Previous research has found that organised sports for young people has an important role in testing out physical boundaries and skills, for doing alternative femininities, and as part of the wider matrix of bodily pleasures that performatively shapes gender and sexual identities (Luiggi et al., 2019; Yungblut et al., 2012).

322

S. MacBride-Stewart

As this chapter has been alluding to, this is not simply about providing familiar spaces for girls to use, but rather reflects their active, conscious awareness of the limits and opportunities that some spaces can provide. As such they can be conceived as using the affordance of outdoor spaces to negotiate other or multiple ways of doing their femininity (MacBride-Stewart, 2019). G10:

[Local town’s] just a small place there’s not many people there and not many of the girls bother with us, so we’ve grown up doing boy things […] I: You do boy things, is thatBoth: Fern diving I: What’s fern diving G11: Just jump around in ferns like G10: No just jump in ferns G11: [Couldn’t do it on this mountain] it’s really steep you’d just roll on for ages G10: That’s what you get from bothering with boys I: not a bother for you girls [they start talking about getting messy] G10: Nah. In the discussion above, the girls say they have grown up ‘doing boys things’, meaning they spend time outdoors playing in ferns, rolling down mountains, ‘getting messy’ and not being included with other girls (‘not bothered with’). The girls actively explored with the interviewer their understanding of what they gain by using unfamiliar landscapes— although here the boundary between what is familiar and unfamiliar seems to break down as their account about the more familiar spaces near their home appears physically very similar to the National Park landscape, with its ferns, hillside and play-scape. However, in the possible comfort that this similarity brings, is the repetition of a discourse about where girls normally would be expected to be. While being outdoors seemed to afford them an opportunity to practice an alternative femininity, they also get labelled a ‘certain type’ of girl. The comment ‘[t]hat’s what you get from bothering with boys’ feels loaded with meaning and potential interpretations. For example, the discussion about fern diving

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

323

and ‘rolling’ downhill comes just ahead of this comment, while talk of being messy follows it. Does one get messy hanging with boys? These girls recognise in this the possible expectation of others that ‘they [should] do girl things’, like being engaged purposefully in sport (rather than fern diving) and stay clean and tidy, or presentable. While the girls explored their access to alternative femininities in the discussion, they do so in a way that was not permanent and did not undermine traditional femininities or fix them solidly in one position or another. Different expressions of femininity were possible in these outdoor spaces, representing the various levels and types of involvement of the girls—from being fully involved actively outdoors to observing others (or in the example below, waiting by the path while others explored). Here the familiarity was important; the outdoor spaces provided more space for negotiation for some girls than for others. In describing the process of finding a geocache that was located off a dirt path concealed in a patch of trees and its undergrowth, they explained while other girls did not come in because it was unfamiliar, they encouraged each other, declaring ‘it’s fun’: G12: Let’s go in, you didn’t see it inside… it’s fun. I: What’s in it, describe it to me? G12: trees and forests… try and get through the brambles. We went that way though. The trees were low down and we had to bend . G13: two of the girls didn’t come in, they stayed by here. I: Why, they were worried about the brambles? The answer to the interviewer’s question, like many in the walking interviews, remained unanswered. With the question hanging—and exploration continued—unfamiliar spaces were experienced by these girls through feelings that were variously described as novel, exploratory and fun. In another interview below, a group of girls expressed a certain amount of excitement at being the ‘girls who do boy things’ and identified the boundaries that they constructed with other girls. They saw themselves as free to explore the nearby mountain with the boys, but it was imperative that other girls could not be allowed to come because this would restrain them, stating that ‘if we brought…our friends out

324

S. MacBride-Stewart

we have to sit with em’. This distinction between them and other girls was not about protecting their relationships with boys; it was about protecting their relationships with girls who represented more traditional femininities. They indicated that ‘the girls around us’ are afraid of being embarrassed and showing themselves up in front of the boys. In contrast, they were happy to ‘play hide and seek’ and ‘just act like boys’, making what might be unfamiliar ‘just normal for us, we don’t know any different’. G10: I think the girls around by us- they’re too afraid to get involved with stuff ain’t they? I: What do you think the risk is if they got involved? G10: I think they’re too afraid of embarrassing themselves. They don’t wanna show themselves up in front of the boys. G11: It’s literally us three and two other girls that goes out in [local town]. I: Does that make you stand out?[…] G11: Nah G10: it’s alright cos it’s really funny, when we used to go up the mountain we’d play hide and seek in the ferns, just act like boys G11: It’s just normal for us, we don’t know any different G12: If we brought another girl up with us out, they’d be like ‘what the hell are you doing’! I: So you tend not to bring any other girls out G12: yeah we don’t have to do anything then. If we brought another one of our friends out we have to sit there with em. As such the girls committed to resolving any potential tensions between themselves and other girls by resisting any efforts of other girls to join them. They acknowledged that this gave them freedom to explore their femininity in spaces that had been created by the boys for exploration and play. The girls expressed general pleasure and enjoyment at the fun and play that they were able to have. The potential for hybrid identities i.e., ones that combined multiple forms of femininity, in these unfamiliar outdoor spaces was discussed by the girls. It was possible to observe how they used the conversation about these unfamiliar spaces to avoid the assumption that they expressed their

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

325

femininity in the same way i.e., beyond ‘acting like boys’. As stated by the group above: G10: Us three are so different. I’m ginger for a start. I’m freakishly tall. G11: Where we’re from, we’re probably the tallest people we know. As in girls. G12: We all listen to different music, so that’s one thing. They’ll go out and happily play rugby but I’ll go out and play like, bulldogs. We’re just all different. I prefer to do like dancing. They would prefer to do rugby. G10: Actually I’d prefer to do dancing. G12: It doesn’t stop us from being like close. I: Does the kind of label being a girly girl or a tomboy, does that figure in it any way? G12: It’s weird, we dress up to have makeup and all that stuff but we still go out and be like rough and tough. I’d happily spend an hour in a makeup shop and spend an hour watching a game of rugby. G11: Because we come from [local town], which is a rough place, we get laughed at, but because they come from other places they get to be popular- but we get along with them anyway. G12: We hang with [the boys] but we stay with [the girls] anyway. The familiar landscape of the town, the shops and ‘hanging out’ with other girls is used to construct the girls’ understanding of hegemonic femininity and is part of the backdrop from which their own diverse, hybrid femininities emerge. Notably, the girls represented their hybrid femininity as a favourable femininity (i.e., ‘we’re just all different’), which in turn helped them break away from its hegemonic expectations which were embedded in these familiar landscapes in a way that did not alienate them from others (i.e., ‘we get along/stay with’ the girls). With the girls proposing that the landscape offered by geocaching provided them with opportunities for normal, happy and sociable play, its significance lay in the wider context of their experience relating to the breakdown of an artificial divide between unfamiliar and familiar landscapes that could shape gender identities in new ways (Änggård, 2011).

326

7

S. MacBride-Stewart

Safety and the Family/Familiar

As mentioned earlier, gendered experiences of familiar and unfamiliar landscapes are also largely informed by a discourse of safety. Although unfamiliar spaces were regarded as being unsafe, the girls’ understandings of safety, like identity, was constituted in relation to the familiar places of the local town or people that they know. Protection from others, especially people not known to their family or friends, was emphasised. It was strangers, druggies, incomers, international rugby match nights that were constituted as risky: G13: G14: I: G14:

I dunno- when we were younger we used to go out and everything there weren’t as many druggies yeah… is that a concern? Cos there’s new people moving in as well. A lot of new people move in. They’re not nice people either.

The literature review highlighted how young women are expected to protect their safety, even in familiar spaces. In the last section, the girls explained how they accompanied boys when exploring places away from the town. Notably, keeping company with older boys—which elsewhere may be considered unsafe—facilitated their sense of safety because these boys were known to them. The boys facilitated the girls’ movement around the existing constraints of the local town such as rumours), they ‘looked out for them’, and made certain that the girls got home safely: G16: We used to bother with boys though, always bothered with people older than us… G17: I moved to [local town] and when I moved back I didn’t like walking on my own, they got to walk me home… I: So you have other people that you hang around with, keep an eye out for you… G17: Always rumours of people, you got to watch your safety around rugby G16: but they not like that at all. G17: yeah but [local town]’s small, everybody knows everybody

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

327

G16: If they know you they won’t do anything, whereas if they don’t know you there’s that G17: That’s the issue I: So it’s about they know you, you will bother with older ones that look out for you but alsoG13: not like seriously older like a year or two. The discourse of safety constituted an awareness that it was their actions being scrutinised, and in familiar spaces this included the potential to be monitored from behind curtains and by others who knew them or might be close enough to identify them. In the discussions below, parents and adults constantly assessed on their behalf whether places are safe; even the interviewer asks if playing in the canyon is safe! The girls’ responses to these concerns ranged from the dismissive (‘probably’ safe enough), to humour (‘dad went nuts’) in the effort to deflect parental anxiety and fear: G15: My dad used to go nuts when I came in with grass strains up and down my trousers. I: Did he? [laughs] G15: yeah I [went down the canyon] the other day I: Is it safe enough? G15: probably AW: I think that fear in parents is probably a massive barrier for the children. I think it was the grandmother saying she was too scared to go out walking [with her granddaughter who lives with her]. Whether that’s a true perception or a sort of perception based on a reality, doesn’t really matter [it has an impact]. The girls found few opportunities to spend time unmonitored, or in unfamiliar landscapes. When they do spend time in these places (with boys), they talk about opportunities for their hybrid femininities, along with conflicts that this presented for them, such as having the reputation of being sexually promiscuous/‘a slag’. Here the girls clearly embraced the opportunities to play in and explore the outdoors (‘wear comfy clothes’; ‘really fun’; ‘less drama’). As they communicated their ‘advice to other

328

S. MacBride-Stewart

girls’, they remind us that ‘bothering with boys is fun’, and that indeed they have no other choice (‘them or no one’): I: G17: G16: G18:

I: G17: I: G17: G16: I: G18: G17:

So if there was something you wanted to say what it’s like being outdoors or… Don’t wear jeans [laughs] Wear comfy clothes- don’t stay in, get out. You’re gonna regret not going out and doing something. Actually, bothering with boys is so fun because they just don’t care. The amount of times we’ve been rugby tackled into blinking ferns is unbelievable. But it’s really fun though. And boys are less drama than girls. So wearing kinds of clothes and… People say if you bother with loads of boys, you’re a slag Do you get that reputation? It’s a small place There’s only three girls Does that mean that youWe have no choice Them or no one [laughs].

Extending this analysis of the girls’ experiences of safety and risk, points to the discourses of safety emanating from parents or other adults, and the assumption of the lack of safety for girls in the outdoors. Under the conditions that the older boys maintain the lines of parental safety, the girls therefore create opportunities to be in unfamiliar landscapes. At the heart of these protective relationships with the older boys are a complex set of interdependencies, where the girls’ reliance on the boys for their safety, is a reassertion of traditional but also complex hybrid femininities.

8

Conclusions

As this chapter has suggested, Rockman and Steele’s (2003) notion of the unfamiliar landscape is useful for understanding the experiences and expectations of young girls in relation to their access to outdoor activity

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

329

and space. Emerging from the walk-along interviews, in an area designated by the research as the unfamiliar landscape of a National Park, was the significance of what the girls themselves considered to be unfamiliar and strange or frightening (Freud, 1919). Rockman and Steele (2003) stress that an unfamiliar landscape is more than a place. In this research it is a space of inaccessibility, reflected in the girls’ accounts that it is not easy to conduct traditional femininities in these spaces. Traditional femininities exist in the more familiar contexts of the town and in organised sports, where the girls are routinely subject to parental constraints and controls that further shape their femininity in normative ways, ensuring the girls remain safe and within the confines of known relationships and actions. The role that familiar spaces play in understanding this gendering of safety discourses and actions is therefore important. Following this, unfamiliar landscapes are often talked about in ways that mystify them or allude to an inherent lack of safety and wilderness. This in turn challenges the assumption that they are simply the opposite of familiar landscapes since, as already noted, both were considered unsafe by these girls. Perhaps because as Haraway (2007) has suggested, the unfamiliar is always where the familiar lurks. The concept of the unfamiliar landscape opens up the possibility that while potentially dangerous or unsafe, they can also reflect new sites for exploration or domination. The experiences of the girls who went exploring nonetheless highlighted the possibility of heterogenous and diverse ways of responding to unfamiliarity and safety, for example through hybrid femininities and the maintenance of relationships with boys and other girls. Other places for play (mountains) and ways of engagement with and in nature (getting muddy, fern-diving, rugbytackling) were accessible through the girls’ use of these hybrid femininities, through ‘bothering with’ and ‘being like’ boys, alongside efforts to resist being labelled as sexually promiscuous. Moreover, the girls were aware of the complexities that exploring unfamiliar landscapes posed for their gender. Their experiences suggest some familiarity and even security in these spaces, and it is possible to suggest that by developing their own response to existing gender expectations, they could gain access to the outdoor spaces where they lived, regardless.

330

S. MacBride-Stewart

It would be wrong to conclude that the National Park where the interviews were conducted is inaccessible to young girls, or to generalise the experiences of these participants attending a geocaching programme. By highlighting the role that the discourse of safety plays in familiar and unfamiliar contexts, this chapter has identified how some spaces are more accessible to some girls than others. How this is achieved points to the heterogeneous nature of what is safe and unsafe for girls, emphasised by the different ways of doing safety recorded here. Notably, while improving gendered access to the outdoors aims to reduce barriers, the analysis suggests that this means doing more than focusing on girls’ rights and opportunities, or on safety alone. As alluded to above, real engagement in the unfamiliar space typically took place through play and informal friendships with the boys (Fjørtoft & Sageie, 2000). While some girls managed to find freedom and autonomy, their experiences reflect their relationship to changing gender norms and expectations. Their capacity for engagement in unfamiliar landscapes depended on how they engage with similar outdoor spaces nearer to home and their access to alternative femininities. These findings point to a need for managers of places like National Parks to take into account relevant and changing social and gender norms when designing access programmes for young women, including how girls may depend on others for physical access and safety. National Parks landscapes have an important role to play in supporting girls to explore and experiment with different forms of unfamiliar landscapes and identities.

References Änggård, E. (2011). Children’s gendered and non-gendered play in natural spaces. Children Youth and Environments, 21(2), 5–33. Beil, K., & Hanes, D. (2013). The influence of urban natural and built environments on physiological and psychological measures of stress—A pilot study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 10 (4), 1250–1267.

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

331

Bjerke, T., & Krange, O. (2011). A walk in the woods: The effects of ethnicity, social class, and gender among urban Norwegian adolescents. Nordic Journal of Social Research, 2. Brecon Beacons National Park Authority Visitor Survey 2016–17 Cover.jpg (beacons-npa.gov.uk). Accessed 11 Aug 2021. Brunelle, S., Brussoni, M., Herrington, S., Matsuba, M. K., & Pratt, M. W. (2018). Teens in public spaces and natural landscapes. In J. E. Lansford & P. Banati (Eds.), Handbook of adolescent development research and its impact on global policy (pp. 361–379). Oxford University Press. Clark, S. (2015). Running into trouble: Constructions of danger and risk in girls’ access to outdoor space and physical activity. Sport, Education and Society, 20 (8), 1012–1028. Cosgrove, D. E. (1998). Social formation and symbolic landscape. University of Wisconsin Press. de Lima Costa, C. (2000). Being here and writing there: Gender and the politics of translation in a Brazilian landscape. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 25 (3), 727–760. Doran, A. (2016). Empowerment and women in adventure tourism: A negotiated journey. Journal of Sport and Tourism, 20 (1), 57–80. Evans, J., & Jones, P. (2011). The walking interview: Methodology, mobility and place. Applied Geography, 31(2), 849–858. Fernandez, M., Harris, B., & Rose, J. (2021). Greensplaining environmental justice: A narrative of race, ethnicity, and justice in urban greenspace development. Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, 2(2), 210–231. Fernandez-Lasa, U., Usabiaga Arruabarrena, O., Lozano-Sufrategui, L., & Drew, K. J. (2020). Negotiating alternative femininities? Gender identity construction in female Basque pelota players. Sport, Education and Society, 26 (2), 188–201. Finley, N. J. (2010). Skating femininity: Gender maneuvering in women’s roller derby. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 39 (4), 359–387. Fjørtoft, I., & Sageie, J. (2000). The natural environment as a playground for children: Landscape description and analyses of a natural playscape. Landscape and Urban Planning, 48(1–2), 83–97. Foster, S., & Giles-Corti, B. (2008). The built environment, neighborhood crime and constrained physical activity: An exploration of inconsistent findings. Preventive Medicine, 47 (3), 241–251. Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices: Power, discourse, and gender in contemporary social theory. University of Minnesota Press.

332

S. MacBride-Stewart

Freud, S. (1919). The uncanny. In Fantastic literature: A critical reader (pp. 74– 101). Garcia, C. M., Eisenberg, M. E., Frerich, E. A., Lechner, K. E., & Lust, K. (2012). Conducting go-along interviews to understand context and promote health. Qualitative Health Research, 22(10), 1395–1403. Gehl, J. (1987). Life between buildings: Using public space. Van Nostrand Reinhold Company. Gobster, P. H., Nassauer, J. I., Daniel, T. C., & Fry, G. (2007). The shared landscape: What does aesthetics have to do with ecology? Landscape Ecology, 22(7), 959–972. Greed, C. (2019). Are we still not there yet? Moving further along the gender highway. Integrating gender into transport planning (pp. 25–42). Palgrave Macmillan. Hanson, S. (2010). Gender and mobility: New approaches for informing sustainability. Gender, Place and Culture, 17 (1), 5–23. Haraway, D. (2007). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. J. (2012). Value-added dogs and lively capital. In K. S. Rajan (Ed.), Lively capital: Biotechnologies, ethics, and governance in global markets (pp. 93–120). Duke University Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Duke University Press. Harden, J., Scott, S., Backett-Milburn, K., & Jackson, S. (2000). Can’t talk, won’t talk?: Methodological issues in researching children. Sociological Research Online, 5 (2), 104–115. Hein, J. R., Evans, J., & Jones, P. (2008). Mobile methodologies: Theory, technology and practice. Geography Compass, 2(5), 1266–1285. Hidayati, I., Tan, W., & Yamu, C. (2020). How gender differences and perceptions of safety shape urban mobility in Southeast Asia. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 73, 155–173. Hollway, W., & Jefferson, T. (2000). Doing qualitative research differently: Free association, narrative and the interview method . Sage. Hyams, M. (2003). Adolescent Latina bodyspaces: Making homegirls, homebodies and homeplaces. Antipode, 35 (3), 536–558. Ivinson, G., & Renold, E. (2013). Valleys’ girls: Re-theorising bodies and agency in a semi-rural post-industrial locale. Gender and Education, 25 (6), 704–721. Jin, X., & Whitson, R. (2014). Young women and public leisure spaces in contemporary Beijing: Recreating (with) gender, tradition, and place. Social and Cultural Geography, 15 (4), 449–469.

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

333

Kempf, M. (2020). From landscape affordances to landscape connectivity: Contextualizing an archaeology of human ecology. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 12(8), 1–12. Krenichyn, K. (2006). ‘The only place to go and be in the city’: Women talk about exercise, being outdoors, and the meanings of a large urban park. Health and Place, 12(4), 631–643. Kwan, M. P. (1999). Gender and individual access to urban opportunities: A study using space–time measures. The Professional Geographer, 51(2), 210– 227. Luiggi, M., Maïano, C., & Griffet, J. (2019). Development and initial validation of Sport Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ). Journal of Leisure Research, 50 (2), 132–156. MacBride-Stewart, S. (2019). Atmospheres, landscapes and nature: Off-road runners’ experiences of well-being. Health, 23(2), 139–157. MacBride-Stewart, S., Gong, Y., & Antell, J. (2016). Exploring the interconnections between gender, health and nature. Public Health, 141, 279–286. MacBride-Stewart, S., Parsons, C., & Carati, I. (2021). Playfulness and game play: Using geocaching to engage young people’s wellbeing in a National Park. In F. Xu & D. Buhalis (Eds.), Gamification in tourism. Aspects of Tourism Series. Channel View Publications. Martin, D. M., Schouten, J. W., & McAlexander, J. H. (2006). Claiming the throttle: Multiple femininities in a hyper-masculine subculture. Consumption, Markets and Culture, 9 (3), 171–205. Massey, D. (2013). Space, place and gender. Wiley. McDowell, L. (1993). Space, place and gender relations: Part I. Feminist empiricism and the geography of social relations. Progress in Human Geography, 17 (2), 157–179. McDowell, L., & Sharp, J. (Eds.). (2016). Space, gender, knowledge: Feminist readings. Routledge. Mitchell, C. A., Clark, A. F., & Gilliland, J. A. (2016). Built environment influences of children’s physical activity: Examining differences by neighbourhood size and sex. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 13(1), 130. Mooney, J. (2000). Gender, violence and the social order. Springer. Muñoz, S. A. (2009). Children in the outdoors. Sustainable Development Research Centre. Nguyen, T. M., & van Nes, A. (2013). Identifying the spatial parameters for differences in gender behaviour in built environments: The flaneur and

334

S. MacBride-Stewart

flaneuwe of the 21st century. TRIA-Territorio della Ricerca su Insediamenti e Ambiente. Rivista internazionale di cultura urbanistica, 10 (1). O’Brien, L., & Varley, P. (2012). Use of ethnographic approaches to the study of health experiences in relation to natural landscapes. Perspectives in Public Health, 132(6), 305–312. ONS. (2021). Socioeconomic inequalities in avoidable mortality in Wales, Office for National Statistics (https://www.ons.gov.uk). Available online https:// www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarria ges/deaths/bulletins/socioeconomicinequalitiesinavoidablemortalityinwales/ 2019. Accessed 31 May 2021. Pain, R. H. (1997). Social geographies of women’s fear of crime. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 22(2), 231–244. Rezeanu, C. I. (2015). The relationship between domestic space and gender identity: Some signs of emergence of alternative domestic femininity and masculinity. Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 6 (2), 9–29. Riemer, M., Lynes, J., & Hickman, G. (2014). A model for developing and assessing youth-based environmental engagement programmes. Environmental Education Research, 20 (4), 552–574. Rockman, M., & Steele, J. (Eds.). (2003). Colonization of unfamiliar landscapes: The archaeology of adaptation. Psychology Press. Sackett, C. R., Newhart, S., Jenkins, A. M., & Cory, L. (2018). Girls’ perspectives of barriers to outdoor physical activity through photovoice: A call for counselor advocacy. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 13(1), 2–18. Scharff, C. (2012). Repudiating feminism: Young women in a neoliberal world . Ashgate. Schippers, M. (2007). Recovering the feminine other: Masculinity, femininity, and gender hegemony. Theory and Society, 36 (1), 85–102. Sorenson, O., & Dahl, M. S. (2016). Geography, joint choices, and the reproduction of gender inequality. American Sociological Review, 81(5), 900–920. Squires, J. (2007). The new politics of gender equality. Macmillan International Higher Education. Stafford, M., Cummins, S., Macintyre, S., Ellaway, A., & Marmot, M. (2005). Gender differences in the associations between health and neighbourhood environment. Social Science and Medicine, 60 (8), 1681–1692. Taylor, L., & Hochuli, D. F. (2017). Defining greenspace: Multiple uses across multiple disciplines. Landscape and Urban Planning, 158, 25–38.

13 Girls’ ‘Safety’ in Unfamiliar Landscapes …

335

Thorpe, H. (2008). Foucault, technologies of self, and the media: Discourses of femininity in snowboarding culture. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 32(2), 199–229. Tucker, F., & Matthews, H. (2001). ‘They don’t like girls hanging around there’: Conflicts over recreational space in rural Northamptonshire. Area, 33(2), 161–168. Valentine, G., & McKendrck, J. (1997). Children’s outdoor play: Exploring parental concerns about children’s safety and the changing nature of childhood. Geoforum, 28(2), 219–235. Virden, R. J., & Walker, G. J. (1999). Ethnic/racial and gender variations among meanings given to, and preferences for, the natural environment. Leisure Sciences, 21(3), 219–239. Whittington, A. (2006). Challenging girls’ constructions of femininity in the outdoors. Journal of Experiential Education, 28(3), 205–221. Yungblut, H. E., Schinke, R. J., & McGannon, K. R. (2012). Views of adolescent female youth on physical activity during early adolescence. Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, 11(1), 39–50.

14 Conversations with Practitioners 2: Phoebe Smith and Dwayne Fields Hannah Pitt and Thomas Aneurin Smith

1

Introduction

Phoebe and Dwayne are explorers, writers, presenters and more. We heard about them through work to promote #WeTwo, their foundation created to give young people an opportunity to travel to the Antarctic. Our conversation explored their own experiences as young people moving between landscapes, through their involvement in the ‘outdoor’ industry and what this revealed about continued exclusions and prejudices within this community. They shared reflections on the chapters in this section, connecting them with their own experiences and that Interviewers: Hannah Pitt (HP) and Thomas Aneurin Smith (TAS).

H. Pitt (B) · T. A. Smith School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. A. Smith e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_14

337

338

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

of working to introduce young people to new landscapes. The discussion was so rich and fun that we have had to edit it for inclusion here, but have tried to retain the natural flow to reflect the spirit of the journey they took us on that afternoon. We began by asking each how they came to work with young people and the outdoors. Dwayne: I was born in rural Jamaica. From age zero up until almost seven I spent every single waking moment outdoors. I was in the fields, in the forests, in the woodlands, in the small hills around the area I was born in. I grew up in a place just outside of Linstead, Jamaica. They call it the back of the bush. They call it go-go hole. It’s just a small woodland with six or seven other houses. So fast forward to me being seven years old. I moved to London and it’s a completely different world. If you imagine this kid who’s very independent. The outdoor environment was very natural for me. And, I land in London, and I remember the drive from the airport and it was buildings, buildings, buildings. Bear in mind I come from a place where it was all single-floored, corrugated iron roof, breeze block buildings, to now see tower blocks and very few trees, very few open spaces. I remember I ran through the house when I got to our new home, and I thought ‘right, I haven’t seen any trees, any woodlands’. My understanding is that the whole world is trees and woodlands. I remember thinking, ‘I haven’t seen any. They must be out the back’. And, depression kicked in when I ran through the house and opened those curtains and it was just a concrete space. At that point, I realised that I was in a completely different world. Fast forward a few more years, I moved to East London. I guess I fell into the trap of almost a stereotypical urban youth. It was all about tracksuits, trainers, nice clothes, jeans, staying fresh, wearing the latest… y’know, in my case it was looking for girls and... Erm, hanging around and laughing at jokes that weren’t funny but you just want to be part of something.

14 Conversations with Practitioners …

339

A few years later, I get into an incident where… this wasn’t the first time I’d had a gun pulled on me, but it was the first time the trigger was pulled. And, without going too deep into that, the trigger was pulled twice. The guy was determined to kill me. Following that incident, it was the pressure from everyone that I should do something that led me to say, ‘Right, Dwayne, you can’t keep doing what everyone else does. You need to find yourself, discover who you are, discover what you love and discover what you’re passionate about.’ All I could think of was that little kid in the woodlands, in the fields, in the forests, in Jamaica… wading through streams and pond skimming, and bringing home bags of tadpoles. That was me. And, I thought, ‘Right well it would be a bit weird if you’re 20 years old man. If you start bringing home bags of tadpoles people are gonna have you sectioned’. So, I thought I would do it but in a grown-up way. That led me back to the outdoors, back to the woodlands, back to the fields, back to the hills. TAS:

So I guess I’d be really interested to know that bit in between, from being 20, and making that decision, to where you are now.

DF:

For me it started off by discovering Epping Forest. By chance, it was me and a few friends. We were driving through, and I remember thinking, ‘Woah, this is quite a big forest’. There’s one or two roads that go straight through Epping. You can drive for 10, 15 minutes and it’s woodlands on both sides. And I remember just thinking, just ‘stop the car’. I got out and I walked off for about a minute. I couldn’t hear any traffic, I could just hear natural sounds, and to me it just felt right, it felt natural. I was in a really comfortable place. Then I did the three peaks to raise money for a charity in the Midlands, and that felt very right. I wanted more. I did a few marathons or half marathons, a few cross countries.

340

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

I then heard Ben Fogle and James Cracknell speaking about rowing across the Atlantic. They wanted to walk to the South Pole. And I thought ‘Wow. Sounds like a dog whistle. Sounds like he’s saying Dwayne, this is for you’. So I applied a couple of weeks later. I ended up saying yes to the North Pole, not having a clue what that meant. I didn’t know what training, what equipment, what gear, what cost… I just wanted to do something so different, so abstract to everything that I grew up around. I wanted to break all the stereotypes, all the sentences, all the statements, all the comments I’d heard about who does what and the type of industry that white and black people are into, and the type of industry that women do and men do. From going to the North Pole, it was walk across the Sinai, some bits of the jungle, and erm, Phoebe will tell you the story of how we met. Phoebe:

Well before I tell that wonderful story I’ll say a bit about me. It was almost the opposite for me. I grew up in North Wales, on the coast, in an area that the tabloid press affectionately nicknamed Costa del Dole, owing to the number of people from Liverpool and Manchester that came to sign on. My family weren’t destitute, but nor were we rich. My mum was a nurse, my dad was a motorbike mechanic, and I just didn’t think the outdoors was for me. If you look at where I lived, I was probably 30 miles from Snowdonia, 20–30 minute car drive to the Clwydian Hills, Offa’s Dyke pathway up the road, but I didn’t really know any of it was there, no one was there to tell me. In school it wasn’t something that we were made aware of. Scouts was around but you had to be a boy to be in the Scouts. I remember being in primary school and there being a massive media thing when Alison Hargreaves dared to go and try to climb K2, and died on it. The press just had a field day with ‘how dare she leave her family?’. And I remember my mum, who was quite proudly feminist, was also really scathing about her leaving her family to do this. I was about

14 Conversations with Practitioners …

341

seven. I still remember thinking, ‘How come no one says that to all the men who were doing that?’ So, that sort of thing made me think it definitely wasn’t a place for me. We couldn’t really afford to go on any school trips. My brother managed to go to an out of bounds centre, and when he came back it was just pictures of male instructors, and it seemed very uncomfortable. And I just genuinely thought it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t until I finished school, ended up signing on, and then I realised you could get visas to travel and work. I spent the best part of a year working in a pub, saving money and then went off and travelled. Suddenly when you’re away from home and away from the people that tell you ‘you can’t leave, you shouldn’t leave’, you’re seen as a bit of a traitor if you aspire to leave. Once you’ve removed yourself from it, suddenly you’re much more willing to push your comfort zone. The defining moment for me was in Australia, and I was persuaded to sleep in a swag in the Outback. It was a guided trip, but when the guide was going through all the things that could kill you… I remember thinking, ‘How come I’m doing this here, on the other side of the world where there’s actual danger, and I’ve never tried to do this at home?’. I had an incredible night. I remember watching the sunset. The wildlife came a lot closer and it wasn’t scary it was just amazing. And then seeing the stars come out. It was just a series of these wonderful things that, I thought, ‘Well how come I’ve never done this at home’. So when I got back to the UK, I sadly lost my mum and I had to stay with dad to help him, and I got a job on a newspaper, and when I was doing that I was very time poor and on a starting journalist salary. I still wanted the adventure, and the only thing I could do was go for walks, and I thought, well, camping seems cheap, and then I heard about wild camping which was free! I went with other people at first, and then I thought ‘I want to go and do it on my own’. And I just was

342

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

hit by this wall of ‘no you can’t do this on your own, you’re gonna be attacked, you’re gonna be raped, you’re gonna be mugged’. Definitely the wall went up of ‘you can’t do it and you should take a male chaperone to make sure you’re okay’. And I didn’t want to do that, so I went anyway because I’d become quite stubborn and I’m sure Fields will attest to that as part of my personality [laughs]… I remember getting back to my car and seeing my face all red and bitten, and just knowing that there’d been this cataclysmic shift in my thinking, that everyone said I couldn’t, and then I did. And I survived and I felt this rush of exhilaration and energy, a lot like what Dwayne talks about after he rediscovered the outdoors.

2

Shared Personal Experiences of Discrimination and Creating WeTwo

Although both Phoebe and Dwayne found ways into the world of outdoor explorers, it is striking how both continue to be shown ways in which they do not ‘fit’. This shared sense of being different led to them working together. PS:

From that point on I just wanted to encourage other people because I felt at the time, and it still is to this day, very much the image of a male, white, privileged, normally ex-military, who’s pitted against the outdoors to survive it. Whereas what I was doing was finding that it was an environment I could harmonise with. It didn’t feel judgemental and especially when I went on my own it was a completely level playing field. I ended up writing books about it and doing talks to schools. I did a lot of kit reviews and I used to annoy all the gear manufacturers when I went to outdoor shows and say ‘don’t just shrink it and pink it when you make women’s gear’. And eventually they started to listen, but still there’s a disparity.

14 Conversations with Practitioners …

343

To get to the point where me and Dwayne met: We were both invited to hand out Gold Duke of Edinburgh Awards at Buckingham Palace…. So, me and Dwayne were outside waiting to get in and security was eyeing up both of us quite suspiciously, so Dwayne of course started making jokes that I was the interloper who shouldn’t have been there. And… DF: I just encouraged them to check your ticket properly! PS:

[Laughs] And he tried to say ‘Sir I don’t know who she is’ [laughs]. But anyway, we got on really well, and a year later we were both asked to be on a panel for Countryfile Live at Blenheim Palace, so then the joke was we only ever will meet at palaces [Laughs]. So we got talking after the Countryfile panel. Dwayne was the token Black man, I was the token woman, and we realised that for different reasons, and from different journeys, we’d experienced similar ‘you shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t be able to do something’, and then we’d gone and done it. And we shared the passion of passing this on to the next generation, to get them to realise that we’re nothing special, we’re ordinary, we’re not this macho kind of superhero. We’re just people that like to have fun. And my motto’s always been, when it comes to the outdoors, ‘enjoy not endure’. I think that’s very rare, I think it’s still perceived as survival against the elements rather than working with it. Dwayne was expressing an interest in Antarctica which is somewhere I very luckily as a travel writer managed to go, and I desperately wanted to go back, and I said, do you want some company? So then we formed what we call ‘#WeTwo’ (www.tea mwetwo.com). I would often do talks and people would say, ‘oh but what about people who are from a black or minority ethnic community’, and I was like ‘well I can’t answer questions on that’. And equally Dwayne would give talks and say ‘yeah but what if you’re a woman?’, and, so the idea was if we team together our reach should be wider. The idea of the WeTwo Foundation was to take a group of underprivileged young people to Antarctica by expedition ship. We

344

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

wanted to do an Antarctic trip together first, to change that face of adventure. We tried to get funding and there were just roadblocks everywhere. We decided to do an Antarctic-style expedition in the UK which was our 2019 walk across Britain. We pulled the sleighs on wheels and basically had miserable weather the entire time [laughs]! That kickstarted the fundraising and now we’re in a position to take 10 underprivileged young people to Antarctica in 2022. Our motto is that it’s not about planting flags, it’s about planting seeds and we hope this expedition will be the first of many, and the young people that we take will be ambassadors and mentors for the next group. We want it to spread this message that outdoors and adventure really is for everyone. DF: There’s lots of veins where me and Phoebe are polar opposites: I’m a Black man, she’s a white woman. She was born in North Wales, I was born in Jamaica. But we had such similar experiences and there’s a word that she used: traitor. Being made to feel like a traitor. I had people saying things to me like ‘that’s not what we do’. It made me feel like hold on, am I stepping outside of something here? Are there boundaries that I’m crossing here? And there were times when I was questioning what I was doing. And under the guise or umbrella of ‘we’, I suppose it meant ‘we’ as Black people or ‘we’ from Hackney or ‘we’ as a North London community. When it was someone who I would’ve called a friend, I felt like it was them saying that’s not what we do from the estate. When it was a 50-year-old Black man from Jamaica saying ‘that’s not what we do’ I attribute it to that’s not what we Jamaicans do. I heard it so many times, so Phoebe saying that she was made to feel like a traitor for aspiring to do more, is one of the reasons why we joined up because the experience was very similar. PS:

And we both felt that neither of us was represented in the figures that you see in the media, or if you went to a school and asked a child to draw a picture of an explorer… it wouldn’t look like me or Dwayne.

DF: There’s a website that features something like 100 explorers from Britain. I think there’s 78 men and 22 women. I thought, ‘that’s

14 Conversations with Practitioners …

345

not representative’. If it was a snapshot of society, then there’d be one or two Black people in there, there’d be a few Asians, but it’s just not the case at the moment and we’re trying to change that for the better. PS:

If working together has done anything it’s given us that chance to see it from the other person’s side. I did a talk and Dwayne came along, and afterwards Dwayne ran into someone he knew quite well and respected, and said ‘Oh this is my polar expedition teammate’, and without introducing themselves, it was a man, he walked over, he looked me up and down and he came over and he pinched my bicep to see if I was strong enough. And then he walked back to Dwayne and said ‘oh, how did you get a teammate who looks like that?’. And I was like, ‘I’m right here’. [Laughs]

DF: Honestly I respected this man so much and instantly my respect went from 90–95 to 10. And it was embarrassing for me. Another example is the time where we had a funding meeting and they said ‘well there’s other women, y’know, trying to be tough as well’… PS:

Who were younger, sexier, and…

DF: I think it was later that day, I messaged Phoebe, because I had heard racist things before, but I’ve never witnessed somebody else receiving it. I messaged Phoebe to say, ‘Phoebe are you okay?’, and she kind of said ‘Yeah’ and it almost sounded like she didn’t realise what had happened. PS:

But then I’d sat there in January 2019, and heard someone basically say ‘oh, well even if you do get some funding, it will only be because you’re a Black man’ and then there was something else like ‘oh, you’d only do it cause you’re a Black man and a woman’. I think I was shocked. I am not stupid. I know that racism and sexism exist. But normally it’s hidden subtext. But this was just blatantly out there. That’s been a benefit of the work that we’ve done together, it’s opened our eyes to the other. It’s given us this other perspective and got angry on the other person’s behalf.

DF: I think when you’ve got some support behind you, you can do a lot more. When you feel like you’re ploughing on alone it’s tougher

346

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

to get over the terrain, I mean the comments, and the constant barrage. When you’ve got someone who is sharing that experience with you it’s easier to say buck up, or let me give you a hand. PS:

2.1

It turns what could be very negative into a positive. For WeTwo we’re not trying to belittle anyone who came before us, any of the explorers of the past, and when we say the predominant image in the media is this kind of privileged ex-military white male, we’re not saying they don’t deserve to be there. We’re just saying other people should be there too. The reason for WeTwo is that it wasn’t supposed to be just us, the whole idea of working together is to help more people to discover it.

Societal Aspirations for Underprivileged Young People: Intersections of Gender, Race and Poverty

The negative perceptions Phoebe and Dwayne encountered seem to persist, as became apparent when we asked about reactions to the young people they are working with. TAS: We wanted your reflections on whether you feel things have changed, and whether you’ve met any resistance to what you’ve been trying to do? DF:

I’ve been working with young people in different capacities for 15 years. Have I met with some resistance? Yes. Have we met with some resistance, both Phoebe and myself, on this project? Yes. Shockingly it’s come from places that we wouldn’t have expected.

PS:

Yeah, so when we were saying that we wanted to go to Antarctica ourselves, we were both told to ‘know our place’. People said, considering where we were respectively both from our backgrounds, we’d done very well to get where we were …

DF:

I think the words were ‘considering where you’re from, you should just be happy with what you’ve achieved…’

14 Conversations with Practitioners …

347

PS:

Yeah… and to aspire for more we risked damaging what we already had. In that same conversation when we said the goal was to fundraise to take these young people to Antarctica, we were told ‘well look these are underprivileged young people, just take them on a weekend to Dartmoor. Why do they need to go to Antarctica?’ We were like, ‘you’re totally missing the point, that is exactly why because we want to take them somewhere that’s so beyond their wildest dreams’.

DF:

Trying to raise funds, we’ve had doors closed. We’ve spoken to huge companies where it’s like ‘we’re focused on diversity’. We’d tell them about ourselves, and they’d say ‘yeah, erm, this isn’t quite what we want’. And you’d think well, what exactly is it that you’re looking for?

PS:

This is why throughout the pandemic we’ve been madly fundraising and forming partnerships with sponsors it’s been a real struggle.

DF:

But fundamentally have we seen resistance? Yes. I’ve heard groups ask me personally why would these young people need to go outdoors, why would they need to go up a hill? I was asked why don’t you walk around Hackney? Well you’re from Jamaica why don’t you walk around Jamaica? I’ve heard so many comments about, ‘well, what are they gonna get from going out there?’ Again, that’s a barrier. That’s not encouraging change. And who wants to jump on a ship that’s full of doubt?

HP:

I’m interested, how much that lack of aspiration for the young people is reflected from the young people themselves? Are they receiving this message, that ‘we can’t do that’?

DF:

Growing up, my aspirations were based on what people would say and I would see. And then you’d look for a magazine and you’d see someone who doesn’t look like you doing X, that reinforces that mental image that you don’t want to do that. And everyone around you also recognises that these people doing that don’t look like you.

348

PS:

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

I think it’s so deeply rooted in the culture, isn’t it? And when I say culture, I think it’s a class issue as much as anything. If you look at how many people are classed as being in poverty in Britain, it’s something like over four million people are in poverty, and disproportionately something like 49% are from Black or minority ethnic groups. And a similar number are females, and again it’s because of period poverty, it’s because they’re lone parent families that are predominantly headed up by a woman who has to take a low wage. It’s also like Dwayne said, if you’re from a particular place, and your friends don’t do it, your family don’t do it, you don’t even know that you’re allowed to go and climb that mountain. If you’ve only experienced property ownership from a view where you don’t have it, and you stay out of this land because it’s private, so you would never think that you were allowed to go somewhere, like: What’s a right of way? What’s that footpath? None of this is taught in schools. If it were it should be about the right to roam, about the mass trespass, about what your rights to access in this country. If you look in Sweden or Norway, they have an integral right to water, to forage food, to camp out. Every person knows that, because it’s engrained in the culture. But we don’t have that, because our culture is rooted in private land ownership. Most land in Britain is owned by a private individual, and we have had a history of a struggle to fight for access. So it’s about access to doing the activity, and knowledge of how you do it, where you start, what kit you need. And then you come to the question of can you afford that kit? When a good waterproof is the same price as a month’s rent, you’re gonna choose to pay your rent over having a waterproof hood.

14 Conversations with Practitioners …

3

349

Hostile Environments: Encountering Racism and Classism Outdoors

As we moved on to discuss the book more specifically, parallels between these experiences and those described in the chapters became apparent. Whilst Phoebe and Dwayne were quick to point out that they could not speak to the specific places and communities presented, they did identify connections, starting with the unfamiliarity and inaccessibility of skiing. PS:

Skiing above many outdoor activities is one where you need money, where class is probably the biggest factor. I could never afford to go skiing. Dwayne was there when I went skiing thing for the first time, when we were preparing for this expedition. We went to the snow centre in Hemel Hampstead, that was the first time I had ever even tried it, and even that was expensive. I think it makes a lot of sense what they were saying, because class and poverty disproportionately affects people from Black and minority ethnic groups.

DF:

I think you’re spot on. I think class definitely plays a part, but as we know, in the western world, if you are from a Black or a minority ethnic community you are more likely to be poor. Being in those Black or ethnic minority communities you can’t expect the same wage, therefore you can’t pass on that same level of inherited wealth to your kids and grandkids, therefore they will have less time, and less money to spend on recreational activities. I love anything that points you to a bit of history that you may not have known. I love the fact that 200 years ago, a Black person of Nigerian heritage went to the Arctic. It was beautiful to read. I can’t explain why, it just made me feel like, ‘oh, there’s some skin in the game’. What made me feel even better was that his direct descendant was buried in Abney Park Cemetery in Stokey. That was across the road from me. About the skiing, in terms of the young people going out and being looked at oddly. From my experiences, when I’ve taken out young people, one of the things I’ve experienced is when you

350

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

hand them their gear and they’re looking at their boots, instantly they’re looking like ‘I’m supposed to wear those boots? Ahhh’! Because that’s not what they’re used to. They are used to what I was used to at 15 or 16. I was uncomfortable on the estate, but I still made sure I was part of something. My trainers were always clean and fresh, white and polished. I didn’t want soil or dirt or dust on me because it wasn’t the look. And I always desperately wanted to be part of something. At that age I think we all do. That chapter (Chapter 11, Broch) chimed with me because it was what I witnessed myself. When you’re taking a young person from everything they know, which is inner city life, where you know the dangers at the end of your streets, you know which roads to avoid, which dogs will bark at you, and you’re putting them in an environment where they’re not familiar, there’s different rules. If someone’s staring at you in the city the thing is ‘hold on, why is that person staring at me?’. It makes you uncomfortable and it might even raise up some anger and frustration. If you’re on a ski slope and someone is staring at you, that could be because they’re looking at your jacket. Or, ‘oh how come that guy’s got the newest or the latest, or all the stuff that he’s wearing is two seasons out’, or all these other reasons, but your mind isn’t telling you that. It’s telling you that the one thing about me that stands out is I’m Black, they’re all white, they’re looking at me, I feel out of place, I feel uncomfortable. PS:

Where I grew up, if you walked down the street and looked up at people, a fight very easily started. So I found it jarring when I first started going to the outdoors that people stopped and spoke to each other, and smiled at each other. Like Dwayne said, you automatically might think it’s because I’m this or that, whereas I don’t think it always is.

DF:

Hard times make you defensive. I think much of the apprehension when you’re in these environments is based on your defensive stance. I always look back on the Windrush generation when they first arrived here, it was a very hostile environment, and the way you stayed safe was by staying in your lane, you stayed in

14 Conversations with Practitioners …

351

your community, you stayed local. So going out, you’re putting yourself in danger. And that message filtered through to their kids, which would have been my mum, and it’s always ‘we don’t leave the confines of the city. We stay here where it’s safe’. And I think there’s something human about staying local, staying close to what you know, to stay safe. PS:

Reading the Chapter 10 (Scott), it did remind me of when I told someone that I worked with that we were trying to get the Antarctic thing off the ground, I was like ‘Dwayne’s walked to the North Pole already.’ And they said ‘Oh, he’s not gonna be a great Antarctic team mate cause he’s from Jamaica, he’s not used to cold weather’, and I was like ‘he’s been to the North Pole!’ I remember being shocked that someone said that. An interesting thing in that chapter (Chapter 10, Scott) was where they were talking about a Canadian newspaper published a story about the adventure gap, and skiing being a white space. And it generated a considerable amount of online comments about it, and it reminded me of when Dwayne recently did a piece for Countryfile and got the most complaints they’ve ever had…

DF:

[Laughs] I hold the record.

PS:

In one of the comments (in Chapter 10, Scott) it said something like ‘there’s no barbed wire or fences stopping Black people going to the national parks’ and you were getting similar stuff on social media Dwayne?

DF:

I was getting loads. Even yesterday I had someone else say ‘oh, so now trees are racist again?’ I don’t think I said anything that poo pooed anyone’s ideas, I think the quote actually said ‘though Dwayne found solace in the great British countryside, many in the BAME community find it daunting…’ or something to that effect. I got a barrage of abuse. I guess I should say I expect it now because it’s been happening for so long.

PS:

It’s sad. But this was from a DEFRA report, it wasn’t like Dwayne had just decided to label it this way. I think that report said it was

352

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

both Black and white people who saw the countryside as a white space… DF:

Absolutely. I mean I read all 167 pages, and at no point did it point to an individual that was racist. It looked at barriers and it looked at people’s perceptions. But fundamentally it was a lot of abuse, for reading a report. [Laughs]

PS:

I wrote a piece on how safe bothies are for women (Smith, 2021). I was very careful, it took me ages to write… to get the tone right because I love going to bothies and I’ll stay in one on my own, I don’t want be ‘oh I’m this terrified woman’. Some people put it on Facebook groups, and it got removed because others thought it would cause too much of an argument. That wasn’t the point, the point was ‘how can you make women feel safe, here’s something you might not have considered’. And then there was a lot of people… similar to what we see with Black Lives Matter the whole White Lives Matter, and it’s like you’re missing the point. I had people criticising it, they were all white middle-aged males, who didn’t like that a woman had made going to bothies an accessible thing. I got hate mail, I got people writing to the publisher saying I was a danger, I got death threats, I had abuse on Amazon. Some made comments that I wasn’t Scottish so how dare I talk about Scotland. I had never had anything like it. It definitely is this idea of, ‘how dare you make it accessible?’

TAS: There’s something interesting about the way in which you’ve both touched a nerve in outdoor communities.

3.1

Endurance and Enjoyment, Positive Role Models, and Community Norms

Another of the chapters resonated with Phoebe’s ethos for engaging with the outdoors:

14 Conversations with Practitioners …

PS:

353

When I wrote a book called Book of the Bothy (Smith, 2015), it was the first guidebook to bothies. It touches a little on Chapter 12 (Smith and Pitt) this idea of the outdoors having to be suffering and enduring pain: I wanted to make this book a departure from that. My motto’s always been ‘enjoy not endure’. For me and Dwayne, when we go on these adventures together, it’s all about having a laugh. It’s meant to be about the joy and the fun, and the whole point of the book was to use vignettes of amazing experiences that I’d had in bothies, to give people the impetus to go and do it.

HP: I straight away picked up Phoebe when you said that your slogan is ‘enjoy not endure’. That exactly resonated with what we were trying to write about. PS:

I think it touches on issues you’ve already raised, young people from an inner city urban environment where the young men in particular are in their tracksuits and trainers and don’t want be seen to be enjoying looking at flowers with their mates.

PS:

It’s almost like, you have a uniform, and by putting on clothes to go canoeing or hiking, you’re being asked to ditch the things that are your comfort blanket. It takes time. For me, transitioning into wearing outdoors clothes and being comfortable, I would try everything in black, almost ninja style, not to be noticed. Now I’m going for the brightest jackets, I want to be loud and proud! It’s funny because reading that chapter, I really felt like I could see these young people, I don’t know how you felt Dwayne, I could see them starting off being really nervous and screaming. It reminded me of your video with the bugs and stuff…

DF: It’s the journey that they take. They go from this, reluctant young person, because they secretly want to do it they just don’t want to be seen to want to do it, and they turn into this guy or this girl who, ‘oh, I’ve got a bit of mud on me, it doesn’t matter’, and then it goes into them being this full blown eight year old, and it’s all these tiny little things that they do, seeing a bug on a flower or just smelling a flower, something that they wouldn’t normally do cause it’s not cool. So reading for me it was taking me straight back

354

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

to Street2Peak (https://getoutside.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/guides/str eet2peak-behind-the-scenes/). Can I ask one thing? The change that you noticed in the young people, how long did you find it lasted for? HP: The community organisation that was the link into the families and the young people, they’ve been involved in a series of different initiatives, so there’s now been a couple of years of them taking people on a canal boat trip and doing various things, so what has been interesting is because of the involvement of the families as well as the young people, word was getting out that this was okay to do. PS:

I really thought it was important when you guys wrote about the first time it was a white male instructor, and then the next time someone was from a Somali background, and suddenly when they were looking at more diverse instructors, the feedback seemed to be more positive. It goes back to that idea of ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’. That’s why I think Dwayne has had success with the young people on Street2Peak, because suddenly there’s someone like them, who sounds like them, who has come from the same background, there’s a positive role model that they fully identify with.

DF: Yeah, if that person looks like me and comes from where I come from, and can be successful doing it, it’s not a terrible thing and I don’t have to hold my head in shame to say I want to do it. PS:

Some of the young people had mentioned about how they wished it had been more diverse. Is that organisation looking to do anything where they mix, so it’s not just Somali young people?

HP: There were different views on that. Some of the young women said that it would be nice to be more mixed, but also they saw the advantage of feeling like it was just them, and just people like them. It was like it felt safer for them. One of the things we talked about longer term would having a more mixed group. I think maybe you’d have to do a bit of both, or in stages.

14 Conversations with Practitioners …

PS:

355

I think perpetuating segregation is probably unhelpful for everyone in the longer term. Like you said maybe as a first step. For kids, I think once they’re doing something that focusses them, like an outdoor activity, then there’s a level playing field. If you’re all out there in the rain, it’s raining on you all equally, it doesn’t really matter where you’re from or what gender you are.

DF: It’s exactly right. If I take a group out, it’s always a mixed group. It has to have women, it has to have young men, it has to have a broad mix. I think the field that we’re trying to create here is one of integration, and one of equal ownership and equal responsibility. If everyone’s responsible for it, or if everyone likes and enjoys it, everyone will work to protect it. One of the biggest challenges we have is if you type in British countryside images, you will find 99.9% white male or families. You will see very few Black or ethnic minority people. Now, how do we fix that challenge if we’re not bringing everyone to the wheel? It’s not just a white men or a white women or a white family problem, environmentally it’s a people problem. Sometimes when we talk about barriers to the outdoors we always look to the hegemonic group, which is white people here in the UK. But it’s not always about white people. It’s about the norms within your community, the norms you’re expected to live up to, and that can be forced on you. Phoebe for you it’s ‘women don’t leave this place and if you dare to aspire for more, then you’re not adhering to the norms here’. And I think that could be as powerful. HP: Previously when I’d talked to the adult generation in the Somali community, the ones who’d moved over as refugees, they talked about how they used to love swimming in the river, going horse riding, and then they ended up in somewhere like Leicester where there’s none of that. So the same shock you described Dwayne of, ‘where’s my trees?’, they had the same experience. DF: The challenge is change. Where they were before, they could go swimming in the river, that’s a leisure activity. Horse riding, that’s

356

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

a leisure activity. When you live in a place like the UK when you’re on the bottom rung of the ladder, your focus is your daily bread, and you don’t have time for leisure activities.

3.2

The Accessible Outdoors: Gender and Perceptions of Safety and Risk

The final chapter we discussed immediately presented connections for Phoebe as it focuses on young women living near the Brecon Beacons National Park. PS:

For me it hit familiar ground, because they were saying these young people were within a 20-minute drive of the national park, well, if you don’t have a car, a 20-minute drive is out of reach, and often the problem with national parks and green spaces is there is no public transport. Again, it really showed that it intersected with class and opportunity, and that people go, ‘Oh, well they’re only 20 minutes from the Brecon Beacons’…

DF: When you are talking about young people who have no knowledge of how to get there, what to do when they’re there, what the rules are when they get there. It’s now a massive task, just getting up and going, when actually I could just stay right here. PS:

Yeah, where I know I’m safe. And I think the issue of that chapter (Chapter 13, MacBride-Stewart) is the discourse around being a woman, saying you’re going to the outdoors, and other people saying you will be unsafe, more than your male counterpart. Because not only will you be unsafe in the way a male might, because of physical weather or whatever, it’s that you’re also vulnerable because you’re a woman, someone might do something to you because you are a woman. There’s a discourse which we’ve seen come out of the Sarah Everard murder: if something does happen to you i.e. you got raped or attacked, it’s your fault. You were choosing to do something that you shouldn’t, because it was risky and you decided to take that risk so, that is your decision. That’s certainly what I had when

14 Conversations with Practitioners …

357

I started doing my solo wild camping, it was like, well you’ve only got yourself to blame. If you choose to go wild camping and someone attacks you, that’s on you. And I think outdoor gear is an issue. Unisex gear, as I know from my reviews, is still based on a man’s body. It’s that whole thing of young people feeling like they’re moving away from their uniform. You’re not gonna dress like you’re wearing a sack of spuds are you because you’ll feel really… DF: Self-conscious. PS:

Self-conscious and out of your comfort zone. I interviewed a woman called Barbara James who was one of the first mountain guides in Britain and in Snowdonia. She said y’know the fact that as a teenage girl it’s awkward anyway, you’re going through periods starting, you’re going through changes with your body, and then you add to that uncomfortable heavy gear. All those things make it a very different experience for girls getting into the outdoors. And what that chapter showed as well was that the types of sports in school you can do perpetuate that. When me and Dwayne were walking across Britain, I was often on the map working out which route we’d take, but people would naturally look to Dwayne and ask which way we were going. Because of course for women, we can’t navigate. I remember speaking to Lucy Creamer who was one of the best climbers in Britain, and had done routes that some men couldn’t do. She would say that she would often arrive at the crags in the Peak District, and have men telling her not to try that route because it’s a bit hard, without knowing or asking her any questions, and she wouldn’t rise to it, she’d just say ‘oh I think I’ll be alright’. And then she’d do it and they’d be like ‘ah’.

DF: Reading through this there was one thing that kept coming to mind. Just before COVID, around August 2019, I took a group down to Hertwood Forest, towards Surrey. I remember it was day two, I said ‘look, we’re going to go for a night hike in the forest’. And everyone there was like, ‘oh what d’you mean?’, and I said

358

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

‘we’re just going to go for a walk, I know it well, we won’t get lost. We’ll be absolutely fine, we’ve got our phones, we’ve got our maps, we’re fine’. My intention was we’d wake up about four o’clock, and we go to this point in Hertwood where you can see the sunrise. After walking there, we got to the point where we were looking out at the sunrise and the sun’s just coming up. And I remember this young girl just freezing and saying, ‘what’s that?’, and I laughed at the time, and I felt stupid afterwards because she said ‘I’ve never seen the sunrise before’. And when I read this, when I read the title for this chapter (Chapter 13, MacBride-Stewart), girls in unfamiliar landscapes, I thought to myself how many young girls have not seen that because people are writing things that make girls feel unsafe in unfamiliar terrain or landscapes. I read it thinking I don’t really have much skin in this game, this is very much a Phoebe question. And, as I read through, I thought, ‘yeah I can attribute this to that part of my experience’.

4

Questioning Unfamiliar Landscapes

Discussing this chapter led Dwayne to reflect on the theme on the book and whole idea of unfamiliar landscapes. DF: We talk about the landscape being the issue. And it’s never actually the landscape that’s the issue, it’s everything leading to the landscape. I kept hearing things like ‘oh, unfamiliar’, and I just kept seeing each time they raised the words, or the ‘unfamiliar landscape’, ‘safety’ being raised as an issue, I almost found it to be a barrier. It perpetuates the image of an unsafe landscape. It’s not the landscape: it’s because young people in schools aren’t being taught about the dangers in the outdoors, and often the dangers are simple, it’s tripping and falling over. And the more we keep perpetuating this image of unfamiliar, unsafe landscape, I think we need to be more specific about the outdoors and say, well actually what’s unfamiliar to you is the rules of that landscape, and

14 Conversations with Practitioners …

359

what’s familiar to you is what you can do and can’t do, or should do and shouldn’t do in that landscape… PS:

It’s the knowledge isn’t it?

DF: It’s also the norms. You can teach this stuff the exact same way you teach maths! You can dedicate an hour of this stuff a month, a week, and you can solve so many of these challenges just by dedicating some time in school. So for me landscape seems to be pushed forward as the issue, and I don’t think it’s landscape. PS:

There was a line: ‘From the perspective of gender girls tend to be less physically active than boys, and interest seems to decrease with an increase in age, so by age 18 girls are less likely to be spending time outdoors’. I don’t think that’s anything to do with the landscape, that’s social conditioning. That’s because to be more girly or feminine, which you’re told you have to be, you’re told not to do that. Girls are told they should look a certain way, and then they’re told ‘now you’ve gotta go into the outdoors, put on this kit which makes you look unfeminine’. It’s confusing as hell.

DF: Well, the biggest people on social media are these content builders, they are young women who are made out to look a particular way, and they’re the complete polar opposite to what you need to wear when you’re going out in the wild. And if you’re being conditioned like you said, hour after hour, click after click, to look like, be like, act like, have the things that this person has… you’ve now made this world that much further away. Most advertisements for outdoor gear is 90%, I’m being anecdotal here, or maybe 70% male orientated, the rest of it is family orientated. There’s very few ads you see of a woman heading out on her own. You genuinely don’t see a strong woman at the top of that mountain, looking into the mid-distance, saying ‘look I’ve just conquered this thing’. It’s much more difficult to be empowered if the images you’re seeing do not reflect you, if the lifestyles you’re seeing don’t reflect yours.

360

PS:

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

And in schools, young people should be learning about people like Matthew Hanson, the first Black guy who was in the arctic. I always thought was there are no women in adventure, in the outdoors, in exploration… It took me being older when I was trying to find them, which you don’t do as a young person because you just accept what you’re taught. Why aren’t we taught about Isabella Bird who went on her own in the Rockies when it was completely faux pas? Why aren’t we taught about the awful failure of a British expedition to Rangal Island, where the only survivor was the Inuit woman who went as the seamstress, and was the only one strong enough to survive scurvy and work out how to live off the land? We’re not taught about these role models. Like Dwayne said it’s almost false putting landscape as the thing is almost like…

DF: It’s using that as the excuse, or the cover. And unfamiliar, the word unfamiliar. There’s nothing unfamiliar about the outdoors other than the actual location itself if you’ve never been there before. I think we’re more suited for it than people think, the term unfamiliar landscape is used as a scare tactic sometimes.

5

Inspiring Dialogue

As our conversation drew to a close, Phoebe and Dwayne summed up what their cooperation is about and why it seems to work. PS:

There’s a real tendency to make a women issue only of interest to women. Which it nearly did to Dwayne, and make him go…

DF:

it’s not my problem it’s a woman’s problem. Yeah.

PS:

Yeah. Which is why again WeTwo works with us together. Because it’s that whole thing of, would I necessarily have to care about race? Well yes, of course I do. I want to be engaged in that conversation, I want Dwayne to be engaged in the conversation about what barriers women might face…

DF:

Absolutely.

14 Conversations with Practitioners …

361

PS:

For the WeTwo project, we hope that it inspires that dialogue to learn about others. How do you see things through another lens? It’s like me and Dwayne walking across Britain together and seeing the other perspective, that’s what we hope will happen to them. All being on that ship together, having that shared experience will start to get them talking to each other. It’s that dialogue and how we break down the barrier of thinking, ‘well I don’t have a problem with race in the outdoors so I’m not going to read that’.

DF:

Exactly. And in the dialogue, it’s about leaving that little gap for someone to make a mistake. I think sometimes people are reluctant to take part in a conversation because they don’t want to, y’know, have a bungle and then have that held against them forever. If we can get more people having a dialogue and willing to leave a little buffer where someone can say something that may not quite be right, if they’ve left enough room to be corrected. And I think that’s when we’ll start fixing a lot of these challenges, societally as well as like amongst young people, environmentally as well.

TAS: Maybe a way to finish up would be to come back to your project, what you’re hoping to do next year, and what’s next for you both? DF:

The project itself has been a few years in the making. It’s about highlighting to young people that what we do has consequences. This is the first carbon negative expedition in the world of its kind. We’re taking them from their communities where they have few options. It’s about finding those young people and taking them on this vessel, and almost crossing through history. The Drake Passage is where at least half the Western explorers headed to Antarctica, who were all white. Now we’re taking these kids, some of them will be white, some will be Black, hopefully some Chinese, some Asian, whoever it is, if their experience of life has been harsh or there’s been doors closed, they’re the ones who are going to come. They’re on this vessel getting to meet people who are taking part in real life science. They’re going to be doing research, they’re going to start creating a legacy, part of something they can be proud of, and hopefully that will start opening their

362

H. Pitt and T. A. Smith

aspirational eyes. It’s going see them go back and talk to their communities and maybe just change one friend, two friends or maybe all their friends. PS:

Being on the ship and being exposed to the kind of people who can afford to go on this ship other than them, are not the kind of people that they would normally be able to interact with. That to me breaks down a barrier of ‘oh I can talk to these people’. But then you share an experience with these people of all seeing your first penguin, trying to get your rucksacks back, and suddenly you can all talk to each other. I think that will open their eyes to sharing experiences and similarities with people who they didn’t think had anything in common with them. Seeing career options on the ship whether it be for an ornithologist, a geologist, a mountain guide, an expedition leader or anyone working on a ship, knowing that this is a viable option. And the important thing of returning to their communities, because we’re getting them to take forward environmental initiatives in their local community. It’s the whole ethos of the planting seeds not flags, of leaving this legacy.

References Smith, P. (2015). The book of the Bothy. Cicerone Press. Smith, P. (2021). A safe space for women? We need to talk about Bothies. Available at https://outdoorsmagic.com/article/how-can-women-feel-safer-in-bothies/

Part IV Being Well, and Being Unfamiliar

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy in an Unfamiliar Sea for Young Asylum Seekers Easkey Britton, Sarah O’Malley, and Sara Hunt

1

Introduction

The sea is a place of paradox—a place of healing and loss. The sea represents freedom and exploration of unfamiliar ‘new worlds’, as well as a barrier to finding safety in unfamiliar territories for the millions of people seeking asylum in the world today. As part of a national project investigating the feasibility of coastal blue space activities for generating health and wellbeing outcomes, we present the preliminary, qualitative E. Britton (B) Whitaker Institute for Innovation and Social Change, National University of Ireland Galway, Galway, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] S. O’Malley Limerick City and County Council, Limerick, Ireland S. Hunt Welcome Wave, Cork, Ireland

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_15

365

366

E. Britton et al.

findings of an ethno-case study with young asylum seekers who participated in a surf therapy programme called Welcome Wave (WW), on the south west coast of Ireland. We explore how and in what way WW’s surf therapy programme can connect young asylum seekers with ‘local’ coastal beaches which they otherwise deem unfamiliar landscapes. The positive social, emotional and physical aspects are explored in light of the prevalence of mental health and welfare issues for children and young asylum seekers. This exploratory study finds the sea does not have to become familiar in order for it to be enjoyed. The sea, by its unpredictable, everchanging nature will always have an element of unfamiliarity. In the face of an uncertain future and far from the familiarity of their former homes, our findings highlight the resilience-building and wellbeing-enhancing qualities of the sea and surfing for the young asylum seekers.

2

Welcome Wave

Welcome Wave (WW) was founded in 2018 and is based at Incheydoney beach in county Cork in the south west of Ireland. The aim of the voluntary-led, not-for-profit project, according to co-founder (and co-author of this chapter) Sara Hunt, is to, ‘share our ocean and the unique joy of surfing ’ with young asylum seekers living in Direct Provision (DP) centres in Cork City and Clonakilty. WW delivers a free four-week surf programme in partnership with a local surf school every September for young asylum seekers from the two local DP centres. For Sara the motivation for WW was born from a tragic experience in her and her partner’s lives and her own connection to the sea as a place of healing: While pregnant with my daughter Zoey I found myself in unfamiliar territory. A pregnancy with many complications and an uncertain outcome. It was not clear what these complications would mean for us until Zoey was born. That period of waiting and sitting with the unfamiliar was incredibly difficult and scary. Racing thoughts and worries were a daily occurrence. I was lucky, however, as I finally felt rooted in place having moved home to the south west coast of Ireland. I could swim in the sea or surf or walk the beach and I got my solace there. After her birth, Zoey lived for only three days and her

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy …

367

death left me deep in grief. I turned as I always do to the sea. Just as Zoey had been kept safe swimming in the salty amniotic fluid I felt somehow safer when being held up by the salty sea water too. And quite soon after her death I knew I wanted to share that feeling with others. The idea to share my love for the ocean with people who may not have access to it was a way for me to continue loving Zoey although she was not physically here. It was a way to offer children who may feel like they had no real or safe home or were in unfamiliar territory a place to feel safe and held. Perhaps the sea would also offer them a place of comfort . And I believe it did.

The surf programme discussed in this study includes the first cohort of participants from 2018 to 2019 and included the involvement of all three authors in various stages of its design and delivery. We wish to acknowledge the potential power dynamics in terms of how we were positioned in this study as (i) a research scholar and accomplished professional surfer and surf instructor (Britton); (ii) research scholar and outdoor educator (O’Malley) and (iii) WW founder and project coordinator, and medical doctor (Hunt). Unlike the study participants, we were familiar bodies in a familiar landscape, with each of us experienced in the surf. The authors were both researchers and surfers who actively participated in facilitating the surf programme providing surf instruction or volunteer support. For O’Malley and Britton, this particular beach was unfamiliar in that they had never surfed there before joining the project. We argue that our unique combination of skills and expertise helped build trust and acceptance with the participants (Parker-Jenkins, 2018). The following sections detail the context of this programme within the literature, the participants and the design and delivery of the surf programme.

2.1

The Sea: Healing and Enabling for All?

Research literature that explores the sea as an ‘unfamiliar body’ from the perspective of asylum seekers is limited. The often transient and temporary experiences of asylum seekers makes investigating their attachment to place (land or sea) challenging (Burdsey, 2016; Rishbeth & Finney, 2006). This study draws, and builds on, similar work with immigrants in ‘green’ environments, to better understand how engaging with blue space, the sea, through surfing can facilitate social interactions and

368

E. Britton et al.

forms of place attachment, promoting the health and wellbeing of immigrants (Gentin et al., 2019). Taking on a reflective and ethno-case study approach, this chapter draws on the experiences of young asylum seekers surfing for the first time. It seeks to better understand how they engage with a blue space, and to what extent surfing can promote a sense of wellbeing and place attachment for those who might otherwise feel ‘out of place’ in an unfamiliar landscape. This study is timely, considering that globally, there has been a rapid increase in the use of surfing as therapy for vulnerable populations (Britton, 2018; Caddick et al., 2015; Hignett et al., 2018; Marshall et al., 2019; Wheaton et al., 2017). A recent systematic review identified surfing as having a positive impact on health and wellbeing for diverse populations (Britton, Kindermann, et al., 2020). Research findings have emphasised the socially connective properties of surfing (Britton & Foley, 2020; Hignett et al., 2018) and that immersion in the sea can produce a sense of ‘respite’ from everyday and acquired anxieties, mental health issues and depression (Caddick et al., 2015). The increasing demand for surfing as a health benefit is further evidenced by the establishment of the International Surf Therapy Organisation (ISTO) in 2017. One of the primary aims of ISTO is to respond to the need for evidence-based interventions by investing in research to better understand the healthpromoting mechanisms and qualities of surfing. However, research on surfing and its links with wider relational health is under-developed. There has been limited focus on how exactly surfing and/or surf therapy works, and to what extent the immersive elements of being in water shape our mental, physical and emotional wellbeing (Britton & Foley, 2020). This is particularly the case as research on ‘blue space’ is critiqued for failing to adequately address issues of accessibility, inclusion and diversity (Bell et al., 2019; Phoenix et al., 2019). Engaging in surfing and other water sports is often perceived as the domain of the privileged and able-bodied (Wheaton et al., 2020). Refugees and migrants, including asylum seekers, are one of the most vulnerable groups of people in society (Egoz & De Nardi, 2017), and experience significant exclusion from public spaces, such as parks (Rishbeth & Finney, 2006), beaches and coasts (Burdsey, 2016). Experiences of exclusion at surfing sites have also

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy …

369

been documented in the literature (Britton et al., 2018; Wheaton et al., 2017). For example, the negative impacts and qualities associated with water, such as the risk of drowning, or the experiences of other blue spaces such as rivers and canals as ‘dirty’, polluted or even sites of death (e.g. suicide), are poorly considered (Pitt, 2019). In the context of the refugee crisis, water can be a paradoxical place of both loss and healing with the sea as a potential pathway to escape and/or a barrier to freedom. In response to the failure to represent the significantly different experiences of blue spaces for minority groups, there are a growing number of examples of surfing initiatives around the world addressing the lack of inclusion of these ‘unfamiliar bodies’. An example of some of the initiatives that are beginning to recognise the diversity of ‘bodies’ who surf include the Finisterre Seasuit project, designing modest surf wear for Muslim women, Sea Sisters providing water and ocean safety lessons for women and girls in Sri Lanka, Waves for Change, providing a safe space for disadvantaged youth to learn to surf and train as surf instructors in South Africa, and Black Girls Surf who initiated Surfing in Solidarity ‘paddle-out’ events at surfing locations around the world in peaceful protest against racism. In the following section we discuss the current context for asylum seekers in Ireland, which we argue is an unfamiliar environment with negative consequences for the wellbeing of young people in particular. This is followed by a discussion of how we understand the sea as an ‘unfamiliar’ landscape, one that has the potential to promote health and wellbeing.

2.2

Asylum Seekers and Direct Provision in Ireland

The number of displaced persons globally has nearly doubled over the last 20 years to 65.6 million in 2016, with the number of asylum seekers totalling 2.9 million (UNHCR, 2017). In Ireland, asylum seekers are defined as people seeking protection as refugees and who are legally entitled to stay in the country until their application for protection is decided (Irish Refugee Council, 2020a). In Ireland Direct Provision (DP) involves a controversial system of providing the basic needs of food and

370

E. Britton et al.

shelter for asylum seekers while their claims for refugee status are being processed. Asylum seekers can remain for years in DP while waiting for the outcome of their case. Though legislative and policy changes have been introduced to better manage asylum applications, the Irish state’s ability to process applicants is in crisis (Arnold et al., 2018; Irish Refugee Council, 2020b). Amid efforts to clear the backlog of applications there are calls for frontline staff training, additional resources and administrative systems to improve the waiting time for applicants (Irish Refugee Council, 2020b). The period of time spent in DP can range from less than one year to seven years. While in the asylum process people live in shared accommodation centres which are managed by private contractors (Irish Refugee Council, 2020a). Centres differ in terms of the standard of accommodation, quality of food, access to healthcare and public transport and proximity to local school and activities (Arnold et al., 2018; St. Stephen’s Green Trust, 2018). The personal wellbeing, family life, private life and social life of young applicants are adversely affected by long stays in DP centres (University College Cork, 2016). Recently, a Royal College of Physicians in Ireland (RCPI) report highlighted that 94% of applicants seeking international protection have experienced traumatic events and required professional treatment for mental health issues, including posttraumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety but only a very small minority received any treatment (RCPI, 2019). According to a recent report by the Irish Refugee Council (IRC), a third of all asylum seekers (approximately 2000) living in DP in Ireland are children (Irish Refugee Council, 2020a). Some have lived in DP since birth. For young people in DP centres, their ability to access and participate in physical activities, particularly outdoors, is a major issue for their developmental health, emotional and social wellbeing (Irish Refugee Council, 2020a). For young people and children transport costs are a significant barrier to participating in activities outside DP centres (St. Stephen’s Green Trust, 2018). Overcrowded living conditions, health issues related to malnutrition and poor diet, lack of access to safe outdoor, natural environments, with little or no freedom to roam independently, increases social exclusion (Irish Refugee Council, 2020a). However, despite initial resentment from local communities towards

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy …

371

planned DP centres in their towns or villages, especially in rural areas where there are a lack of services to cope with additional numbers of people, there are also examples of local community efforts to welcome asylum seekers. For example, the ‘Lisdoonvarna is Nurturing Knowledge and Solidarity’ (LINKS) group organise and coordinate social events to support greater integration and familiarity between asylum seekers and the local community. Such initiatives are usually local, grassroots-led, and depend on volunteer fundraising efforts to increase opportunities for children and young asylum seekers to socialise and play with others in the community (Deegan, 2018). Following mounting public pressure, the Irish government elected in 2020 committed to ending the DP system in the coming years and to improving living conditions and the processing of applications. The surf project in this study did not seek to address all these issues and needs, rather it aimed to provide access to positive inclusive experiences of surfing in the sea. We explore how the unfamiliar setting of the sea and surf could become a welcoming space for young asylum seekers in Ireland.

2.3

Can an Unfamiliar (Sea)scape Be Healing and Enabling?

As explored in this volume, unfamiliar landscapes can be both disabling and enabling. For asylum seekers, DP centres are unfamiliar, with a lack of autonomy, lack of recreational choices, limited space and mundane routines experienced. Experiencing the coast and sea can be significantly different, especially for minority groups, and may feel unwelcoming (Gentin et al., 2019; Rishbeth & Finney, 2006). However, the ‘unfamiliarity’ of the sea can be experienced as therapeutic if a supportive and enabling space is created to provide a positive encounter rather than a threatening or exclusionary one (Britton et al., 2018). These experiences in the fluid and dynamic nature of the sea can contrast with routine, mundane, everyday experiences. In coastal waters, what is familiar one moment can become unfamiliar the next. For example, the inversion after standing tall on a surfboard

372

E. Britton et al.

and all of a sudden being completely submerged underwater in an unfamiliar environment where the taken-for-granted biological functions like breathing are no longer possible. This sense of unfamiliarity can be exciting or terrifying depending on one’s perspective. In this study we draw on the concept of ‘hormesis’, described in the fields of biology and medicine, ‘as an adaptive response of cells and organisms to a moderate (usually intermittent) stress’ (Mattson, 2008: 1), such as a rogue wave breaking suddenly before us, to describe how these challenging and dynamic characteristics can help build resilience. Our very perspectives and orientation to the world around us can shift with the tumble of a wave or a dive beneath the surface. As Britton and Foley (2020: 3) write, ‘[i]n such settings the capturing of the experience of place is constantly changing; we are also in a sense captives of place, giving over a certain embodied grounding to floating free and being at the mercy of mobile, more-than-human environments, currents and flows’. In this study, we explore the unfamiliarity of the setting (the sea) and the activity (surfing) as a ‘novel’ experience, where there is an element of surprise, and we discuss the role of this novelty or ‘unfamiliarity’ in enhancing wellbeing and resilience (Rishbeth & Finney, 2006). Briefly, we share how coping with the unfamiliar helped inspire and inform this study. Coping with the unfamiliar was apparent in Sara Hunt’s work as a medical doctor prior to starting the WW project: Just after the birth of my first son I worked as a doctor in a psychiatric service and many of my patients were people living in direct provision. I had the opportunity to listen in detail to their stories. Unfamiliarity was a strong theme and it was often associated with fear. It seemed to add to their psychological distress. There were many examples of this idea that the unfamiliar was something to be feared. For example, due to the overcrowding in DP, many asylum seekers must share rooms with strangers. A Christian woman unfamiliar with Muslim prayer practices believed her roommate to be a witch due to her praying; the unfamiliar ways of dealing with psychological distress within Ireland’s health service; unfamiliar ways of accessing services such as English language classes or local transport links. The feeling of being transplanted from one side of the world to another with no feeling of “home” or the familiar was a common issue. Parenting in an unfamiliar landscape

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy …

373

and place struck me as being incredibly difficult and a prominent reason for sadness amongst some of the mothers and fathers.

A key motivation for WW was to see if an organised surf programme could facilitate an introduction to the unfamiliar (the Irish coast, sea and surf ) in such a way that created a sense of empowerment rather than fear, and ultimately, a sense of belonging, or acceptance of the upheaval and transition in young people’s lives. To help overcome feelings of exclusion, or feeling like they might be ‘transgressing boundaries of acceptability’, which, ‘can exacerbate refugees concerns of safety and lack of a social context’ (Rishbeth & Finney, 2006: 292), WW organised surf lessons around the needs of the participants, organised transport from the DP centres, and surf instructors, including the researchers, were there to share and provide advice regarding the use of the blue space. The ratio of one volunteer for every two or three participants aimed to create a supportive and encouraging environment, tailoring the surfing session for each individual, where successes and difficulties could be acknowledged. Creating an enabling space of acceptance is an essential component of the therapeutic process in nature-based activities (NEAR Health, 2020) and is vital for those who might settle long term in their adopted country, enabling them to accept their change of circumstances through the transformation of an ‘unfamiliar place’ into a more welcoming and familiar one. The design of the surf programme and the outcomes of the process are discussed next.

3

Research Process

As part of a wider national project, this study investigated the feasibility of coastal blue space activities for health and wellbeing outcomes. Along with informed consent from parents and participants, we adopted a participatory community research approach, working in partnership with community members (e.g. surf therapy coordinators, surf instructors, volunteers and participants). This provided the opportunity ‘to plan and conduct research that meets high standards of scientific evidence that are contextually appropriate, and to communicate the findings of that

374

E. Britton et al.

research in ways that promote community capacity to pursue community goals’ (SCRA, 2012: 13). This chapter makes a valuable contribution to the field of blue space research as it adopts an innovative ethno-case study methodological framework which combines ethnography practices with case study research, addressing the differentiated experiences of minority groups and the need for more fluid and dynamic research approaches (Bell et al., 2019; Wheaton et al., 2020). We seek to capture what Burdsey (2016: xi) refers to as ‘coastal liquidity’: ‘seaside social relations and spaces’, that are, ‘fluid, dynamic and indefinite’. An ethno-case study employs ethnographic techniques but accommodates the possible ‘limited research time and immersion in the context and/or data’ (Parker-Jenkins, 2018: 25). The authors were not able to spend the substantial time with each group taking the surf sessions which a classic ethnography would require, nor were they wholly ‘detached’ from the surf sessions being studied. A case study methodology of investigating and reporting ‘real life, complex dynamic and unfolding interactions of events, human relationships and other factors in a unique instance’ complements ethnography (Cohen et al., 2011: 289). Combining both approaches into a new ‘ethno-case study’ methodology allows for sensitivity and valuable insights into how participants experience the sea, employing techniques associated with long-term intensive ethnography over a shorter timeframe (Parker-Jenkins, 2018). An ethnocase study methodology gives ‘voices to participants’ (Cohen et al., 2011: 219) and their interpretation of reality through combining data sources (the surfing event; children’s words and reactions; observations of the research team) in a ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973: 10) of events. All three authors actively participated in at least one of the surf lessons, with one (Hunt) present for all lessons. During the surf sessions the researchers moved between the sea and the beach, alternating between being in the surf as an observant participant (Smith, 2019) and on the shore where some of the children took breaks. Ongoing conversations with participants allowed for experiences to be described in their own words. The authors recorded their observations, feelings and insights in field diaries as soon as possible after the surf session.

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy …

3.1

375

Participants

A total of 25 children and young people aged between eight and eighteen from DP centres in Cork participated in four surf therapy sessions at Inchydoney Beach in West Cork in September 2018 and 2019, with an almost even mix of boys and girls. There was a large range of nationalities including those from: Nigeria, Mexico, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Ukraine, South Africa, India and Pakistan. Numbers fluctuated weekly, however, there were never fewer than fifteen participants. The amount of time participants had spent in DP was also broad: some had arrived the previous month and had not yet started school, others were born in Ireland and lived in DP for over eight years. Participants were recruited in person by WW following a visit to DP centres, explaining the WW programme and making contact with interested participants. In advance of the surf programme WW organisers arranged transport, and halal food for after surfing. Surf lessons were coordinated with the local surf school and volunteers recruited to support instructors in the water. All surf equipment (boards and wetsuits) were provided by the local surf school. As it was difficult to assess in advance any special needs the children may have had it was important to have a high adult/child ratio to ensure safety. This programme was the only chance these young people had to visit the beach and see the sea, since their arrival in Ireland and for some, for the first time in their lives.

3.2

Activity and Setting

The weather ranged from sunny with light wind and small waves to windy, rainy, cold and big waves. On the beach, before heading into the water, participants were gathered in small groups where a surf instructor demonstrated the surfing techniques and safety instructions. Each session commenced with a physical warm up. Participants were invited to share their goals for that surf before entering the sea with a volunteer instructor to help support and instruct them, if they wished, for at least an hour. WW surf lessons differed from typical mainstream lessons in that they provided a two-to-one ratio with a volunteer instructor for every two

376

E. Britton et al.

participants, allowing the experience to be adapted for each child and their goals. This was beneficial for those who were unfamiliar with the sea or surfing to feel supported. In the second year (2019), there was a 60–70% return rate with the majority of participants feeling more competent in the surf so the ratio was one volunteer instructor to every three participants. After surfing, participants shared food together before returning by bus to the DP centres.

3.3

Data Analysis

Notes from informal or surf-along interviews and field observations were analysed by each author individually using an inductive, grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), coding to identify emerging concepts. This approach to data analysis was adopted because of its flexibility to integrate emerging concepts around the notion of blue space as therapeutic, and how the experience of an unfamiliar place may enhance place attachment for vulnerable groups. In addition, the researchers took time after each session to individually write up memos to document observations and initial ideas as to the organisation of topics and potential coding of data. The memos and photographs also reengaged the authors with the experiences felt during the surf sessions. This approach allowed us to treat data as a combined construction via the perception of the participants (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Sparkes & Smith, 2014).

4

Findings and Discussion

In this section we explore how young asylum seekers engage with blue space through surfing and whether surfing can help transform an unfamiliar environment into an enabling one. In particular, the qualities or mechanisms of the sea and surfing which help create an enabling environment are discussed. Finally, we emphasise the significance of accessing therapeutic environments in light of the prevalence of mental health and welfare issues for children and young people in DP.

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy …

4.1

377

Embracing the Unfamiliar

The process of surfing involves a transition or journey from the more familiar and solid, stable terrain of land into the unstable, fluid and unfamiliar medium of the sea. In fact, we argue that it is this very ‘unfamiliarity’ that can enhance positive outcomes. Similar to Rishbeth and Finney’s (2006) study with migrants in urban green spaces in the UK, the experience of the novelty of surfing and the sea was usually positive for participants who expressed enthusiasm and delight to be in the sea and to surf for the first time. For example, one commented on feeling the ‘saltiness’ of sea water on his face while others remarked on the temperature difference from their homeland. This suggests a combination of surprise and pleasure at being in the sea. The experiences also encouraged creativity, play and a carefree or positive attitude. One participant, for example, who had never experienced the buoyancy of saltwater before, remarked: I never thought I would be able to float, I have tried so many times, it feels really great —male, 16 years old

He was able to link the experience with elements from his former home (of being immersed in fresh water), and yet, discovered a new characteristic (saltwater) that enhanced his previous experiences of immersion in water. These embodied experiences of being in the sea and how the more-than-human qualities of the sea created an enabling environment were explicitly and frequently referred to by participants: I was really looking forward to meeting the water —female, 10 years old

The duration of the programme (four lessons over four weeks), allowed time and space to grow more familiar with the seascape through a range of wave sizes and weather conditions. For some, the unfamiliar seascape became familiar with ease. As observed by Hunt, on the second week on the bus drive to the beach, participants were already wishing for ‘bigger waves’ (female, 15 years old). By the end of the last session, it was evident that many participants already considered themselves surfers,

378

E. Britton et al.

looking forward to the following year’s surf programme, ‘I’m sad it’s my last day but I’m happy too that I did some surfing ’ (female, 9 years old). This is further evidenced by the high return rate of 60–70% (2019), ‘[i]t was easier to come this year because I knew what to expect ’. The participant-led design of surf therapy programmes can facilitate a greater sense of agency and autonomy (Britton, Carlin, et al., 2020). While many participants had never swum in the sea or even been to the beach, each one found a way to make it familiar to them. For example, some who had more experience swum to deeper water straight away, while others made their way out into the waves slowly, finding the water cold and taking the time to adjust, at their own pace: I never swam in the sea before now I know I can—male, 16 years old Before this I was scared to put my face in the water—female, 12 years old

As these findings suggest, the sea does not have to become familiar in order for it to be enjoyed or build self-confidence. The sea, by its unpredictable, ever-changing nature will always have an element of unfamiliarity. Perhaps feeling confident in the unfamiliar sea can help foster greater resilience in the face of an uncertain future and the unfamiliarity of the young people’s everyday lives in DP. The experience of the unfamiliar can be negative or positive depending on the ‘dose’ or degree of unfamiliarity, with both DP centres and the Atlantic sea-space being unfamiliar for many of the participants. However, the experiences of these environments are significantly different, with the former exacerbating feelings of exclusion and the latter with potential to be welcoming depending on the social context and factors that help create a supportive and accepting space. Surfing with WW provided a ‘low dose’ of novelty and challenge, which may be beneficial and lead to an adaptive response allowing greater resilience, otherwise known as ‘hormesis’ (Mattson, 2008). As Gomez-Pinilla (2008: 57) explains, ‘[t]he novelty associated with many environmental stimuli represents a physiological challenge for affected individuals. The sustained pressure of these environmental factors results in the activation of adaptive mechanisms that can become beneficial for neuronal health

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy …

379

and plasticity’. The very characteristics of surfing—challenging, unpredictable, dynamic—require adaptive responses, leading to a greater sense of self-efficacy and confidence (Britton & Foley, 2020; Britton, Carlin, et al., 2020). Considering the increased vulnerability of young asylum seekers to mental health issues and poor health, exacerbated by limited opportunities for recreation or physical activity, the potential for surfing to enhance hormesis or build resilience is important to consider.

4.2

The Role of Surfing in Enhancing Wellbeing

An emphasis on play over the technical or performative aspects of surfing has been identified in the literature as a key health promoting quality of surf therapy (Britton, 2018; Britton & Foley, 2020; Marshall et al., 2019). In this study, participants were not interested in sitting and listening to the brief ‘lesson’ at the beginning of each surf session which involved practicing a ‘pop-up’ (standing position) on the surfboard. They wanted to get into the water as quickly as possible showing the urge for experiential learning rather than being ‘taught’. Participants were quick to progress, picking up the basic skills required to ride a broken wave (white water) to shore while lying prone or standing on the surfboard. Despite many not being able to swim, participants showed confidence by paddling into bigger waves as the session progressed, building the skills to stand up and ride a wave to shore. Some were disappointed if the surf was smaller than the previous session, preferring the thrill and challenge of bigger waves as they became more skilled and confident. However, although some participants were more committed to acquiring the skills to surf, others showed a preference for play and engaging with the beach, sea and waves in novel and creative ways. This was supported by the participant-led design of the programme, where the content was not dictated by the instructors but by the goals and desires of the participants. This enabled a greater sense of play (Fig. 1) with examples of spontaneous wave-jumping, learning to float, playing in the sand and letting the wet sand drip through hands, exploring rock pools or resting in the shallow water between surfs. For example, some participants wanted to

380

E. Britton et al.

Fig. 1 Participants playing and dancing on the beach between surfs

learn to swim with their faces in the water and asked a volunteer to teach them. Some chose to dance on their boards or spend the whole session jumping through the waves, ‘I love jumping in the waves the most’ (male, age 11). Others preferred to stick with learning to surf and did not like the more immersive aspects, ‘standing up on my board was good but I didn’t like getting water in my face’ (female, age 13). The emphasis of WW was not necessarily to learn how to surf but rather on how surfing could facilitate an immersive and positive engagement with an unfamiliar environment. What was clear throughout was the children’s lack of fear, sense of fun and autonomy within the coastal space. This agency (Beames & Brown, 2016) is a key aspect in creating authentic learning experiences, with or without specific outcomes and can facilitate experiences of emotional wellbeing. As one young female participant stated, ‘I enjoy it and it makes me feel happy’ (female, age 12). These experiences of positive engagement in the surf support Rishbeth and Finney’s (2006) argument that meaningful participation in the local environment can be a key part of integration into a new society for migrants.

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy …

4.3

381

Fostering a Sea-Connection

Learning to surf in a group context can enhance a sense of belonging and identity through shared experiences in the surf (Godfrey et al., 2015; Hignett et al., 2018). Participants were diverse in cultural background, levels of confidence, age and interests, and although some participants were siblings or familiar to each other living in the same DP centre, the surf programme also provided the opportunity to mix with young people from another DP centre. There were numerous examples of social connections made during the surf session (Fig. 2), for example, two young girls lying backwards on their boards and holding hands as they caught a wave to the shore: And after she was laughing at me too and my other friend laughed and it was really fun—female, 10 years of age

What was perhaps more surprising were examples of a profound connection to the more-than-human qualities of the sea. One young girl

Fig. 2 Group interactions and celebration during a surfing session

382

E. Britton et al.

‘high-fived’ a wave. Other participants ‘embraced’ the water or the sand, with one lying down in the shallows, familiarising himself with the water and being immersed in it. Children learn and develop their attitudes towards the natural environment (and the sea) through socialisation processes (O’Malley, 2015). Some argue that children in modern society are disconnected from the natural environment due to societal transformations such as increasing modernisation and urbanisation (Louv, 2005). This disconnection is attributed to changes in how children develop attachment with their natural surroundings due to the rapid expansion of (sub)urbanisation and related changes in the physical landscape (Corcoran et al., 2009). Unregulated play outdoors, something children in DP typically do not have access to, is integral in developing a connection but also expanding children’s imagination, creativity, vocabulary and language development (Wenner, 2009). This is important for children’s social development as with ‘a rich exposure to social play experiences [a child] is more likely to become an adult who can manage unpredictable social situations’ (Pellis, 2009 cited in Wenner, 2009: 4). However, the disconnection hypothesis overlooks children as active agents in their environmental learning (O’Malley, 2014). Recent studies find that children are in fact active agents in ‘creating their own cultures and life world’ (Corcoran et al., 2009: 52). Children have expectations as to the structure and purpose of their physical environment to enable exploration and creativity. Personal, social and physical development is closely linked to children’s appropriation of, and sense of belonging to, a particular landscape. Where young people in DP centres often have limited access to outdoor recreation or social interaction, provision of opportunities to play in nature may help facilitate positive social interactions and forms of place attachment in their unfamiliar, adopted home (Gentin et al., 2019). The role young asylum seekers play in creating positive connections to place, as well as the cultural forces shaping that place, is central to this. For example, the nine-year-old female participant who said, ‘I sometimes wonder how did god make the water, I love it so much’, suggests such positive connections.

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy …

4.4

383

Overcoming Barriers

Engaging with the sea cannot be easily or neatly captured (lisahunter, 2018), which is why we chose an ethno-case study approach, and participatory methodologies. However, there remains a tension between being both researcher and observer. It could feel like an intrusion to ask participants questions, for example, how are you feeling? Or, how does it feel to be in the water and to surf? At times, questioning felt like we were interrupting their flow, play and thoughts. Therefore, as the study progressed, we felt there was greater value in observing, listening and absorbing what was experienced and recalling and recording in field notes. The use of more embodied methods, such as body mapping, used previously in surf therapy and considered especially effective when engaging young people in research, could be considered in these settings. Although there were no major language barriers identified during this study, in further work with migrant groups who do not speak English or groups with communication difficulties, body mapping could also overcome language barriers as it relies more on visual than verbal communication (Britton, Carlin, et al., 2020). Surf therapy and shared nature-based learning experiences have been shown to enhance social cohesion (Hignett et al., 2018), however, social mixing can also lead to inter-relational tensions that may re-surface once participants return to shore or their everyday ‘land lives’ (Britton et al., 2018). For example, on one occasion a group of younger girls were shouting at older boys who became quite upset. Even though there was great bonding in the water, once back on land some underlying interpersonal problems can surface. However, this did not appear to interrupt the flow of subsequent sessions with no further visible tensions arising. Self-selection bias is an issue when it comes to better understanding unfamiliar bodies (young asylum seekers) in the surf and may influence the framing of the sea as an enabling space. Without accounting for those who were absent, this study can only provide limited insights into differential experiences of the unfamiliarity of the sea and surf. It is quite possible that those who did not participate may perceive the sea as a place of fear or associate it with negative experiences. However, uptake was high with the majority of children at both DP centres signing

384

E. Britton et al.

up to participate, even if they had no prior experiences of blue spaces. Furthermore, new participants were encouraged to join in subsequent surf sessions following positive reports from their siblings or friends. The high return rate the following year also highlights that the majority of young people had still not received refugee status and remained in DP with continuing uncertainty regarding their future. Longitudinal data is desirable to better understand how surfing facilitates forms of place attachment and even integration for young asylum seekers in what could otherwise be viewed as an ‘unfamiliar landscape’ (Gentin et al., 2019). Despite high levels of interest, participants did not continue surfing outside the WW programme. Becoming ‘familiar’ and establishing positive place attachments can be temporary. Lack of access to transport to the coast, and affordability of participating in surfing independently, are issues common for the sustainability of initiatives working with disadvantaged groups (NEAR Health, 2020). A possible solution, especially given the value of surfing as a form of play, could be to partner with local clubs or organisations, such as a dance school, which could offer a winter programme that continues to tap into self-expression, body awareness, movement and play.

5

Conclusions

WW provides invaluable insights into the experiences of young asylum seekers in a potentially unfamiliar landscape, the sea and surf. The unfamiliarity of surfing, combining surprise, pleasure and discovery (of new skills, perspectives, sensations and new aspects of the coastal environment) encouraged creativity and play. These are all important factors that can help contribute to a sense of integration into a new society. Our findings highlight how active learning experiences in the sea can facilitate a greater sense of relational wellbeing and place connection that emerges from the dynamic interplay of personal, societal and environmental processes. Accessing enabling and therapeutic environments for young asylum seeker is extremely important especially in light of the worrying prevalence of mental health issues and lack of healthcare available in Direct Provision. However, a greater understanding of differential

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy …

385

experiences of these settings, especially blue spaces, is needed in order to accommodate diverse and conflicting needs (Pitt, 2019). Recognising familiar elements or characteristics of an ‘unfamiliar’ place could help provide a conceptual link between former and new homes for asylum seekers (Rishbeth & Finney, 2006), as suggested by one participant’s contrasting experience of trying to float in fresh water compared to the ease he experienced floating in saltwater. Further research would help build understandings of the lived experiences of those not accessing blue spaces (Pitt, 2019). This is especially important given the powerful emotions that can be associated with experiences of the sea, especially traumatic ones for refugees and migrants, and how the risks and fears associated with the coast and sea can be passed through generations (Bell et al., 2019). Such initiatives deserve greater research support and collaboration to help monitor new therapies and provide relevant evidence for practitioners and policy makers. This would support the provision of evidence-based training by governing, sporting and recreational bodies to make inclusion practices mainstream. This would also seek to facilitate therapeutic nature encounters in ways that help promote the capacity of vulnerable groups and individuals to pursue their goals overall.

References Arnold, S., Ryan, E., & Quinn, E. (2018). Ireland ’s response to recent trends in international protection applications [online]. Available https://www.esri.ie/publications/irelands-response-to-recent-trends-ininternational-protection-applications. Accessed 13 Dec 2019. Beames, S., & Brown, M. (2016). Adventurous learning: A pedagogy for a changing world . Routledge. Bell, S., Hollenbeck, J., Lovell, R., White, M., & Depledge, M. (2019). The shadows of risk and inequality within salutogenic coastal waters. In R. Foley, R. Kearns, T. Kistemann, & B. Wheeler (Eds.), Blue space, health and wellbeing: Hydrophilia unbounded (pp. 153–166). Routledge. Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101.

386

E. Britton et al.

Britton, E. (2018). ‘Be Like Water’: Reflections on strategies developing crosscultural programmes for women, surfing and social good. In L. Mansfield, J. Caudwell, B. Wheaton, & B. Watson (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of feminism and sport, leisure and physical education (pp. 793–807). Palgrave Macmillan. Britton, E., Carlin, C., & Kindermann, G. (2020). Surfing and the senses: Using body mapping and embodiment practices to understand the sea and surfing as health enabling. Global Journal of Community Psychology and Practice, 11(2), 1–17. Britton, E., & Foley, R. (2020). Sensing water: Uncovering health and wellbeing in the sea and surf. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 45 (1), 60–87. Britton, E., Kindermann, G., Domegan, C., & Carlin, C. (2020). Blue care: A systematic review of blue space interventions for health and wellbeing. Health Promotion International, 35 (1), 50–69. Britton, E., Olive, R., & Wheaton, B. (2018). Surfers and leisure: ‘Freedom’ to surf? Contested spaces on the coast. In Living with the sea (pp. 161–180). Routledge. Burdsey, D. (2016). Race, place and the seaside: Postcards from the edge. Springer. Caddick, N., Smith, B., & Phoenix, C. (2015). The effects of surfing and the natural environment on the well-being of combat veterans. Qualitative Health Research, 25 (1), 76–86. Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2011). Research methods in education (7th ed.). Routledge. Corcoran, M., Gray, J., & Peillon, M. (2009). Making space for sociability: How children animate the public realm in Suburbia. Nature and Culture, 4 (1), 35–56. Deegan, G. (2018, May 7). Fear turns to friendship as Lisdoonvarna welcomes asylum seekers. The Irish Independent. Accessed online at https://www.iri shtimes.com/news/social-affairs/fear-turns-to-friendship-as-lisdoonvarna-wel comes-asylum-seekers-1.3587878 Egoz, S., & De Nardi, A. (2017). Defining landscape justice: The role of landscape in supporting wellbeing of migrants, a literature review. Landscape Research, 42(sup1), S74–S89. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays by Clifford Geertz. Basic Books. Gentin, S., Pitkänen, K., Chondromatidou, A. M., Præstholm, S., Dolling, A., & Palsdottir, A. M. (2019). Nature-based integration of immigrants in Europe: A review. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 43, 126379.

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy …

387

Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (1967). Grounded theory: The discovery of grounded theory. Sociology the Journal of British Sociological Association, 12(1), 27–49. Godfrey, C., Devine-Wright, H., & Taylor, J. (2015). The positive impact of structured surfing courses on the wellbeing of vulnerable young people. Community Practitioner, 88(1), 26–29. Gomez-Pinilla, F. (2008). The influences of diet and exercise on mental health through hormesis. Ageing Research Reviews, 7 (1), 49–62. Hignett, A., White, M. P., Pahl, S., Jenkin, R., & Froy, M. L. (2018). Evaluation of a surfing programme designed to increase personal well-being and connectedness to the natural environment among ‘at risk’ young people. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 18(1), 53–69. Irish Refugee Council. (2020a). Useful definitions [online]. Available https:// www.irishrefugeecouncil.ie/information-and-referral-service/law-centre-inf ormation. Accessed 13 Jan 2020. Irish Refugee Council. (2020b). Refugee decision making waiting times at crisis point [online]. Available https://www.irishrefugeecouncil.ie/news/irish-ref ugee-council-refugee-decision-making-waiting-times-at-crisis-point/6147. Accessed 13 Jan 2020. lisahunter. (2018). Surfing, sex, genders and sexualities. Routledge. Louv, R. (2005). Last child in the wood: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Algonquin Books. Marshall, J., Kelly, P., & Niven, A. (2019). “When I Go There, I Feel Like I Can Be Myself.” Exploring programme theory within the wave project surf therapy intervention. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16 (12), 2159. Mattson, M. P. (2008). Hormesis defined. Ageing Research Reviews, 7 (1), 1–7. NEAR Health. (2020). Connecting with nature for health and wellbeing toolkit. Environmental Protection Agency: Research Report. Johnstown Castle, Co Wexford. O’Malley, S. (2014). (Re)connecting children with nature? A sociological study of environmental education in Ireland (Unpublished doctoral thesis). National University of Ireland. O’Malley, S. (2015). The relationship between children’s perceptions of the natural environment and solving environmental problems. Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, 21, 87–104. Parker-Jenkins, M. (2018). Problematising ethnography and case study: Reflections on using ethnographic techniques and researcher positioning. Ethnography and Education, 13(1), 18–33.

388

E. Britton et al.

Phoenix, C., Bell, S. L., & Hollenbeck, J. (2019). Segregation and the sea: Towards a critical understanding of race and coastal blue space in Greater Miami. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 45 (2), 115–137. Pitt, H. (2019). No ducking, no diving, no running, no pushing— Hydrophobia and urban blue spaces across the life-course. In R. Foley, R. Kearns, T. Kistemann, & B. Wheeler (Eds.), Blue space, health and wellbeing: Hydrophilia unbounded (pp. 132–149). Routledge. RCPI. (2019). https://www.rcpi.ie/news/releases/the-faculty-of-paediatricscalls-on-the-government-to-abolish-the-direct-provision-system-and-placefamilies-in-appropriate-accommodation/ Rishbeth, C., & Finney, N. (2006). Novelty and nostalgia in urban greenspace: Refugee perspectives. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 97 (3), 281–295. SCRA. (2012). Competencies for community psychology practice society for community research and action, draft, August 15. Society for Community Research And Action (SCRA; APA Division 27). Smith, T. S. (2019). Therapeutic taskscapes and craft geography: Cultivating well-being and atmospheres of recovery in the workshop. Social & Cultural Geography, 22(2), 151–169. Sparkes, A. C., & Smith, B. (2014). Qualitative research methods in sport, exercise and health: From process to product. Routledge. St. Stephen’s Green Trust. (2018). Direct provision centre activities for children [online]. Available https://www.ssgt.ie/direct-provision-centres-activities-forchildren/. Accessed 10 Jan 2020. UNHCR. (2017). Global trends: Forced displacement in 2016 . UNHCR. University College Cork. (2016). Report of DCYA consultations with children and young people living in Direct Provision [online]. Available http://www. justice.ie/en/JELR/Report_of_DCYA_consultations_with_children_and_ young_people_living_in_Direct_Provision.pdf/Files/Report_of_DCYA_c onsultations_with_children_and_young_people_living_in_Direct_Provis ion.pdf. Accessed 10 Jan 2020. Wenner, M. (2009). The serious need for play. Scientific American Mind Magazine [online]. Available http://www.blcelmhurst.org/blcseriousneedforplay 1011.pdf. Accessed 8 Mar 2010. Wheaton, B., Roy, G., & Olive, R. (2017). Exploring critical alternatives for youth development through lifestyle sport: Surfing and community development in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Sustainability, 9 (12), 2298.

15 Welcome Wave: Surf Therapy …

389

Wheaton, B., Waiti, J., Cosgriff, M., & Burrows, L. (2020). Coastal blue space and wellbeing research: Looking beyond western tides. Leisure Studies, 39 (1), 83–95.

16 Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected by Displacement: How Young People Sense the (Un)familiar and How It Affects Their Mental Health Hannah Sender, Yazan Nagi, and Diana Bou Talea

1

Introduction

In this chapter, we build on literature about displacement, place and environmental factors of adolescent mental health to argue for an expansion of existing approaches to displacement and adolescent mental health. We draw on 30 semi-structured interviews and three photography workshops with young Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian residents about their experiences of living in Bar Elias, a town in Lebanon which has H. Sender (B) UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] Y. Nagi New York Medical College, New York, NY, USA D. B. Talea American University of Science and Technology, Beirut, Lebanon e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_16

391

392

H. Sender et al.

been shaped by the displacement of tens of thousands of people from Syria. We show how these young people sense places in Bar Elias, and Bar Elias itself, as being familiar or unfamiliar, and argue that their sense of Bar Elias is related to their personal experiences of displacement. We argue that young people with no personal experience of moving across a border can also experience displacement as a process of ‘un-homing’. We show how young people orientate themselves towards or away from familiar or unfamiliar places to protect or enhance their wellbeing, and indicate the effects of these orientations on their mental health.

2

Approaching Bar Elias

Whenever we drive to Bar Elias, we take the Beirut-Damascus Highway flyover across the new Pan-Arab Highway and observe its extension through the Beqaa Valley. Although the Pan-Arab Highway is still under construction, people have already started building huge mansions along the route. The Beirut-Damascus Highway is the main route into the town from Beirut, and connects it with the Syrian border, which is only fifteen kilometres to the East. When we reach Bar Elias, the highway becomes a commercial street. There’s always a lot of traffic, parked cars and a few pedestrians who squeeze past car bumpers that almost touch the shop fronts. The commercial street brushes the edge of the old town, a circular island of urban life in an otherwise rural region, which dates back to the Bronze Age, where narrow streets wind around low-rise houses, shops and public buildings. Bar Elias serves an important function as a trading place in the Beqaa Valley, an agricultural region of Lebanon. It is also a rest-stop for those travelling between Syria and cities on the Lebanese coast. There are an estimated 100,000 people living in Bar Elias, around half of whom have been displaced from Syria since war broke out in 2011 (UNDP, 2018). The presence of these new residents can be read in the landscape. Shops selling Syrian goods have appeared on the commercial streets, their colourful produce spilling out onto pavements in the traditional Syrian ‘salon’ style. In the town, bins spray-painted with NGO logos line street corners. Intersections have become sites of commerce, as boys

16 Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected …

393

and girls pace between cars clutching packs of tissues and nappies for sale, or buckets of soapy water and windscreen cleaners. When we leave the commercial area and head towards farmland, we can see large settlements (known as Informal Tented Settlements, or ITSs) that have been built in farmers’ fields. One of the largest ITSs is located on the outskirts of town, between a Bedouin settlement and a neighbourhood of low-rise apartment blocks. Displaced Syrians live in the settlement, as well as in the apartment blocks which overlook it. Some residents have been here since the war broke out. Others had arrived later, often after having tried settling in other parts of Lebanon. The history of the ITS here is typical of many. It was established by a few displaced people who rented plots of land from the farmer. They were joined by other families, and NGOs which provided some goods and services as and when they could afford to. Although there are stories of people moving back to Syria (Hamou & Al Maleh, 2019), the ITS remains. In 2021, Syrians’ protracted displacement in Lebanon entered its tenth year, and does not seem likely to end soon. For anyone unfamiliar with Lebanon or the situation of the 1.5 million people from Syria who live there,1 it might be surprising to discover that displaced people are not living in formal camps. Instead, they are required to settle themselves in existing buildings or to establish their own settlements. The Government of Lebanon’s policy of non-encampment adds urgency to existing reflections on places of displacement (Agier, 2002; Darling, 2017; Martin, 2015; Sanyal, 2017): where displaced people live, in what conditions, and how these places are created, maintained and dissolved. In this chapter, we explore: (a) how young people construct a sense of Bar Elias as a place that has been shaped by displacement, and (b) how their sense of place affects their mental health. We present definitions of displacement which trouble common understandings, and explore how these intersect with theories of place, which consider the human subject, their historical experience and their sense of place as being intertwined. 1 1.5 million is an estimated population size. The number of registered refugees is under 1 million, but the UNHCR has not registered anyone as a refugee since May 2015, when the Government of Lebanon demanded that they stop.

394

H. Sender et al.

Building on these, we suggest that Bar Elias can be thought of as a place shaped by displacement, and that adolescents who live there—including Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians—are affected by displacement. We suggest that young people orientate themselves towards or away from familiar or unfamiliar places to protect or enhance their mental health and wellbeing, and call for an extension of adolescent mental health studies, to recognise that place can be a mental health factor in its own right.

3

From Camp, to ‘Campscape’, to Landscape: Spatial Lenses on Place and Displacement

In international policy, ‘displacement’ refers to the forced movement of an individual or group from their homes across local or international borders. Some scholars have troubled this definition. Nixon (2011) argues that ‘displacement’ should not only refer to the physical movement of an individual across a border, but to ‘the loss of the land and resources beneath them, a loss that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable’ (ibid.: 19). Nixon calls this ‘displacement in place’ (ibid.: 17). Focusing on the affective qualities of such experiences, Elliott-Cooper and his colleagues argue that displacement is an experience of ‘un-homing’, where the link between people and place is ‘violently severed’ and the ‘right to dwell’ is undermined, an experience which does not always involve a physical movement of bodies (Elliott-Cooper et al., 2019). By arguing that people’s relationship with place can be changed across time as well as space, these scholars push for a more inclusive definition of displacement. What counts is not merely people’s physical movement between spaces, but rather people’s experiences of change over time and its effect on their sense of place. Physical displacement of a group of people to another place might prompt or exacerbate long-term residents’ displacement in place. When displaced people from Syria began to move across the border and to

16 Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected …

395

emplace themselves in Bar Elias, long-term residents’ social lives and places were reshaped. This reshaping continues today, and contributes to instability of long-term residents’ sense of place, leading to experiences of un-homing. Emphases on the process of emplacement, and the broadening of conceptualisations of ‘displacement’, are both important contributions to discussions about contemporary spaces of displacement. It is becoming increasingly recognised that displaced people do not necessarily move to camps, and instead settle in existing shelters, repurposed buildings or self-built structures. In Lebanon, non-encampment has been a policy for people displaced from Syria, but non-encampment of displaced populations is now the global norm (UNHCR, 2019). Among the registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon, 66% rent apartments and repurposed buildings in urban areas, 19% have established new informal settlements and the remaining 15% sleep in non-residential structures such as garages and active construction sites (UNHCR, UNICEF, World Food Programme, and Inter-Agency Coordination Lebanon, 2018). Syrian practices of emplacement in Lebanon have caused scholars to look at places of displacement, rather than groups of physically displaced people. They describe these places as assemblages of particular actors and activities, rather than as bounded places that exist in isolation from existing settlements. Humanitarianism, securitisation of local roads and neighbourhoods, marginalisation and informality co-exist, interrelate and inform activities in these places (Fawaz, 2016; Harb & Fawaz, 2019; Sanyal, 2014, 2017). These entanglements make it impossible to distinguish between places where displaced people live, and places where long-term residents live (Darling, 2017; Martin, 2015; Sanyal, 2017). However, certain processes or materials can be read as signifiers of displacement. These include economies of aid (Randa Nucho, 2011), labour (Betts et al., 2014; Turner, 2015), waste (Harb & Fawaz, 2019), materialities such as temporary structures (Sanyal, 2017), and even new sounds created by street sellers (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2017). Displaced people and long-term residents share common spaces, material goods and public services, and are implicated in the same social and economic processes impacted by displacement.

396

H. Sender et al.

These insights suggest that displacement ought to become an integral part of how we make sense of places in Lebanon. The challenge scholars face is that displacement and emplacement are ongoing processes, which intersect with other processes which produce place. The effect of this intersection is often thought of in terms of shifts between the rural, urban and camp spaces, as well as the liminal spaces between them (Agier, 2002; Boano et al., 2019). There is a distinct feeling that new spatial concepts are needed, which are more mobile than the categories of ‘urban’, ‘rural’ and ‘camp’. According to Doreen Massey (2005), the problems of working with spatial categories start with the concept of ‘place’ itself. Place has mistakenly been thought of as a static, bounded and locatable referent for space (Massey, 2005). The concept of place has therefore served a similar function to the concept of the ‘camp’: solid ground from which to begin to divide people according to their situatedness outside or inside of it. But place is not an objectively available referent (Hage, 2019). Place is a ‘meeting place’ between people, and between people and their environments, a quality Massey describes as ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey, 2005: 140). Massey suggests that ‘place’ can emerge as something that is ‘sensed’ as being unique to the interrelations which occur as a result of ‘throwntogetherness’ (ibid.). The encounter, made possible by ‘throwntogetherness’, affects subjects involved in the encounter, and subsequently affects re-imaginings of place. In Bar Elias, displaced people from Syria, long-term residents and related actors (like NGO staff ), together with new or changed environments, such as informal settlements, repurposed factories, NGO-funded healthcare centres and concreted-over farmland, are implicated in these encounters. If a sense of place emerges from encounters, then we need to account for human subjects’ situatedness in particular contexts. Arjun Appadurai’s concept of ‘landscape’ helps to refocus our concept of place on the human subjects who produce it. He says that ‘[t]he suffix scape allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes […] terms with the common suffix -scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather,

16 Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected …

397

that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical , linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors’ (Appadurai, 1996: 33, quoted in Martin, 2015). Appadurai’s concept of ‘landscape’ is useful for two reasons. First, it is an open-ended and fluid concept for understanding something which appears to be static and bounded (i.e. land), but which is actually always changing. It can encompass any and all of the categories others have found useful to describe places, and the slippages between them. Second, the suffix ‘scape’ signals the importance of the sensing and reflecting subject, embedded in historical, linguistic and political conditions. The situatedness of the subject is particularly relevant to the issue of displacement, since it indicates how people’s past experiences of place intertwine and inform one another in the present moment. According to Rivke Jaffe, when subjects sense their environments, they orient themselves according to whether a place is sensed as familiar or unfamiliar (Jaffe et al., 2019). A sense of place is informed by historical experience, and therefore the moment of sensing place exceeds the immediate and encompasses the past. It also extends into the future, because people act on these senses by seeking or rejecting familiarity or unfamiliarity, and endeavouring to change something accordingly. The common ground between Massey, Appadurai and Jaffe, is that place is sensed as being temporal and spatial. By reflecting on the (un)familiar, we can see how place is informed by subjects’ histories, which meet in contemporary encounters, and which have the potential to be changed and to change others’ trajectories. But whereas Appadurai and Jaffe’s focus is on the ‘historical, linguistic, and political situatedness’ of the individual subject and how those conditions affect the subject’s perspective, Massey’s focus is on the moment of encounter between people and their non-human environments. In addition, Massey tends to focus on the ‘unprecedented’ nature of the encounter, and the radical openness of ‘place’, implying the importance of a feeling of unfamiliarity to the vitality of a place. But a sense of place can be held by people over time, and therefore made or kept familiar. By combining insights from Massey’s theory of place, Appadurai’s theory of landscapes and Jaffe’s insights about orientations, the discussion of empirical research in Bar Elias shows: (i) that the situated, sensing subject experiences

398

H. Sender et al.

place as (un)familiar, and this experience is affected by their own and others’ displacement, (ii) that their experience informs their orientations towards or away from place and (iii) that these experiences and orientations contribute to their wellbeing or mental ill-health. In doing so, we connect theories which focus on the moment of the encounter as prompting a sense of place, theories of displacement as an experience of being ‘un-homed’ and adolescent wellbeing.

4

Place, Displacement and Young People’s Mental Health

In studies about displacement in Lebanon post-2011, emphasis has been on adult refugees’ or displaced people’s situatedness as ‘others’ in Lebanon. Given that around three quarters of mental health disorders develop during adolescence (Kessler et al., 2005), and that these disorders are linked to adolescents’ environments (Sawyer et al., 2018; Viner et al., 2012), we can anticipate that hostile environments will have long-term consequences for individuals and wider societies. Since the Syrian Civil War broke out in 2011, adolescent mental health literature in Lebanon has explored the impact of displacement to Lebanon on adolescent Syrian refugees. The experience of being physically displaced, and of encountering violent, unfamiliar and exclusionary practices and places in their post-migration environments, are linked to poor mental health (DeJong et al., 2017; Dube et al., 2019). These studies have also supported a balanced perspective, recognising the effect of environmental factors on young people’s mental health, and young people’s capacity for resilience. Less work has been done to explore young people’s agentic attempts to affect their environments. This might be because studies typically discuss place as settings where social interactions happen (i.e. school, home, public space, work), rather than place-making processes in which young people are agentic subjects. Places which are understood as being unique (like Bar Elias) are treated as ready-made stages for social interactions rather than as factors of adolescent mental health. The diminishment in

16 Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected …

399

empirical studies of place as a dynamic process is linked to the exclusion of certain groups from existing research. In studies of displacement, adolescents who have not been physically displaced are often excluded, even though they often share the same place as physically displaced adolescents. The study on which this chapter is based sought to redress these points, by considering physical displacement as an important factor in the shaping of a place, and by approaching displacement as an experience of ‘un-homing’. It therefore includes adolescents with diverse experiences of displacement, including those who have no personal experience of physical displacement (i.e. young Lebanese and Palestinians who have grown up in Bar Elias). Whilst there are very important differences between the experiences of young men, women, refugees and long-term residents, there are also important commonalities. This is what is recognised in the phrase, ‘a lost generation’, which describes young people from refugee and host communities who face similar hardships (UNICEF & World Vision, 2018). In our study, experiences of violence and discrimination differed across nationalities, genders and (dis)abilities. However, the research did reveal common experiences between adolescents living in Bar Elias, which confirm the value of approaching adolescent mental health from a place-based perspective.

5

The Study

This chapter draws on 30 semi-structured interviews with Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian people between the ages of 15–18 years, and three photography workshops with the same participants. The research was conducted in March and April 2019. The photography workshops involved training in photography skills and story-telling with photographs, before inviting participants to photograph things, people and places which mattered to their wellbeing in Bar Elias. The research forms part of a wider collaboration between University College London (Institute for Global Prosperity and Institute of Global Health), the American University of Beirut, Balamand University and CatalyticAction, a not-for-profit design studio. The academic

400

H. Sender et al.

team worked in partnership with the Lebanese Union for People with Physical Disabilities and MultiAid Programmes, who informed research design and supported participant recruitment. They also provided space and assistance during interviews and photography workshops. Nine differently-abled participants were included in the research, to avoid the research being ability-normative. We do not distinguish differently-abled participants unless their disability is relevant to the discussion. The study was designed to investigate the relationship between adolescents’ experiences of moving to, and living in Bar Elias, and their mental health and wellbeing. It therefore had two parts: the first was to define what mental health and wellbeing means to young people who live in Bar Elias, and the second was to investigate how experiences of Bar Elias impact on mental health and wellbeing. In the remainder of the chapter, we discuss how young people produce a sense of Bar Elias, and then describe how their sense of place prompts a change in them, which can be linked to mental health and wellbeing.

6

Young People’s Perspectives of Bar Elias

When young people were asked about their experiences of growing up in Bar Elias, almost all of them compared their experience of Bar Elias now to their historical experiences of Bar Elias and to other places. Here we describe these comparative perspectives using the terms ‘familiar’ and ‘unfamiliar’. We argue that a sense of (un)familiarity encompasses the immediate feeling generated in a moment of encounter, but also includes an appraisal of this place in relation to other places. Young people did not necessarily use these terms, but their descriptions of their relationships with other people and places evoke a sense of familiarity or unfamiliarity. We move fluidly between Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese adolescents’ narratives, suggesting commonalities in the ways they produce a sense of place, and commonalities in the ways they experience Bar Elias. In doing so, we trouble assumptions about the relationship between displacement and sense of place, which link physical displacement with feelings of being unfamiliar, and we work towards a more inclusive and dynamic understanding of displacement.

16 Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected …

6.1

401

Becoming Unfamiliar

Several young people we spoke with had lived in different places in Lebanon before moving to Bar Elias. The following narrative comes from a young Lebanese woman born in a village next to Bar Elias and who moved to Beirut, before moving back to the area. She described her current living situation: My mother rented this house in a place full of Syrian people (( ‫( أجلک‬feeling disgusted)) and we are the only Lebanese. We are the only ones who clean up and work. I’m telling my mother to change the place of our living and go and see the world, things that we know, people we know, not people who don’t say good morning or good evening or anything. It means getting away from the world around us, go to see how the world is. If we wanted to go to the store we should go in the car. I told my mother that we should change our living place, first we will get out more often and then we can compare ourselves with people who are like us, and then we will laugh and joke and won’t stay tensed […] it is far from the environment that I know. (Lebanese, female, 17)

Although this young woman spent her childhood on the outskirts of Bar Elias, she feels as though the environment she is in has become unfamiliar. She connects the sight of people from Syria, the mess they do not ‘clean up’, and their silence whenever she encounters them, with this sense of unfamiliarity. The people who share her building are sensed as being ‘not like us’. By contrast, ‘the world’ is potentially full of people ‘who are like us’. There are two places that matter in this narrative. Bar Elias is a place sensed as having become unfamiliar. Her narrative echoes Massey’s notion of place as something which emerges from ‘throwntogetherness’, rather than as a bounded and fixed abstraction. Her description of increasing unfamiliarity describes an experience of being ‘un-homed’ which Nixon (2011) and Elliott-Cooper et al. (2019) call ‘displacement’. Bar Elias is a place away from which this young woman wishes to, and can, orient herself. This orientation away from Bar Elias is key to her wellbeing, to her capacity to laugh and joke. The second important place

402

H. Sender et al.

is ‘the world’, a hoped-for place of familiarity. This is a virtual place— it exists in her imagination—but it is no less important as a place of potential, towards which she orients herself.

6.2

Finding the Familiar

Two brothers who had lived in Lebanon for seven years considered Lebanon their home. Although they had been forcibly displaced from Syria, and hoped to return there in the future, Bar Elias was familiar to them. Much of this sense of familiarity came from spending several years in Bar Elias, attending school for a few months, working and driving a motorbike around the town. The brothers not only learned to navigate the town, but to travel outside too. In the photography workshop, one sibling described discovering a single immediate link between his former home in Syria and his home in Lebanon. The young man had photographed a tree outside his home in Bar Elias (Fig. 1). His mother used the tree’s leaves for cooking. This young man did not only sense that the unfamiliar became familiar over time, but also abruptly discovered the familiar in Bar Elias. The sight of the tree, together with the taste of the leaves, was an immediate connection between his home in Bar Elias with that in Syria. The taste of the leaves reminded him of his childhood, and made him happy, but not in such a way as to make him reject Bar Elias and orientate himself towards Syria. When he encounters the familiar, the young man’s historical experience of place in Syria and his current lived environment coalesce into one place, in Bar Elias. Bar Elias becomes familiar, both through this young man’s sustained encounters with it over several years, and also abruptly, when he realises the familiar tree in his home in Bar Elias. In Bar Elias, the young man is able to feel happy where he is. Though he has been physically displaced from Syria, his narrative indicates the possibility that a place can become home-like, and a source of mental wellbeing, over time.

16 Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected …

403

Fig. 1 Photograph taken by 17-year-old Syrian male participant

6.3

Moving from the Familiar to the Unfamiliar

This young man’s sibling shared many of his brother’s sentiments about Syria and Lebanon. He did, however, also describe a sharp instant of unfamiliarity in Bar Elias: The curriculum in Lebanon is with a foreign language and not Arabic so this is why I didn’t learn […] this is why I didn’t continue and also all students used to run away and escape school and this is why our existence is the same as our absence. […] After a while my father saw us and discovered that we are escaping school and we told him that we learned nothing and it’s useless to go and he told us to go stay at home. […] you know I regret everything, I regret not continuing my education, I regret. (Syrian, male, 17)

404

H. Sender et al.

The Syrian curriculum is taught in Arabic, but the Lebanese curriculum at secondary school level is taught in either French or English (with the exception of Arabic lessons). Although Lebanon and Syria share the same conversational Arabic dialect, the young man hears a foreign language when he enters secondary school. This aural experience is jarring, and he struggles to learn. Although he does not mention his disability here, both siblings had hearing impairments and wore hearing aids. When we met in groups, both would have to make additional effort to hear what was being said. This disability is very likely to have been a problem in this school environment, where a foreign language was being spoken. The young man orientates himself away from this unfamiliar schooling environment and ‘escapes’, before eventually dropping out altogether. His virtual ‘absence’ from school—an orientation away from education—precedes his physical absence from school. The effect on his mental health and wellbeing is apparent: he regrets everything. The young man looks back to this experience and his decision to orient himself away from education, and he connects this with his present inactivity (‘I sit doing nothing and I’m not happy with that’) and his difficulty finding work. Unfamiliarity becomes a sensory barrier to his education (because he cannot make out the foreign sounds) and impedes his future. Unfamiliarity and regret intertwine. He seems to be suggesting that the unfamiliar could have been made to become familiar if he persisted at school. His narrative signals the vacillating relationship between people and place which Massey and Appadurai foreground. However, the immediate encounter—full of possibility for reorientation, according to Jaffe—is in the past, to be regretted and not to be changed.

6.4

Returning to the Familiar

In the previous three examples, we heard from young people who have oriented themselves away from the unfamiliar and towards the familiar. They have connected the experience of sensing their environments as familiar with good mental health and wellbeing. In this section, we hear from a young Lebanese man who orientates himself towards a less familiar place, whilst he has to live in a place that is familiar to him.

16 Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected …

405

This young man was born in Bar Elias, but lived in Beirut for four years before moving back to the town. Like the other young people we have heard from so far, this young man described how Beirut became familiar to him over those four years. He did not describe Bar Elias as having become unfamiliar to him in that time: on the contrary, he describes Bar Elias as ‘[his] village and I like it, no one doesn’t like his village […] I have friends, family, and everyone from the same blood’ (Lebanese, male, 17). However, the experience of living in Beirut was preferable: Now in Bar Elias it is not the same environment that I got used to in Beirut. I am facing difficulties sometimes adapting to the environment. When I was a kid I used to like Bar Elias a lot. But when we left Beirut I knew its value. (Lebanese, male, 17)

When asked what made him prefer Beirut to Bar Elias, the young man says that Beirut is simply ‘better, in terms of civilization, social life, culturally, everything. The roads are different. For example, in Bar Elias there is a lot of garbage on the streets. In Beirut, and especially in Ashrafieh and Hamra, none’. To contrast the two places, the young man suggests that it is the mindset of people in Bar Elias and their effect on the environment, which makes him orient himself away from it: ‘The difficult thing in Bar Elias, is the mentality of the people, meaning the things they have reached, culturally reached, they are not well surrounded, they don’t value the person they are talking to. They don’t think about the consequences’. The sight of garbage is one sensory experience among several, which cause him to orient himself away from Bar Elias and towards Beirut. There is also something ineffable which the young man tries to grasp at—social life, culture, civilisation—which evades a single sensory experience, but is a sense of place that emerges from a combination of sensory encounters. The young man says that returning to Beirut will have a direct impact on his mental health: ‘I improve my mental health, if I go’, but it is still difficult for him to say exactly what it is in or about Beirut that has this effect. The young man brings his historical experience of another place to Bar Elias, into his encounters there. As Appadurai has noted, the young

406

H. Sender et al.

man’s positionality affects not only how he perceives Bar Elias, but also how he describes it to others. Hence, the place of Bar Elias emerges in relation to Beirut. The young man’s historical positionality also affects his orientation: he orients himself away from ‘his village’ of Bar Elias towards Beirut. He imagines this reorientation away from Bar Elias will improve his mental health: he is struggling to adapt to Bar Elias, not necessarily because it has changed as a result of displacement, but because his position in relation to Bar Elias has changed as a result of having lived in Beirut. This narrative pushes at the boundaries of the concept of displacement, implying that forced emplacement (even in one’s ‘village’) has similar consequences for young people’s mental health as displacement.

6.5

Making the Unfamiliar Familiar

Young people in Bar Elias encounter the unfamiliar when they experience ordinary life events. One young Palestinian woman, who had grown up in Bar Elias, shared her experience of moving schools: Participant: It was a bit hard to move from one school to another. Researcher: What did you feel at that time and how did you go along with this situation? P: Normal, a year and [it] pass[ed]. R: What did you do to feel more comfortable? P: I started integrating more with the teachers and my studies. It’s almost the same school. R: But with other teachers? P: Yes of course. R: So you became more aware? P: Yes. (Palestinian, female, 16) In the context of this chapter, this young woman’s narrative highlights an important relationship between familiar and unfamiliar places hinted at throughout. We have seen how unfamiliar landscapes can become familiar over time, and vice versa. But individuals’ encounters and ways

16 Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected …

407

of dealing with such processes are also an important part of shaping a sense of place. This young woman did not consciously make the school familiar to herself, but it became familiar because she endured its unfamiliarity. This young woman refers to her ‘integration’ with teachers, until she can say that the school is ‘almost the same school’. But her senses are not dulled by the familiarity. Instead, she ‘became more aware’ of her environment. Reflecting on enduring a shift in her mental health (a result of encountering an unfamiliar place), this young woman suggests a lasting impact on the person she is now and how she relates to others. Her ability to persist in school is not only an expression of personal agency to endure difficult circumstances. It also signals her capacity to contribute to the emergence of the school and of Bar Elias as places where people like her can exist and do well. Reading her narrative through Appadurai, her awareness of her own positionality and power in relation to others will contribute to the endurance and emergence of place, not as a site of social relations, but as a product of them.

6.6

The Remotely-Experienced Familiar

Most of the young people we spoke with mentioned having family, friends and romantic partners in other places. Their social networks therefore stretch around the world. When we asked about his plans for the future, one young Palestinian man from Bar Elias told us that he wanted to travel to Spain to study: Researcher: Would you like to stay in Lebanon or would you prefer to travel? Participant: Travelling. R: Where to? P: Spain. R: Why? P: My uncle is there; he wants to take us to study there. R: Do you like this idea? P: Yes, but there will be a lot of suffering.

408

R: P:

R: P: R: P:

H. Sender et al.

Like what? You need to study the new language and then when you get back here you need one year to legalize your certificate. Hard work to be done. Other than this hard step, is there any other thing making you hesitate to travel? Like being far from your parents? No no normal. Why normal? I got used to it: they’re always at home and I am outside. (Palestinian, male, 17)

This young man’s plans for the future are common among the young people we spoke with: 14 of the 30 participants explicitly expressed a desire to leave Bar Elias. Apart from the young Lebanese woman we heard from first, these young people named specific countries and cities they would like to move to. They knew about these places from family members who lived there, and with whom they spoke. Whilst some had no direct experience of these places, they had become familiar with them indirectly, through their social networks and communications technology. Young people reported spending a lot of their time on their phones, and named Facebook and WhatsApp as ways of communicating with people living elsewhere. This young man’s online communication with his uncle means that he has been able to make Spain more familiar to him over time, without physically visiting it. Several of the young people we spoke with orientated themselves towards places they have never been to, but had heard about through family and friends abroad. This orientation away from Bar Elias and towards remotely experienced places is an orientation away from one kind of familiar landscape, towards another kind of familiar landscape—one made familiar through communication with friends and family in digital spaces. This adds a new dimension to the notion of the ‘encounter’: until now, we have appraised physical encounters between young people and their environments. But young people are situated in an era of digital spaces, and their perspective on, and production of, a sense of place, are inflected through these. Digital spaces serve as a kind

16 Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected …

409

of extension of the familiar space: communication in these spaces solidifies relationships among residents of Bar Elias, and between residents of Bar Elias and family and friends abroad. The young man anticipates the impact leaving Bar Elias will have on his mental health. Although he suggests there will be some emotional ‘suffering’, he seems to look forward to leaving Bar Elias, implying moving will benefit his mental health in the long term. This implies that young people can calculate the degree of suffering they are willing to experience, in order to live a better life in the long term.

7

Conclusions

We have shown that young people develop a sense of place by encountering others, and by being able to see, hear and taste in that encounter. Their immediate sensory experience of place is then animated by feelings of (un)familiarity. Sensing the (un)familiar has different temporalities: it can happen in a brief moment, or over a prolonged period of time. The concept of the (un)familiar has also allowed us to demonstrate that young people have mobile subject positions which are related to their past, present, digital and even imagined environments. This informs whether they orient towards or away from place. We have heard from young people who have moved away from the unfamiliar, towards the familiar, and from young people who have leant towards the unfamiliar and away from the familiar, depending on their encounters with other people, things (such as rubbish in the streets) and experiences of ineffable qualities (such as local people’s ‘mentality’). Finally, we have indicated a link between young people’s sense of the world as familiar or unfamiliar, and their mental health and wellbeing. Some young people attempt to orientate themselves towards and away from familiar or unfamiliar places, in order to protect their mental health and wellbeing. There are two key conclusions we want to draw out of these reflections, which relate specifically to conceptualisations of displacement. The first problematises the concept of ‘displacement’ as a category of movement across a border and puts forward a concept of displacement

410

H. Sender et al.

that is linked with mental health and wellbeing; the second argues that ‘displacement’ can be seen as a process which shapes a sense of place. Many of the young people we spoke with feel displaced within an increasingly unfamiliar Bar Elias, signalling the dynamism of place which renders their relationships with it unstable. For these young people, the ‘characteristics that made [Bar Elias] inhabitable’ are not necessarily tangible resources like food or water, but ineffable resources which make somewhere a good place to live. For the first young woman, the ineffable resource is trust between herself and her neighbours. For the young man who moved to Bar Elias from Beirut, the resource is an accepting attitude to others. Whereas the young woman craves familiarity (‘people like us’), the young man desires an accepting attitude towards the unfamiliar. Both express a sense of Bar Elias as a place which is lacking important resources which allow them to have good mental health and wellbeing. In this sense, these young people express a sense of displacement as a process of feeling un-homed. Whether or not they have physically moved across a border, many young people we spoke with expressed this sense of being displaced in place. This research has shown that physical displacement intersects with existing problems in a place, and can lead to common mental health challenges, needs and desires that should be addressed holistically. Secondly, this chapter has explored the concept of ‘displacement’ as a character of a place. Earlier, we drew on Appadurai’s concept of ‘scape’— particularly the notion that landscapes are a perspectival construct—and Massey’s concept of ‘place’, to suggest how place is not available as an objectively given referent, but as something that emerges from the encounters between people and environments. In the analysis, we showed that young people in Bar Elias reflect on such encounters in relation to previous encounters in other locations, or in Bar Elias in the past. But, as we have seen, young people’s descriptions of Bar Elias are also animated by ideas of other places. Young people are able to develop ideas of places of which they have no direct experience. Family members and friends being dispersed across the world, together with the availability of communications technology, mean that young people can also draw on others’ narratives about places. All of these can be drawn into comparison to inform a sense of place as being either familiar or unfamiliar.

16 Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected …

411

This substantiates Jaffe and Appadurai’s claims about people’s biographies informing encounters, and Massey’s claim about encounters comprising place, in the context of young people’s lives in the Beqaa Valley. But this empirical work also highlights the importance of other people’s mobilities, adolescents’ ideas of the places they are in, and their considered orientation towards those places, to the perception of Bar Elias as a place to leave, and to be disconnected from. Once a place is sensed as being familiar or unfamiliar, young people describe how they orientated themselves towards or away from the place they are in. Their narratives liberate the terms ‘unfamiliar’ and ‘familiar’ from normative interpretations as either bad or good for mental health. The question is not whether a place is unfamiliar or familiar, but whether young people feel as though they are able to create further encounters with a place that will be positive for them, or whether they are able to physically withdraw from places should they choose to. An important part of mental health and wellbeing is the sense that one is living well in relation to others. When young people in Bar Elias encounter others, they reflect on how they wish to live in relation to other people and develop an ethical sensibility founded in mutual recognition of others in shared spaces. The Lebanese young woman accuses her neighbours of failing to respect her family and their building. In the Lebanese school, the young Syrian man’s language needs are not recognised. The young Lebanese man from Beirut complains of people not being accepting of, or caring for, shared spaces. The mutual recognition of others might be a starting point in supporting young people to reproduce familiarity and to feel supported in their exploration of the unfamiliar. Unfortunately, many young people we spoke with imagined this only being possible away from Bar Elias. Whilst mutual recognition was valued by young people, opportunities to become familiar and embed themselves were limited by poor quality and low numbers of services for young people. Schools struggle to provide classrooms and teaching for the increased number of students; public transport is deemed unsafe and too expensive for many; and youth services are underfunded. For many, the potential to create positive encounters elsewhere is also limited. Limitations on movement tended to come up in conversations with those

412

H. Sender et al.

adolescents who have experienced a process of un-homing to, or within, Bar Elias. This conjunction of physical immobility and displacement contributes to poor mental health in Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian adolescents alike. They are compelled to endure the situation in Bar Elias, even as they orient themselves away from Bar Elias and towards other places. Given the legal (e.g. border restrictions), economic (e.g. cash flow) and social (e.g. gendered) limitations on movement, this orientation towards other places is likely to remain virtual. Though we have heard from some young people with enduring agency, most lack power to make Bar Elias a place they would like to live in, or to move to another place. As these young people are becoming adults, their possible ways out are increasingly restricted, and their hope for a future elsewhere is eroding. Compelled to remain displaced in place, these young people’s individual actions, whilst small and ordinary, are reshaping Bar Elias. Whilst some young people continue to orient themselves towards Bar Elias, their efforts to find the familiar and explore the unfamiliar ought to be supported for the wellbeing of coming generations. Acknowledgements This work was made possible by the passion and dedication of the following people: Dr. Miriam Orcutt, Dr. Delan Devakumar, Joana Dabaj, Ramona Abdullah, Rachel Btaiche and Dr. Fouad Fouad. We are grateful to CatalyticAction, the Lebanese Union for People with Physical Disabilities and Multi Aid Programmes for the excellent work they continue to do, in increasingly impossible circumstances. We thank the young people who took the time to share their experiences with us. We thank them for their honesty and look up to them for their bravery in unimaginable times of crisis. This research was funded by a UCL Grand Challenges grant and philanthropic funding from Marc Schoucair.

References Agier, M. (2002). Between war and city: Towards an urban anthropology of refugee camps. Ethnography, 3(3), 317–341.

16 Encountering (Un)familiar Places in a Place Affected …

413

Betts, A., Bloom, L., Kaplan, J., & Omata, N. (2014). Refugee economies: Rethinking popular assumptions. Oxford. Boano, C., Dabaj, J., & Al-Harithy, H. (2019). Learning to be a city: Emerging practices for housing the displaced . AUB City Debates. Darling, J. (2017). Forced migration and the city: Irregularity, informality, and the politics of presence. Progress in Human Geography, 41(2), 178–198. DeJong, J., Sbeity, F., Schlecht, J., Harfouche, M., Yamout, R., Fouad, F. M., Manohar, S., & Robinson, C. (2017). Young lives disrupted: Gender and well-being among adolescent Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Conflict and Health, 11(1), 25–34. Dube, A., Bartels, S. A., Michael, S., & Michaelson, V. (2019). Positive worry and negative hope: Paradoxical perceptions of the experiences of Syrian refugee girls in Lebanon. Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 4 (1), 0–15. Elliott-Cooper, A., Hubbard, P., & Lees, L. (2019). Moving beyond Marcuse: Gentrification, displacement and the violence of un-homing. Progress in Human Geography, 44 (3), 492–509. Fawaz, M. (2016). Planning and the refugee crisis: Informality as a framework of analysis and reflection. Planning Theory, 16 (1), 99–151. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2017). Disrupting humanitarian narratives? Retrieved December 13, 2019, from https://refugeehosts.org/representations-of-displa cement-series/ Hage, G. (2019). Academia in the revolution. Retrieved July 29, 2020, from https://vimeo.com/369147268 Hamou, A., & Al Maleh, A. (2019). The politics of return: Refugees, NGOs navigate increasingly fraught climate in host countries. Retrieved July 30, 2019, from https://syriadirect.org/news/the-politics-of-return-refugees-ngosnavigate-increasingly-fraught-climate-in-host-countries/ Harb, M., & Fawaz, M. (2019). Forced displacement, urbanization, and the dark side of informality: A view from Lebanon. AUB City Debates. Jaffe, R., Dürr, E., Jones, G. A., Angelini, A., Osbourne, A., & Vodopivec, B. (2019). What does poverty feel like? Urban inequality and the politics of sensation. Urban Studies, 57 (5), 1015–1031. Kessler, R., Berglund, P., Demler, O., Jin, R., Merikangas, K., & Walters, E. (2005). Lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset distributions of DSM-IV disorders in the national comorbidity survey replication. Archives of General Psychiatry, 62, 593–602.

414

H. Sender et al.

Martin, D. (2015). From spaces of exception to “campscapes”: Palestinian refugee camps and informal settlements in Beirut. Political Geography, 44, 9–18. Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage. Nixon, R. (2011). Introduction. In Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press. Randa Nucho, J. (2011). Everyday sectarianism in urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, public services and power. Princeton University Press. Sanyal, R. (2014). Urbanizing refuge: Interrogating spaces of displacement. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(2), 558–572. Sanyal, R. (2017). A no-camp policy: Interrogating informal settlements in Lebanon. Geoforum, 84, 117–125. Sawyer, S. M., Azzopardi, P. S., Wickremarathne, D., & Patton, G. C. (2018). The age of adolescence. The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health, 2(3), 223– 228. Turner, L. (2015). Explaining the (non-)encampment of Syrian refugees: Security, class and the labour market in Lebanon and Jordan. Mediterranean Politics, 20 (3), 386–404. UN, and Government of Lebanon. (2019). Lebanon Crisis Response Plan 2017–2020 (2019 update). Retrieved July 29, 2020, from data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/download.php?id=7723 UNDP. (2018). Below the surface: Results of a WhatsApp survey of Syrian refugees and host communities in Lebanon. Retrieved July 29, 2020. UNHCR. (2019). Global trends: Forced displacement in 2018. Retrieved July 29, 2020, from www.unhcr.org/5c6fb2d04 UNHCR, UNICEF, World Food Programme, and Inter-Agency Coordination Lebanon. (2018). Vulnerability Assessment of Syrian Refugees in Lebanon 2018. UNICEF & World Vision. (2018). No lost generation 2018 update. Retrieved July 29, 2020, from http://childrenofsyria.info/2016/07/12/no-lost-genera tion-2016-update/ Viner, R. M., Ozer, E. M., Denny, S., Marmot, M., Resnick, M., Fatusi, A., & Currie, C. (2012). Adolescence and the social determinants of health. The Lancet, 379 (9826), 1641–1652.

17 University Students Noticing Nature: The Unpleasant, the Threatening and the Unfamiliar Francesca Boyd

1

Introduction: The Desks and the Ducks

The university library is adjacent to a park. The study area desks line the large windows that overlook the park’s duck pond. The students sit on one side and the ducks on the other. They watch each other. It is just before the Easter holiday, so the library is particularly busy as deadlines and exams approach. When lunchtime arrives, the ducks offer an audience to those who have come to eat by the pond. The benches are usually filled with families and individuals enjoying a break. However, the library is still humming with study, as many of the students take their breaks in the area of the library which allows food. Whilst the park is only the other side of the glass, many students do not use their breaks to visit. The physical glass barrier is not what prevents some students from visiting the park. It is the accumulated unseen dimensions that F. Boyd (B) Landscape Architecture Department, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_17

415

416

F. Boyd

manifest to make this park unfamiliar to those sitting next to it. This chapter considers the social, individual and behavioural dimensions that result in a familiar landscape becoming an unfamiliar place to visit. Unfamiliar is considered to be a lack of experience of a place rather than a lack of recognition. Many of us can imagine or recognise a local park with its flower beds and tarmac paths; however, that does not explicitly mean we have experience of or attachment to the place. The multidimensional experience of place attachment is explored here using Scannell and Gifford’s (2010) Place Attachment Framework. Specifically, this chapter details the elements of urban green spaces which prevent university students’ engagement with nature. Considering the desks and the ducks, this chapter answers why it is important to understand the dimensions of place attachment as a way to support university students’ use of nearby green space for their well-being.

2

The University Campus

University students can find the transition from home to university life challenging (Pullman et al., 2009). This transition represents an intense period of geographical, economic and social change, moving many miles and from one life stage to the next. It is also an opportunity for independent living and development of personal interests and habits. The university campus is usually a place comprising of accommodation, lecture theatres, libraries and labs. Campus landscape design is restricted by the inherited buildings, the estates management plan and the required functionality. Whilst each university campus varies, all share the physical role of providing the backdrop to undergraduates’ formative time at university. The campus represents a patchwork of compulsory spaces such as lecture theatres and chosen spaces such as cafes or study areas. The intersection between the spaces students’ desire and avoid, and those available may reveal opportunities to improve the university experience. This chapter suggests nature on campus is an important element to support university students’ mental health. Whilst ‘natural’ is a contested term with definitions ranging from pristine environments through to designed gardens, within this chapter the

17 University Students Noticing Nature …

417

natural environment is considered a space which contains flora, fauna and is outside (Bowler et al., 2010; Sturm & Cohen, 2014). Specifically, the university campus landscape is considered an urban green space meaning a natural environment within a built area. A liberal understanding of ‘natural environment’ and ‘nature’, was used in the research to be as accessible as possible for the participants. As this research investigated university students’ lived experience of urban green spaces, it was vital those spaces could be designated by the participants. Attachment to place and spaces is a personal construct and for this research it is explored through the participants’ choice of natural environment and urban green space.

2.1

University Student’s Mental Health

Over the past decade concern for university students’ mental health has increased. Three quarters of mental health problems emerge by the age of 25, with undergraduate university students five times more likely to be diagnosed with a mental health condition than the general population (Public Health England, 2018; Usher & Curran, 2019). University services have experienced increased demand for mental health support as awareness, diagnoses and funding limitations grow (Aronin & Smith, 2016; Ibrahim et al., 2013). Studies from the USA and UK present a mixed understanding of increasing mental health issues at universities; however, it is evident that mental health support for depression and anxiety is needed amongst the student population (Blanco et al., 2008; Ibrahim et al., 2013). For example, mental health related disclosure amongst students at the University of Sheffield has increased fivefold in ten years (University of Sheffield, 2017). Student well-being affects all aspects of university life including student retention rates, grade achievement and life satisfaction (McFarland et al., 2008). Given increasing pressures on student support services, the current reactive response may benefit from preventative measures such as utilising the mental health benefits provided by natural environments (Richardson, 2019; Universities UK, 2015). This could be achieved using university landscapes and practical interventions to

418

F. Boyd

engage those who do not currently frequent natural environments. Therefore, this research details opportunities and challenges of introducing university students to unfamiliar landscapes for their well-being.

2.2

Nature and Health

Research over the past three decades has demonstrated the potential well-being benefits from increased regular engagement with urban green spaces (Hartig et al., 2014; Honold et al., 2014; Irvine et al., 2013; Kaplan, 1993; Maas et al., 2006; Mavoa et al., 2019; Plane & Klodawsky, 2013). This potential is partly associated with creating connection to nature through frequent visits or engagement (such as gardening or bird watching). Some researchers believe humans have a biological affinity with the natural world and as such receive positive physiological responses when they are able to fulfil this connection known as Biophilia (Wilson, 1984). Others hypothesise that the natural environment provides a relief from mechanical time and allows for soft fascination to arise (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989). This soft fascination allows the mind to recuperate and restore as defined by Attention Restoration Theory (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989). The application of ART to indoor spaces has seen positive effects on stress and fatigue (Kaplan, 1993). Lower levels of stress and fatigue have wide-reaching effects on health, work productivity and well-being (Kaplan, 1993). The natural and built environment are amongst the determinants of health and well-being; others being social and economic factors (Marmot & Bell, 2012). These determinants can have positive or negative impacts at an individual or population level and are influential in exacerbating or equalising health inequalities (Marmot & Bell, 2012). Over the past decade there has been increased attention in this area with Public Health England (2017) promoting a more holistic approach to health that includes the environment. These determinants operate on university campuses and as one of the dominant environment’s students engage with, provide opportunities for a public health level (rather than an individual interventions) approach to students’ well-being.

17 University Students Noticing Nature …

419

The role of nature as a salutogenic tool is of particular importance due to increasing levels of urbanisation (National Capital Committee, 2015; World Health Organization, 2017). The UK Government’s latest 25year plan dedicates substantial attention to the benefits afforded through developing people’s relationship with the natural environment (DEFRA, 2018). Engaging with the natural environment for 30 minutes or more per week could reduce the prevalence of depression and high blood pressure by 7 and 9%, respectively (Shanahan et al., 2016). Restoration for mental fatigue through time in the natural environment is evidenced to reduce conditions such as anxiety, depression and stress (Bragg & Atkins, 2016; Kaplan, 1995; Ohly et al., 2016). Therefore, integrating nature into campus landscapes could provide key restorative moments, particularly for urban student residents who typically have less access to green space.

2.3

Connection to Nature

An additional dynamic to consider is that an individual’s connection to nature changes throughout their life course and is influenced in a multidimensional way which is not yet fully understood (Hughes et al., 2019). For university student’s, the recorded drop in their connection to nature score presents a contemporary challenge. Previous, non-longitudinal research found that different age groups reported varying levels of connection to nature (Bird, 2007). A dramatic decrease in connection to nature was observed in teenagers which does not increase until the mid-20s, the typical age group for undergraduate university students. An additional complication regarding young adults is whilst connection to nature may support positive emotional well-being, contradicting evidence suggests that benefits may not be related to the immediate environment. A study of 11–16-year olds in Canada found the immediate residential environment did not act as a leading determinant for their emotional well-being (Huynh et al., 2013). Instead, Huynh et al. (2013) found individual contexts, such as demographic characteristics, family social-economic status and perceptions of neighbourhood surroundings were stronger potential determinants for emotional well-being.

420

F. Boyd

Both childhood nature experience and duration of time spent engaging with the natural environment were independently found to predict an individual’s connection to nature (Cleary et al., 2020). A lack of engagement with the natural environment can be due to many reasons including personal and geographical factors (Dallimer et al., 2014). It is still possible for a new positive experience in the natural environment to increase levels of nature connection, meaning that even adults unfamiliar with natural environments may still be able to create a connection (Cleary et al., 2020). The idea that connection to nature can change through current experiences in different natural environments (such as parks, or forests) is vital for the success of interventions. A large nationwide study conducted between 2009 and 2015 by Natural England on the self-reported reasons for not engaging with the natural environment found specific demographic groups were more likely to give certain responses (Boyd et al., 2018; King et al., 2015). The study found that 20% of the 8852 respondents aged 16–24 reported visiting the natural environment less than monthly in the past 12 months (Boyd et al., 2018). University students largely fall within this age group so would be more likely to have low levels of nature engagement compared to the general adult population of England. This, in combination with their high levels of mental health issues, presents good reason to promote their use of green space. To understand why people visit and engage with the natural environment, and later form a connection to nature, requires a multifaceted approach, as each experience is influenced by dimensions beyond the physical and immediately visible. Scannell and Gifford’s (2010) Place Attachment Framework considers the natural environment as a space affected by personal, place and process-based dimensions. These dimensions are related to the individual narratives constructed around a place, the cognitive and behavioural components of attachment, and the significance of physical elements. Previous research has begun to identify the barriers associated with these physical, social and place-based dimensions such as: a lack of physical facilities, a difference in cultural use of different environments or narratives around a space such as an urban

17 University Students Noticing Nature …

421

legend of a dangerous forest (Milligan & Bingley, 2007; Morris et al., 2011). Identifying the social and contextual dimensions of place–people interactions informs design of effective interventions to reduce barriers to the well-being benefits of engaging with nature.

3

Nature-Based Interventions

A facilitated activity or intervention designed to prompt engagement with nature through visits, arts and craft or social outdoor activities are known as nature-based interventions or green prescriptions (Bragg & Leck, 2017). This non-pharmaceutical approach has increased in popularity over the past 30 years and includes the promotion of nature-based interventions (Boyd et al., unpublished). Types of green prescription range from working on a smallholding through to art with nature classes. The amount and type of engagement with nature vary from growing plants through to painting leaves or walking through urban green spaces. The natural environment can provide a backdrop as well as an activity. Green prescriptions have varying success rates (Bragg & Atkins, 2016), and at present, there is limited knowledge of the required nature ‘dose’ (Shanahan et al., 2015). An alternative nature-based intervention is a change in physical urban infrastructure to encourage use such as green networks: paths, cycle lanes or parks. The latter option is explored here in relation to the university campus design.

3.1

University Students and Green Spaces on Campus

Availability and engagement with campus green space are important for students and institutions, as previous research suggests it is a contributing factor to student retention, well-being and academic success (McFarland et al., 2008). The university campus accommodates and shapes students’ experience and education (Ibrahim & Fadzil, 2013; Turk et al., 2015). It contains formal spaces for teaching and learning, and informal spaces. As previously outlined, these spaces are influenced by unseen dimensions such as cultural, personal and psychological preferences (Ibrahim &

422

F. Boyd

Fadzil, 2013; Turk et al., 2015). The physical environment can support or inhibit positive social and academic experiences. Previous research has found numerous health and psychological benefits associated with experiencing nature on campus including reduced stress, improved emotional regulation and attention restoration (Felsten, 2009). Felsten (2009) concludes that campus managers and landscape architects can enhance the restorative features of campus green space through planning and renovating outdoor areas. One study at a US university asked about students’ favourite places for positive mental health (Windhorst & Williams, 2015). Participants all chose places that were natural (not built) environments and familiar to them, places with a symbolic influence from either a previous positive experience or association with a familiar place elsewhere (for example, an old tree acting as a reminder of childhood). This study concluded that the locations students chose allowed a separation from the context of their everyday lives. The quiet places which lacked other human presences (other people and physical structures) allowed the participants to form a different and more relaxed attachment with the place (ibid.). The environments that support emotional restorative responses are those familiar to the individual and provide a sense of control over oneself (Korpela, 1989). Passmore and Holders’ (2017) intervention study with university students found a positive well-being association in noticing nature. Whilst there was no change in the amount of time spent in nature, increases in well-being were reported to have been achieved through emotional engagement with everyday nature. This study reflected that a wholescale lifestyle change or travelling to ‘wild’ areas may not be necessary to improve well-being as small and regular nature interactions are more practical and have significant outcomes (Passmore & Holder, 2017).

4

The Study

This study formed part of a larger research project (Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature—IWUN) focussed on engagement with urban nature at the University of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England

17 University Students Noticing Nature …

423

(UK). The research discussed in this chapter comprised a 7-day naturebased intervention with students. Sheffield is the self-declared greenest city in England and contains more trees per person than any other city in Europe (Made in Sheffield, 2019). The University of Sheffield has over 28,000 students and over 8000 staff (University of Sheffield, 2018). It aims to meet the demand for student support services through a holistic mental health strategy (University of Sheffield, 2017). Whilst the potential of Sheffield’s green spaces is yet to be utilised within this, nature on campus presents opportunities as a holistic, preventative well-being intervention. The aim of the intervention was to increase participants’ connection to nature as a pathway to increased well-being. The study was designed to facilitate the three main elements of green prescriptions: mobilising restoration through nature, positive social contact and facilitating meaningful activity (Bragg & Atkins, 2016). Within the intervention, encouragement to notice nature aimed to support participants in experiencing attention restoration. In-line with grounded theory the focus group element used inductive analysis to allow the hypotheses to move from the particular to the general (Sbaraini et al., 2011). The use of emerging thematic analysis in focus groups allowed the experience to be captured as it is presented by the participants rather than from pre-determined parameters. This research examined opportunities to tailor green prescriptions for university students, comparing interventions aiming to increase the participants’ connection with nature through noticing, e.g., identifying something the participants liked or visiting a natural environment more regularly. Focus groups allowed for exploration of the use and avoidance of urban green spaces in and around the university campus. An app called ‘Shmapped’ was designed for IWUN’s city-wide research study. It encouraged participants to notice something good in nature every day for 7 days (McEwan et al., 2019; Richardson et al., 2016). Nature could be a garden bird, a tree in bloom or a flower creeping through the pavement; it was open to participants’ interpretation. The comparator intervention was a more traditional green prescription: a walk in a natural environment (Walking for Health, 2014). Participants joined a group walk and then were asked to go on

424

F. Boyd

a solo walk later in the week. Self-reported measurements of well-being (ReQoL) and connections to nature (NR-6, Nature Connection) were obtained at days zero, seven and 30 to provide a baseline, post intervention and follow-up measures (Keetharuth et al., 2018; Mayer & Frantz, 2004; Nisbet & Zelenski, 2013). Fifty-two participants completed all three measurements. The results of the intervention outcome measures are available elsewhere (Boyd & Brindley, unpublished). Twenty-six participants aged 18–24, primarily undergraduates participated in the study. Of these, 30 contributed to focus groups. Participants varied in ethnicity, gender, course and year of study. Recruitment to the study initially created representative groups of the student population at the University. However, due to drop out, this was not maintained. Participation in the focus group was optional and therefore self-selecting. All data was collected and anonymised in-line with the University of Sheffield’s guidance and GDPR. The focus groups contained between one to eight participants with on average three to four. Questions explored the intervention participants had undertaken, then prompted discussion of possible new green spaces on campus. It is within these discussions that experiences of the unfamiliar emerged.

5

Discussion

The intervention study operated within a limited time frame (7 days) to alter participants’ engagement with the natural environment. Throughout the interventions, participants reported noticing something new. Those using ‘Shmapped’ reported in the focus groups that post intervention they continued to notice new things. For those in the walk some participants reported that they had visited the park for the first time and intended to return as a result of the group walk. It is likely that sustained well-being benefit would require a more long-term behavioural change. Successful interventions encourage participants to not only spend time in nature but also to reflect on the ways in which they feel part of and interdependent with nature (Mackay & Schmitt, 2019). It is therefore important that future research take the findings

17 University Students Noticing Nature …

425

further and explore mechanisms for achieving long-term and reflective behaviour change. To summarise experiences within the intervention: in general, participants would make time to visit favourite green spaces in and outside the city during their leisure time. Therefore, the interventions were easy to fit into their routine. They also talked positively about changing their walk home from university to include routes with more nature even though the journey might take longer. Whilst some participants found using the app highlighted negative aspects of their environment, others found using it enhanced their experience of the nature surrounding them. Some participants reported being more aware of the birdsong by their desks or the flowers beginning to bloom on their walk to campus. It is the aforementioned negative aspects of nature which came as a surprise. Whilst it was evident that ‘good’ elements of the natural environment in Sheffield can be found throughout the city and surrounding area including the Peak District, these spaces were often the familiar spaces participants regularly visited. Yet, some university green spaces were considered not accessible to the participants or not a suitable place to enjoy. For example, participants felt one courtyard within the university campus was associated with a certain department and therefore they would not be welcome there. This courtyard has the physical barrier of being behind two large imposing doors but also a socially determined barrier. Place-based limitations which prevent regular engagement with certain landscapes created unfamiliarity and limited the opportunities to engage with nature.

5.1

Unfamiliar Landscapes

Landscapes become unfamiliar when participants feel discouraged from visiting them, usually due to specific themes presented here as unpleasant, threatening and unfamiliar. University students, unlike those typically younger than them, have more autonomy and can therefore selfselect familiar landscapes. These chosen landscapes are likely to consist of, or replicate elements of familiarity in physical or process form, such as facilitating a behaviour. For example, being quiet in the library or

426

F. Boyd

going running in the local park. For some participants being prompted to notice more resulted in noticing some unpleasant aspects. This reflects previous research on young adults and nature, which found similar responses to unmanicured natural environments of fear, disgust and discomfort (Bixler & Floyd, 1997). There is evidence of the impact of emotionally negative childhood experiences preventing visits as an adult (Milligan & Bingley, 2007). As Milligan and Bingley (2007) discuss, the therapeutic value of the natural environment is reliant on the young person’s previous experience and the types of activity available. Therefore, a positive experience of the natural environment is reliant on the user’s familiarity with the place.

5.2

Noticing the Unpleasant

I was like ‘ah it’s going to be quite easy’ but then I feel like when I was looking at things like flowers in the city centre, there’s so much litter […] I was like this whole route is literally just trashy. Female participant age 20 Walking along the main road up there and it was just kind of trees with no leaves and then rubbish, like it wasn’t very pretty nature. It wasn’t nice. Female participant age 19

Participants discussed how being encouraged to notice nature had a negative side effect of noticing the unpleasant. Litter became more prominent as they actively began to seek out nature in the city centre, which contradicted their previous perception of the city’s environment as the greenest in England. This supports previous work (Speake et al., 2013) surveying university students, which found attention to quality (planting schemes, maintenance and litter) over quantity for green spaces the participants would regularly visit. Furthermore, Brindley et al. (2019) found that green spaces with poor cleanliness standards were associated with higher prevalence of self-reported poor health. The quality of green space can counteract the positive associated health and well-being benefits (Brindley et al., 2019).

17 University Students Noticing Nature …

427

Other features which create an unpleasant natural environment are the weather or the lack of places to sit. Participants were undoubtedly enthusiastic for visiting the local park with friends if it was a sunny day. Weather was not discussed by the participants to be a general barrier, nor has previous research found weather to be a barrier for this age group (Boyd et al., 2018). Yet participants did express that it caused spaces on campus to become unpleasant to visit, as these spaces do not facilitate engagement in poor weather as there is a limited shelter or dry seating areas. The University of Sheffield features a lecture theatre in a decommissioned church, which is surrounded by a graveyard with some grassy space where gravestones have been removed. A few participants would never walk near the graves, yet some eat their lunch in the space, and others found it a peaceful place to sit before exams. This is a morally challenging space for the participants; as in other research, cemeteries function as private place of remembrance and cultural value more than functional recreational spaces (Nordh & Evensen, 2018). This indicates the importance of green space designers comprehending pre-defined behaviours associated with some spaces (Allam, 2019; Scannell & Gifford, 2010). The ambiguity of a deconsecrated church and the surrounding green space meant this provided limited engagement with the natural environment for university students. Reasons for not engaging with an urban green space primarily arose from unpleasant physical elements such as a lack of shelter. Aspects of cultural significance also reduced the participants’ desire to visit a space and resulted in avoidance or confusion around a space. A change in the cultural context of the graveyard or adding benches and shelters in a space could alter how it is perceived and therefore used. Reducing the number of unpleasant features such as litter or poorly maintained areas is also important, supporting previous research which found the quality of a space affects the well-being outcomes experienced there (Mears et al., 2019; Paquet et al., 2013).

428

5.3

F. Boyd

Noticing the Threatening

I think you’re asking for trouble if you’re walking through a public green space if it’s dark and late at night. Male participant aged 22

Natural environments at night were unanimously described as dangerous: to walk through a park in the dark was considered to be ‘asking for trouble’. For times when places were deemed threatening participants would take a different route, for example, alongside the road or by bus. The threat presented by partly lit or completely dark green spaces prevented participants from visiting after work or university during winter. In undergraduate students’ perceptions of the university campus there is a correlation between lighting and safety: unlit places are most threatening, with illumination being strongly related to perceived safety (Fisher & May, 2009). Fisher and May’s (2009) found generally low and comparable levels of fear towards crime on campus between male and female students. Focus groups participants of all genders repeated this idea of dark and quiet areas as being scary. Prior crime information, lack of security presence and concern for anti-social behaviour in the neighbourhood have been identified as reasons individuals may refrain from visiting urban green spaces (Mak & Jim, 2018). Mak and Jim (2018) demonstrated that all participants were fearful of crime regardless of gender. There is further evidence that urban green spaces are deemed threatening when users visit alone (Jorgensen et al., 2013). Participants in the focus groups perceived the presence of other people in the park as threatening. Whilst there was limited gendered difference in responses from focus groups participants, other research has found a difference in perception of threat in age group and gender (Jorgensen & Anthopoulou, 2007; Jorgensen et al., 2013). The idea of ‘the threatening’ surrounds a place through collective narrative which dictates avoiding an area. For example, hearing a local rumour of crime in the area produces a narrative of danger. The combination of social process and spatial design demonstrates the complexity of urban green space. As considered in other research, the physical factors such as planting schemes could promote threatening behaviours

17 University Students Noticing Nature …

429

by creating places to hide (Lis et al., 2019). The theme of urban green spaces soliciting a sense of threat compliments previous research which found that whilst landscape design can influence perceived fear, the cause is more likely to be previous experience and the social narrative of the space (Lis et al., 2019; Sreetheran & Van Den Bosch, 2014). An unfamiliar landscape can be threatening due to the unknown elements, but more prevalent for urban green spaces, especially those around campus, was darkness and the presence of other people. As the university timetable is focussed in winter and darker months, opportunities to engage with nature between commitments are important, as is the provision of lighting.

5.4

Noticing the Unfamiliar

I feel like I don’t know what to say, because I’m so not a nature kind of person, which is really bad to say that especially in Sheffield because people are like ‘let’s go for a walk in the Peaks’ and I’m like ‘what do we do there’! Female participant aged 19

Urban green spaces on campus are, in theory, accessible to everyone and there are limited physical constraints on students’ engagement. This could be passively through eating lunch there or more actively admiring the flowers. Yet the lack of familiarity with a place reduces the participants’ desire to seek it out or regularly visit. Within the theme of the unfamiliar, dimension acts within personal individual experience and the socially constructed arena that the place is present in. There are several reasons participants reported not visiting nearby green spaces. One was a limited desire to visit, as constructed through a social narrative of time dedicated to university; participants felt that when on campus they should be undertaking productive work or socialising. As with office workers, the idea of visiting the local park during ‘university time’ was surrounded by social pressure that this would not be perceived as efficient use of time (Hitchings, 2013). Of the participants who would consider visiting the local park, about half felt it would not be acceptable within their friendship group. The social dimension of the university

430

F. Boyd

campus constrains the opportunity to visit a place. It becomes unfamiliar because it is not part of the campus ‘essentials’, unlike the library or shop. Respondents considered that partaking in an outdoor activity during university time would not aid their studies. Students described personal experiences of different landscapes, especially those unfamiliar to them. One discussed other people’s use of certain natural environments as strange: they were unfamiliar with the Peak District (a national park partly within Sheffield’s administrative boundary) and did not understand why someone would go on a day trip to walk there. For some participants, the lack of local green space where they grew up resulted in unfamiliarity with urban parks and they felt this reduced the likelihood of them actively routinely visiting a green space. This may be challenging to overcome through an intervention. Some participants had viewed the park out of the library window but not visited until the group walk intervention. The perceived unfamiliarity of a landscape so close and visible from their workplace seems surprising. As discussed in the introduction, the desks look out at the ducks, but not many university students visit this place for lunch. There was general agreement amongst the participants that they eat their lunch at their desks or on some steps by the library due to lack of alternative facilities. The park benches in straight lines do not facilitate socialising or studying. The urban green spaces on campus could provide places to eat lunch if suitable physical structures were provided. The unfamiliar could be overcome by synthesising familiar and prioritised behaviours into alternative spaces. The intervention reminded some students of previous enjoyable times in urban green spaces and there was some enthusiasm to return. However, physical and social constraints to using green space remained, making it unlikely that this was successful in changing their behaviour in the longer term.

17 University Students Noticing Nature …

6

431

Conclusions

As mental health issues continue to constrain students’ prospects at university there are opportunities to embrace the salutogenic effects of the natural environment. A large body of research has evidenced the physical and mental benefits of engaging with urban green spaces. Understanding how to tailor opportunities to increase an individual’s connection to nature required the multifaceted approach taken in this research, to investigate how green space campus experience is influenced by dimensions beyond those immediately visible. Through the discussion in the focus groups, it became apparent that the opportunities for university students to engage regularly with the natural environment come primarily from the environments within their commute and the university campus. As others have suggested it is important to appreciate different lifestyles so that strategies are effective at influencing engagement with urban green space to promote health and well-being (Hitchings, 2013). The University Mental Health Charter principles of good practice include embedding well-being and accessibility in the redevelopment and maintenance of university estates. It advocates facilitates and activities which encourage staff and students to engage with nature (Hughes & Spanner, 2019). As explored in this chapter there are clear implications for the planning, design and management of university campus environments. The role of the unfamiliar emerged as a novel finding during the focus group discussions. The green spaces on campus were expected to be familiar to the majority of university students; however, from this sample, it was evident most spaces were unfamiliar. The university campus facilitated their learning and extracurricular activities and was seen primarily as a place to work and socialise. There was limited desire to visit a university green space unless they were already familiar with it and it featured on route to home or class. Because the participants would not actively seek out an opportunity to engage with nature, it is important these moments are infiltrated into their everyday practice. There are numerous opportunities to introduce nature into everyday campus landscapes including routes and pathways as well as incidental and larger green recreational spaces. The way a campus is designed could promote

432

F. Boyd

multiple micro-opportunities for restoration as students pass between lunch and lecture. For university students there can be negative experiences in noticing nature and reasons for avoiding green spaces. This is confounded by time pressures which limit their opportunity to engage with the natural environment during the week. The UK University timetable is concentrated from autumn to spring, meaning students have limited free time during daylight hours or good weather. In addition, ‘the unpleasant’ creates a negative experience of nature, whilst ‘the threatening’ and unfamiliar create reasons to not visit at all. Creating an increase in connection to nature requires a multifaceted approach considering all these dimensions. Previous research has suggested that the campus environment should be designed to have open spaces which create an integrated blend of sheltered spaces for study and open spaces for collaboration (Beckers et al., 2016). These spaces should be clearly defined to denote expected behaviour and so reduce the stress that can occur when a space is not coherent (Lau et al., 2014). Understanding more about the negative aspects of some natural environments allows future interventions to be more effective in changing users and use perceptions of the landscape. This study suggests that the design of campus spaces must be pleasant and safe, which for students means convenient, welcoming and inclusive, with the facilities and characteristics that students enjoy, making it clear and unambiguous that spaces are there for students to use. These places must also be physically free of litter and damage or evidence of anti-social behaviour. Participants were asked what new green space they would like to see on campus. There was a desire for a place in which they felt protected from the noise and business of the city, often described as a place in which trees provide physical protection. They also talked about an area which had some ‘wildness’ to it which in this case meant a lack of geometrically configured flowerbeds but instead mixed flower meadows and naturalistic flowering shrubbery. Participants also commented on a desire for somewhere to meet, to sit and eat lunch or to work in groups. The current green spaces provide limited integration of familiar behaviours such as socialising or working into unfamiliar spaces.

17 University Students Noticing Nature …

433

The unfamiliar may not be 20 miles away in the Peak District, it may be the park next to the library. It could be the family-filled park during the day, becoming threatening in the darkness. To comprehend university students’ engagement with the natural environment, it is important to first understand how they allocate their time and the dimensions of place attachment which influence them most, and how this generates unfamiliarity amongst readily available natural environments. Engagement with unfamiliar local landscapes could be encouraged, by integrating familiar activities through providing spaces for lunch or creating library-style working areas in urban green spaces. Campus design is emerging as a potentially important well-being component of the university experience (Abdelaal, 2019; Hipp et al., 2016; Ibrahim & Fadzil, 2013; Matloob et al., 2014). Future research into campus design should take these ideas further by working with students’ and staff ’s perceptions and lived experience of campus green space. It should recognise and seek to overcome the unseen dimensions which create the divide between the desks and the ducks.

References Abdelaal, M. S. (2019). Biophilic campus: An emerging planning approach for a sustainable innovation-conducive university. Journal of Cleaner Production, 215, 1445–1456. Allam, Z. (2019). The city of the living or the dead: On the ethics and morality of land use for graveyards in a rapidly urbanised world. Land Use Policy, 87 , 104037. Aronin, S., & Smith, M. (2016). One in four students suffer from mental health problems. YouGov. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/ 2016/08/09/quarter-britains-students-are-afflicted-mental-hea. Accessed 26 Apr 2019. Beckers, R., van der Voordt, T., & Dewulf, G. (2016). Learning space preferences of higher education students. Building and Environment, 104, 243–252. Bird, W. (2007). Natural thinking. Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

434

F. Boyd

Bixler, R. D., & Floyd, M. F. (1997, July). Nature is scary, disgusting, and uncomfortable. Environment and Behavior, 29 (4), 443–467. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/001391659702900401 Blanco, C., Okuda, M., Wright, C., Hasin, D. S., Grant, B. F., Liu, S., & Olfson, M. (2008). Mental health of college students and their non–collegeattending peers: Results from the national epidemiologic study on alcohol and related conditions. Archives of General Psychiatry, 65, 1429–1437. Bowler, D. E., Buyung-Ali, L. M., Knight, T. M., & Pullin, A. S. (2010). A systematic review of evidence for the added benefits to health of exposure to natural environments. BMC Public Health, 10 (1), 456. Boyd, F., Allen, C., & Robinson, J. (in review). The past, present and future of nature and place-based interventions for human health. Landscape Research. Boyd, F., & Brindley, P. (in review). Encouraging university student’s engagement with urban nature through a mobile phone app and walk intervention. Digital Culture and Education. Boyd, F., White, M. P., Bell, S. L., & Burt, J. (2018). Who doesn’t visit natural environments for recreation and why: A population representative analysis of spatial, individual and temporal factors among adults in England. Landscape and Urban Planning, 175, 102–113. Bragg, R., & Atkins, G. (2016). A review of nature-based interventions for mental health care. Natural England Commissioned Reports, 204. Bragg, R., & Leck, C. (2017). Good practice in social prescribing for mental health: The role of nature-based interventions (Natural England Commissioned Reports, 228). Brindley, P., Cameron, R. W., Ersoy, E., Jorgensen, A., & Maheswaran, R. (2019). Is more always better? Exploring field survey and social media indicators of quality of urban greenspace, in relation to health. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 39, 45–54. Cleary, A., Fielding, K. S., Murray, Z., & Roiko, A. (2020). Predictors of nature connection among urban residents: Assessing the role of childhood and adult nature experiences. Environment and Behaviour, 52(6), 579–610. Dallimer, M., Davies, Z. G., Irvine, K. N., Maltby, L., Warren, P. H., Gaston, K. J., & Armsworth, P. R. (2014). What personal and environmental factors determine frequency of urban greenspace use? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 11(8), 7977–7992. DEFRA. (2018). A green future: Our 25 year plan to improve the environment. HM Government.

17 University Students Noticing Nature …

435

Felsten, G. (2009). Where to take a study break on the college campus: An attention restoration theory perspective. Journal Environmental Psychology, 29, 160–167. Fisher, B. S., & May, D. (2009). College students’ crime-related fears on campus. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 25, 300–321. Hartig, T., Mitchell, R., de Vries, S., & Frumkin, H. (2014). Nature and health. Annual Review of Public Health, 35, 207–228. Hipp, J. A., Gulwadi, G. B., Alves, S., & Sequeira, S. (2016). The relationship between perceived greenness and perceived restorativeness of university campuses and student-reported quality of life. Environment and Behaviour, 48, 1292–1308. Hitchings, R. (2013). Studying the preoccupations that prevent people from going into green space. Landscape and Urban Planning, 118, 98–102. Honold, J., Lakes, T., Beyer, R., & van der Meer, E. (2014). Restoration in urban spaces: Nature views from home, greenways, and public parks. Environment and Behaviour, 48(6), 796–825. Hughes, G., & Spanner, L. (2019). The university mental health charter. Student Minds. Hughes, J., Rogerson, M., Barton, J., & Bragg, R. (2019). Age and connection to nature: When is engagement critical? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 17 (5), 265–269. Huynh, Q., Craig, W., Janssen, I., & Pickett, W. (2013). Exposure to public natural space as a protective factor for emotional well-being among young people in Canada. BMC Public Health, 13, 407. Ibrahim, A. K., Kelly, S. J., Adams, C. E., & Glazebrook, C. (2013). A systematic review of studies of depression prevalence in university students. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 47 (3), 391–400. Ibrahim, N., & Fadzil, N. H. (2013). Informal setting for learning on campus: Usage and preference. Procedia-Social and Behavioural Sciences, 105, 344– 351. Irvine, K. N., Warber, S. L., Devine-Wright, P., & Gaston, K. J. (2013). Understanding urban green space as a health resource: A qualitative comparison of visit motivation and derived effects among park users in Sheffield, UK. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 10 (1), 417–442. Jorgensen, A., & Anthopoulou, A. (2007). Enjoyment and fear in urban woodlands—Does age make a difference? Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 6 , 267–278.

436

F. Boyd

Jorgensen, L. J., Ellis, G. D., & Ruddell, E. (2013). Fear perceptions in public parks. Environment and Behaviour, 45, 803–820. Kaplan, R. (1993). The role of nature in the context of the workplace. Landscape and Urban Planning, 26 , 193–201. Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press. Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15 (3), 169–182. Keetharuth, A. D., Brazier, J., Connell, J., Bjorner, J. B., Carlton, J., Buck, E. T., Ricketts, T., McKendrick, K., Browne, J., Croudance, T., & Barkham, M. (2018). Recovering Quality of Life (ReQoL): A new generic self-reported outcome measure for use with people experiencing mental health difficulties. British Journal of Psychiatry, 212(1), 42–49. King, H., Stewart, D., Bradshaw, R., & Wilson, V. (2015). Monitor of Engagement with the Natural Environment: Technical Report from Year 6 of the Survey, March 2014 to February 2015. Korpela, K. M. (1989). Place-identity as a product of environmental selfregulation. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 9 (3), 241–256. Lau, S. S. Y., Gou, Z., & Liu, Y. (2014). Healthy campus by open space design: Approaches and guidelines. Frontiers of Architectural Research, 3(4), 452– 467. Lis, A., Pardela, Ł., Can, W., Katlapa, A., & R˛abalski, Ł. (2019). Perceived danger and landscape preferences of walking paths with trees and shrubs by women. Sustainability, 11(17), 4565. Maas, J., Verheij, R. A., Groenewegen, P. P., De Vries, S., & Spreeuwenberg, P. (2006). Green space, urbanity, and health: How strong is the relation? Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 60 (7), 587–592. Mackay, C. M., & Schmitt, M. T. (2019). Do people who feel connected to nature do more to protect it? A meta-analysis. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 65, 101323. Made in Sheffield. (2019). About Sheffield . https://www.madeinsheffield.org/ about-us/about-sheffield/. Accessed 12 Dec 2019. Mak, B. K., & Jim, C. Y. (2018). Examining fear-evoking factors in urban parks in Hong Kong. Landscape and Urban Planning, 171, 42–56. Marmot, M., & Bell, R. (2012). Fair society, healthy lives. Public Health, 126 , S4–S10. Matloob, F. A., Sulaiman, A. B., Ali, T. H., Shamsuddin, S., & Mardyya, W. N. (2014). Sustaining campuses through physical character—The role of landscape. Procedia-Social and Behavioural Sciences, 140, 282–290.

17 University Students Noticing Nature …

437

Mavoa, S., Davern, M., Breed, M., & Hahs, A. (2019). Higher levels of greenness and biodiversity associate with greater subjective wellbeing in adults living in Melbourne, Australia. Health and Place, 57 , 321–329. Mayer, F. S., & Frantz, C. M. (2004). The connectedness to nature scale: A measure of individuals’ feeling in community with nature. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24, 503–515. McEwan, K., Richardson, M., Sheffield, D., Ferguson, F. J., & Brindley, P. (2019). A smartphone app for improving mental health through connecting with urban nature. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16 , 3373. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16183373 McFarland, A. L., Waliczek, T. M., & Zajicek, J. M. (2008). The relationship between student use of campus green spaces and perceptions of quality of life. HortTechnology, 18(2), 232–238. Mears, M., Brindley, P., Maheswaran, R., & Jorgensen, A. (2019). Understanding the socioeconomic equity of publicly accessible greenspace distribution: The example of Sheffield, UK. Geoforum, 103, 126–137. Milligan, C., & Bingley, A. (2007). Restorative places or scary spaces? The impact of woodland on the mental well-being of young adults. Health and Place, 13, 799–811. Morris, J., O’Brien, E., Ambrose-Oji, B., Lawrence, A., Carter, C., & Peace, A. (2011). Access for all? Barriers to accessing woodlands and forests in Britain. Local Environment, 16 (4), 375–396. Natural Capital Committee. (2015). Third Report to the Economic Affairs Committee: The State of Natural Capital—Protecting and Improving Natural Capital for Prosperity and Wellbeing (p. 73). Nisbet, E. K., & Zelenski, J. M. (2013). The NR-6: A new brief measure of nature relatedness. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 813. Nordh, H., & Evensen, K. H. (2018). Qualities and functions ascribed to urban cemeteries across the capital cities of Scandinavia. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 33, 80–91. Ohly, H., White, M. P., Wheeler, B. W., Bethel, A., Ukoumunne, O. C., Nikolaou, V., & Garside, R. (2016). Attention restoration theory: A systematic review of the attention restoration potential of exposure to natural environments. Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B, 19 (7), 305–343. Paquet, C., Orschulok, T. P., Coffee, N. T., Howard, N. J., Hugo, G., Taylor, A. W., & Daniel, M. (2013). Are accessibility and characteristics of public open spaces associated with a better cardiometabolic health? Landscape and Urban Planning, 118, 70–78.

438

F. Boyd

Passmore, H. A., & Holder, M. D. (2017). Noticing nature: Individual and social benefits of a two-week intervention. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 12(6), 537–546. Plane, J., & Klodawsky, F. (2013). Neighbourhood amenities and health: Examining the significance of a local park. Social Science and Medicine, 99, 1–8. Public Health England. (2017). Psychosocial pathways and health outcomes: Informing action on health inequalities. Public Health England. (2018). Wellbeing and mental health: Applying all our health. Pullman, A. W., Masters, R. C., Zalot, L. C., Carde, L. E., Saraiva, M. M., Dam, Y. Y., Simpson, J. A. R., & Duncan, A. M. (2009). Effect of the transition from high school to university on anthropometric and lifestyle variables in males. Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, 34 (2), 162–171. Richardson, H. (2019). Universities “in dark” over student mental health needs. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-49689893?fbclid=IwA R0lnAzcVF4LBayMpsbDhr8NPR0iMZt3ShB83RrNXbGTgKpkCB_m CP7A8qo. Accessed 26 Jan 2020. Richardson, M., Cormack, A., McRobert, L., & Underhill, R. (2016). 30 days wild: Development and evaluation of a large-scale nature engagement campaign to improve well-being. PloS One, 11(2), e0149777. Sbaraini, A., Carter, S. M., Evans, R. W., & Blinkhorn, A. (2011). How to do a grounded theory study: A worked example of a study of dental practices. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 11(1), 1–10. Scannell, L., & Gifford, R. (2010). Defining place attachment: A tripartite organizing framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 30, 1–10. Shanahan, D. F., Bush, R., Gaston, K. J., Lin, B. B., Dean, J., Barber, E., & Fuller, R. A. (2016). Health benefits from nature experiences depend on dose. Scientific Reports, 6 (1), 1–10. Shanahan, D. F., Fuller, R. A., Bush, R., Lin, B. B., & Gaston, K. J. (2015). The health benefits of urban nature: How much do we need? BioScience, 65 (5), 476–485. Speake, J., Edmondson, S., & Nawaz, H. (2013). Everyday encounters with nature: Students’ perceptions and use of university campus green spaces. Human Geographies, 7 (1), 21–31. Sreetheran, M., & Van Den Bosch, C. C. K. (2014). A socio-ecological exploration of fear of crime in urban green spaces–A systematic review. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 13(1), 1–18.

17 University Students Noticing Nature …

439

Sturm, R., & Cohen, D. (2014). Proximity to urban parks and mental health. The Journal of Mental Health Policy and Economics, 17 (1), 19. Turk, Y. A., Sen, B., & Ozyavuz, A. (2015). Students’ exploration on campus legibility. Procedia-Social and Behavioural Sciences, 197 , 339–347. Universities UK. (2015). Student mental wellbeing in higher education: Good practice guide. University of Sheffield. (2017). Student mental health strategy 2017– 2020. https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/sss/mental-health-strategy. Accessed 7 May 2019. University of Sheffield. (2018). Facts and figures. https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ about/facts/info. Accessed 27 June 2019. Usher, W., & Curran, C. (2019). Predicting Australia’s university students’ mental health status. Health Promotion International, 34 (2), 312–322. Walking for Health. (2014). Walking works. The Ramblers. Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Harvard University Press. Windhorst, E., & Williams, A. (2015). “It’s like a different world”: Natural places, post-secondary students, and mental health. Health and Place, 34, 241–250. World Health Organization. (2017). Urban green space interventions and health review of impacts and effectiveness. World Health Organization.

18 Placelessness and Dis-ease: Addressing the Need for Familiar Places for At-Risk Youth Amanda L. Hooykaas

1

Introduction: The Importance of Place Excerpt from my notebook: I sit here and write – adorned with new trip rope bracelets, one to represent each of my last two trips out with “my” youth… The first – light red – is for my first trip over which 100 kilometres of water was paddled. Two of the three youth I tripped with last year, and the third was a new addition to our motley crew. Together with Emily, my co-tripper for the time being, we braved seemingly endless thunderstorms and when not in the middle, were either chasing or being chased by them. No sun was had, no swimming was done, but we survived. Let me introduce you to my comrades… all of which hail from spaces much different than here. Each a bit lost but seeking a way to belong.

A. L. Hooykaas (B) University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_18

441

442

A. L. Hooykaas

Last year S. was detoxing from cocaine on our canoe trip, this year she soared and continues to inspire me with her courage, brilliance, and strength. Last year C. was struggling to leave a bad relationship; this year she prepares to move out on her own and return to school . She leaves me with new insight into “the system”, and an impression of resilience and gusto quite uncommon in a seventeen-year-old. Thirdly is T., a thirteen-year-old who has panache for creating elaborate stories to cover a painful truth. She is brave, proud, and intelligent, yet that is overshadowed by her need for acceptance. She did not make it to the end of the trip, and I know not what will come of her in the next few years… I hope that I see her again one day and that she can thank us for the time we spent together and that she sees her worth as we do…. It’s Purposeful, This Work…

Place matters. For people and the planet. And as people continue to move through landscapes, the familiarity of one particular location, one specific spot, is perhaps difficult to acquire. That sense of place may be further complicated in the case of youth at-risk where connections to people and landscapes may be built upon less healthy circumstances. This chapter is based on my experiences guiding youth at-risk in backcountry,1 multi-day canoe expeditions in Northern Ontario, Canada. I initially applied to be a canoe tripper as I have always found true happiness out in the backcountry and I could not imagine being paid to lead others on such experiences. I began the position with much training— both psychosocial and crisis management—but by the time I met the first youth, I felt far less confident that I could really manage to support the potential challenging behaviours before me. Nonetheless, I persisted and the experiences I share here are based on the experiences we (the youth and I) had on those trips. Some are based on conversations we had while paddling into a headwind, others while I sat across from silhouettes at the campfire, and yet others based on the extensive profiles we received about each youth prior to meeting them. As part of my personal decompression process after coming off the trip, I wrote reflections of each trip and each camper, some of which are included here verbatim. The stories of these youth stuck with me and I continue to be impacted 1

Backcountry is defined as a geographic area considered remote and isolated.

18 Placelessness and Dis-ease …

443

by the lessons they taught me, and the landscape which we experienced together. The excerpts lay a foundation upon which the chapter explores the role of the unknown wilderness in connecting youth at-risk to places, in the process helping themselves to become empowered individuals who feel connected and important. This chapter has a particular focus on urban youth at-risk, such as those residing in “priority neighbourhoods” of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Such neighbourhoods are designated areas that require additional investment to combat specific problems such as high unemployment rate, lack of critical social community services, insecurity, and more (Urbact, 2020). Many youths who reside within these neighbourhoods are rarely able to venture beyond their own communities to discover new and novel natural landscapes. Despite the challenges these youth face, they are not alone in having difficulty at this age. Youth, specifically when transitioning into high school, experience significant physical and cognitive changes (Dolgin, 2014). Combined with living in challenging environments, these factors can affect adolescents’ psychological well-being. While many high school-aged youths successfully adapt during this time, some become identified as “at-risk” of substance use, reckless behaviour, and to the development of long-lasting mental health issues (Aunola et al., 2000). While youths all experience some stress at this time in their lives, when foundational elements of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are threatened or perhaps unavailable altogether, mental health issues become more likely. Many of those youth can also be frustrated by having little control over their lives and may lack emotional, social, and financial stability to move beyond those neighbourhoods and some of the associated challenges of living there. The opportunity to connect to places in meaningful ways may serve as a touchstone for the youth of any description as they navigate new and unfamiliar landscapes of young adulthood. Backcountry wilderness expeditions (which in this context may be described as a form of wilderness therapy) can help to bridge the gap between youth and place, urban and rural, and isolation and connection, thereby strengthening the connections of youth to themselves, their communities, and the wider natural landscape as well. Wilderness therapy (as described in the excerpts throughout this chapter) emerged in the 1920s as rehabilitation programs for adolescents at-risk

444

A. L. Hooykaas

and were at times viewed by such educators as Kurt Hahn, founder of Outward Bound, as an antidote to perceived “laziness”. Wilderness therapy programs often involve expedition-based interventions in outdoor wilderness settings that aim to offer alternatives to maladaptive behaviours (such as aggression or substance use) via experiential learning (Margalit & Ben-Ari, 2014). The majority of youth at-risk who participate in such programs are adolescent boys with behavioural issues, family problems, conduct disorders, self-esteem challenges, depression, and suicidal ideation and the majority of those have diagnoses which are drug and alcohol related (Davis-Berman et al., 1994 in Gillespie & Allen-Craig, 2009). A focus is placed on group aspects including promoting communication with peers, interpersonal abilities, reliance on peers and staff (Clark et al., 2004; Russell & Farnum, 2004), supporting group initiatives and decision-making processes, and learning how one is perceived by others (Bandoroff & Newes, 2004; Corey & Corey, 2000). In addition, a key to the process is the landscape itself therapy of this form would take a very different path for urban youth at-risk if it were conducted in a more familiar, urban landscape.

2

The Role of Place for People S. is yet another of my young friends from last summer and just as carefree and delightful as I remember her being (refreshing when sometimes a year can harden one so much). A. comes from a dark past and struggles to choose the right path… perhaps her time with us has done something to solidify her worth on this great planet. Thirdly comes K., a tiny girl with such a fire within her. She can paddle, portage, and trip just as hard as any youth out there, and can leave trouble behind her, at least for the time being. It broke my heart to sit with them on the bus south-bound and see each recede into her shell, begging me to allow her to remain in Temagami and to not have to return to the city. I believe that these youth need places like Temagami so much – they miraculously have connected to themselves and one another on those lakes, beneath those tall pines… they’ve found “home” in a way. We, as trippers, are really only facilitators… the waters always do the work for us.

18 Placelessness and Dis-ease …

445

The youth on the journey described above, share a story of displacement through various social service agencies, school boards, and family structures. None of them spoke of any stability within their lives. On the canoe trip, by contrast, there is a constant rhythm and a slowly found sense of familiarity—the trees are some of the oldest around, the rocks steady, and the maps indicate where to go. With a touchstone of sorts created by the landscape and the company of strangers upon who one must rely, a sense of place may be slowly established—perhaps for the first time. But their perceived lack of place is not unique to them. Adolescence is considered a crucial period for the development of place attachment, both because of the amount of time youth spend in their own neighbourhoods and the important role this landscape has for personal autonomy (Hidalgo & Hernandez, 2001). Furthermore, Altman and Low (1992: 10) suggest that “place attachment may contribute to the formation, maintenance, and preservation of the identity of a person, group, or culture”. Without guaranteed safety and autonomy into the future, youth can easily lose the connection to their surroundings, thereby losing their way (Weil, 1971). For a sense of place to be understood, the importance of its absence should also be acknowledged, as described by the youth. It was not uncommon for these youth to share stories about their home lives, often with some remorse—lack of consistent adult figures, family financial concerns, and other adult stressors which sometimes caused them to reject these spaces and any possible connections to them as places. These stressors could be exacerbated by technology. There is a significant predisposition towards placelessness amongst younger generations that some researchers have associated with information technology and social media (Beatley, 2004; Moreno et al., 2015; Younes et al., 2016), suggesting that technology can offer a false sense of security and connection in this electronic, mobile world. Relph (2018) does not see the mobility of today as competing with a place but rather as being an evolving dimension of it. He suggests, “stability and mobility are complementary aspects of place, reinforcing rather than competing with each other. Some people prefer to stay, and others to travel. Some like to have a base from which to travel and return. Some like to live somewhere for a while, get to know it, put down roots, then move on. There is no

446

A. L. Hooykaas

contradiction or opposition in this” (Relph, 2018: 2–3). For the youth at-risk, so many aspects of their lives may be unstable and even more problematic—actually unsafe; the role of place in their well-being may be important and enable them to begin to become strong, healthy advocates for themselves while recognizing the successes they have had while in the backcountry. To dwell within a landscape means to be able to connect deeply to it like no other (Casey 1993 in Duff, 2010; Heidegger, 1962; Hooykaas, 2009, 2012). But for those for whom the landscape of home is inherently dangerous due to gang violence, the presence of illicit substances, and tenuous family ties, is this possible? And yet for youth at-risk, dwelling within a wild landscape can provide an antidote to the environment within which they are growing up—a new space within which to re-create themselves as they would like to be back home. Increases in self-esteem, self-efficacy, problem solving, locus of control, and selfperception, coupled with noted decreases in depression and conductdisordered behaviour, have made wilderness therapy popular in the past several decades” (Moote & Wodarski, 1997). The reasons for the effectiveness of wilderness and adventure therapy have been debated, however, perhaps the most powerful aspect has been the immersion component. The extended amount of time group members spend interacting in wilderness settings (e.g., days or, depending on the program, weeks) is substantially larger than in traditional clinical settings (e.g., hours).” (Dolgin, 2014: 85) What occurs on these extended trips is important and place-based education helps to support this deep engagement to unfamiliar landscapes.

3

Fostering Early Connections to Places Through Place-Based Education On my last trip I was out with four 13 and 14 year-old boys from southern Ontario. None had ever been in the wilderness and few had spent any more than a night away from home… so we were certainly in for an adventure. All boys were medicated with various drugs and had hugely troubled pasts. Two

18 Placelessness and Dis-ease …

447

were roommates in a group home, the Children’s Aid Society was watching another, and yet another could very well have fallen into either of the above categories. Over the eight days of the trip our campers had a number of physical fights, were constantly swearing and yelling at each other, and once all were comfortable with each other, the issues could be directed at any camper… not one was safe from the wrath of another. In general, I was the listener, but no one wanted to talk. It was the most exhausting and frustrating week I have ever experienced but, as with everything, there is always a silver lining, sometimes just waiting to be revealed. Mine came in three parts, each just a few minutes in length, but significant, nonetheless. It was during those moments, albeit brief, I “captured” my boys. They were absorbed by genuine conversations we had as just two people who respected one another – as we stood on the rocks skipping stones, paddled and laughed with a tailwind, and figured out how to make a new recipe together – and I think that it is moments like those that count most of all and those that I must live for and remember when things get so difficult. I know that we (my co-tripper and I) have made a difference, even though the effects and memories may not be felt for a number of days, weeks, months, or even years. We firmly believe that those boys are the types of youth who need us, and the wilderness, most of all, and despite everything, I am honoured to have been able to have some positive impact on their difficult lives.

It is now widely recognized that the health of the planet is in peril. And today individual stewardship is vital: political economist Elinor Ostrom (2012) suggests that national and global solutions to environmental crises will only work if people are committed to them at local levels—rooted in places. The stewardship of places and ultimately the sustainability of our beings and those beyond us can be facilitated through place-based education. Relationships to place, however intimate, tangible, or varied, connect an individual to their surroundings and by extension can create a steward of that individual (Beatley, 2004; Hooykaas, 2008; Relph, 1976). Place-based education may be a way to engage with places and ensure that the youth on the expeditions feel

448

A. L. Hooykaas

grounded and connected to themselves, their community, and the wider landscape. Place-based education creates linkages between the pupil and their surroundings, often natural but peopled as well. Gruenewald and Smith (2008) acknowledge the importance of both the social and ecological aspects of a place. Gruenewald (2003) goes further and insists that there be a proactive aspect to place-based education: it can and should seek to change the place in question, actively promoting social and ecological justice rather than merely learning about the place. However, sociodemographic barriers (including experiences of insufficient employment, unsafe housing, and unreliable transportation), frequently undermine the ability of some people to connect to natural landscapes that are not in close proximity to urban spaces. But for those people, time in nature may in fact be most impactful: “Disadvantaged children who live far away from city parks [for example] are more likely to display conditional problems and less prosocial behavior” (Balseviciene et al. 2014 in Li et al., 2018: 34). For the youth in these backcountry expeditions, the newness of the landscape is clear, from the wide open spaces to living in rhythm with the sunrises/sunsets, to the availability of moments and spaces to be alone; when program facilitators offer opportunities to actively engage with the place and its peopled and other residents, it becomes more meaningful. Arguably all children are raised in places, not just spaces, because, be it a community of childcare, home, school, backyards, or some other space and circle of care, here they begin to develop meaningful connections. They explore those landscapes in detailed ways that help them to gain mastery of their world. Through this immersion in spaces, children learn about them and develop a sense of place (Ansell, 2009; Davy, 2019). This state, however, can be transient and ephemeral. For those youth facing challenging home environments, this landscape—however connected— may be confining and perhaps even dangerous. Research suggests, for example, that parental concerns about crime and safety found within their community prevents many children from playing outdoors and exploring nearby nature (Valentine & McKendrick, 1997). This lack of deep-seated connection with natural places is troubling.

18 Placelessness and Dis-ease …

4

449

Placelessness of Urban Youth At-Risk “Our girls” ranged in age from 12 to 17 and were from Southwestern Ontario. Each had a story, each had a past, and I firmly believe that we had a little something to do with each having a slightly brighter and more confident future. What these girls all had in common were incredibly strong spirits and sturdy souls to boot. I have no doubt that each will overcome whatever obstacles they have and will do so with tremendous grace and dignity. I have no doubt in my mind that each will live up to her potential and lead a meaningful life. I have no doubt that, despite the tears, the minor conflicts, and the sodden clothing, the eight days spent in Temagami did what they were supposed to do… transform. By the end, no one wanted to go home and two told me the following, yet another memory to add to this summer: “In the city there’s so much around but nothing to do… around here in the wilderness there’s nothing around and yet so much to do”. Precisely.

Perhaps it is not the place that made the difference, but I’m certain it played a key role in their transformations. This same experience is not replicable in the city where familiarity may encourage old habits to continue and unhealthy relationships to persist. The unfamiliar landscape of the backcountry offers a canvas upon which to reinvent themselves within the safety of caring adults, supportive peers, and the steadfast nature that surrounds the experience. Today I continue to receive random updates from my youth stating that “because of that canoe trip with you, I am able to….”. The youth are able to directly connect some of their successes today to the time spent in that seemingly foreign landscape. To connect to a place is meaningful. To connect to a place when one has never before been tethered healthily to a landscape and been offered the opportunity to grow within that landscape can be even more profound. On a canoe trip, this may be possible. According to Kudryavtsev, Krasny, and Stedman, a number of empirical studies demonstrate that place attachment is strengthened by commitment to outdoor recreation activities that happen in a particular place (Moore & Scott, 2003) […] and active engagement with places such as participating in hands-on environmental stewardship activities (Ryan et al.,

450

A. L. Hooykaas

2001, 2012). For the youth described in this chapter, a key component of the extended trips with the more experienced youth was stewardship activities ranging from helping clear a new portage route, to building a kybo (outdoor toilet), to helping community leaders in other environmental initiatives. To become placed is not an outward goal of many backcountry expeditions, but it can be seen as being important to the well-being of youth at-risk as much as (or perhaps more than) it is for any youth. Youth at-risk may have difficulty achieving a healthy sense of place and the associated well-being. One antidote to this pressing need to connect to places may be experiencing such as backcountry wilderness expeditions, where youth are immersed in the novel and largely unfamiliar landscapes. To be considered at-risk may imply the potential for negative outcomes as preconceived destinies are socially constructed and limiting for those wanting to change their futures. Such outcomes may be avoided with support and connection, which can be acquired through such experiences as reconnections achieved on backcountry wilderness expeditions, where youth, while in unfamiliar landscapes, begin to forge new connections with themselves and their potential.

5

Reconnection Through Unfamiliar Landscapes Most youth come to us on the advice of their group home, parole officer, child and youth worker, or another social service agency. They don’t necessarily want to be there initially – it’s so foreign, really. I am not sure why they come – intrigue, maybe? A chance to reinvent? I hope they come seeking this – and some of them surely find it in the process. One youth discovered her love of archery and spent hours doing target practice with a bow and arrows she made. One youth discovered she could float in the water . One youth discovered she could haul a canoe on her head through waist deep mud – on a wrong trail – but still laugh at it around the campfire that evening. None of these youth are “gone” – they just need some reprieve. I think these wild spaces give that to them.

18 Placelessness and Dis-ease …

451

Having a deep-rooted and healthy connection to one’s home is often strengthened when one is distant from it as those elements one might have taken for granted (a hug from a friend, a comfortable bed, etc.) are no longer as accessible. In being instructed to put all one’s belongings in a canoe pack, to essentially be stripped of one’s “comforts” of home in preparation for a canoe expedition, a youth at-risk tends to begin to reflect on what matters. When they have a long portage and just the echo of the branches snapping off the canoe on their head, there tends to be plenty of time to be with their own thoughts. When the portage ends and they are again surrounded by a small community who is celebrating their successes and strengths, it can often shift that youth’s perception of themselves and their value. In the adopted space (whether a new country or an unfamiliar landscape just a few hours away), a person’s ties may not directly and immediately translate into comfort and a sense of security within that landscape. Deborah Tall (1993: 105) suggests that “When the landscapes we find ourselves in are not diffused with our meanings, our history or community, it’s not easy to attach ourselves to them. It cannot be a natural connection but must be a forged one. It is easier to turn inward from a strange land than to attempt to bridge the gap”. In wilderness therapy, however, the immersion into the unknown can lead to connection as those ties one has to their familiar surroundings are often no longer at hand. It has been my experience that often in backcountry expeditions, many of the youth’s possessions are stored at base camp to protect them from the elements, to ensure appropriate attire is worn (i.e. fast drying), and to put all youth on the same level (no gang affiliations, expensive or tattered clothing). Without these, youth must find new ways to connect to their surroundings, devoid of the protection/insulation of their possessions. They are given the opportunity to reinvent themselves in a group of peers with whom they’ve never before spoken. This also allows new connections to place to develop, both to the land on which they travel and the landscape from which they’ve come. The activities youth partake in backcountry build participants’ individual confidence through the development of wilderness skills, being at peace within novel surroundings, and developing a sense of community with their group members. These new abilities and ways of adapting are transferable skills and help to support youth on their return to the city.

452

A. L. Hooykaas

There are no preconceived notions and expectations put upon these youth while in an unfamiliar place and they can choose who they are. Place-based education as can be experienced in a backcountry expedition is crucial for the fostering of a sense of place in children and for urban youth at-risk; wilderness therapy in unfamiliar spaces can continue to hone wellness in otherwise unhealthy places. The skills developed are often transferrable to their lives back home. While a focus is often on the physical (hard) skills, soft skill development is key. Youth will brag about how far they paddled, how many times they “got chased by a bear” (often zero!), and how much their pack weighed on the portage. While those are the most engaging to their peers, facilitators will often focus on other development: their reliance on one another, the leadership possibilities, and the opportunity to be heard as an autonomous individual (especially key for those youth who come from “the system” and rarely have choice of their own). As a course director for Outward Bound once famously said of guiding in the wilderness: “Let the mountains speak for themselves” (James, 1980: 1)—both metaphorically and physically. This is key to the creation of familiar places.

5.1

The Role of Wilderness Therapy in the Creation of Familiar Places

A first paddle, a first meteor shower, a first s’more… these things were crucial in my life compass and I hope may influence the youth a sliver of the way I have been affected. Once again, I see the incredible beauty and strength and fear that nature can create… everything resonates in the eyes of my youth and therefore in myself. How fortunate I am to have a caring family, a strong community, a future I can choose, and the passion and belief in myself to follow any path I wander. How fortunate, too, am I to be in Temagami, to be touched by “my kids”, to share trip rope bracelets with incredible souls around Ontario, and finally, how fortunate am I to be growing every second that my paddle touches the water.

18 Placelessness and Dis-ease …

453

Unfamiliar spaces—those previously largely unimagined and rather daunting for the youth described in this chapter—can offer opportunities for youth to be transformed, and offer the tools to become more empowered versions of themselves. I would suggest that the key to the immersive experience is the unfamiliar landscape itself and the new ways that youth are required to engage with themselves, their group members, their environments, and their stories. At the beginning of the expedition, a sixteen-year old boy stepped off the school bus in Temagami, Ontario, five hours north of Toronto, Ontario. He looked around, not recognizing anything familiar and asked in a serious tone if we had arrived in Florida. He looked for his duffel bag. Lowered his headphones. He asked because he’d heard both were far away and he’d been to neither (of note is that Orlando, Florida is a straight twenty-hour drive without stops). The distance made no difference for this boy - each was as novel as the other. Each unknown and for him uncharted. Once he’d located his belongings, he began to unpack.

Like so many stepping off the bus and into the unknown, this youth had never before left the city. His point of reference of “away” was Florida. He, like so many, was in an entirely new landscape and was able to almost “begin again”—his history with substances, his lack of success in school, and his family instability were all irrelevant to who and where he was now. History does not need to follow a youth into these unfamiliar places—the lack of people, the exposure to the elements, the magnitude of the lakes, the trees, and the vistas all offer an opportunity to begin again. Wilderness therapy and expeditions such as this have been said to decrease mental health disorders within this population due to several factors including the recognition that familial, social, and/or academic struggles are not confined to one individual and are instead shared by the majority (Dolgin, 2014). This would not be a conversation easily spoken when a youth is immersed in their urban environment. There is a saying that the most truths come out in the conversations of a campfire. It has been my experience that in the shadows around a campfire the youth at-risk do not need to make eye contact, do not need to speak with anyone in particular, can pause, and there’s some safety in that. Around the campfire body language remains hidden, hoodies and

454

A. L. Hooykaas

toques can be worn low, and whatever other protective measures can be used without judgement. Additionally, the youth rarely know each other before an expedition and so what is spoken remains in the forest and the majority of youth will never see each other again. But that distance— both protective and geographical—returns to some of the youth as they return to the city after such an immersive experience in the backcountry. It isn’t infallible: As we get closer to Toronto, the youth begin to slouch, conversations become halted, and the proud, lifted faces retreat beneath heavy hoodies. They are returning to “their place”. One boy – particularly challenging, lumbers off the bus and walks toward the subway, no one there to pick him up. No one there to witness his magnificence. All I want is for him to turn around and react to my wave. All I want is for him to know that we saw him. That we care about him. That we think he’s magic. I hope he remembers the stars. I hope he remembers the portages. I hope he remembers his strength. I hope he remembers himself.

6

Conclusions: A Return to Wild Spaces and Known Places

For youth at-risk on a wilderness expedition for the first time, it is common to feel very alone and scared and largely as though they are in uncharted territory. While this may be seen as difficult to navigate, this discomfort can also be an opportunity for growth—indeed in subsequent years those who return will often openly share this with newer campers and it seems as though this becomes an easy talking point. During the experience of an expedition, they are asked in so many ways to “show up” for themselves and for their team, whether in taking responsibility for packing effectively each morning, for putting on sunscreen, or for asking for support when things become difficult. They are asked to trust a process they have never before encountered through unfamiliarity with gear, clothing, vehicles, peers, guides, landscapes. They are tasked with changing - improving themselves through challenging themselves, ameliorating dis-ease through discomfort. For some, to step off

18 Placelessness and Dis-ease …

455

the bus is challenging enough and they return to the familiarity of the city soon after. For others, this newness becomes an addiction and they return summer after summer to complete longer and more strenuous trips, standing taller, prouder, and more certain of themselves on the land. Both face unfamiliarity. And both are changed to some degree. While the facilitator is key to creating a safe and nurturing environment within which the youth can experience the landscape, it’s never about them. I think it’s always been about the place, and allowing the mountains to speak for themselves. Through arguably a rather disruptive and intentional shift in landscape and a move away from the pressures of the city, these youth have little option but to open their eyes—really open their eyes—and begin to see for perhaps the first time. They tuck a tiny part of the landscape into their hoodies when they return home and keep that with them. Some bring their children camping. Others keep in contact. And others just know that at one moment, they carried a canoe on their shoulders for a very long way. I often get emails and social media messages with photos and stories of “my youth” years later—they haven’t forgotten the journey they embarked upon. And neither have I, though I recognize I am just a mere witness to a fraction of that development. For those youth for whom a sense of place is perhaps difficult to attain due to challenging circumstances—financially, socially, emotionally, or otherwise—a lack of place puts them at-risk of dis-ease and may further exacerbate presenting issues (Albrecht, 2010). To have a solid grounding and connection to place developed through such experiences as those that may occur in the backcountry, youth can develop soft skills that directly support them in their daily lives, however difficult. Through this chapter we explored the importance of places for youth at-risk, how this may initially be acquired through place-based education through wilderness therapy such as that of the expeditions I reflected upon throughout. The end result may be that the step into the unknown of these “wild spaces” can actually foster increased well-being in youth at-risk. The summer for me has come to an end of sorts… I moved home down that lonely road south two days ago and sit here now to compose my last few paragraphs of my summer... it’s overwhelming, really, to try to put it into

456

A. L. Hooykaas

words at this time so instead I’ll just copy an excerpt from my journal, entry dated September 1st , 2005, and build from there: “So it’s nearly over, a summer of magic moments, eye-opening splendour, and endless possibilities. I have been given a great gift this summer – the ability to see me for who I really am, one who can be true to her emotions, react to her gut instincts, speak up for what is right and true, be quirky, and, perhaps largest of all, can change lives. I don’t just mean superficially, but can truly and deeply shake one so that s/he will never think of her/himself in any small way again. This is a gift and I am so thankful for it”. […] I was able to connect to some of those youth in just a few days as I was a listener and they were frequently just seeking a person with whom they could share their often-challenging lives. I became friends with youth all too familiar with horrible and devastating things: substance abuse, suicide, abuse, rape, “the system”, and the list goes on. Though I know we can’t connect with them all, and that some will end up as statistics, I know that many have now seen a different way of living, and I take their stories in stride. So, what seems best is to thank those youth I paddled with, wherever they are now: You have changed my life.

Perhaps the unfamiliar landscapes of life and land resonated loudly with us both. I would like to think it continues to provide us with lessons we didn’t yet recognize we needed to learn.

References Albrecht, G. (2010). Solastalgia and the creation of new ways of living. In S. Pilgrim & J. N. Pretty (Eds.), Nature and culture: Rebuilding lost connections (pp. 217–234). Earthscan LLC. Altman, I., & Low, S. (1992). Place attachment. Plenum. Ansell, N. (2009). Childhood and the politics of scale: Descaling children’s geographies? Progress in Human Geography, 33(2), 190–209. Aunola, K., Stattin, H., & Nurmi, J. (2000). Adolescents’ achievement strategies, school adjustment, and externalizing and internalizing problem behaviors. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 29, 289–306.

18 Placelessness and Dis-ease …

457

Bandoroff, S., and Newes, S. (Eds.). (2004). Coming of age: The evolving field of adventure therapy (pp. 1–30). Association for Experimental Education. Beatley, T. (2004). Native to nowhere: Sustaining home and community in a global age. Island Press. Clark, J. P., Marmol, L. M., Cooley, R., & Gathercoal, K. (2004). The effects of wilderness therapy on the clinical concerns (on axes i, ii, and iv) of troubled adolescents. Journal of Experiential Education, 27 (2), 213–232. Corey, M. S., & Corey, G. (2000). Groups: Process and practice. Brooks/Cole Publishing Company. Davis-Berman, J., Berman, D. S., & Capone, L. (1994). Therapeutic wilderness programs: A national survey. Journal of Experiential Education, 17 (2), 49–53. Davy, A. (2019). A sense of place: Mindful practice outdoors. Bloomsbury Publishing. Dolgin, R. (2014). Into the wild: A group wilderness intervention to build coping strategies in high school youth through collaboration and shared experience. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health., 9, 83–98. Duff, C. (2010). On the role of affect and practice in the production of place. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(5), 881–895. Gillespie, E., & Allen-Craig, S. (2009). The enhancement of resilience via a wilderness therapy program: A preliminary investigation. Australian Journal of Outdoor Education., 13(1), 39–49. Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). Best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), 3–12. Gruenewald, D. A., & Smith, G. A. (Eds.). (2008). Place-based education in the global age: Local diversity. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc. Hidalgo, M. C., & Hernandez, B. (2001). Place attachment: Conceptual and empirical questions. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21(3), 273–281. Hooykaas, A. L. (2008). The study of placelessness: Toward a conceptual framework. Master’s thesis, College of the Atlantic. Hooykaas, A. L. (2009). The study of placelessness: Toward a conceptual framework. The International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability, 5 (3), 295–304. Hooykaas, A. L. (2012). Enduring gardens: Woven by friends into the fabric of the urban community. UWSpace. http://hdl.handle.net/10012/7154 James, T. (1980). Can the mountains speak for themselves. Scisco Conscientia, 3, 21–40.

458

A. L. Hooykaas

Kudryavtsev, A., Krasny, M. E., & Stedman, R. C. (2012). The impact of environmental education on sense of place among urban youth. Ecosphere, 3(4), 29. Li, D., Deal, B., Zhou, X., Slavenas, M., & Sullivan, W. C. (2018). Moving beyond the neighborhood: Daily exposure to nature and adolescents’ mood. Landscape and Urban Planning, 173, 33–43. Margalit, D., & Ben-Ari, A. (2014). The effect of wilderness therapy of adolescents’ cognitive autonomy and self-efficacy: Results of a non-randomized trial. Child & Youth Care Forum, 43, 181–194. Moore, R. L., & Scott, D. (2003). Place attachment and context: Comparing a park and a trail within. Forest Science, 49 (6), 877–884. Moote, G. T., Jr., & Wodarski, J. S. (1997). The acquisition of life skills through adventure-based activities and programs: A review of the literature. Adolescence, 32(125), 143–216. Moreno, M. A., Jelenchick, L. A., & Breland, D. J. (2015). Exploring depression and problematic internet use among college females: A multisite study. Computers in Human Behavior, 49, 601–607. Ostrom, E. (2012). Nested externalities and polycentric institutions: Must we wait for global solutions to climate change before taking actions at other scales? Economic Theory, 49, 353–369. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. Pion Limited. Relph, E. (2018). Part Two: Changes to Experiences of Places”. Place Changes since 1975 (and their implications for understanding place and placelessness). Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/37404564/Place_Cha nges_since_1975_and_their_implications_for_understanding_place_and_ placelessness_._Part_Two_Changes_to_Experiences_of_Places Russell, K. C., & Farnum, J. (2004). A concurrent model of the wilderness therapy process. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 4 (1), 39–55. Tall, D. (1993). From where we stand: Recovering a sense of place. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Urbact. (2020). Priority Neighbourhoods. URBACT . https://urbact.eu/pri ority-neighbourhoods Valentine, G., & McKendrck, J. (1997). Children’s outdoor play: Exploring parental concerns about children’s safety and the changing nature of childhood. Geoforum, 28(2), 219–235. Weil, S. (1971). The need for roots: Prelude to a declaration of duties toward mankind (A. Wills, Trans.). Harper Colophon Books.

18 Placelessness and Dis-ease …

459

Younes, F., Halawi, G., Jabbour, H., El Osta, N., Karam L., Hajj, A., and Rabbaa, K. (2016) Internet addiction and relationships with insomnia, anxiety, depression, stress and self-esteem in university students: A crosssectional designed study. PLoS ONE, 11(9), e0161126.

Part V Digital and Sonic Encounters with Unfamiliarity

19 Sounds (Un)familiar: Young people’s Navigations of the Intersecting Landscape and Soundscape of a Community Radio Station Catherine Wilkinson and Samantha Wilkinson

1

Introduction

“Unfamiliar landscapes” are places young people are introduced to, voluntarily or otherwise, by a range of actors, be it friends, family or strangers. Unfamiliar landscapes include sites of formal learning (e.g. schools, colleges and universities) or informal learning (e.g. youth clubs and other community organisations), which young people may not be skilled in traversing. The unfamiliar landscape at the centre of this chapter is KCC Live, a volunteer youth-led community radio station situated in Knowsley Community College, neighbouring Liverpool, UK. C. Wilkinson (B) Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Wilkinson Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_19

463

464

C. Wilkinson and S. Wilkinson

Although KCC Live is based in a college, the youth-led environment is very different from the adult-imposed order of schools, thus contributing to its unfamiliarity to the young people. Most obviously, young people lead the radio station alongside the station manager and thus traditional adult-youth hierarchies were somewhat reduced. In this chapter, we explore the navigation of the young volunteers, aged 16–25, both in the unfamiliar landscape of the physical space of the community radio station and also the unfamiliar soundscape of the airwaves. Here, we define soundscape as a combination of sounds that form or arise from an immersive environment. Specifically, we position the airwaves as a soundscape that young people engage with through not only listening but also producing, shaping and broadcasting: that of 99.8 fm (https:// www.kcclive.com/radioplayer/listenlive/). The focus of this chapter is on the enskilling of the young people, many of whom were Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET), through both formal training and situated learning. This combination of formal and informal learning enables the young people to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of the airwaves and to develop their radio personalities, as they simultaneously find themselves “at home” in the physical space of KCC Live. We also consider how, although KCC Live is based in a college, the youth-led environment is very different from the adult-imposed order of schools, thus contributing to its unfamiliarity to the young people. Further, whilst the landscape of KCC Live affords young people freedom and creativity of expression, the airwaves are adult-mediated and policed. The unique contribution of this chapter is the emphasis on the intersection of landscapes and soundscapes, framed through the lens of (un)familiarity. First, this chapter provides an overview of existing literature on young people and community radio. It then introduces the reader to KCC Live, before moving on to outline the methods used in the project. We then present findings related to navigating both the unfamiliar landscape and soundscape of KCC Live.

19 Sounds (Un)familiar …

2

465

Young People and Community Radio

Community radio has been heralded for its ability to empower young people (Marchi, 2009; Podkalicka & Staley, 2009; Wagg, 2004) and to position young people within dominant societal discourses, from which they were previously excluded (Baker, 2007). Previous studies have explored how participation in community radio can enable young people to “locate themselves more fully in the social and cultural fabric” of their geographic locale and neighbouring areas (Baker, 2007: 587). Underpinned by the view that popular music is culturally central to young people, Baker (2007) writes that the production of a weekly community radio show, Guerrilla Radio, by a group of young Australians allowed the marginalised radio crew to build productive networks. Seen in this way, for young people, community radio is a means to negotiate marginalisation. Bloustien (2007) finds that young people can discover new forms of networking, collaboration and trust through using convergent media forms. Drawing on research from an international project, Playing for Life, Bloustien (2007) argues that participation in such media practices makes possible a greater sense of inclusion in social and familial networks, whilst offering opportunities to create new experiential communities centred on music, the arts, and cultural activities. A further upshot is that young people are producing and developing new communities and founding new ways of belonging (Bloustien, 2007). This supports Halleck’s (2002) argument that participation in community media can function as a source of empowerment for young people to represent themselves. Previous writing has been concerned with the specificities of the learning environment engendered by youth media participation. Chávez and Soep (2005: 409) introduce the concept of “pedagogy of collegiality” to describe the process through which young people work alongside peers and adults with a shared purpose. Chávez and Soep (2005) devote attention to how adults in this partnership spur young producers to develop and grow. It is in this vein that the authors believe that youth media functions as a tool for expanding democratic participation (see also Soep & Chávez, 2010). If such partnerships are successfully conducted—for instance, connecting young people to their peers, adults and community

466

C. Wilkinson and S. Wilkinson

members, young people have the ability to create their own representations of their culture (Kranich & Patterson, 2008). As Kranich and Patterson (2008) argue, constructive relationships between young people and adults, resulting from participation in media projects, can generate authentic opportunities for greater leadership roles for young people within the community. A related body of work has concentrated on the skills that young people gain through youth media participation. Writing about Youthworx, Hopkins (2011) tells how the media organisation offers young people, who have withdrawn from formal education, skill-building through multi-media training. The project aims to assist estranged young people into more socially productive pathways, making “personal, prosocial connections with the world around them” (Hopkins, 2011: 196). This work exemplifies how, through gaining valuable media skills, young people become empowered as active citizens and are both competent and eager to contribute to decision-making. Podkalicka (2011) goes further to highlight the ways in which Youthworx is important as an access point for young people—not only to foster creative digital mediabased experiences and the related development of skills but to increased geographical mobility and involvement within the city based on transportation provided by staff and friends within the Youthworx network. Podkalicka (2011) believes that Youthworx offers a means for young people to begin exploring the city beyond the constraints of their local suburbs. This imagining of social mobility is related to a more general understanding of social inclusion, through which young people realise greater opportunities within the city. A small body of literature concerns youth radio as a means of (re)connecting young people with education and employment. Writing on the case of Youthworx, Podkalicka and Staley (2009) tell how this organisation uses media and non-institutionalised learning to engage marginalised young people in a process of participation that aims to reconnect them to education and society. They report increased social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) through acquisition of media skills, improved social or familial relationships and augmented self-confidence. Such findings mirror Wallace’s (2008) writing about a Massachusetts college radio station, where students controlled the college radio station,

19 Sounds (Un)familiar …

467

and therefore many of its practices fit a community radio model. Wallace (2008) tells how, aside from their own entertainment, young people use the station as a stepping-stone towards another destination, through acquiring on-air experience and building their CVs. This dovetails with scholarship (Bloustien et al., 2008), which finds that, through engagement in media creation, young people may resultantly re-enter education or find employment. The extant literature is also concerned with community radio as giving voice to disenfranchised or disadvantaged community members, for instance, those who are economically, linguistically or politically marginalised (e.g. Dahal & Aram, 2013; Podkalicka & Staley, 2009; Tsarwe, 2014). Certain commentators suggest that, in producing a radio show, young people gain agency in the production of their own audio, thereby affording them a voice they are often deprived of in school and family settings (e.g. Wagg, 2004). Using the case of CKUT CampusCommunity Radio, Wagg (2004) finds that marginalised young people are enfranchised through involvement in media production, particularly through using media production as an outlet for their voices. In this respect, Wagg (2004) argues that the act of sharing their texts is empowering for young people, irrespective of the size, or even presence, of a listening audience. That is, it is “the legitimacy of discursive space” that is the most enfranchising for young people (Wagg, 2004: 268). Central to this is the idea that the airwaves “affirms a worthy sense of self ” (Wagg, 2004: 275) through the vocalisation of words, ideas, thoughts and opinions. Further, most existing literature considers voice in its literal sense, as projected through the airwaves. Weller (2006: 304) suggests that radio station phone-ins create “participatory spaces”, which allow previously muted young people to express their opinions to a listening audience. She provides a sharp lens on the effectiveness of radio phone-ins in adding eminence to young people’s voices, through assigning space for issues important to them. This view is mirrored by Kranich and Patterson’s (2008: 27) assertion that “youth media fills an important step in truly amplifying youth voice by connecting the many voices that have never had the opportunity to connect with compassionate teenagers”. Consistent with this, Glevarec and Choquet (2003) maintain that young people

468

C. Wilkinson and S. Wilkinson

find a space on the airwaves to engage in meaningful interactions in which they communicate their own issues, and acquire knowledge of others’ experiences. The central argument here is that radio functions as a facilitator in projecting and receiving youth voices. So far, “youth voice” on the airwaves has been presented as largely empowering and beneficial for young people. One of the most cogent criticisms levelled at youth voice concerns its claims to authenticity (Wilkinson, 2019a). Discussing children’s voice, Komulainen (2007: 13) argues: “what is ‘true’ and ‘real’ about voices remains an unresolved puzzle”. For Komulainen (2007: 13), despite being a powerful rhetorical device, the child’s voice is socially constructed through the very “socialness” of human interaction, discourses and practice. Told in this way, youth voice is becoming increasingly detached from its representation as the ideal product of media communication. In an analysis of voice in educational discourse, Juffermans and Van der Aa (2013: 112) argue, “the production of voice is always situated, socially determined, and institutionally organized”. Similarly, Komulainen (2007) makes a persuasive point that voice is not constant across an individual’s lifespan, rather, it is fluid and mutable, changing over time and space. Further fleshing out this point, James (2007) considers how projects that profess to give voice to young people can gloss over the diversity of their individual lifeworlds, presenting them as a homogenous group. It should be apparent then that community radio must account for the variety and multiplicity of young people’s voices. Bemoaning the fetishisation of youth voice by media producers and theorists as individual, authentic and untainted expression, Soep and Chávez (2010) argue that their text is not a celebration of youth voice. Youth Radio, the radio station at the centre of their analysis, does not simply provide young people with recording devices and “give” them voice. Instead, it encourages young people to connect with their senses and experiences of their communities and social worlds and to interrogate and examine other points of view. Thus, scholars should not position youth voice as the outcome, yet instead consider it as a starting point that advances a complex set of questions (Benwell et al., 2020; Cairns, 2009; Chan, 2006; Soep & Chávez, 2010). Such questions might include: whose voices are being heard? How have these voices been

19 Sounds (Un)familiar …

469

negotiated? It is in this vein that Soep (2006) argues that there is a need to go beyond voice in youth media production. Offering a critical contribution, Soep (2006) acknowledges that “youth voice” as connoting free expression is an over-simplification. Rather, young people have the potential to adjust, amplify and experiment with a selection of genuine and illusive voices; for instance, finishing off someone else’s sentence and mimicking the speech of an individual or group. For Soep (2006: 199), use of reported speech by youth media producers results in “crowded talk” and is underpinned by constant self and peer evaluation. Thus, contradictory voices and interests can exist within youth media projects. Ames’ (2003) research is noteworthy in this sense. Ames (2003) analyses the representation of local voices within a regional radio station, illustrating that certain youth voices within the locale are projected, whilst others are muted. Ames (2003) thus complicates the idea that youth voice is all-empowering and signifies a welcome departure from uncritical treatments of voice. The key messages across these various literatures are that media projects can generate authentic opportunities for greater leadership roles for young people within the community. In addition to this, community radio provides an opportunity for skill-building, thereby functioning as a bridge to education and employment. Further, community radio is a platform where young people can negotiate marginalisation, through founding new ways of belonging in their wider lives. Above, we have reviewed literature which champions community radio as giving a voice to disenfranchised young people, whilst being critical of the authenticity of this voice. Despite the potential impact of community radio as a space in the lives of young people, research has so far not explored how young people negotiate (un)familiarity with the radio station environment itself. This chapter goes some way towards filling this void.

470

3

C. Wilkinson and S. Wilkinson

KCC Live

Founded in 2003, KCC Live was originally set up as a college-based enrichment and work experience radio station, based at the Roby Campus of Knowsley Community College. KCC Live acts as an important element of the college’s retention strategy and intends to function as a bridge for NEET young people to re-enter education and training. The station typically has a 14–25 year-old volunteer base (KCC Live, 2007), although at the time of conducting this research all volunteers were over the age of 16, and there were a number of volunteers over the age of 25. KCC Live positions itself as a youth-led radio station, with volunteers (unpaid) from both the college and the wider community assuming the role of presenters, producers, newsreaders, copywriters, segue-technicians, jingle producers, music programmers, web-editors, designers, and assistant managers. KCC Live also recruits students for unpaid work placements. Since the station’s conception, there have been around 50–200 volunteers at any one time. The makeup of the KCC Live volunteer body is hyperdiverse (Wilkinson, 2019b) in terms of the accents and hometowns of the young people, as well as their musical tastes and interests. KCC Live broadcasts 24 h a day seven days a week both on 99.8 fm and online, with a combination of live and pre-recorded shows. The station’s target audience is 10–24 year-olds in the centre of the Borough of Knowsley (KCC Live, 2007). KCC Live positions itself as an “exciting, non-elitist, highly-varied radio” (KCC Live, 2007: 4), which values and explores young people’s musical tastes, opinions, and daily lives, in ways that are relevant to them.

4

Methodology

This chapter draws on a larger mixed methods research project conducted by the first author (see Wilkinson, 2015), which adopted a participatory design in collaboration with young people at KCC Live. A “palette of methods” (Wilkinson & Wilkinson, 2018) was deployed, including 18 months of observant participation (see Wilkinson, 2017 for discussion of this term and method); interviews and focus groups with

19 Sounds (Un)familiar …

471

volunteers; interviews with management at KCC Live and Knowsley Community College; a listener survey; listener diaries (see Wilkinson & Wilkinson, 2019) and follow-up interviews. In this chapter, we focus specifically on data arising from interviews with the young volunteers and station management. More than 90 semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with volunteers at KCC Live. Interviews typically lasted between one and one and a half hours, or around 30 min for follow-up interviews. Further, six semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with key stakeholders at KCC Live, including station management and management from Knowsley Community College, where KCC Live is based. Data was analysed thematically. Believing that much of what is heard is lost in transcription, the verbatim words of young people have been included in the findings section. In the findings that follow, all young people have been referred to by a pseudonym. Catherine allowed young people and listeners to choose their own pseudonyms. Many KCC Live volunteers chose pseudonyms after pop stars, DJs and presenters. All station management and college management wished to use their genuine names, and therefore they were able to review their interview transcripts and were given the opportunity to request the deletion of content.

5

Findings: Making the Unfamiliar Familiar

In this section, we focus on findings relating to the role of KCC Live in introducing the young volunteers, aged 16–25, to both the unfamiliar landscape of the community radio station and the unfamiliar soundscape of the airwaves, respectively.

472

5.1

C. Wilkinson and S. Wilkinson

Navigating the Unfamiliar Landscape

Young people come to KCC Live with a range of previous experiences, as well as from diverse socio-economic and cultural contexts. Regardless of any existing radio or media knowledge, formal training provided at KCC Live is mandatory before volunteers are allowed on-air. The training takes the form of six hours (one hour per week for six weeks) dedicated to Ofcom1 training, KCC Live procedures, the station identity, getting to know oneself as a presenter, experimenting with technical equipment, and producing a demo. As illustrated through the quotations below, the induction training is useful for volunteers entering the unfamiliar environment of the radio station, yet it is not a substitute for more experiential learning: It [the training] was really good … Hannah [a former member of staff] would give you a breakdown of different techniques within the world of radio, and you would be shown how to do them and you would kind of work your way up from there really. The thing about radio is that you’re not going to learn everything. There’s probably presenters in their 50s or 60s who have really good jobs, it’s one of those jobs where, you know, you get something different from every radio scenario. So the training back then it was good but it wasn’t, it wasn’t a master class. You weren’t going to learn everything which comes with experience. (Modest Mouse, 28) Sometimes it [the formal training] was a little bit of a, err use your initiative err, which I think was a good thing, err that you know that they [station management] weren’t there all the time, because you kind of get used to doing something, like using equipment, and you get to know how to do it more, rather than them holding your hand as it were and kind of guiding you through it all the time. I prefer to just like do it, rather than be taught. (Andy, 23)

1

The Office of Communications, commonly known as Ofcom, is the UK government-approved regulatory and competition authority for broadcasting.

19 Sounds (Un)familiar …

473

These quotations demonstrate that the young people value the formal training process for enabling them to gain understanding of the requirements of a presenter and providing familiarity with the various technical equipment. However, as made clear by Modest Mouse, the formal training is limited in that volunteers cannot learn everything “which comes with experience”. Further, Andy stresses that he prefers to “do it, rather than be taught”, thus demonstrating a preference for what Land et al. (2019) refer to us learning with place. From the above, the training, although formal, can be seen as an alternative learning environment for young people, affording autonomy, in contrast to the “adult-imposed order of school environments” (Collins & Coleman, 2008: 291). Notwithstanding the importance of formal induction training, young people predominantly learn new skills informally in the everyday lifeworld of KCC Live, and through peer teaching. Take the following quotation from Station Manager Chrissie: Some stuff they will pick up naturally and not even realise they’ve learnt them, so spending time in the station and talking to people. It could just even be learning how to do interviews, so in their learning how to interview a band, they don’t realise that in doing that they’ve actually become really good in interviews. So when they’re going for jobs and stuff, they’re coming across really well … Erm, so some of them are taught formally in training associated with radio, and even though radio’s the tool, it’s not necessarily erm all that they learn … So even though in the training they’re learning about how to conduct an interview, but they’re also learning about open questions and the things that they need to know outside of radio basically … But yeah some of its formal and some of it isn’t, it’s just a case of being around this environment and this kind of work/office environment, they pick up those skills. (Chrissie, 30)

As Chrissie tells, volunteers “pick up” skills through their everyday participation at KCC Live. As such, learning is woven into the social fabric of the station as well as in the work of actually “doing” a radio show where a certain skill set is required. This holds resonance with the notion of situated learning: that is, knowing and learning which “cannot be abstracted from the environments in which they take place” (Sadler, 2009: 2). Further, informal learning is unplanned and

474

C. Wilkinson and S. Wilkinson

occurs through everyday experiences and even chance encounters (Hayes, 2012). Informal learning at KCC Live is experiential and collaborative. The following quotations from Chris and Calvin exemplify this point: It’s completely different from a college classroom, like you’ll have people coming into the station with completely different backgrounds, so you’re learning from people who are 24 or 25, so you’re learning off their life experiences. That kind of gives you an advantage for whatever you want to do, and you get advice off them, you seek advice if you want it. And it’s kind of boring sitting in a classroom, doing Maths or English, we’ve all been there, we all know, but I think it’s, it’s a good way to learn. (Chris, 17) I have a really bad attention span, I can’t listen that long and learning is difficult usually, but with radio it’s just normal, it’s what you do, it’s just like your normal routine. (Calvin, 19)

Above, Chris describes the learning environment at KCC Live as “completely different from a college classroom”, attributing this to the variety of ages of people who join the station, coming from different backgrounds, enabling him to learn from their life experiences. Calvin references his short attention span, describing learning as “difficult” for him. However, he acknowledges that learning technical skills at KCC Live occurs unconsciously: “it’s what you do”. Following Hayes (2012), informal learning may be particularly valued by those young people at KCC Live who have been marginalised by traditional (and more formal) learning processes. Spending time in a youth radio station and engaging with specialist software can create “the possibility of a slow accumulation of skills and knowledge”, and can act “as a seed for the future” (Podkalicka & Staley, 2009: 3). This research found that the young people developed a variety of technical skills using specialist radio broadcasting equipment and editing software:

19 Sounds (Un)familiar …

475

I mean there were so many things that, in my university course, that I actually hadn’t learnt until I came here. I know more about the Myriad system, which is what you use for the recording. I learnt more here than when I was there. (MJ, 22) I see KCC Live as, well it’s helped me. Not like on an academic level, but with the technical skills of the desk [broadcast mixer]. Like say if on my course I have to do a bit of sound tech and sound engineering, I’ll know how to use the levels and stuff which will help me. It’s helped me on my course at the moment to be honest. (Kurt, 18)

The above quotations demonstrate “digital fluency” (Hsi, 2007: 1509), gained through increased competency in the use of specialist playout equipment. MJ has learnt skills at KCC Live that she had not learnt on her radio university course. Kurt makes the distinction that, although KCC Live has not helped him “on an academic level”, he has gained useful skills in sound engineering, which he can use within his college course. It is interesting here that whilst Kurt seeks to distinguish between an academic environment and the radio station (formal and informal), at the same time he acknowledges the fluidity of learning between the two. As Soep and Chávez (2010) discuss, young people begin participation in media projects in more marginal roles, and we argue that as the landscape becomes more familiar to them, they move into more involved roles, requiring less direction from others. At KCC Live, this process is cyclical in that, unrestrained by the formal parameters of school, young people impart their newfound skills to new generations of volunteers. This peer teaching takes a variety of forms, for instance: sitting in on other volunteer’s shows; spending time with others in the studios; helping other volunteers with show plan ideas and listening back to audio and providing feedback. The following quotations demonstrate these forms of peer teaching: I just try and not be one of those people who thinks erm new people and just just let them get on with their work, they’re here to learn, I try to help them out as much as I can. Because when I was volunteering here first I did get a

476

C. Wilkinson and S. Wilkinson

lot of help and support from other presenters and workers here at the station, and I like to be that kind of head over their shoulders that they were to me. (MJ, 22) There’s a lad downstairs who’s just started called Jay and, erm, he was asking me if I could help him and stuff. So I helped him when I could and, erm I let him like sit in on the show and I listened to his show properly today and I gave him tips and that because he’s only just started. And, erm, I like to give back what people gave to me when I started … like Steve, Steve helped me so much when I started, and if I can just do a little, like even if I can do half of what he done to help me, then I’ll feel like I’m giving back. (Calvin, 20)

Above, MJ and Calvin recount how they received support in “becoming” skilled (Lea, 2009) in radio production techniques as newcomers at KCC Live, and therefore they position themselves as “returning the favour”. This holds resonance with Jones’ (2002) discussion of how some young people, possessing increasing independence, effectively supervise young people on the other side of the youth divide. The portrait emerging is that, as young people become more familiar with the landscape of KCC Live, they aid new volunteers in making the unfamiliar familiar, in a bid to “give something back”. Essential to this idea of “returning the favour” is the possession of skill. Skill has been discussed in wider geographical literature as practical; processual; technical; ecological and political (Patchett & Mann, 2018). In this above account, we see acquisition of skill: the performance of skill and then continuation of skill through the training of peers (see also Mann, 2018 on knitting). In this sense, skill can be redistributed (Mann, 2018). Following Hunt (2018), it is important to become attuned to the placing of skill. KCC Live, then, becomes the micro space in which people, knowledge, practice, objects and activity come together to form a “skillscape”.

19 Sounds (Un)familiar …

5.2

477

Navigating the Unfamiliar Soundscape

As well as navigating the unfamiliar landscape of the space in which radio production took place, young people also had to navigate the unfamiliar soundscape of the airwaves. Soundscape here is understood as the totality of all sounds within a location, with an emphasis on the relationship between individual’s or society’s perception of, understanding of and interaction with the sonic environment (see Schafer, 1994; Truax, 2000). To start with an example, “radio voice” was a phrase used by one volunteer, Fearne, to explain her on-air voice, which she describes as different from her everyday voice: Fearne:

The only difficulties I’ve faced is getting into like doing me show properly and like doing me voices and things Catherine: What do you mean by your “voices”? Fearne: When I say me voices I mean, like I couldn’t just go on air and speak like this, it has to sound right, it has to sound professional and radio-ish, I don’t just want to sound like me. Well I want to sound like me, but a better sort of crafted version of me. I have me voice and then I have me radio voice (Fearne, 22) As the above exchange highlights, for some young people, speaking onair is not a simple case of stepping up to the microphone and talking. Fearne rehearses her voice to make it sound “radio-ish”. In this sense, Fearne is concerned with “speech production” (Goffman, 1981: 218), in that she is taking steps towards producing “spontaneous” and fluent speech. Other volunteers, though referring to a more sanitised voice, discussed this notion of a “crafted version” of self: In training I was taught like the presenting side of things, like erm how to present, like practicing links, what kind of stuff to put in the links, how to erm get them nice and snappy and not mess up, and then obviously all Ofcom

478

C. Wilkinson and S. Wilkinson

training,2 erm don’t swear, don’t say anything offensive, practically don’t have an opinion on anything, things like that. (Shaz, 18) It’s like Your Telephone Voice isn’t It, Sometimes if I’m Conscious of It I Do Try to Self-Censor What I Say. (Madonna, 18)

Here, unfamiliarity is encountered by the young people as the airwaves have new rules, for instance, no use of profanity, which the landscape of KCC Live (that is the physical space of the radio station) does not. Madonna speaks of how she conducts self-censorship on-air, comparing the projection of herself on the airwaves to a “telephone voice”, which is typically considered polite and professional. Madonna has implemented a technique of self-control to ensure that she does not go against the regulations. As Goffman (1981) tells in a discussion of radio talk, presenters desire to project refined versions of themselves, and to this end, their performances are heedful and self-conscious. Further, the young people work with a pre-censored idea of speech, that is, they make decisions about what they will say in the context of “an already circumscribed field of linguistic possibilities” (Butler, 1997: 129). In this reading, beyond self-control, the young people contend with censorship that precedes speech and is therefore responsible for its production (Butler, 1997). Thus, further than erecting boundaries for expression, censorship is formative of the young people’s speech. It is interesting to see here that, whilst on the one hand, the young people become familiar with how they are projected into the soundscape through their modification of language, and developing a radio voice, in so doing they reproduce the “airwaves” as different from “everyday” speech. For instance, the young people reproduce the norms of speech and voice on radio, which are somewhat prescribed to them through having to operate through the radio station, perhaps therefore reproducing unfamiliarity between everyday language and that produced for radio.

2 KCC Live holds compulsory training for new volunteers that covers the basics of presenting techniques, for instance, use of equipment and awareness of The Ofcom Broadcasting Code.

19 Sounds (Un)familiar …

479

Management at Knowsley Community College spoke of their perceived duty to “veto” what young people had to say, and to “police” the station: You might get a bigoted person who might want to muscle in and, erm, have their opinions voiced that are perhaps not of the sort of opinions you would normally like. The trouble with radio of course is, is that you’ve got to be seen to be fair, and you’ve got to be seen to be letting everybody have their say. But when you’ve got erm, responsibilities for students and their wellbeing and what have you, you have to be careful. So, sometimes it’s a question of perhaps having to veto what some people would like to say. (Pam, 68, former Vice Principal of Knowsley Community College) There was always a risk that, erm, you know, you put together young people, particularly sort of the teenage-type person on a public broadcast medium like that and you’ve got a risk of what they might say. You know, what they might say was always a bit of a risk. So it was my duty to police it in that sense. (Frank, 63, former Principal of Knowsley Community College)

A common thread running through these excerpts is the supervised, and indeed curated (through the training and ongoing policing) nature of youth voice on the airwaves. Although these examples of “policing” may not sound unreasonable, they demonstrate the tensions surrounding the co-construction of youth voice (see Komulainen, 2007), that is, voice as a product of a variety of influences arising from the context within which it is produced. Whilst the ethos of KCC Live is very much concerned with the projection of youth voice, the college maintains that the policing of youth voice on the airwaves is necessary in order to protect the station and its continuation (fines received from Ofcom could be detrimental to the station’s continuation). Consistent with this, in Wales’ (2012: 544) research, one participant’s reinventions through digital storytelling were “not good enough for the school authorities”. Interestingly then, it can be seen from data collected through this study that, whilst the young people attempted to “become” familiar with the soundscape of the airwaves they were doing so in a context that is in some ways mediated by policing adults. As such, the young people are learning what is acceptable and reproducing it in this context.

480

C. Wilkinson and S. Wilkinson

Podkalicka and Thomas (2010: 404) speak of how, if a place is “too professional”, its unfamiliarity in this sense can segregate certain disenfranchised young people who may wish to “remain on the periphery of creative production”, not seeking further education or employment in the media industry. The following vignettes from Nikki and Olly illustrate this tension: I pre-record my show and then I edit out all of the mistakes, like if I slip up pronouncing something, it has to be perfect … I try to do it by the book. Because I want a career in radio, like real bad, this is the best training ground for me. It’s good to know like the broadcasting err conventions and stuff, and then I work my show around them. So it’s basically the same as a show on Radio 1. (Nikki, 21) I really struggle with this whole idea of erm sticking to timings. Like, the news has to come in at the top of the hour, dead on. The ads err, they have to be played out at a certain time. They can’t be late. For me it’s pressure and it’s daunting, like thinking I’ve got to talk there and for X amount of time, or I can only talk for 40 seconds in that link else my show will run over. I just like wanna do my thing. I just want to sit there in the studio, play some boss tunes and talk about random stuff. I know we should stick to timings because we’re trying to be professional, but that’s not for me. I just want to sit here and do my own thing. (Olly, 17)

Thus, whilst aspiring BBC Radio 1 presenter Nikki appreciates the broadcasting conventions at KCC Live, as they put her in good stead for her future career, Olly values free expression. In line with Goffman (1981: 198), Nikki has been “schooled” to undertake speech production on-air that is free from “slips and gaffes”. This builds on insights by Soep (2006), who presents voice as structured by relations, including training and discipline. Yet Olly, who has no desire to pursue a career in radio, perceives the broadcast conventions that KCC Live adheres to as boundaries that stifle his voice. Throughout the first author’s participant observations, she noted that Olly attempted to combat norms, for instance, running over timings; speaking into tracks; taking out songs

19 Sounds (Un)familiar …

481

that are playlisted3 and scheduling his own music choices. These actions can be seen as strategies of resistance (see Hill & Bessant, 1999), through which Olly is trying to combat an uneasy and unfamiliar relationship with the audio technology. Taken together, we argue that an emphasis on professionalism may impede both young people’s creativity and presentation of self. This is reminiscent of Brushwood Rose’s (2009) discussion of the impossibilities of women and girl’s self-representation in digital storytelling. Brushwood Rose (2009: 4) speaks of the “power of the unpolished voice” and speculates that a coached approach to storytelling may restrict young girl’s voices.

6

Conclusions

This chapter has explored the enskilling of young people, many of whom were NEET, at a youth-led community radio station through both formal training and situated learning. This combination of formal and informal learning enabled the young people to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of the airwaves and to develop their radio personalities, as they simultaneously find themselves more “at home” in the physical space of KCC Live. The unique contribution of this chapter is the emphasis on the intersecting of landscapes and soundscapes, framed through the lens of (un)familiarity. An interesting finding arose from the differences in power structures between the landscape and soundscape of KCC Live. We found that young people’s attempts to “become” familiar with the soundscape of KCC Live were ultimately controlled and curated by more powerful adults, concerned with reputational damage on the airwaves. This is in contradiction to the landscape of KCC Live which the young people were responsible for leading, and which adults did not intervene. Further, as is evident in our empirical findings, the soundscape and landscape of KCC Live had different rules. As such, becoming familiar with the landscape (that is the physical space of KCC Live, comprising

3

A list or schedule of the recordings to be played on the radio.

482

C. Wilkinson and S. Wilkinson

the building and the volunteer body) did not automatically enable familiarity with the soundscape of the airwaves, which brought with it additional unfamiliarities (such as spoken and unspoken rules surrounding speech production, technical aspects and timing). Much of this unfamiliarity lay with the policing adults who monitored the airwaves in a bid to protect the station from large fines which would prohibit its continuation. Thus, whilst there were aspects of fun and creativity which can be seen in the production of “radio voices” by volunteers on the airwaves, there was also a sense that the voices of some young people were stifled and sanitised. This leads us to question the authenticity of “voice” and indeed “youth voice”, which has been somewhat idealised in some existing literature. Through our data, there was a dominant narrative of how learning technical skills increased both confidence and competence, aiding familiarity with place, building relationships and thereby encouraging familiarity amongst the volunteer body, as experienced volunteers passed on their skills to newcomers. In addition, this research found that familiarity with skills was deemed important for future work by young people. This is particularly important when considering the NEET status of many KCC Live volunteers, and the role of KCC Live as a stepping-stone to further education and employment. It is clear that young people at KCC Live negotiate the developement of their own skills, and even within a relatively non-hierarchical environment (compared to, for instance, schools), still find ways to subvert the impositions of the “adult world”, for instance, through subverting radio conventions. Further research is needed in exploring children and young people’s geographies in spaces of unfamiliarity, with particular emphasis needed on the process of making the unfamiliar familiar.

19 Sounds (Un)familiar …

483

References Ames, K. (2003). Silent voices: Representations of difference on regional radio. A Rockhampton case study. Paper presented at ANZCA 03: Designing Communication for Diversity, Brisbane. Baker, S. (2007). Young people and community radio in the northern region of Adelaide, South Australia. Popular Music and Society, 30, 575–590. Benwell, M. C., Davies, A., Evans, B., Wilkinson, C., and Volunteers at KCC Live Community Radio Station. (2020). Engaging political histories of urban unrest with young people: the Liverpool riots, 1981. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 38(4), 599–618. Bloustien, G. (2007). ‘Wigging people out’: Youth music practice and mediated communities. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 17 , 446– 462. Bloustien, G., Peters, M., & Luckman, S. (2008). Sonic synergies: Music, technology, community, identity. Ashgate Publishing Limited. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The Forms of Capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood Press. Brushwood Rose, C. (2009). The (im)possibilities of self-representation: Exploring the limits of storytelling in the digital stories of women and girls. Changing English, 16 , 211–220. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. Routledge. Cairns, K. (2009). A future to voice? Continuing debates in feminist research with youth. Gender and Education, 21, 321–335. Chan, C. (2006). Youth voice? Whose voice? Young people and youth media practice in Hong Kong. McGill Journal of Education, 41, 215–225. Chávez, V., & Soep, E. (2005). Youth radio and the pedagogy of collegiality. Harvard Educational Review, 75, 409–434. Collins, D., & Coleman, T. (2008). Social geographies of education: Looking within, and beyond, school boundaries. Geography Compass, 2, 281–299. Dahal, S., & Aram, I. A. (2013). Empowering indigenous community through community radio: A case study from Nepal. The Qualitative Report, 18, 1–26. Glevarec, H., and Choquet, A. (2003). Youth and ‘free-radio’ programmes. Young People’s Links with Radio. The Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media, 1(1), 29–46.

484

C. Wilkinson and S. Wilkinson

Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Basil Blackwell. Halleck, D. (2002). Hand-held visions: The impossible possibilities of community media. Fordham University Press. Hayes, D. (2012). Re-engaging marginalised young people in learning: The contribution of informal learning and community-based collaborations. Journal of Education Policy, 27 , 641–653. Hill, R., & Bessant, J. (1999). Spaced-out? Young people’s agency, resistance and public space. Urban Policy and Research, 17 , 41–49. Hopkins, L. (2011). Youth Worx: Increasing youth participation through media production. Journal of Sociology, 47 , 181–197. Hsi, S. (2007). Conceptualizing learning from the everyday activities of digital kids. International Journal of Science Education, 12, 1509–1529. Hunt, R. (2018). On sawing a loaf: Living simply and skillfully in hut and bothy. Cultural Geographies, 25, 71–89. James, A. (2007). Giving voice to children’s voices: Practices and problems, pitfalls and potentials. American Anthropologist, 109, 261–272. Jones, G. (2002). The youth divide: Diverging paths into adulthood . Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Juffermans, K., & Van der Aa, J. (2013). Introduction to the special issue: Analyzing voice in educational discourses. Anthropology and Education Quarterly., 44, 112–123. KCC Live. (2007). Public sections of Hywel Evans’ application to ofcom for a community radio licence on behalf of mission need Ltd and KCC live (pp. 1– 64). Komulainen, S. (2007). The ambiguity of the child’s ‘voice’ in social research. Childhood, 14, 11–28. Kranich, K., & Patterson, W. (2008). Hook ‘em with technology, keep ‘em with relationships. Youth Media Reporter, 2, 24–28. Land, N., Hamm, C., Yazbeck, S., Danis, I., Brown, M., & Nelson, N. (2019). Facetiming common worlds: Exchanging digital place stories and crafting pedagogical contact zones. Children’s Geographies, 18(1), 30–43. Lea, J. (2009). Becoming skilled: The cultural and corporeal geographies of teaching and learning Thai Yoga massage. Geoforum, 40, 465–474. Mann, J. (2018). Knitting the archive: Shetland lace and ecologies of skilled practice. Cultural Geographies, 25 (1), 91–106. Marchi, R. (2009). Z-Radio Boston: Teen journalism, political engagement, and democratizing the airwaves. Journal of Radio and Audio Media, 16 , 127– 143.

19 Sounds (Un)familiar …

485

Patchett, M., & Mann, J. (2018). Five advantages of skill. Cultural Geographies, 25, 23–29. Podkalicka, A. (2011). To Brunswick and beyond: A geography of creative and social participation for marginalised youth. M/C Journal, 14 (4). Podkalicka, A., & Staley, J. (2009). YouthWorx media: Creative media engagement for ‘at risk’ young people. Journal of Community, Citizen’s and Third Sector Media and Communication, 5, 2–8. Podkalicka, A., & Thomas, J. (2010). The skilled social voice an experiment in creative economy and communication rights. International Communication Gazette, 72, 395–406. Sadler, T. D. (2009). Situated learning in science education: Socio-scientific issues as contexts for practice. Studies in Science Education, 45, 1–42. Schafer, R.M. (1994). The soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world . Inner Traditions: Bear and Co. Soep, E. (2006). Beyond literacy and voice in youth media production. McGill Journal of Education, 41, 197–214. Soep, E., & Chávez, V. (2010). Drop that knowledge. University of California Press. Truax, B. (2000). Acoustic communication. Greenwood Publishing Group. Tsarwe, S. (2014). Voice, alienation and the struggle to be heard: A case study of community radio programming in South Africa. Critical Arts, 28, 287– 310. Wagg, H. (2004). Empowering youth with radio power: “Anything goes” on CKUT campus-community radio. Journal of Radio Studies, 11, 268–276. Wales, P. (2012). Telling tales in and out of school: Youth performativities with digital storytelling. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 17 (4), 535–552. Wallace, D. (2008). Reinventing the wheel vs. grinding the same old axe: An ethnographic view of the students and community members at a Massachusetts college radio station. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 5, 44–66. Weller, S. (2006). Tuning-in to teenagers! Using radio phone-in discussions in research with young people. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 9, 303–315. Wilkinson, C. (2015). Connecting communities through youth-led radio. Doctoral dissertation, University of Liverpool. Wilkinson, C. (2017). Going ‘backstage’: Observant participation in research with young people. Children’s Geographies, 15, 614–620.

486

C. Wilkinson and S. Wilkinson

Wilkinson, C. (2019a). The performance of youth voice on the airwaves. Children’s Geographies, 17 , 334–346. Wilkinson, C. (2019b). On the same wavelength? Hyperdiverse young people at a community radio station. Social and Cultural Geography, 20, 1251– 1265. Wilkinson, C., and Wilkinson, S. (2019). All about that place: Tuning in to community radio – Listener diary accounts. In K. Doughty, M. Duffy, and T. Harada (Eds.), Sounding places: More-than-representational geographies of sound and music (pp. 231–242). Edward-Elgar Publishing. Wilkinson, S., & Wilkinson, C. (2018). Researching drinking “with” young people: A palette of methods. Drugs and Alcohol Today., 18, 6–16.

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming: Collecting Sense-Data in Sense-Full Environments Sharon Watson

1

Introduction

This chapter aims to inspire researchers and practitioners to consider the role digital filmmaking can play in eliciting in-situ responses to sense-data. It examines the capacity of the camera as collector, conduit, confidante, interlocutor and creative tool, in lines of enquiry stretching between indoor and outdoor filmmaking sessions with young filmmakers. The chapter draws on a practice-based doctoral study that captured children’s exploration of urban wildspaces with digital cameras. The research set out to explore Edith Cobb’s (1977) observation that “we know very little about the creative effect on perception and mind of those rhythmical continuities, visual, auditory, tactile, or metabolic, that support the system and unite its organs of research with systems in nature”, and investigate how creative filmmaking contributes to these S. Watson (B) Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_20

487

488

S. Watson

experiences. Furthermore, there have been calls in landscape research for researchers to adopt more immersive-based studies, to investigate perceptions of nature in the making (Ward Thompson, 1998) and the experiential (Thwaites & Simkins, 2007). While Cobb was interested in exploring whether early experiences in nature contributed to creativity in adulthood, the study discussed in this chapter uses digital cameras to trace children’s nature connections outdoors, and then follows children’s experience back to indoor settings, to observe how these connections reappeared in creative filmmaking after the event. An insightful study with adult participants by Kroh and Gimblett (1992) uncovered differences in the language participants use to reflect on landscape experience indoors or outdoors. This might indicate that methods which focus on understandings gained from indoor investigation do not provide a full understanding of children’s nature connections. The difference in how children might speak about or speak to nature whether indoors or outdoors is currently under-researched. Towards these ends, examples in this chapter demonstrate that sense-data and the materialities of in-situ engagement transfer back to base (i.e. to the playscheme or after-school club set up in the study), unevenly and indirectly. This chapter begins by framing the study, drawing from a range of practices employing methods capable of capturing a sense of the rhythmical, visual, auditory, and tactile experience identified by Cobb. The following section provides a brief review of emerging, immersive practice. After this, I outline the impact of digital cameras and film (or ‘digital video’) as an ideal medium for capturing in-situ engagements. Accordingly, I discuss the work of artists, photographers, and ethnographic filmmakers, in addition to academic research.

2

Immersive Practice

Over the last ten years, immersive, in-situ practices and mobile research methods have enhanced understandings of children’s geographies, and the sensory connections children make to nature and landscape experience. In the UK, Christian Nold’s Sensory Journeys project with Sustrans

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

489

(2009–2010) investigated the different sensory observations children made travelling between home and school. Nold staged a participatory mapping project to track how movement on foot, cycling, by scooter, and by car, affected children’s sensory perceptions, which were shared with wider stakeholders using a custom-built web application. The walking, cycling, and scooting map produced showed considerable interaction with biophilic connections,1 such as the rain, the birds, the sky, and smells. The maps include quotes by the children, which served to bring the unfamiliarity of children’s outdoor experiences into indoor settings. Other research seeks to move away from reflexive accounts. In New Zealand, Carroll et al. (2011) uncovered different ‘insider and outsider’ interpretations, derived from ‘go-along’ interviews, where adult researchers took part in child-led walks around their neighbourhood to collect in-situ voices. Similarly, a study in Malawi, Ghana and South Africa, carried out by Porter et al. (2010) developed a method of ‘accompanied walks’, to enable young participants to carry out peer-to-peer interviews while walking, which uncovered insights on landscape issues otherwise difficult to obtain in other interview scenarios. These studies are important in beginning to capture in-situ understandings of nature connections, and engage with in-situ practices (Lynch & Gimblett, 1992; Thwaites & Simkins, 2007; Ward Thompson, 1998). One key question that remains is to what extent in-situ methods elicit unfamiliar, or less commonly heard ways of describing nature and landscape experiences. In children’s geographies, studies adopting immersive research methods, that involve walking with and following children’s lived experience, arrive at a different kind of telling, valued for the insights gained that are unavailable in ‘decontextualised interviews’ (Arvidsen, 2018). Immersive research methods uncover an array of embodied and emotional practices as they are experienced and performed to derive ‘a language of lived experience’ (Anderson & Jones, 2009). For example, conversations with children drawn from mobile/in-situ experiences give rise to ‘unfamiliar’ analytical descriptions—‘weather-walking’ with young children enables researchers to be ‘open to being surprised’ (Rooney, 2019), while ‘murmarative diffractions’ as Merewether (2019) explains, 1

http://www.sensoryjourneys.net/NewOakWalking.pdf, last accessed 13 Dec 2019.

490

S. Watson

help refocus adult attention towards the materiality of child/nature entanglements. Immersive methods shape how researchers themselves come to be more ‘familiar’ with children’s lived experiences in-situ. One persistent feature of this literature has been to focus academic discussion on the socio-material agency of bodies and matter (Änggård, 2016; Woodyer, 2008), and efforts to re-script the prevailing nature/culture binary towards posthumanist approaches (Arvidsen, 2018; Merewether, 2019; Rooney, 2019; Smith & Dunkley, 2018). The use of digital cameras in these studies is pivotal to facilitating exploration of how ‘unfamiliar’ nonhuman agencies are explored—by children and adults—and how mobile/digital/in-situ methods can contribute to this ‘becoming familiar’. For many children, the camera is an appealing tool to use to investigate their lived experience, widely demonstrated in research that uses methods such as participatory video, photovoice, and place mapping. Children in Ewald’s (2000) study experiment with a creative use of photography and text to interrogate places of childhood and identity, and Fursman (2020) uses photographic collage to question school spaces and pupil empowerment. By allowing children to use the cameras themselves, as Loescher (2005) notes, children can sometimes subvert the researcher’s aims in playful, performative appropriations of the medium. The addition of synchronous sound recording through digital video extends the role of the camera further—becoming a ‘conduit’, ‘confidante’, and ‘interlocutor’. Findings presented in this chapter demonstrate how such modes contribute to eliciting self-narration, and at the same time engage a deep ‘listening in’ to nature and nonhuman agencies. Experiencing nature is heightened: I have called this ‘bio’graphic filming to describe in-situ filming that captures responses to biophilic connections. In this way, ‘listening in’ to nature with cameras supports posthumanist and new materialist goals which seek to expand how we come to know the world. How thinking occurs through objects and other nonhumans, commonly advocated by non-modern ontologies and emerging interspecies paradigms which have influenced posthumanism, might itself be approached through these ‘bio’graphic filming techniques and analysis. Russell (2005: 439) questions the suitability of a human voice being the only ‘speaking subject’ in research and asks whether there

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

491

is ‘room for nature to write back’ within the current limitations of academic texts. Russell provides examples of environmental education research that has pushed academic norms in writing in the direction of more literary, poetic, or artistic forms, and calls for representations in environmental education that are multivocal, providing a platform for representing more audible voices of nature and correspondingly, the animality of ourselves. Equally, Oakley et al. (2010: 94) argue, ‘as we challenge humanism in our work’, by which she refers to institutionalized anthropomorphism, ‘we must equally be prepared to seek out methods of inquiry that allow us to creatively reposition other species as actors and participants’. Lester (2011: 19), discussing children’s play, argues that ‘humans are caught up in a trans-human network of sacred, viroid, digital, animal and plant life, and geological forces, all of which have their own speeds and flows, but which interpenetrate each other at genetic, cellular, bodily, planetary and cosmological scales’, emphasising the immense difference between scales of such networks. Silences are important to capture—filled up with sounds and presences of the natural world. Others note that it is not uncommon for humans to fall silent in nature, where human voices are often felt to be somewhat out of place. Darby’s (2000) ethnographic study of a long-distance walking group in Yorkshire noted the reduction in speech production by the group at specific sites, especially mountain tops. Indeed, new materialist approaches, employing photography, video, and digital cameras to capture human and nonhuman entanglements, emphasise the role of embodiment, the nonrepresentational, and the non-verbal (Smith & Dunkley, 2018). Järviluoma and Vikman (2013: 647) present a middle path, suggesting, ‘any convincing empirical study of sensory environments, however, requires openness on the part of the researcher to how the sensory and linguistic aspects of experience correlate’. Their technique has been to develop a ‘listening while walking’ method, facilitating young participants who take part to become their own ‘authors of space’ (ibid.: 650). Hearing one’s own voice in nature could be considered an unfamiliar habit. The children who took part in this study were of an age where developmentally, ‘overt speech’ or the constant chittering of children’s ‘private speech’ had already gone under-board (Geva & Fernyhough,

492

S. Watson

2019), i.e. internalised. As such, children would therefore be more likely to not verbally express their experience of processing sense-data, to themselves out loud, or at least not continuously so, as invited to do in this study through ‘bio’graphic filming. Through examples in the following sections, I wish to show that, although unfamiliar, this action has potential benefits. The filming techniques discussed in this chapter appear to heighten children’s acuity to nature, producing footage that enhances adult understandings of children’s perceptions of nature. Additionally, the technique also uncovers an unfamiliar viewing of the fluctuating interplay between children’s voices and nature. Summing up, the advantages of using digital cameras as an empirical tool to capture nature connections are multifold, capturing imaginative, creative expressions, as well as tangible concrete engagements with the materiality that children encounter. In addition, the unfamiliar practice of self-narrating—i.e. speaking to the camera—elicits in-the-moment responses that may otherwise go unheard or unseen.

3

Methodology

This chapter draws from a qualitative, practice-based study, which sought to explore the ways in which young participants interpret, enact, and assign meaning to landscape interactions in urban wildspaces, and the capacity for digital filmmaking to aid this exploration. The methodology, recruitment of participants, and selection of locations built on my experience as a practitioner leading adventurous wildwalks for Forest School programmes and playschemes in Birmingham, in the West Midlands, UK. Two locations in Birmingham were selected for the young filmmakers to carry out in-situ filming: Woodgate Valley Country Park and Moseley Bog. Both sites offered a mix of open and wooded areas. Compared to more manicured parks in the city centre, these sites contained spatial characteristics that offered a greater sense of privacy, and a high level of informality, which would provide the participants opportunities to engage with nature in ways not common in city centre parks. For example, having accessible rivers and trees with low branches allowed

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

493

participants the freedom to take part in marginalised outdoor activities, like climbing trees or being in a river. Three groups of young participants took part in the study between June 2011 and May 2012: Research Group one (June and August 2011) was drawn from Optima Youth Club, a housing association playgroup in Ladywood, Birmingham city centre; Research Group two (July 2011 and May 2012) were based at Brearley/Teviot playscheme in Newtown; Research Group three (February to May 2012), were based at an afterschool club at St. Bernard’s Catholic School, which bordered Moseley Bog. Due to the nature of working with play organisations, ages varied between 5 and 12 years old. Participants in RG1 and RG3 were selected by staff at the host organisation, while participation by RG2 was more open and subject to attendance at playscheme activities during school holidays. Filmmaking activities were held at urban parks in Birmingham, and at the host organisation. Sessions held at the host organisation included both indoor and outdoor play areas. Filmmaking activities held at the host playscheme or after-school club are referred to as ‘back at base’. Cameras were made available for participants to share, and prior to each trip equipment was laid out for participants to choose what they wished to bring. This included three cameras and three tripods, as well as ropes, buckets, plastic trays, magnifying viewfinders, trowels, a spade, selection of fabrics, notebooks, and pencils. For indoor activities, the participants had access to camera footage, three MacBook Pro laptops with film editing software for making trailers and animations. At the end of the study the children took souvenir DVDs home with footage, photographs, and films they had made. It is worth noting the differences between filming outdoors and the filmmaking that took place indoors. The distinction between indoor and outdoor filmmaking arose from preferences exhibited by young filmmakers in RG1 and RG2. In response to instructions to ‘tell the camera about …’ the river, or climbing the tree, a ‘bio’graphic style of filming emerged outdoors, where young filmmakers focussed on capturing in-the-moment responses to various nature connections they encountered. This kind of filming elicited self-narrated accounts, continuously recorded footage, where their added commentary is dependent

494

S. Watson

on and paced out by the interactions developing on-site. Efforts to revisit in-situ footage back indoors were not as motivating for the young filmmakers; ‘tell me more about …’ being in the river or climbing the tree offered little further information. Researcher-led efforts to re-visit footage were abandoned during these phases of the study. Watching footage back is odd: it does not constitute the same ‘active presence’ (Järviluoma & Vikman, 2013) that listening in-situ entails. Instead, the study accommodated young filmmakers’ demands to engage in different kinds of filmmaking. In contrast to in-situ filming, narrative structures which emerged during filmmaking indoors centred on fantasybased characters. Examples discussed in the next section analyse the commonalities and differences between indoor and outdoor styles of filmmaking, and document the uneven transfer of in-situ experience to indoor settings. The case study in the following section is drawn from filmmaking activities with Research Group three. Twelve young filmmakers (six boys and six girls) from Year 4 (aged 9–10) took part. Over a fourmonth period, between February and May 2012, the young filmmakers attended an after-school club, set up for the purposes of the research, which offered sessions of indoor and outdoor filmmaking. Two sessions were held per week, each lasting two hours. Each week, one session involved a walk around Moseley Bog, to carry out in-situ filming. The direction was in part led by the young filmmakers’ wishes to go to ‘the den’, ‘the swamp’, and the river, where they could film, alongside taking part in ‘free play’ activities. The indoor session focussed on re-visiting insitu footage and making trailers, ‘mini’ movies, and hand-drawn one-stop animation films. Each filmmaking session was accompanied by three or four adults: the researcher; the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country park ranger; an adult volunteer from Friends of Moseley Bog and a second member of staff from the Trust. Ahead of meeting the children, a briefing with the adults was held to stress that the study would aim to follow child-led investigations and seek to achieve a balance between ‘silence’ and ‘presence’ (Dimmock & MaGraw, 2006) to support, but not overly interfere in the children’s creativity. The aims of the study were explained to the young filmmakers: they were told the research was about

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

495

exploring their responses to nature, which included tangible responses they might feel and intangible ways nature might feed their imagination, dreams, and daydreams.

4

Case Study—The Alien Tree and the Bollywood Monster

This section focuses on insights relating to sharing nature connections with others, and seeks to highlight the importance of on camera and off camera self-censoring, the importance of capturing responses alone or at a distance from others, and the value the young filmmakers attributed to sometimes quite personal accounts. Firstly, I explore ‘bio’graphic filming, demonstrating how filming involved thinking with the hands, eyes, body, voice, and cueing into different rhythms, i.e. in-situ responses to biophilic ‘prompts’. Two ways of telling emerged as significant: either intersubjective or autonomous. If filming was carried out in groups or pairs, this was categorised as intersubjective. If carried out alone, at a distance from others in the group, this was considered to be autonomous. Hence, the term auto’bio’graphic filming describes when young filmmakers actively sought out time on their own to record their own interactions at a distance from others. The second section discusses how in-situ footage was developed back ‘indoors’ at the host organisations. We begin outside in the playground, where everyone from Research Group three is gathered to select what they want to bring on the trip into Moseley Bog, choosing from climbing ropes, a spade, trowels, magnifiers, buckets, and hand-held cameras, laid out on the playground floor. The group was one week into the study. Our first vignette involves three participants, Jason, Kiera, and Emily. Before setting off, they take part in a short, filmed interview, to describe what they have selected and why they wanted to bring these things: ‘We wanted to see what you could do with, like, things that you don’t think you can do. See what you could do with a rope like to see if you could use it’. Kiera adds, ‘Like make patterns on the floor, to wrap some round trees’. ‘To pull out the tree or something that’s already stuck’, Jason offers. Emily adds another activity, ‘We’re going to be digging holes and we

496

S. Watson

might um like see some stuff, like leaves or stones. Stuff like that’. Or, ‘Maybe like insect’ Jason adds at the end. Their responses demonstrate a keenness for open-ended outcomes and possibilities for tacit engagement—for ‘doing’ in front of the camera (Smith & Dunkley, 2018), rather than working behind the camera, as ‘directors’. Walking into the Bog, Kiera tells me, in a conversation taking place off camera, that inside Moseley Bog there is an ‘alien’ tree that she has seen before, in a visit with her class last year. This in itself presents an interesting example of how children can hold different ideas (from adults) about ‘natural’ spaces. I turn the camera on hoping to capture her thoughts. However, on camera, self-censoring, Kiera changes track, to deliver a very public performance for the camera, rather than the highly individual description she just gave: ‘There are beautiful trees in Moseley Bog’, she relays on camera, reverting to the way nature was described in the peer-to-peer interview she conducted with other girls in the group, back indoors, while practising with the cameras before setting off. In those interviews, the group of girls talked about nature using much more familiar terms to respond to the question ‘What’s in Moseley Bog?’ Their replies noted (i) ‘animals, leaves, trees and mud’, (ii) ‘really mud, loads of trees, a lake, it’s really fun, we make things in there, it’s like nature’, (iii) ‘lots of nature, trees, lakes, all muddy lake, and beautiful birds and logs’, and (iv) ‘trees, lakes, mud and plants, grass and wood’. Outdoors, Kiera continues on along this vein of description, ‘There are beautiful trees and lots of adventurous things’, not mentioning the alien tree. With encouragement I ask, ‘What about the big tree you were telling me about?’, and in response, speaking more confidently and eagerly, Kiera describes how she imagined the alien tree, ‘…there’s a tree that looks like a monster … an alien monster’ (Fig. 1). Winding our way through wooded areas, our group arrives at what turns out to be the alien tree—the felled trunk of an old beech tree. Both Emily and Jason are sitting on the alien tree, independently engaged with digging the ground. Kiera appropriates a camera and records an interview with Emily, and then Jason. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m an architect’, Jason replies looking up from the ground to directly speak to the camera ‘and I’m trying to figure out what’s underneath this ground cos there’s a big log here, as you can see’, gesturing across the felled trunk with his

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

497

Fig. 1 The ‘alien’ tree described by Kiera. Image from young participant’s footage. Courtesy of the author

trowel. Taking this cue, Kiera seeks to find out if Jason agrees with her own imaginative reading: ‘There. It kind of looks like feet of an alien, doesn’t it?’ Half drawn into Kiera’s prompting, Jason continues, with his own imagined scenario: ‘Yeah, well we had to cut the feet off because it, well not, no, well not the feet, the roots’. ‘What are you going to do after you’ve done that, done that hole? What are you gonna put in it? What are you gonna do with it?’ Kiera continues, acknowledging Jason’s more matter-of-fact response. Leaving the alien tree to set off to ‘the ditch’, the camera switches hands. Jason, holding the camera in his hand, records responses to the trees he finds interesting along the walk. In these clips Jason’s ‘camera actions’ (actions made moving the camera to capture various different details), zig-zag across the tree canopy, and scan up and down the tree trunks several times: ‘This looks like a Christmas tree but it’s not. Look. Look at this! This looks like a red den, but it isn’t, it’s like lots of trees have landed on it. Hopefully it doesn’t fall ’. ‘This could be the tallest, the tallest’ Jason’s camera actions scan from the ground to the top ‘tree that we’ve got in Moseley Bog, without leaves’.

498

S. Watson

Fig. 2 Multiple, sequential frames from a clip of Jason filming the ‘tallest tree’ in Moseley Bog show how his camera actions track up and down the height of the tree. Courtesy of the author

Walking on, noticing a different tree he adds: ‘this is like a scrambled up nest which is really big, and it’s lots of trees have been cut down all ’. On reaching a pond: ‘This is a nice pond. Chill-laxing one, even though it’s like a bit muddy and it’s got a big log across it. Probably, so you can’t, so you can’t, so you can’t go in it. But it might be really big that if you step in it, it might fall down. Well, you wouldn’t like that, so I’m not having a go’.

It is difficult to transpose the numerous camera actions he makes to the written page. Figure 2 above shows frames extracted from one of these clips. Looking at multiple frames together, a ‘timeline’ of his interactions unfolds. At the ditch (Fig. 3), Jason, barely speaking into the camera, focuses on capturing the materiality of the site—filming and stepping into the ‘soggy’, ‘dirty’, ‘deep’, ‘slobby’, ‘slippy’ ditch as described by Emily, then abandons the camera completely, to follow his exploration unhindered by the camera. Kiera steals the camera back and turns the camera round to capture Jason enacting a terror scene— ‘Action!’ ‘I’m stuck. Aaargh! Think I’m going to have a panic attack. Aaargh, I can’t get off. Urgh, I’m soo muddy. Cut!’ Giggles and excitement follow. Following explorations at the ditch, Keira steals away from the others to record three short clips about her muddy experience. In the first take,

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

499

Fig. 3 Multiple frames (‘timeline’) from Jason’s footage at the ditch show how his attention turns away from filming others, to record the materiality of his engagement as he steps into the water, and then captures his clean boots. Courtesy of the author

turning the camera lens round to record herself speaking loudly, Kiera rushes out with, ‘It smells like poo in, in there and it’s horrible because the water is all dirty, even though it cleans your feet’. The second take is calmer, paced out with deep breaths: ‘I love the Bog because it’s very good and muddy and I like muddy things (deep breath in) and the water can wash (breathes out) your boots before you go. I love the Bog’. In the final take, Kiera’s face is fully framed, ‘I love the Bog. It is very fun and muddy and I love muddy things and you can wash your boots before you go. I love the Bog so much’. These are recorded immediately after exploring the muddy ditch in Moseley Bog. Having autonomous access to the camera facilitated her personal descriptions, which fluctuate with intense emotional content, reflected in the tone, pitch, and rhythm of

500

S. Watson

her voice, as well as the jittery framing, which calms down by the final take. When the group heads back to the school building, Jason takes the camera again and records a long auto’bio’graphic account. This is a ‘quiet’ recording. He films more than he speaks, making 97 different ‘camera actions’ in the ‘5 min and 42 s’ he had available, and avoided interruptions from anyone else, hanging back from the group walking ahead. In an indoor film session three weeks’ later, Jason decides to make an animation film titled The Bollywood Monster, arriving at the session with a story he wrote at home. The story tells the tale of ‘a dream’: ‘I dream of when them two trees that have been blew over by the wind and looks like two giant legs. They start to stand up and walk while not realising that the legs are crushing everywhere such as Moseley Bog, St. Bernard’s and the houses and buildings nearby. And then half an hour since we nearly died, a wooden tree head comes on its own going through the air as it walking without a body and legs. The head was much gentler than the legs which was peculiar. I knew really what was going on. The legs were trying to find the head and body. The head was trying to find the body and legs. I never had seen the body. The head was still with us. I knew how you speak woodic. I read a book about it. I said to the head, “Ding dong whang tahal la kong.” He went, we never heard of him again’.

The resulting animation combined re-worked in-situ footage, with sound effects and hand-drawn animation sections, constructing a scary, supernatural film, in which the ‘Bollywood Monster’ shares the same ‘legs’ as the alien tree (Fig. 4). Jason’s animation references the ‘alien legs’/’big log’ that Kiera interviewed Jason about in the Bog, despite his reluctance to be drawn into Kiera’s imagined trajectories at the time. The re-working of in-situ footage and hand-drawn animation combines realities and unrealities. The edited footage and hand-drawn paper world, plus the sounds added, create a dream-like structure, a fantasy world where natural laws do not apply, which was a common feature across all of the young filmmakers’ filmmaking activity indoors.

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

501

Fig. 4 The monster’s legs in Jason’s animation film, The Bollywood Monster. Courtesy of the author

An interview was set up for Jason to discuss the film with two other boys in the group, Oliver and Hisham. Oliver interviewed Jason, while Hisham recorded the interview on camera. Before starting the interview, the group watched the animation again. While watching, Jason and Oliver act out dramatic emotions, faking being scared and fear, emphasising the scary content. In the interview, Jason explains where he got the idea, Bollywood Monster from: ‘from when we went to Moseley Bog and we saw the the the trees that looked like legs’, and added, ‘it’s about a a head and the legs finding each its body and the body finding its (inaudible)’. Disconnected from its body, the monster’s head floats above the trees (Fig. 5). As the narrator on film, Jason, explained ‘the head was much gentler than the legs which was peculiar’, ‘because he was up in the air and it’s different from, when you’re up in the air’ demarcating a distinct difference between these zones of air and ground in his imagination. Oliver

502

S. Watson

Fig. 5 A single frame clipped from Jason’s animation The Bollywood Monster. The full length combines hand-drawn backgrounds, characters, and text, with film footage and his voiceover narrating the story. Courtesy of the author

adds, ‘yeah, because he doesn’t have any hands to bash with’. Jason agrees, only with a softly spoken non-committal, ‘yeah’. In the ‘dream’ world imagined by Jason, communication between species is possible, because natural laws do not apply. As the narrator of the ‘dream’, Jason understands ‘woodic’ the language of the Bollywood monster. He tells Oliver that the phrase at the end of the film, ‘ding dong whang tahal la kong’ means, ‘get away you beast’. What followed was a discussion on how nature speaks or communicates in its own language, relating posthumanist critiques on nonhuman ‘voices’, to a very child-centred perspective: Oliver: Can anyone else speak Woodic. Wood..woodic? Jason: No.

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

503

Oliver: I can, look. King kong dong yang. Something like that. Do you have to learn woodi from a book? Woodic from a book? Jason: No. Oliver: How. Where do you learn it from? Jason: You learn it from um..you learn it from the ground, and..the famous Indian places. Because they’ve got funny language like the Taj Mahal. That’s where I got.. Oliver: T-a-j-m-a-h-a-l. Jason: (inaudible) La. And French. SW: And you learn it from the ground because? Jason: Because like um the ground sometimes makes noises and sounds like that. SW: So how? When the ground speaks to you, how do you know what it’s telling you? Jason: Because I’ve got the (inaudible). Oliver: So you learn it from a book? Jason: Yeah. Oliver: Translation book. Okay. SW: Where did you get the book from? Jason: Poundland! (Giggles all round.) Jason’s joking at the end of the interview draws this unfamiliar way of conversing—how nature talks, and how the monster talks, to a close. He protects his own imagined trajectories from further quizzing by the group. Despite the highly ‘performative’ aspect of playing to the cameras which appeared in footage collected outdoors, the personal importance filmmakers attached to the final edited films, which they could take home on ‘souvenir DVDs’, was clear. Evidenced by Jason’s comments above and in their responses when asked who they would like to share the films they had made with. A majority of the young filmmakers in Research Group three said they would not like to share these films with strangers or people who would not understand.

504

5

S. Watson

Characteristics of ‘Bio’graphic Filming: Camera as Collector, Conduit, Confidante, and Interlocutor

The kind of in-situ filming young filmmakers produced in this study, which I term ‘bio’graphic filming, shared certain characteristics and commonalities. Of which, it is possible to discern particular ‘modes of operation’—the camera as collector, conduit, confidante, and interlocutor. These are useful frames in which to explore the various agencies the camera presents or affords young filmmakers. One commonality across the young filmmakers’ films is the use of the ‘camera as a collector’ , to gather and capture footage of live events and phenomena unfolding in real time. In this case, filming was about responding to unplanned events and getting the action. Capturing nature noticings that were compelling, often expressed in exclamations and commands to film-friends in the group, ‘Look! Look at this!’ Jason (RG3), or ‘Did you get that?’ Jade (RG3). In addition, outside, the young filmmakers’ voices ‘sound out’ visceral connections, ‘Wharghs!’ and ‘Urghs!’ expressing embodied senses of the haptic, vestibular, and proprioceptive experience of nature connections. The texture of this experience is revealed in paralanguage, as well as full sentences, pitch, and emotion, which could convey excitement and disgust, as Kiera’s three short accounts above demonstrate. A second commonality was while these encounters could be shared with others, it was also important for young filmmakers to find time on their own. Jason’s and Kiera’s accounts above are good examples of auto‘bio’graphical filming, where filmmakers valued working alone, distancing themselves from the rest of the group. Here, the camera is employed ‘as a conduit’, rather than a representational device. Having time on their own cues the children into different nonhuman rhythms, away from distractions caused by the group. The ‘camera as conduit’, helps filmmakers to read into, or ‘listen in’, to in-the-moment biophilic connections that are personally compelling. Jason allowed himself to be responsive to the different ‘things’ encountered on the way back to the school, described above. As such, speaking about nature is fragmented

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

505

and accumulated, dependent on the materialities of site, influenced by hands-on enquiry and tactile interactions, rather than pre-planned or following a clear narrative arc. This is a third commonality among the filmmakers ‘bio’graphic style, that in-situ voiceovers, and corresponding camera actions, were led by responses to what they found in the environment. As a result, this makes for uncomfortable viewing when watching footage back. Jason’s film footage collected on his walk back feels fast, despite the fact that this is a continuous recording of his walk back to the school, in one long take. In fact, Jason highlights how much time this took, ‘five minutes 42 s!’ when he arrived back at the group, indicating that the duration of filming was important. In the other auto’bio’graphical example provided, three short clips recorded by Kiera, her film footage reveals how she apprehends the ‘camera as confidante’. This was a fourth commonality to arise, shared across all of the groups. Kiera moved away from the group, to find time on her own to speak about the intensity of the muddy experience in the Bog, an unfamiliar experience you ‘wouldn’t normally do in the park or in the playground’. For the young filmmakers, the camera became an interlocutor—i.e. the camera encouraged active participation, which seemed to be less about representation, and much more about exploration. Outdoors, cameras, in the hands of participants, are pointed forwards, to the side, above eye-level or behind. Watching Jason’s film footage, recorded on his journey back, feels fast and disorientating because of the way the camera lens is moved, quickly tracking across the field of vision, zig-zagging from left to right, up and down, recording in three-dimensions; multidirectional, rather than steadfastly pointing the camera ahead, which disrupts, intentionally or otherwise, more familiar tropes employed by grownup filmmakers. The ethnographic filmmaker, MacDougall (2006), refers to this technique as ‘hunting’ with the camera, an over-enthusiastic technique, adopted by ‘inexperienced’ filmmakers. While footage from this technique is disorientating for the audience, it produces a very ‘kinfluential’ account, marked by the kinaesthetic, physical responses young filmmakers enact. I have called this technique ‘bio’graphic filming, as what the audience sees is a response to the fullness of nature as-experienced, and the compelling interactions that being

506

S. Watson

in and around ‘nature’ seems to invite for these children. ‘Bio’graphic filming does not offer the audience a parallel viewing. What we see is not held steady at eye-level, but in the hand—the camera follows the body movement of the filmmaker, pointing down to capture things on the ground, unintentionally or intentionally, or zig-zagging the lens in three -dimensions. The disorientating effect on the viewer is compounded by a dominance of close-up shots, with no room for perspective. There is no horizon line in the footage for the audience to orientate to. It is a technique that makes for distinctly unfamiliar viewing. A similar technique is deliberately used by the video-artist Mike Marshall. His video work Birdcatcher, 2006 and A Place Not Far From Here, 2005, contain densely filled frames, restricting what the audience sees, to force a different kind of looking, aiming to provoke a heightened acuity to organic complexity. Because the density is difficult to watch, Marshall sometimes includes a prop, for example, the rope swing in Bird Catcher, to help the viewer attach meaning and enter the space. The young filmmakers have no prop, they tilt and turn the camera lens, sometimes through 360 degrees, roughly capturing all that can be seen with the camera. It is often too much for them to watch as well, the blurring and rapid movement of the camera are referred to as, all that ‘zooming around’ and ‘dizziness’ by Hisham (RG3) and Lucy (RG3) when watching their own footage back. But, in-the-moment, this affords a significant way for the young people to forge a kind of ‘listening in’ to nature. Another way the young filmmakers’ recordings are very different to traditional tropes in ethnographic film, is that the self is very evident in ‘bio’graphic filming. The young filmmakers used ‘I think’ to prefix ideas, as well as demonstrating their presence by turning the camera lens round to record their own face or mouth. They refer to themselves on camera as ‘your director’, ‘the author’, ‘reporting to you from Moseley Bog’, offering factual, descriptive accounting, and their own imagined realities, misreadings, and musings, speculative observations that see the world differently, ‘This could be …’, ‘That looks like …’, ‘It’s like … but it isn’t’, as Jason notes above. Sometimes, turning the camera round to record their mouths, lips, tongue, and teeth emphasises these objects of articulation. The camera as ‘conduit’, and ‘confidante’

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

507

offered unconditional listening, an encouraging interlocutor. This affordance gave permission to the children to hold radically different ideas about ‘natural’ spaces together, to switch between very different types of accounts—raising questions regarding to what extent any of these accounts are ‘truthful’ to their thoughts on such places—or indeed if they hold both in tension—or whether both are extreme productions for the representation of filming itself. Language production was also subject to social influences. ‘Auto’bio’graphic filming’, was particularly distinct for its tendency to avoid inter-subjectivities on film. Focussing on capturing the journey back, Jason’s footage contains a temporary silencing of human voices. Actively moving away from others, getting closer to material, and incidences where Jason tries to avoid the annoying interruptions of others are caught on camera too. The silence he imposes shuts out human speech—watching, filming attentively while nature ‘speaks back’ (Sassen, 2013).

6

Back at Base Films Are Different

In contrast, the content, purpose, and structure of filmmaking were different back at base, instigated by preferences Research Group two displayed. Working with cameras and laptops to compile souvenir DVDs, little further interpretation was offered when captioning and adding titles to in-situ film footage, to compose edited ‘comic book’ DVDs chronicling in-situ engagement. Filmmakers in Research Group two rejected this form of linear re-telling, opting to compile a mosaic of clips, which allowed them to dip into different footage. Other ways of filmmaking developed out of this reluctance to work with in-situ footage, which better suited their motivations, including: hand-drawn animations representing fantasy-based worlds; fantasy-based trailers that re-worked in-situ footage into stories of heroes and monsters, and other fantasy-based mini-movies recorded back at base. In these films, young filmmakers magnified and extended their imaginations to off-ground adventures in trees or travelling through outer space, populated by fantasy, fairy-tale, and horror characters.

508

S. Watson

With the exception of the alien tree (which later became the Bollywood Monster ), and Kazim’s Dude of Moseley Bog (RG3), most of the films made back at base did not directly relate to what was found out on site. When asked what had inspired their indoor films, filmmakers referred to making animations as an opportunity to ‘let your mind go’ Ella (RG3), ‘kiddish’ Jade (RG3), to be ‘funny’ Hisham, Oliver, Liam, and Hana (RG3), or ‘weird’ Liam and Jade (RG3). The animations created can be surreal, as the young filmmakers noted themselves, and yet at the same time offered an opportunity to create something complete and coherent. Mainstream fantasy-based films have a narrative coherence that the audience can follow without the filmmaker having to explain their meaning, they are constructed, and considered in the same way that the construction of cinematic ethnographic films ‘stand alone and contain their own story’ (Henley, cited in Flores, 2009). In addition, the hand-drawn, low-tech aesthetics of the children’s animation films contain a pared down iconography, like comic books, which as McCloud (1994) states, makes the images accessible to a wide audience, as too much realism distracts audiences from empathising with the characters in the storyline. Fantasy-based films made back at base were dominated by their preference for blending the real with imagined, much more so than in the field, where fantasy-based characters were seldom referred to. When the young filmmakers had the chance to edit the footage, or experiment with animations and trailers, the imaginative, fantasy or dream-like narratives took over, and the existing footage became moulded into these narratives—rather than simply editing the existing footage into the narrative that took place at the time. In-situ experience therefore transfers unevenly back to base. The difference between how children interpret and re-interpret their experiences of natural places ‘in-the-moment’ and, on reflection ‘inside’, implies very different ways of thinking about ‘nature’. Unlike ‘outside voices’ that reverberate and resonate with tactile presence, the voiceover added to animation films is measured, practised, and rehearsed. It is read aloud from a script while others watch, or added as a soundtrack on top of the animation, structured around a linear narrative. The language variation between these indoor and outdoor formats demonstrates different

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

509

ways of telling. Storylines in animations and trailers contain expansive imagined trajectories, relaying vertical, off the ground adventures in space and air-borne action on earth. While in the field, their voices evoke new insights to how ‘tactile epistemologies’ (Grimshaw & Ravetz, 2005) may sound. It is difficult to comment on to what extent the focus on fantasy-based characters and creatures, rather than biophilic connections, demonstrates that putting the fullness of ‘organic complexity’, to borrow Marshall’s term, to paper was too difficult a task. Grimshaw (2011) argues that it is impossible to capture this ‘texture’ so successfully on any format but film. Some of the filmmakers experienced this translation more acutely than others. This was certainly true for Kazim (RG3), who wanted to make a film about his experience running up and down the river, and the powerful sense of ‘I’m running on water’ that this enduced. Perhaps putting this feeling into a hand-drawn animation was an unsurmountable task. Instead, Kazim re-worked in-situ footage to produce a short trailer for a movie, telling the tale of The Dude of Moseley Bog.

7

Conclusions

Through this chapter, I wish to encourage other researchers and practitioners to engage with digital cameras. This chapter demonstrates how appreciating different modes of operation within ‘bio’graphic filming may enable adults to gleam small insights into the ‘less familiar’ aspects of children’s engagement with nature. Exercising ‘outdoor voices’, elicited through ‘bio’graphic filming, enhances engagement with biophilic connections. The camera’s agency provides an unconditional listening— a confidante—witness to the different rhythms and perceptions observed by Cobb (1977). Fundamentally, the technique enables filmmakers to tune into an ‘alternative sense-scape’ (MacNaghten & Urry, 2000), and explore nonhuman agencies, as well as pushing the role of the camera into unfamiliar territory. For adults, as well as the young filmmakers, the technique of approaching the camera as an interlocutor is an unfamiliar way of working, but illuminating, in the drawing out of highly

510

S. Watson

personal, many-sided, multi-dimensional ways children record and speak about nature. There are some challenges for adults, for one, how the ‘sounding out’ and ‘listening in’ contained in ‘bio’graphic filming could work within organisations centred around spaces of childhood, such as playschemes and schools, or how they might go further afield to wider public realms. Young filmmakers’ film footage might, for example, contribute to a repository of biophilic connections. An archive of ‘bio’graphic film footage would enable children’s outdoor experiences to be shared with educators, playworkers, parents, and other children, in play centres and visitor sites. There is certainly a need for ‘outdoor voices’ to be heard. Not least, because the embodied, often non-verbal quality of ‘bio’graphic filming contrasts sharply to the type of exploration posed by fantasybased films produced indoors, which were more about letting your mind go free, to paraphrase one participant. Furthermore, Margulies (2019: 3) notes that geographers have not explored ‘what working with visual materials as an active process might do’. Developments in experimental ethnographic film, are useful indicators to where this may lead. Grimshaw’s (2011: 257) review of Barbash and Castaing-Taylor’s film Sweetgrass provides a detailed exposition of the techniques the filmmakers employ in pursuing ‘the synesthetic, spatial, and temporal properties of film’, which she credits as developing innovative anthropological knowledge. The desires of these filmmakers, to represent a sensory, interspecies turn, are redolent of similar goals in new materialist approaches. Perhaps young filmmakers have an intuition for allowing spaces and silences, for ‘listening in’ to nature to relay nonhuman agencies and biophilic phenomena. That the children’s outdoor filming produces an unfamiliar framing of nature should perhaps be tolerated, as the lack of constraint is conducive to the process. Working off-tripod facilitates the three-dimensional exploration, while timelines (Figs. 2 and 3) offer tracking of shifting responses, that a single frame or photograph cannot capture. While developments in ethnographic film offer a ready-made precedent in shifting from text-based to visual explorations, digital filmmaking for children in this study was a very personal tool for exploring their

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

511

world, and not something to be shared with an unfamiliar audience— quite the opposite of visual anthropology’s goal. Being so intimately acquainted with self, a challenge lies in sharing ‘bio’graphic films in a way that respects the very personal connections to place this affords. Solutions to which need to be explored further. A key challenge lies in exactly how to speak back to literary representations of film, and children’s experiences, and the task of accommodating different ways of telling that use sentences, as much as emotive paralanguage, sighs, breaths—embodied reactions, and the silencing of human voices. In this study, in-the-moment experience remained distanced from indoor filmmaking. This is not to say that it is impossible to transfer outdoor experience to indoor settings. Perhaps a key tension lies in investigating how young filmmakers are involved in digging into the data, i.e. reviewing and editing the footage. Watching in-situ footage back in realtime, back indoors, was troublesome in this study. While it is common to review footage in this way, perhaps new insights would be gained, if carried out closer to the time and place of engagement. How such moments are disseminated, shared, or reach wider audiences where the impact of ‘bio’graphic filming is furthered, is a question which perhaps this book can begin to contribute to, in its convergence of academic and practitioner reflection.

References Anderson, J., & Jones, K. (2009). The difference that place makes to methodology: Uncovering the “lived space” of young people’s spatial practices. Children’s Geographies, 7 (3), 291–303. Änggård, E. (2016). How matter comes to matter in children’s nature play: Posthumanist approaches and children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 14 (1), 77–90. Arvidsen, J. (2018). Growing dens. On re-grounding the child-nature relationship through a new materialist approach to children’s dens. Children’s Geographies, 16 (3), 279–291. Carroll, P., et al. (2011). Kids in the City: independent mobility, physical activity and well-being – Researcher/child/parent perceptions from one

512

S. Watson

Auckland neighbourhood in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In WellBeing 2011: Exploring the multi-dimensions of well-being. Birmingham. Cobb, E. (1977). The ecology of imagination in childhood . Columbia University Press. Darby, W. (2000). Landscape and identity: Geographies of nation and class in England , Berg. Dimmock, I., and MaGraw, L. (2006). Silence and Presence: How adult attitude affects the creativity of children. In Teacher Research Conference, The National Teacher Research Panel . Ewald, W. (2000). Secret games: Collaborative works with children 1969–1999. Centre for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Flores, C. Y. (2009). Reflections of an Ethnographic Filmmaker-Maker: An interview with Paul Henley, Director of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester. American Anthropologist, 111(1), 93–108. Fursman, J. (2020). Chasing pedagogy: Searching for a new school portrait, or can this be a school if it doesn’t look like one? International Journal of Education through Art, 16 (2), 197–207. Geva, S., & Fernyhough, C. (2019). A penny for your thoughts: Children’s inner speech and its neuro-development. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1708. Grimshaw, A. (2011). The Bellwether Ewe: Recent developments in Ethnographic Filmmaking and the Aesthetics of Anthropological Inquiry. Cultural Anthropology, 26 (2), 247–262. Grimshaw, A. and Ravetz, A. (2005). Visualizing anthropology, Intellect. Järviluoma, H., & Vikman, N. (2013). On soundscape methods and audiovisual sensibility. In J. Richardson, C. Gorbman, & C. Vernallis (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (pp. 645–658). Oxford University Press. Kroh, D. P., & Gimblett, R. H. (1992). Comparing live experience with pictures in articulating landscape preference. Landscape Research, 17 (2), 58–69. Lester, S. (2011). Moments of nonsense and signs of hope: The everyday ‘political’ nature of children’s play. In International Play Association (IPA) World Conference: Playing into the Future - surviving and thriving. Cardiff. Loescher, M. (2005). Cameras at the Addy: Speaking in Pictures with City Kids. In A. Grimshaw and A. Ravetz (Eds.), Visualizing Anthropology, Intellect Books (pp. 55–68).

20 ‘Bio’graphic Filming …

513

Lynch, J., & Gimblett, R. (1992). Perceptual values in the cultural landscape: A computer model for assessing and mapping perceived mystery in rural environments. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 16 , 453–471. MacDougall, D. (2006). The corporeal image: Film, ethnography, and the senses. Princeton University Press. MacNaghten, P., & Urry, J. (2000). Bodies of nature: Introduction. Body and Society, 6 (3–4), 1–11. Margulies, J. D. (2019). On coming into animal presence with photovoice. Environment and Planning e: Nature and Space, 2(4), 850–873. McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding comics: the invisible art. William MorrowHarperCollins Publishers. Merewether, J. (2019). New materialisms and children’s outdoor environments: Murmurative diffractions. Children’s Geographies, 17 (1), 105–117. Oakley, J., Watson, G. P. L., Russell, C. L., Cutter-Mackenzie, A., Fawcett, L., Kuhl, G., Russell, J., Van Der Waal, M., & Warkentin, T. (2010). Animal encounters in environmental education research: Responding to the question of the animal. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 15. Porter, G., Hampshire, K., Abane, A., Munthali, A., Robson, E., Mashiri, M., & Maponya, G. (2010). Where dogs, ghosts and lions roam: Learning from mobile ethnographies on the journey from school. Children’s Geographies, 8(2), 91–105. Rooney, T. (2019). Weathering time: Walking with young children in a changing climate. Children’s Geographies, 17 (2), 177–189. Russell, C. L. (2005). Whoever does not write is written: the role of nature in post-post approaches to environmental education research. Environmental Education Research, 11, 433–443. Sassen, S. (2013). Does the city have speech? Public Culture, 25 (2), 209–221. Smith, T. A., & Dunkley, R. A. (2018). Technology-nonhuman-child assemblages: Reconceptualising rural childhood roaming. Children’s Geographies, 16 (3), 304–318. Thwaites, K., & Simkins, I. (2007). Experiential landscape: An approach to people, place and space. Routledge. Ward Thompson, C. (1998). Review of research in landscape and woodland perceptions. Edinburgh College of Art/Heriot-Watt University. Woodyer, T. (2008). The body as research tool: Embodied practice and children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 6 (4), 349–362.

21 Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark Ria Ann Dunkley and Thomas Aneurin Smith

1

Introduction

In this final conversation with a practitioner, we speak to Toby Clark, the John Muir Award Scotland Manager. The John Muir Trust is a UKbased, membership-based conservation organisation, which focuses upon the protection and enhancement of wild places. Here, Toby discusses the ecological mindset underpinning the work of the John Muir Trust. Like Sunita Welch (Chapter 9), he shares his early ecological experiences in ’nature’ as playing a pivotal role in his career in conservation. Toby shares Interviewers: Ria Dunkley (RD) and Thomas Aneurin Smith (TAS).

R. A. Dunkley (B) School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. A. Smith School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_21

515

516

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

a narrative of walking his dog to emphasise his unbounded connection to the natural world as a child. Early discovery of unfamiliar landscapes seems to be a vital element of the story of his career choices. Toby is keen to emphasise that his career route did not begin with a traditional pathway within the environmental sciences. Instead, lived experience of both nature and conversations with others guided his interest. He then moves on to reflect upon how leaving the familiarity of his childhood in the South-East of England has led to a constant reflection upon the geographies of privilege and a commitment to addressing social injustice. Toby moves on from this to describe the anticipated impacts of encountering unfamiliar landscape experiences upon disadvantaged young people. Through his involvement with the New Deal framework (a programme introduced by the New Labour government in the UK from 1998, originally targeted at young unemployed people to provide training and volunteering opportunities towards work), Toby encourages a critical reflection upon youth participation. He highlights the misinterpretations that outdoor educators can make, and the significance of such activities in providing a sense of purpose for young people in vulnerable situations. He then draws upon reading the chapters to describe the significance of surprise, pleasure, and discovery, and the importance of ‘low dose’ novelty, authenticity, and belonging to those unfamiliar with particular landscapes and outdoor activities. Toby problematises the notion of authenticity in outdoor education experiences, highlighting the importance of seeing what is authentic to those encountering places. Related to this, he discusses the unconventional ’rites of passage’ that might constitute going into unfamiliar environments for young people. Towards the end of the conversation, Toby reflects upon technology use in outdoor experiences. Our conversation ends with a reflection upon the significance of family learning in unfamiliar environments.

21 Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark

2

517

Career Towards Working with the John Muir Trust

Toby: So now I’m working with the John Muir Trust. We’re a UK organisation but very much with Scottish roots. We take our name from John Muir, a Victorian Scot, who, like many Scots of that time, left Scotland for the New World, for America, when he was about 10, or 11, but had quite a large impact on the modern-day conservation movement and is widely credited as helping set up the world’s first National Parks. My take on Muir is in the sense that the Victorians were really good at compartmentalising things into, you know; if you’re into trees, you’re an arborist, if you’re into birds, you’re an ornithologist, and these clear sections in classifications, which is absolutely fundamental to our understanding. But he began to break this apart and talk about things in a more holistic way. If you cut down the trees, it’s going to affect the birds, and if you dam up the rivers, it’s going to affect… etcetera, etcetera. So he really influenced that modern-day thinking that everything’s connected. I’ve worked for the Trust for about 20 years. Before that, I grew up in a place called Maidenhead in Berkshire, just west of London. I grew up in a small village outside of a commuter town and we were lucky; we had dogs and from a very early age, we had a garden and from that we had a makeshift plank of wood over a fence that led to a back field, that then led to another footpath, that then led to further footpaths. I could walk the dog without crossing a road, and I could walk for hours. Well, I say roads, they were lanes that I crossed. I think fundamentally, right from an early age, I was out—sometimes with brothers sometimes alone—just walking and exploring, and I think that had a significant impact on me. I played a lot of sport, but I also sort of went down to the River Thames which wasn’t too far away, and I learnt to swim with my pals down the river. I learnt to smoke

518

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

on the banks of the rivers, and we did some fishing as well, so I had that kind of experience and exposure to wild places. I ended up going to Newcastle to study Sociology. I did some volunteering there with a local green space, did some travelling, did short-term work in outdoor centres, youth groups, youth clubs, and bar work. After that I got onto a course in Scotland with the Scottish Wildlife Trust, which was about landscaping and nature conservation, and it involved that people aspect as well, that countryside rangering elements and interpretation. Bringing people into connection with nature and wild places through that course was something that really triggered an interest for me. And after two-and-a-bit years, I spent some time up in the Highlands, an outdoor ecology centre there working for six months, which was great. And then I got a job with the Scottish Wildlife Trust, for their junior membership, and delivered some countryside rangering skills courses for folk that were long-term unemployed, that were looking to supplement their dole money through volunteering. So, for a couple of years I worked with a squad of young people, primarily taking them out and about and doing practical conservation skills, and leading guided walks. At that stage, I was volunteering with the John Muir Trust and was in the right place at the right time to get a job with the Trust, and then continued my career there. So, I suppose the key things that I want to get across is that I studied Sociology at university, I don’t have that technical background, and my ecology-based understanding is much more self-taught and inspired by others as opposed to, you know, the academic aspect of that. So, that’s how I’ve got to where I’ve got to, and I count myself as incredibly lucky!

21 Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark

3

519

Geography, Class, Privilege, and Access to Nature

We asked Toby to reflect more on some of the central themes of this book, around privileged access to the countryside, and how his own personal experiences informed his understanding today. TC: Where I am now is probably a significant reflection of class, and that I was very privileged to have access to the countryside as well. And the colour of my skin as well, you know. I think a key part of growing up is of not really having much to compare with, and that’s just the nature of being young. There was a quote in Chapter 16 (Sender) from a young lass that she was saying that ‘my neighbours don’t tidy up after themselves, they don’t even say good morning’. She was projecting living in a better place, even though she was unfamiliar with that other place, she knew that it was a better place and I liked that. It says that unfamiliarity may not be a negative thing. But generally speaking, I think you accept what you are used to and what you grow up with as being the norm. And it’s only perhaps when you move away where you go, ‘Wow, actually, I was incredibly underprivileged.’ Or ‘Wow, I was incredibly privileged.’ Or ‘Actually, yeah, my experiences were pretty similar and isn’t that funny how they are similar to lots of other people’s experiences.’ Since leaving the Southeast of England I constantly recognise the privilege geographically and socially that I benefited from. And in a way, I think, it’s that injustice which gets me out of bed, that huge disparity of wealth and health within society. I think looking back on it now, I really appreciated the beauty of that landscape. There was an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty close by to where we lived, and the Chilterns were far away, and the River Thames is lovely. The Royal Berkshire Agriculture College was immediately behind the house and that was very well kept, so there was definitely beauty there. But there was also beautiful moments about building a treehouse with my brothers, and feeling accepted

520

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

by them because they were older. And that beauty of having the freedom. I remember racing back on my bike from fishing because the last thing my mum said was, ‘Just be back before dark’. And it was getting dark, and I absolutely busted a gut to get back. And I arrived, you know, back at the house full of joy that I managed to get back just before dark, and she hadn’t even noticed that I’d been away. I wasn’t really aware of this privileged access I had at the time, I was just accepting of it. But now I think, looking back and looking at what was accessible to me and looking back at the experiences that shaped me, I recognise how important it was to me, and how important it should be for other people as well.

4

Misinterpretations and a Sense of Purpose: Anticipated Impacts of Unfamiliar Landscape Experiences upon Disadvantaged Young People

We asked Toby to talk more about his experiences of working with underprivileged young people on the New Deal, and to speak more about how the John Muir Trust approaches the challenges of working with young people in a range of landscape to address these challenges. TC:

Working with young people as part of the New Deal was really, really eye-opening. I remember when I worked out of Grangemouth, I worked with a lot of young folk from Falkirk area, it must have been in the early 2000’s. There was a partial solar eclipse, and I just thought it would be really good to take, predominately, they were lads, up to up to the hill to see the solar eclipse as something different. And unbeknownst to me, they all got carry-outs [take-away alcoholic drinks], and it turned a bit messy, and because we weren’t building some footpaths, instead I had set up the day like: ‘Guys, let’s just have a bit of an informal

21 Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark

521

day’. And they kind of misinterpreted that. So they all got carryouts and a couple sort of blitzed it and we couldn’t even get them back in the van, and they had to make their own way home. Later, we took them up to a place called Handa Island—a nature reserve just off the west coast of Sutherland [in the north of Scotland]—it’s just fantastic. And, again, it blew their minds. But, again, the first night, we had issues. We drove up and then we camped on the mainland before we got the ferry across—a place called Scourie—and again they just blitzed it with the booze. And so that was quite hard. But once we got over that, because it was a residential and we spent more time together, we found more of an equilibrium and eventually it was just incredible. There was—I’ll never forget—one lad who barely spoke, he was quite a large, heavy guy, quite unfit, didn’t really know what to do with his life and never engaged, would never look you in the eye, would never speak but, you know, participated. He wouldn’t be a barrier, but he would never be a booster to things and just sort of roll along with it. It was about a six-hour drive on the way back, and on the journey he handed me this piece of paper with these beautiful, detailed pen and ink drawings of some of the birds that we’d seen. And it’s just, ‘Where did this come from?’ Absolutely amazing. It was just with a biro and a piece of paper in the back of the van on his way home. He must have just sketched scenes and he just passed them to me. That was a real eye-opener, you know, it’s easy for me, for us, for people to look at other people’s experiences through our own eyes and expect them or to assume that if they’re having a good, or a negative or a bad experience through our eyes when, you know, that isn’t the case. The only way that someone can have experiences is through their own eyes. And, in fact, it was about three or four years ago, a chap called Brian, who was the fella that got particularly boozed up on the campsite who was, you know, hard work. He emailed me through Facebook and he was saying that he still thinks about and still references that trip away. And he’s got a wee boy now and he’s

522

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

actively, you know, taking them out and about into the parks as well. And any other reflections on the New Deal? We often spoke about getting up that routine for the young people: getting the bottle of iron brew, and the newspaper, and the steel toe cap safety boots, and feeling part of something. That was a significant part to it, the process of just turning up, of having a moan and, you know, trying to take an extra ten minutes for a fag break and try to get over the next thing. To me, it felt like the social things really mattered, that getting up and being present as much as being really proud of creating a fence or clearing some litter or planting some trees. And don’t get me wrong, there was that pride in putting something back, but it felt more about the process of just getting out of bed in the morning, having something to really focus on. TAS: I wondered how much the John Muir Trust is trying to address these issues around engaging young people from the backgrounds of those on that New Deal programme? TC:

Okay. So the Trust, deep down, is about how we care about wild places, and how we care about them as fundamental cornerstones to society. They are places of huge relevance with regards to capturing carbon, they’re places of huge relevance with regards to supporting biodiversity, they’re places of huge relevance with regards to thinking and how we feel about ourselves as people. You know, it’s clichéd, but I’m gonna fall into that cliché because often when I talk about this stuff, I can’t help but turn to Muir’s words to best describe it. And why should I best describe it when perhaps Muir has done that? But we’re increasingly recognising that going back to wild places, going back to the mountains is going home. You know, that’s where we feel as if we’ve come from, and that’s where we feel as if our learning and our culture has been rooted in. And I think there is something in that. So if we, as an organisation, are serious about what we do, then we need all sectors of society to value wild places. And it’s that, ‘how do we ensure that all sectors of society do value these wild places?’

21 Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark

523

which is where the John Muir Award fits in. The John Muir award is a nationally recognised environmental award scheme that just simply focuses on encouraging people to enjoy, and to connect with, and to care for wild places. Another cornerstone to our philosophy and our ethos is Patrick Geddes. He really believed that environmental space, and green space, was fundamentally important to help people develop and grow, and create their sense of place. And he came up with his ‘Head, Hearts, Hands’ model, a really early environmental engagement model. If you’re serious about engaging people outdoors, then you need to focus aspects on knowledge and understanding—the head. And the heart, you know, tap into what people care about, in essence, what people are interested in and what is special and important to them. And the hands, which is obviously giving people the opportunity to make a difference. It’s not passive, it’s: ‘come on, let’s do something about it’. There was something in Chapter 15 (Britton et al.) about the young people surfing, which was really rooted in that experiential learning. And what I loved about that chapter was, it was quite late on in the chapter where you suddenly realised that this wasn’t about the surfing, this was about playing. This was about young people jumping over waves, and if they spent a whole hour at surf school jumping over the waves or floating, you know, to me, that’s not surfing but, actually, that’s fundamentally is surfing, isn’t it? You know, it’s that play, and it is the unstructured stuff, and it’s the part where people can say: ‘you can choose what you want to do’. Fundamental to that is at the John Muir Trust, we don’t set a syllabus. We don’t say, ‘Right, you know, on session one, you’ve got to do X, Y, and Z, and number two, you’ve got to do A, B, and C’. But what we provide is a structure, a framework, which are the four challenges. The first is to discover a wild place. You need to choose a place in which you spend some time outdoors, explore it through all the activities you wish to do. The second is to explore, from hanging off rocks, to paddling, to sensory stuff,

524

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

to getting creative with pen and ink and drawing pictures, it’s entirely up to you. And third is to conserve, which is fundamental to each John Muir award, is that people put something back. And fourth, to share, and how they share their experiences is entirely up to them. So, and this goes right back to the beginning of the conversation where I was keen not to set myself up as an expert, because that, I think, is fundamental to the John Muir trust as well. We aren’t the experts. We want to give the confidence and the competence and the structure and the framework and the credibility, the okay-ness. We want to empower people. That’s maybe not quite the right word, but we want to empower people to use their own skills, to use their own professionalism, their own training to really enhance the outdoors and bring the outdoors to life. So, we’re not the experts but we want to empower experts to use wild places whether that’s through bridging the poverty-related attainment gap, or whether that’s building communication skills, or whether that’s building relationships through family dynamics, or whether that’s demonstrating biodiversity. All the different reasons why organisations use the John Muir award. A lot of people talk about the award being a handrail, and we are really comfortable that for some, the John Muir Award is a stimulus for doing new things but for many, it’s about enhancing and amplifying and giving a reason as to why folk are doing something. Why are we paddling down the river? Why are we focusing on clearing up a green space? Why are we focusing on allotments, or whatever? And also, it’s recognising that actually this is important, there’s an organisation out there that fundamentally believes that you, paddling down a river , connecting with it and taking care of it, is worthy of a nationally recognised certificate, and it’s something that you should be proud of and it’s something that we want to celebrate with you. And I think that is quite a nice, honest relationship that really amplifies this. There is this word that keeps on escaping me. It’s not empowering. It legitimises what you are doing as something that’s credible, and worthy, and

21 Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark

525

worth celebrating. And I think increasingly, as we talk about the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, more and more people are getting that. We’re finding more and more doors are opening and less are having to struggle to get through.

5

Unfamiliar Landscapes: Introducing People Through Surprise, Pleasure, and Discovery

We then turned more specifically to reflecting on the chapters, beginning with Toby’s reflections on the young people’s experiences in Chapter 15 (Britton et al.) and Chapter 18 (Hooykaas), involving surfing and canoeing, respectively. TC: The surf chapter (Chapter 15, Britton et al.), that made me think about the low dose of the novelty and challenge. And I think that speaks back to the John Muir Award being, we call it, noncompetitive in the sense that what we don’t set a bar: ‘You need to have spent X amount of sweat and blood and tears, or have Y amount of midge or tick bites, or carry X weight’. That’s not what we’re about. We try and free up the experts, the leaders, the teachers, the youth workers, the outdoor instructors to really plan their award to make it challenging and meaningful for the people that they work with. So that dose of novelty and challenge is left to those that are closer to the participants. And I think that’s also key, as well, that the model of the John Muir Award is that we are always pretty much at arm’s length from the participants, which is why that social science studies that we’re doing with Ria and with others is really, really important and powerful for us because we do feel as if we are a little bit removed from the impact on participants. So that idea of a low dose of novelty and challenge really jumped off the page for me. The need for experiential learning, I’ve already mentioned, some preference

526

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

for play, for novel creativity, for the non-surf engagements which we discussed, or for it to be participant-led as well. And there was something else in Chapter 18 (Hooykaas) that talked about soft fascination, and allowing nature to speak for itself, or allowing the mountains to speak for themselves, during the outward-bound paddling or canoeing. And I love that, having the confidence that you don’t necessarily need to go overboard, to learn the Latin names or to, you know, really focus on nature in that way, and just instead let nature come to you and let mountains speak for themselves. Another thing that comes out of these chapters is being able to facilitate immersive, positive engagement in an unfamiliar environment. So, I think that safety and the boundaries for many, are really, really important. And allowing that dose to increase or decrease with the group as a whole, but also for individuals within that group, is really important. And that’s why teachers are brilliant at this because they do that with 31 kids in a class on a day-today basis. Authentic learning spaces, also. On the example of your paddle trip (Chapter 18, Hooykaas), and for us on the John Muir Award as well, is that for many, it authenticised that experience: ‘Ah, okay, so the fact that we’re working towards a nationally recognised certificate that can go on my CV, or I can speak about it in my interviews for a college or for a job’. Yeah, authenticise, it gives the young people a sense of credibility. It also speaks into a space—and this could be a rabbit hole and Ria might have to steer me away from—about the intrinsic and the extrinsic. So, why are people getting involved in caring for nature? Is it because it’s something internal that they really think is important and is of value? Or is it something a wee bit more external, where I can get a nice flashy certificate, and this is gonna improve my career? I don’t have the answer to that, but I think there’s an interesting tension around that values-based approach. Both of these chapters then talk about the personal social development’s which link to children’s appropriation. A sense of belonging, as well. That ‘This is for you. I think this is yours.’ And,

21 Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark

527

it may be that these young people need to get on a bus or need to pull on a wetsuit but psychologically, it’s about making them feel that things like this are for you as well. And that reminds me of the health impact study we did with Rich Mitchell in 2011. It talks about the health implications, of the language being used, and that the long-term impact of people feeling comfortable in wild places, that impact is huge. Providing the confidence for young people that places like this exists, and I can access them, and they are for me, I think is massive, from a preventative perspective. So the appropriation of and sense of belonging, of surprise, pleasure, and discovery. Encouraging creativity in play. I think that the fun aspect to people’s engagement with wild places is incredibly important.

5.1

Challenging the Familiar and Unfamiliar as a Sense of Place

Drawing on Chapter 16 (Sender et al.) Toby considered the broader themes around how young people might be pushed towards or away from unfamiliar places. TC: To me this chapter (Chapter 16, Sender et al.) made me think about how people orientate themselves towards or away from the familiar. And I think that maybe people do push towards an unfamiliarity because their familiar isn’t what they’re looking for or isn’t suitable, and not something that they’re willing to accept. I found that quite interesting. That a place can be a mental health factor in itself, I thought, was really interesting. I think at the John Muir Trust we are aware of that, and I really like the fact that Naturescot [formerly: Scottish Natural Heritage] seems to be focusing much more of its time and effort on that link between mental health and place, and they’re very much focused on green spaces and the real power of green spaces. One of the things I loved about this chapter (Chapter 16, Sender et al.) is how it described place. When we talk about place, it’s

528

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

the meeting between people and the environment, this thrown togetherness. And sometimes it’s a happy, coincidental thrown togetherness and others, in particular in this chapter about young people who are displaced, perhaps we’re thrown together not because we want to be here, not because you want us to be here, not because we want to choose to live in a tented community, but that’s the reality. And how a sense of place emerges from encounters, as well. That spoke to me. So we talk about the sense of place, but what does it mean? And how do we build it? On one level, in our work that we do, we try and keep it as simple as possible and, you know, that ‘explore a wild place’ is just a series of encounters that should be authentic, meaningful, and relevant for whoever it is, wherever you are. Maybe that chapter challenged me a bit because of the subject matter, but also because it felt more open-ended in a sense that, okay, the unfamiliar can be positive and the familiar can be positive, but equally, they can both be less positive too. There’s the unpleasant, the threatening, and the unfamiliar, I think it’s important that idea of people tuning into nature, and then tuning into the unpleasantness that is there too. And I think there was something about, ‘Oh, actually, this is a bit of a rubbish place for nature.’ Or, you know, ‘By tuning into nature, I suddenly noticed all the trash, all the litter, that was about as well.’ I thought that was important to recognise.

5.2

Authenticity, Nature, and Urban Landscapes

Continuing the conversation from the sometimes threatening and unpleasant aspects of ‘nature’ and the outdoors, and speaking to some of the themes of Chapters 16 (Sender et al.) and 17 (Boyd), Toby reflected on the challenges of thinking about outdoor access in urban contexts, drawing on his own, and other youth workers, experiences of working with young people who lived in urban centres.

21 Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark

529

RD: I think we don’t really talk enough about how you facilitate access to the outdoors and to nature spaces in urban contexts. Even just the different kind of rhythms of the city, and how that plays into what you might or might not do. TC:

I’ve done some volunteering with a campaign to make Glasgow a National Park City—National Park Cities are an emerging concept, which I’m quite excited about. We did some work around urban nature maps—we road-tested them in Glasgow. But we know that nature connection in a city, especially during the winter months, is quite limiting in terms of feeling safe about where you can go. So, there was simple graph on the back of the map of Glasgow about sunset and sunrise times for a city, so for example if you want go on a bat walk, or if you want go looking in the woodlands for what creatures come out, it’s really useful. But it also, in a really non-directive way, it gives people that sense of where I can go after work or, if I’m planning something, what things do I need to think about? But also thinking about nature in the city, I think young people in particular, but all people, seek an authentic experience, and I think they would see through it if, for example, you paddled round a place that was less pretty than another place. And I think that authenticity is really important. Also, I think some young people will look to what’s familiar, what’s familiar to them, and maybe broken glass and, you know, signs of folks skinning up or eating snacks and leaving their litter is something that is familiar to them. So, I think having those discussions, not pretending that places like that, and habits like that and stuff like that doesn’t happen, I think is fundamentally important. But I also think that we also need to recognise what matters to young people. I remember having a wonderful conversation with a youth worker about young people taking care about their appearance and how appearance is important to them. If a young person has £80, £90, or £100 worth of shoe on their foot, then going for a walk in the park is gonna add significant stress. ‘Am I going to be on a path? Am I gonna go through mud?’ You know, these

530

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

are a big deal, this is important to them. And similarly, again, I’ve spoken to youth workers in Belfast, but it would apply to probably any place, any city, there are these no-go areas. You know, what is acceptable and what do you recognise as safe places? I lived in Partick [an area of Glasgow] for many years. And I don’t know why, and I don’t think many people know why, but there wasn’t a gang in that sort of Partick area and so, many people felt safe travelling to Partick to do X, Y, and Z. Whereas for some young people in other contexts, those amenities and facilities and opportunities could be available in other parts of the city, but they had strong gang elements. From the perspective of Belfast, it’s even more heightened through the Protestant-Catholic aspect too. And that’s even more pronounced in adult life as well as that youth culture. So, coming back to the idea that there’s the unpleasant, and the threatening, and the unfamiliar, I found reading some of these chapters really interesting from that perspective. And I love the fact that, to me, Chapter 17 (Boyd) spoke about the design of the space and the campus, so that opportunities to engage with nature infiltrates in everyday practice. To me, that sums up what I’m all about. Let’s be slightly cautious about going ‘Oh, the power of nature, and, it’s really good for you.’ And let’s just have it so that, on my way to school, or on my way to work, or on my way to the shops there’s that aspect of nature connection, that I can or can’t pick up on. And I think that making it everyday rather than, ‘Oh the special…’ I think is important.

5.3

Privileging and Experiencing Wilderness

Building on our discussion of urban nature, we then contrasted this with the ‘wilderness’ experiences in Chapter 18 (Hooykaas). Toby considered how these residential and immersive experiences might be linked to the everyday realities of young people.

21 Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark

531

TAS: I think that’s really interesting about the over romanticisation of certain types of experiences, versus the everyday, and in some ways, that almost plays into where people might then choose to go. There’s an argument that certain types of landscapes are overprivileged as the place that you go to do certain types of activities. TC:

Absolutely and that’s a fundamental challenge that the John Muir Trust is having, in that we have limited resources, and our lands management focuses on being guardians for some of the wilder places of the UK. We manage Glenridding Common and Helvellyn in the Lake Districts, and in Scotland we manage parts of Ben Nevis, Knoydart, Sandwood Bay, parts of the Red Cuillin and Black Cuillin on Skye, Schiehallion in Perthshire. These are iconic places but demand a degree of privilege, even just to get there. So there’s this tension: we only have finite resources but we’re nervous about becoming simply an organisation for the privileged. But this also speaks to what I love about the John Muir Award, it turns that on its head. If you think about the wildest places from a Scotland perspective, then compare that to where people are doing their John Muir Award, and they’re actually across central Scotland, where our cities are. I think an organisation that can find relevance in the remote places through its land management, but can connect with people where they’re at, I think is really exciting. So coming back to Chapter 18, how do we link the iconic, perhaps romanticised kayaking in the backcountry of northern Ontario as a rite of passage, how is that relevant to when the young participants go back to downtown Toronto, how is that relatable? I think there has to be an element of deep residentials ensuring that there is that bridge back to where people come from. It’s not ‘Okay, that made me feel positively in these ways but that was there. I’m now back in my care home, or I’m now back with shitty life at school, or I’m now back sharing a room with someone I don’t want to share a room with’. When really

532

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

removing people, and immersing them in a predominantly residential experience in an environment that is very different from where they’ve come from, you need to be bridging that gap to say, ‘Actually, this is an environment that you should feel very comfortable with’. I love that ethnographic knowledge that comes from the chapter (Chapter 18, Hooykaas), and the rites of passage on that wilderness journey and, I’m sure there’s people growing up in all communities that have, and should have, access to that rite of passage. But for some young people, what’s their rite of passage? Maybe it is, you know, getting high under a canal bridge, or drinking heavily around a campfire on the banks of Loch Lomond, or whatever it might be. And that’s quite sad in a sense. I think historically, over time, we have become unfamiliar with our natural landscape, becoming perhaps less connected, and therefore becoming less environmentally aware, and less healthy and less receptive or more insecure. We don’t have that sense of biophilia, that positive physiological response to nature. We don’t have the relief from mechanical time allowing for soft fascination. So I think addressing this is something that requires a systemic approach, and that’s why I’m quite excited about how in Scotland, we’re focusing on learning for sustainability as an agenda that really embeds itself in schools. How can we bring daily contact with nature as part of an entitlement to every young person? And that’s really exciting because beyond schools, learning for sustainability should seep into—and does seep into— community learning and development in colleges.

5.4

Problematising the Digital in Unfamiliar Spaces

Technology permeates many of the chapters across this book, and we briefly touched on the role that technology might play in the outdoors and for outdoor education.

21 Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark

533

TC: The chapter on placelessness (Chapter 18, Hooykaas) also spoke to me about the feeling of a false sense of security around connection through technology. I think there’s still so much that we’ve got to unpack around that but equally, I’m one of these people that doesn’t see it as black and white, in that tech is bad and non-tech is good. Tech isn’t going away. We live in a post-digital world. We don’t even talk about technology in most cases now when we talk about experiencing wild places. You know, we’re beyond digital, it’s just the world we live in. And I think how we better utilise that is potentially really exciting, but also how we better understand it. For many, it’s incredibly powerful. I think we need to be pragmatic about technology. The tech genie’s well and truly out the lamp and there’s no way it’s going back in. Maybe this is overly simplistic, but I think we should focus on ways in which technology can enhance experiences rather than be the driver of an experience. But I think also we need to recognise that whether it’s body image, or whether it’s wow places, or whether it’s the status, all of this on social media can seem completely unrealistic. So I think that’s where we’ve got to rebalance it as a tool, it’s not necessarily something that we need to show and mirror our lives up against and present ourselves as being successful or not successful against. Also, people often come out of a moment to enable them to capture that moment, and then you have to ask, ‘Well, why are you capturing the moment?’ It isn’t necessarily for themselves. It’s for the people that their social followers or, you know, it’s for others, it’s that image, it’s that presentation if you like, and to my mind, maybe that’s a time when we question why we are using technology. I think it’s our relationship with technology that we need to understand rather than any particular technology that we hold in our hand.

534

6

R. A. Dunkley and T. A. Smith

Concluding Thoughts: Unstructured Experiences, Building Human and Non-Human Relationships, and the Role of Families

We concluded our conversation by returning to themes of lessstructured, non-specialist-led experiences in the outdoors, how young people can better connect to nature through their everyday lives, and the central importance of families. TC: What I’m passionate about is de-specialising stuff, because I think teachers, youth workers, educators, practitioners perhaps use specialisms as barriers to getting involved. So I think being less precious about deep and meaningful nature connection, and instead to be more celebratory about just getting out there and giving something a go, and being comfortable with that, I think is important. Meeting people where they’re at is fundamental. Organisations like the Outward Bound Trust, Wilderness Scotland, or whoever, these highly trained facilitators of experiences in wilderness places certainly have a huge role. But it’s important as well that they feel don’t feel threatened about outdoor learning being done by the non-specialists. And you probably aren’t going to be surprised to hear that a focus on green space and the local is something that I really get, and it’s important but, again, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t be looking at what progression is out there from local green space to National Parks, to wilderness place, to international places. In terms of equality, the more I see and hear, family is increasingly important. It was maybe 10 years ago, we did some work with Barnardo’s—a charity that worked with people either homeless or at risk of homelessness—and we did this really simple activity in a park, about creating a home for an animal. I had a stuffed bat and it was like, okay, there’s no right or wrong way of doing it, you can get really creative with making a roof, or you can think about what bats eat and what predates them and how do they

21 Conversations with Practitioners 3: Toby Clark

535

move around? One of these Barnardo’s charity worker said: ‘This is a really interesting activity because some of the young people that we’re working with, talking about what it needs for a bat to have a safe home is incredibly powerful, because it’s something that we can do with parents as well. And we can create a space where we can talk about the importance of safe homes and safe spaces’. And we ourselves never made that connection, and yet those from Barnardo’s were making those connections and, to me, that summarises the fact that we’re not the experts and instead we can let nature speak for itself and people will find their own paths through it. A key point I’m trying to make is to not look at young people in isolation. We know that one of the biggest impacts on a child’s attainment is whether their parents or carers are in a place where they can read a book to them, support them, or show an interest. That’s huge, absolutely fundamental to the life chances of a child. So maybe we should think more about nature connection from a family perspective. Maybe that’s a nice way to finish off. I think we started talking about Muir and everything being connected. In terms of places and familiarity and nature connection, but trying to rethink that, and ensuring that it’s built into people’s everyday lives and families are very much a crucial part of that.

Part VI Reflections

22 (Re)Conceptualising Unfamiliar Landscapes Peter Kraftl

1

Introduction

This chapter offers a series of broad reflections on the many themes, challenges and questions posed by this book. It does not offer a systematic review of the individual chapters. Rather, I pick up on a number of key tensions and, especially, the generative, exciting and richly evidenced conceptual provocations that emerge in and across the different contributions. Taken as a whole, this volume offers a sustained series of critical reflections on what it means to conceive, articulate, practice and feel ‘unfamiliar landscapes’. As such, in this piece I draw out just some of those critical reflections, offering some broader considerations on how the book affords a step change in (re)conceptualising unfamiliar landscapes. P. Kraftl (B) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_22

539

540

P. Kraftl

This chapter is concerned with three conceptual modalities that cut across the book. First, it draws together the multiple registers— discursive, emotional, embodied, material—in and through which the unfamiliar is constituted. Second, and related, I examine a key tension in the book: whether the unfamiliar is correlated with particular places or ‘kinds’ of landscapes—or whether the unfamiliar is something that (human) actors ‘bring’ with them to those places. In doing so, I offer some critical reflections on the co-implication of everydayness and ‘familiarity’ with unfamiliar landscapes, arguing that the book as a whole provides a lexicon for articulating both the spatial and temporal specificities of that which is rendered unfamiliar, in and around young people’s lives. Third, this piece highlights one of the book’s key contributions: drawing out questions of social difference (especially ethnicity, class and gender) in terms of questions of power, access and marginalisation, in and from unfamiliar landscapes.

2

Registers of Unfamiliarity

A key strand running through this volume is that unfamiliar landscapes are not simply places ‘out there’ that are encountered in a visual register. Rather, they are felt across multiple registers. For a couple of decades, cultural geographers in particular have sought to emphasise how landscapes are experienced across a number of sensorial domains, moving beyond the predominantly visual registers in which landscapes have been understood, theorised and represented (e.g. Wylie, 2005). It might be that an individual’s first sense of a new landscape is a visual one; indeed, any new landscape might appear unfamiliar as one attempts to orient oneself, to gain a sense of perspective, of distance, of the contours of the land. For example, countless generations of visitors to the Grand Canyon have struggled to attune themselves to the enormity (and hence uncanniness) of the landscape, especially since the end of the nineteenth century, when the predominant location for viewing the Canyon switched from the narrow and rather more intimate inner canyon to the outer rim. Yet any landscape—however apparently quotidian or extraordinary— presents itself to us in innumerable ways that complement, extend

22 (Re)Conceptualising Unfamiliar Landscapes

541

beyond, and confuse the visual register. Indeed, our very orientation within landscapes is—as so many phenomenologies of place have attested—a complex combination of experiences combining all of the senses (Hepach, 2021). Complicating this picture further are the ways in which humans may have different capacities to sense. Some of us (myself included) may not be able to see as well as others; others may be attuned to navigating through landscapes in different ways, trained, for instance, in the use of maps and other navigational aids. Meanwhile, as post-colonial and Black Geographers have demonstrated—and a powerful installation at the Royal Geographical Society in 2021, entitled ‘Dreading the Map1 ’ exemplified—the very ‘skills’ that we bring to a landscape, such as navigation, are culturally specific and may entail longentrenched relationships of power and domination. These intersecting questions of power are picked up in the third part of this chapter. It is striking, then, that taken as a whole, the chapters in this volume witness a rich repertoire of embodied, emotional, affective encounters with unfamiliar landscapes. Critically, as the second part of this chapter suggests, unfamiliar landscapes are not necessarily viewed as stable ‘places’ or categories of landscape, nor are they unfamiliar to all (what is the site of a momentary visit for one person may be a longestablished home for others). Clearly, several of the chapters—as may be expected—speak of ‘wild’ places, places far away from or distinct from the ‘normal’ routines of everyday life, such as wild spaces in UK national parks, remote islands of New Zealand, little explored caves in Fuerteventura, and the backcountry of Northern Ontario. Indeed, the promise of unfamiliarity—particularly its pedagogic functions and possible impacts upon young people’s well-being—is located in some measure of literal or metaphorical distance from the banalities of everyday life. Unfamiliarity breeds—perhaps should breed—discomfort, provocation, spontaneity, experimentation, disjuncture, in such a way that young people are moved into acquiring new skills, knowledges or, fundamentally, into reappraising their lives and their identities. These experiences are, however, also (often) carefully managed. Any outdoor educator will attest not only to the multitude of risk assessments and safety measures 1

See https://caricuk.co.uk/provocations/dreading-the-map/, last accessed 16th July 2021.

542

P. Kraftl

that are required, but also to the ways in which young people visiting an unfamiliar landscape for the first time will be introduced to those landscapes in sensitively managed ways, gradually building their confidence and willingness to try new things. Although the pedagogical and health benefits of experiencing unfamiliar—especially ‘natural’ or ‘wild’—landscapes may have been established in some literature (Dankiw et al., 2020), this book reinforces observations that it is the constructedness of those landscapes, again through multiple registers, wherein such benefits may be achieved (or not). Unfamiliar landscapes are, then, multiply-constituted: both in terms of the cultural ‘baggage’ that we bring to them, and the experiences that take place within them. Those landscapes are complex admixtures of human and nonhuman, embodied practice and reflection, feeling and sensing. They require work—as understood in terms of the everyday actions of the practitioners who facilitate young people’s access to landscapes. But they also require work in a much broader sense—the agency of humans and non-humans and, particularly, young people, as they move through, sense, talk about and generally engage with those landscapes. Unfamiliar landscapes are not ‘dead’ spaces, to paraphrase Massey (2005); rather, they exist only through the work that brings them to life, that constitutes them. Whether that work, and its outcomes, are necessarily positive is another question, to which this chapter turns later. However, a key contribution of this book is to acknowledge and exemplify the simultaneity of different registers of experiencing, doing, sensing and feeling that constitute unfamiliar landscapes.

3

Defamiliarising Landscapes

A second reflection on this volume stems immediately from the first. That is, as intimated above, unfamiliar landscapes are often understood to be those that are somehow at a distance from the ordinary spaces of a young person’s everyday life. More specifically, they are often taken to be ‘wild’ or ‘natural’ places that contrast with the (often inner-urban) settings where young people live. However, this volume makes important strides in picking apart those assumptions. There are studies that

22 (Re)Conceptualising Unfamiliar Landscapes

543

are located in places that are much closer to home—in radio station studios, for instance, or local school field trips, and nearby city parks— which reinforce a sense in which unfamiliarity is not only constituted or constructed, but does not necessarily require certain kinds of landscape or place to be produced. This requires, then, a less dualistic understanding of the term ‘unfamiliarity’ (and its ostensible opposite, ‘familiarity’). It also requires a more nuanced conception of the interplay of the ‘everyday’ with the ‘extraordinary’. For a long time, scholars of the everyday such as Walter Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre have been concerned with the ways in which everyday spaces may be defamiliarised—for instance through acts of subversion, ridicule, artistic experimentation, or sudden moments of realisation or hopefulness that things may indeed be otherwise than the ordinary flow of everyday life (and those in power) might lead us to believe (Gardiner, 2004). Moreover, it would be misleading to suggest that it has only been Marxist scholars, such as Lefebvre, who have been preoccupied with the potentialities of the everyday to erupt or spill over into something else, or something more: feminist, queer and critical race thinkers—and those writing at the intersections of those diverse fields of thought—have not only questioned but offered powerful alternative versions of the everyday that knowingly defamiliarise what is most taken-for-granted (e.g. Sargisson, 2012; Warren & Coles, 2020). The implication is, then, that not only are unfamiliar landscapes constituted through multiple registers, but they never exist (solely) ‘out there’ in any a priori sense. Again, turning to the work of Forest School practitioners and other outdoor educators is indicative of this observation in a fairly straightforward sense. That is—and whilst some may disagree with this point—many such practitioners argue that outdoor or nature-based learning does not have to happen in a remote, pristine forest, national park or other designated, special landscape. It can and routinely does happen in school playgrounds, in small, scraggy patches of woodland beside peripheral housing estates, in local parks; it could, arguably, just as easily take place in a patch of urban ‘waste’-ground, or through taking a trip on industrial-era canals through a city usually navigated on roads and paths. Moreover, bringing apparently ‘everyday’ technologies to a landscape where they might seem out of place may,

544

P. Kraftl

far from instantiating a divide between ‘nature’ and ‘technology’, herald new and uncanny assemblages that may reconfigure how we conceive both ‘categories’ (Smith & Dunkley, 2018). The point is that unfamiliarity—and the experience of unfamiliar landscapes—is something that is emergent. It may have an eruptive quality, as per the theorisations of defamiliarisation and uncanniness in the everyday that were briefly referenced above. It may be something more akin to a ‘slow burn’—a gradual realisation that any place—near or far, however ‘different’ from habitual spaces of an individual or group’s everyday life—presents an opportunity to think, feel or do differently. Arguably, then, unfamiliar landscapes are lively landscapes because they are constituted by what humans ‘bring’ to them, and to the encounters between different humans when they are there. However, if it can be accepted that unfamiliar landscapes can be anywhere—even if ‘wild’ spaces, for instance, might hold particular capacities to affect groups of young people who rarely experience them—then it might be asked (in a critically affirmative, not negative) sense: how much mileage does the term ‘unfamiliarity’ have when conjoined with the term ‘landscape’? Is it—perhaps—more helpful to think of ‘defamiliarised’ or, even, ‘defamiliaris-ing landscapes? To think thus might be to offer a sense that spaces still matter, but in a more lively sense (a sense of space as a verb, not a noun: ‘spacing’, as Malbon [2002], puts it). And whilst spaces (or spacings) matter, they become unfamiliar through processes and practices of defamiliarisation, through which a tingle of recognition, or the affective qualities of discomfort or uncanniness or unease may come to the fore.

4

Social Difference and De-Centring the Unfamiliar

Finally, arguably the most powerful and important contribution of this book is a sustained attentiveness—across the chapters—to questions of social difference as they intersect with experiences of unfamiliar landscapes. Many of the chapters discuss rich research with groups of young

22 (Re)Conceptualising Unfamiliar Landscapes

545

people—minoritised ethnic groups and asylum seekers, for instance— who do not have access to, or have historically been marginalised from, certain kinds of landscapes. Critically, again, they do not simply assume that either taking those young people ‘elsewhere’, nor specifically taking them to a ‘wild’ or ‘natural’ environment, will be ‘good’ for them. On the one hand, that (paternalistic) assumption is problematic because it once again assumes some kind of determining effect of an environment on a young person’s learning, identity or well-being, which is itself couched in (often) white, middle-class, European assumptions about ‘natural’ landscapes that may differ from or problematically silence ‘Black geographical expressions’ (Bledsoe & Wright, 2019: 419). On the other, it should go without saying that the particular landscapes and activities with which young people engage may not necessarily have positive outcomes for all; or those outcomes may be ambiguous (Hickman Dunne, 2019). And, perhaps most importantly, taking a group of minoritised youth on a skiing trip or outward bound week in a national park does little to challenge the entrenched racisms and historical relations of power that underlie ongoing processes of minoritisation. Significantly, the chapters in this volume call out just some of those processes and recognise that experiences of unfamiliar landscapes may—and only may—be part of the picture in addressing them. Relatedly, it is also striking that several of the chapters engage with increasingly popular and widespread theorisations of the non-human or more-than-human actors and processes with/in which young people’s lives are inextricably entangled. It is perhaps glib to point out that animals, plants, rocks, technologies, toys and outdoor ‘kit’, alongside hydrological and meteorological processes, are unavoidable, ever-present elements of the multiple registers through which unfamiliar landscapes are constituted. Inspired by feminist new materialist and posthumanist philosophies, there is by-now an established interdisciplinary literature that examines the ‘Common Worlds’ of particularly younger children and the many companion species and processes that they encounter (e.g. Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2018). As some of the chapters in this book demonstrate, this is a ‘decentring’ of young people (and indeed humans) in terms of how we view landscapes. Indeed, a particular contribution of this book is to explore these kinds of decentring with respect to older,

546

P. Kraftl

as well as younger, young people. It is also a recognition of the agential power of the animate and inanimate non-humans with which we must live our lives; the lives of those companions have, in turn, been compromised or even extinguished by the arrogant, Western, male conceits of human exceptionalism and the Anthropocene (Taylor, 2020). It is also an acknowledgement that the ways that we conceptualise landscapes— and the earth itself—must not always start and end with the human. It is thus not so much a question of adding non-humans into the equation, or of ‘decentring’ humans, but of starting elsewhere, and enabling humans to move into and out of focus when appropriate (see Kraftl, 2020). What is less commonly acknowledged—although this does not hold for those scholars specifically cited above—is that moves to extend our analyses ‘beyond’ the human are in themselves riven by power relations—especially those that are classed, raced and gendered. However, on the one hand, questions of human difference and minoritisation in scholarship extending ‘beyond’ personhood have remained remarkably and problematically absent (Jackson, 2015). On the other, efforts to extend ‘beyond’ the human efface the experiences of those who are still—for instance because of their ethnicity—struggling to be recognised as human (Leong, 2016) and engaged in critical discussions about what it means to be human (McKittrick, 2015). Indeed, the very idea of the Anthropocene, which has been a central concept for such moves ‘beyond’ is problematic: despite the claims to a new global geological epoch, the effects of prior (wealthy, male, European) generations on the earth will likely reinforce existing inequalities—we are not all in it together. Moreover, the very designation of geological epochs (such as the Anthropocene) is bound up with historical, now discredited attempts to categorise different human races that nonetheless still influence perceptions and practices around race today (Leong, 2016; Yusoff, 2018). All of this implies that an apparently more generous, de-centred, new materialist or posthumanist approach to unfamiliar landscapes— indeed any landscapes—is neither all-encompassing, nor able singularly to address ingrained processes such as violence, minoritisation and marginalisation. This book does, however, offer some starting points, especially when the chapters that carefully recount the experiences of

22 (Re)Conceptualising Unfamiliar Landscapes

547

(for instance) Black and asylum-seeking young people are read alongside those engaging deeply with new materialisms. There are also inspiring starting points elsewhere, with which readers may wish to connect to follow through these challenges in more depth. Within childhood studies, a key example would be decolonial scholarship that has addressed entanglements of environmental degradation, racism and settler colonialism, towards a vision for Black environmental education spaces for children (Nxumalo, 2019; Nxumalo & Ross, 2019). Beyond childhood and youth studies, a second set of (diverse) examples comes from the engagements of critical race and queer scholars with the ways in which material processes—especially the implications of toxic substances present in landscapes for the health of Black bodies—can compound colonial violence (e.g. Agard-Jones, 2013; Chen, 2011). To repeat a point above: (re)conceptualisations of unfamiliar (or defamiliarising) landscapes could form part of the lexicon in attempts to broach intersections of race, class, gender, and other forms of human difference with the more-than-human world we inhabit. Thus, one might ask, for instance, how ‘toxic’ landscapes might—as equally unfamiliar and discomforting sites—sit alongside the diverse landscapes considered in this book. Ultimately, as scholars from many disciplines know all too well, as do artists, environmental advocates, landowners, farmers who live and work in them, ‘landscapes’ are contested and complex. Notions of unfamiliarity—and processes of defamiliarisation—offer provocative, generative openings for further reflection on those contestations and complexities. In particular, they—like the chapters in this book—provide a rich lexicon for considering how young people come to encounter unfamiliar landscapes: what the rationale for doing so might be, and how, precisely, unfamiliarity is narrated, practised, felt and valued (or not). This is not a celebration of landscapes, however sublime some of the places recounted in this book might be—although that is not to say that landscapes should not be celebrated, nor that some of the positive experiences of landscapes discussed in these chapters should be effaced. Whilst there must remain ongoing questions about the relationship between unfamiliarity and processes of violence, marginalisation and minoritisation, the spacings of defamiliarisation might—with their roots in, not totally removed from, the everyday—also foment moments of hope and capacities for real change.

548

P. Kraftl

References Agard-Jones, V. (2013). Bodies in the system. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 17 (3), 182–192. Bledsoe, A., & Wright, W. J. (2019). The pluralities of black geographies. Antipode, 51(2), 419–437. Chen, M. Y. (2011). Toxic animacies, inanimate affections. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 17 (2–3), 265–286. Dankiw, K. A., Tsiros, M. D., Baldock, K. L., & Kumar, S. (2020). The impacts of unstructured nature play on health in early childhood development: A systematic review. Plos One, 15 (2), p.e0229006. Gardiner, M. (2004). Everyday utopianism: Lefebvre and his critics. Cultural Studies, 18(2–3), 228–254. Hepach, M. G. (2021). Entangled phenomenologies: Reassessing (post-) phenomenology’s promise for human geography. Progress in Human Geography, online early. Hickman Dunne, J. (2019). Experiencing the outdoors: Embodied encounters in the outward bound trust. The Geographical Journal, 185 (3), 279–291. Jackson, Z. I. (2015). Outer worlds: The persistence of race in movement “Beyond the Human”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2), 215–218. Kraftl, P. (2020). After childhood: Re-thinking environment, materiality and media in children’s lives. Routledge. Leong, D. (2016). The mattering of Black lives: Octavia Butler’s hyperempathy and the promise of the new materialisms. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2(2), 1–35. Malbon, B. (2002). Clubbing: Dancing, ecstasy, vitality. Routledge. Massey, D. (2005). For space. Sage. McKittrick, K. (Ed.). (2015). Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis. Duke University Press. Nxumalo, F. (2019). Decolonizing place in early childhood education. Routledge. Nxumalo, F., & Ross, K. M. (2019). Envisioning Black space in environmental education for young children. Race Ethnicity and Education, 22(4), 502– 524. Sargisson, L. (2012). Fool’s gold? Utopianism in the twenty-first century. Palgrave Macmillan.

22 (Re)Conceptualising Unfamiliar Landscapes

549

Smith, T. A., & Dunkley, R. (2018). Technology-nonhuman-child assemblages: Reconceptualising rural childhood roaming. Children’s Geographies, 16 (3), 304–318. Taylor, A. (2020). Countering the conceits of the Anthropos: Scaling down and researching with minor players. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 41(3), 340–358. Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2018). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. Routledge. Warren, C. A., & Coles, J. A. (2020). Trading spaces: Antiblackness and reflections on Black education futures. Equity & Excellence in Education, 53(3), 382–398. Wylie, J. (2005). A single day’s walking: Narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (2), 234–247. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black Anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press.

23 Whose Unfamiliar Landscape? Reflecting on the Diversity of Young People’s Encounters with Nature and the Outdoors Thomas Aneurin Smith, Hannah Pitt, and Ria Ann Dunkley

1

Introduction

Bringing together a diversity of young people’s experiences, this book has forwarded a critical reflection on whether the work of environmental education and outdoor activities, and more broadly interventions with young people in unfamiliar spaces, are working for young people themselves. The diversity of backgrounds and experiences of young people, drawn together here, has unpacked the meaning of unfamiliarity and T. A. Smith (B) · H. Pitt School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected] H. Pitt e-mail: [email protected] R. A. Dunkley School of Education, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5_23

551

552

T. A. Smith et al.

familiarity, for landscapes, the bodies in them, and the ways in which young people are guided and coached through these landscapes. Most significantly, it has foregrounded the young people’s experiences, and tried to tease out what matters to them. In this final chapter, we consider primarily the practice-based implications of this book as a whole, whilst also pointing to future directions for research in unfamiliar landscapes. In a rush to ‘solve’ children and young people’s lack of nature engagement, there has been a tendency to promote certain types of place experiences. Not only does this risk addressing symptom not cause (Dickinson, 2013), it also may do more harm than good by failing to prioritise how young people want to experience the outdoors and neglecting types of experience that will be beneficial for them, or may ignore inherent prejudices embedded in particular ways of introducing young people to unfamiliar landscapes. Studies of young mountain bikers, for example, show that the countryside is essential to them not in ways adults expect, but instead concerns the construction of their preferred identity and using the countryside within their lifestyle (King & Church, 2013). This brings to mind the fern-diving young women we met in Chapter 13 (MacBride-Stewart)—they are also using the countryside in their own way and enfolding it into their own identity work. As King and Church suggest, perhaps we need to worry less about what barriers constrain young people’s access to nature and attend more to how they engage with it in ways that matter to them. On the flip side, research has tended to overlook why those people less likely to be in specific spaces find that they do not emotionally resonate for them, or meet their therapeutic needs (Bell et al., 2019). Pursuing these understandings requires us to seek beyond the expectations dominant groups have for positive place experiences (Bell et al., 2019). We hope this book brings some such diversity, particularly foregrounding some of the many ways young people encounter and imagine outdoor landscapes.

2

Unfamiliar Landscapes?

Should we think of landscapes as unfamiliar at all? Does the term ‘unfamiliar landscapes’ do more harm than good for young people who might

23 Whose Unfamiliar Landscape? Reflecting on the Diversity …

553

be excluded from them or struggle to access them? We began this book using this thinking of landscapes as more or less familiar or unfamiliar as a provocation, to force us to think about what it is that makes landscapes more or less unfamiliar, and to what extent it matters for them to be positioned, whether through representations or practices, as unfamiliar. The term can be troubling and troublesome. Moreover, it is probably no surprise that the contributions here do not settle on any understanding or assessment of the value of notions of unfamiliarity. Is it a useful term if labelling any particular landscape as ‘unfamiliar’ to young people, or specific groups of young people, can form part of a broader exclusion process? Dwayne Fields argued in Chapter 14 that ‘it’s never actually the landscape that’s the issue, it’s everything leading to the landscape… each time they raise the words, or the ‘unfamiliar landscape’, ‘safety’ being raised as an issue, I almost found it a barrier. It perpetuates the image of an unsafe landscape’ (p. 331). Von Benzon focussed, in Chapter 8, on the ideals of the British countryside as the counterpoint to troubling urbanity. This notion, constructed by the Victorian wealthy and middle-classes, reminds us that, whilst producing the countryside as a space of peace and tranquillity, but also of ‘honest’ hard work, these representations further reinforced the supposed unfamiliarity between children and ‘nature’. Such representations still very much inform normative assumptions today about urban youth being somehow ‘unfamiliar’ with landscapes outside of their everyday experiences. Rather than label a landscape as unfamiliar to young people, Dwayne Fields argues that what is often unfamiliar to young people is the ‘rules’ of that landscape: how best to get about it, how to be prepared for all weathers, what to wear. He and other contributors describe how it is often other visitors to a place, or those who position themselves as gatekeepers, who make it feel unwelcoming for young people. This points to the importance of a relational understanding of unfamiliarity, recognising that place experiences are differential (Milligan & Bingley, 2007). Whether a specific landscape is felt to be welcoming and beneficial, or the converse, depends on the complex interactions between individuals, place, and the broader social context (Conradson, 2005). What this book has demonstrated is that whilst adult-youth interactions can be critical to

554

T. A. Smith et al.

this, so can the interactions between young people themselves, and young people’s own identity work within unfamiliar and familiar landscapes. The interactions and experiences of unease described above echo throughout many of the chapters and landscapes in this book. The construction of winter landscapes of skiing as exclusionary to Black young people, as Scott (Chapter 10) and Broch (Chapter 11) both find, is premised on many decades of these landscapes being represented as unfamiliar to Black youth. Equally, the presence of their bodies in such a space is therefore also unfamiliar in everyday practice. Broch (Chapter 11) finds that unfamiliarity is defined by invisible, symbolic boundaries between city areas and between bodies and the everyday, momentary encounters between young people and adults on the slopes. Dwayne’s concern is also born out through evidence that young people can readily reproduce themselves and landscapes as unfamiliar. Normative ideas about the values and aesthetics of outdoor spaces, either as challenging or therapeutic, are unquestioningly reproduced by young people in Hickman Dunne’s study (Chapter 2). Furthermore, back on the ski slopes, Broch (Chapter 11) also finds that young people mark themselves as different and unfit to be on the ski slopes. Kraftl’s commentary (Chapter 22) also speaks to this concern as he wonders whether thinking of landscapes as ‘unfamiliar’ fails to communicate the process by which familiarising or defamiliarising occurs. In essence, calling landscapes ‘unfamiliar’ and the practices that relate to this assumption contribute to making certain bodies unfamiliar in them. It is possible then that attaching a label of ‘unfamiliarity’ might mask the social norms and power structures which inevitably shape how much young people are able to come to know natural, outdoor spaces (Dickinson, 2013; Freeman et al., 2016). In which case, at its worst, the label of unfamiliarity might obscure the importance of tackling the deeply embedded reasons for lack of familiarity: inequality, exclusion, and poverty. Nevertheless, these chapters speak to a more positive sense of the unfamiliar too. On the one hand, the unsettling, disrupting feelings of being in an unfamiliar space can be productive. In Rahman’s contribution (Chapter 7: p. 159), the otherworldly, unfamiliar space of the cave can ‘invite alternative modalities of learning—that evoke particular mind– body interactions’. Indeed, the unfamiliar space contributes to new

23 Whose Unfamiliar Landscape? Reflecting on the Diversity …

555

‘youthscapes’ forming in Chapter 4, where Morgan and Freeman illustrate how young people develop their narratives of space in and through unfamiliar settings. Unfamiliarity, then, can stimulate new forms of learning, novel engagement with space that might be missed if learning only takes place in all too familiar settings. Being in an unfamiliar space can at times be emancipatory for young people. In Hookyaas evocative chapter (Chapter 18), it is the deeply ‘removed’ setting of the Canadian backcountry that offers a safe space, perhaps around the campfire, where young people can talk, or choose to embrace the silence, that might be impossible for them in their more familiar homes and communities. Both Sunita Welch and Toby Clarke also recognise the value, from their careers and experiences, of how the unfamiliar, if carefully and supportively engaged with, can promote learning and self-reflection for young people in positive ways. What seems key is that unease is not held as the apogee of an outdoor experience, for as Phoebe Smith reminds us (Chapter 14), enjoyment is as important as endurance. Moreover, those introducing young people to new landscapes need to be mindful of what it takes to craft appropriate supportive contexts, such as avoiding a family being the ‘odd’ one (Chapter 11). Looking towards, seeking or dreaming of the unfamiliar can be important for young people. In precarious, uncertain circumstances, such as young people who are refugees or asylum seekers, Sender et al. (Chapter 16) find that they can orientate towards the unfamiliar or familiar as an act of protecting their wellbeing. Commenting on Sender et al.’s contribution, Toby Clarke also argues that this may be particularly important for young people living in challenging circumstances. An orientation towards the unfamiliar may be a positive way of imagining and building a way out of the familiar. Pushing towards the unfamiliar can be a way for young people to demonstrate that where they are now is not where they want to be. We see this too in Wilkinson and Wilkinson’s research (Chapter 19), where young radio presenters reach out into the unfamiliar soundscape of the radio waves to re-imagine their identities as presenters. In this regard, a break with familiarity seems to offer an escape or a sense of removal from everyday life and pressures, often identified as a feature of therapeutic place experiences (Pitt, 2014).

556

T. A. Smith et al.

Nevertheless, practitioners and researchers alike must be wary of the potential for producing a dichotomy between landscape unfamiliarity as, on the one hand, reproducing negative and exclusionary stereotypes, and on the other, being purely emancipatory for young people. There are many gradations between these two experiences, even if both have a truth to them. The chapters in this book each find a place within this gradient. Young people taking part in residential outdoor experiences are, as Hickman Dunne (Chapter 2) finds, not on a linear process of becoming more familiar. There is no finite position of ‘knowing’ any landscape, temporal and spatial processes of becoming play into familiarity, or, as Kraftl (Chapter 22) puts it, becoming defamiliarised. Both familiarising and defamiliarising as processes that happen within landscapes might be pedagogically and emotionally powerful, or conversely troubling or even damaging. Processes of connection between spaces and across time are therefore highlighted as necessary across this book. Britton et al. (Chapter 15) find that connecting the unfamiliar environment of the sea to more familiar matters of past experiences for young asylum seekers, such as floating or playing in water, might ease the transition to the unfamiliar activity of surfing in the sea. Connections between everyday family practices in unfamiliar settings are central to Dunkley and Smith’s (Chapter 6) analysis of how families successfully negotiate time outdoors together in unfamiliar moorland environments, particularly managing young children. Others, such as Watson (Chapter 20), find several connections and disconnections between outdoor and indoor spaces, where children filming their experiences outdoors struggle to re-connect with those experiences when reviewing their footage back at base. Yet, the narratives that young people tell in Sender et al.’s research (Chapter 16), remind us that, whether unfamiliar or familiar, what might matter more is whether young people can create and live through meaningful, positive encounters, and if they have the agency to withdraw from experiences or landscapes where they need to. These diverse experiences of connection (and disconnection) should make us think of how orientations to unfamiliarity and familiarity are negotiated, and where young people are in the continuum of the unfamiliar-familiar when they establish a connection to any particular

23 Whose Unfamiliar Landscape? Reflecting on the Diversity …

557

landscape, and how this interacts with the position of other people encountered there. Recognising the exclusionary work that the labelling of landscapes as unfamiliar does, and how such exclusions and assumptions might inform practices of introducing young people to unfamiliar landscapes, is an important step. However, it might also be possible to reclaim unfamiliarity, and processes of becoming familiar, as a purposive, positive tool for enabling meaningful encounters with and through landscapes, as many of the contributions to this book have demonstrated.

3

What Landscapes?

What landscapes are unfamiliar for young people in different circumstances and different spatial contexts? What landscapes are familiar or assumed to be? Whilst many of the chapters in this volume highlight the possibilities and potentials for finding a connection to nature and the outdoors in all sorts of spaces, urban and rural, everyday and wild, they also warn against any suggestion that identifying these potentials is sufficient to address the injustices of access to nature. Just because access to nature can be identified in many diverse contexts does not mean that exclusions from certain natural landscapes no longer matter: just because a young person can find nature on their city doorstep, their explorations do not have to stop there. There is a risk of establishing a dichotomy between the wild, lauded, beautiful and spectacular, and the everyday, urban greenspace, perhaps the inner-city canal, where a diminished version of nearby nature is deemed adequate for young people to make do with. These chapters have interrogated some assumptions about access to these landscapes: urbanity is associated with poor access to the wild and the beautiful and that those proximate to authentic ‘wild’ spaces are privileged. As MacBride-Stewart (Chapter 13) illustrates in her chapter, those proximate to the wild and sometimes spectacular in the South Wales valleys may not engage with landscapes such as the Brecon Beacons National Park, despite being ‘on the doorstep’. However, young women in these communities may engage with closer wild spaces through liberating practices like ‘fern diving’, disrupting normative assumptions about their behaviour in public spaces.

558

T. A. Smith et al.

Much of the discourse about nature connection and, in particular, concerns about urban young people’s access to green space seems to have hovered around a current truism that such spaces can exist around every corner and that any patch of green or blue, no matter how small, can become a space of connection to nature. As some of these chapters attest, such spaces are still significantly undervalued and neglected. Indeed, interventions to draw young people’s attention to these spaces, such as urban parks, may have the negative consequence of also drawing their attention to the unpleasant aspects of them, as Boyd (Chapter 17) finds. Through app-based interventions, her participants began to notice urban greenspaces as littered and dirty, whilst other greenspaces, such as urban cemeteries, were ‘awkward’ to spend time in. Young people and parents also noticed the dirtiness of urban canals. They found discomfort in the ‘nature’ that inhabited them in Smith and Pitt’s study of an intervention in Leicester (Chapter 12). Toby Clarke attested to these kinds of experiences when he spoke about his experience of working with young people from urban contexts: ‘thinking about nature in the city, young people in particular, but all people, seek an authentic experience’ (Chapter 21: p. 505). For some young people, Toby argues, the littered, sometimes dirty, and dangerous urban landscape is familiar to them, and they will ‘see through’ attempts to make these spaces something that they are currently not. The conversations with practitioners in this book all speak to this tension around the value of different landscapes, and the gradations between the wild and the everyday. Toby Clarke again draws our attention to how this tension manifests in the work of outdoor organisations that frequently work with young people: they are often wedded to ‘the wilder places’, or ‘iconic places’ (Chapter 21: p. 505), whilst increasingly navigating the embedded privilege of ‘just getting there’, to more distant, unfamiliar wilder places. Phoebe Smith and Dwayne Fields argue that young people from less privileged backgrounds should be introduced to these wild and unfamiliar spaces to challenge the deep-seated privileges associated with accessing them. In many respects, their fundraising experiences to take underprivileged young people to Antarctica reveal the normative hierarchy of wild spaces and associated degrees of privilege. Phoebe says: ‘We were told “well look, these are underprivileged

23 Whose Unfamiliar Landscape? Reflecting on the Diversity …

559

young people, just take them to Dartmoor. Why do they need to go to Antarctica?”’ (Chapter 14: p. 331). Dwayne felt similar issues applied across his work with young people: “[I’ve been asked] why would these young people need to go outdoors, why would they need to go uphill? I was asked ‘why don’t you just walk around Hackney?’ Well you’re from Jamaica why don’t you walk around Jamaica?” (Chapter 14: p. 331). These normative hierarchies are not just about physical access to spaces but about histories of who has dominated the wildest places and privileges required to reach them and be accepted as belonging there (Byrne & Wolch, 2009). Arguments for the importance of local spaces should not be used as a shroud for excluding some from more distant wild spaces, nor to protect privileged access. Green, blue, natural, or wild landscapes are not always next door. It is an ever-present challenge for countryside managers, outdoor learning organisations, and governments to make these wilder, less accessible spaces inclusive to reflect their importance as a public resource for young people’s current and future wellbeing. Thinking about what landscapes have been counted, constructed, or privileged as unfamiliar is part of a step towards deconstructing that unfamiliarity without also completely dismissing unfamiliarity as an essential vector of excitement, discovery, and provocation towards enskillment. Considering the work of #WeTwo, some might argue that taking a group of underprivileged young people to Antarctica is a frivolity compared to the familiar challenges ‘at home’, expressed in Dwayne and Phoebe’s comments above. However, it could also be viewed as a muchneeded symbolic act, as a way of decolonising the nature of adventure as masculinist exploration for the moneyed few (see also: Bracken & Mawdsley, 2004; Moran, 2011; Mycock, 2019). Kraftl argues in Chapter 22 that unfamiliar landscapes are not viewed across this book as fundamentally stable places, and indeed the degrees of familiarity and unfamiliarity that any individual or group might have with them are also unstable. Where unfamiliarity is assumed or used as a guide to protecting the privilege of landscape access, destabilising that unfamiliarity, making young people more familiar with them, or challenging assumed unfamiliarities is essential. Nevertheless, also critical is making connections between the familiar and unfamiliar for young people, whilst mindful that transitions between

560

T. A. Smith et al.

the familiar and unfamiliar are not always easy for young people. Hooykaas (Chapter 18) explores: where can young people find relatability between the wild backcountry and downtown Toronto? The disruption encountered between these landscapes can be productive but also unsettling. Young people can frequently be caught in a flux between familiarity and unfamiliarity even in nearby landscapes, as Sender et al. (Chapter 16) argue in the case of refugees and asylum seekers, and Wilkinson and Wilkinson (Chapter 19) find in the connection between interior landscapes of a radio station and the soundscape of the airwaves. Finding connections, therefore, between unfamiliar and familiar may be a way of further unpacking and deconstructing assumptions about unfamiliarity. Sunita Welch (Chapter 9) speaks about how young people on residential visits in the Brecon Beacons National Park talk about how ‘it’s really dark’ compared to home at night. This darkness is exciting, awkward (finding the bathroom), and potentially frightening. Yet, these sensory experiences are perhaps a way of looking into how young people find authenticity in unfamiliar landscapes for themselves and how they express and navigate their comforts and discomforts. Of course, this is something that practitioners deal with in their day-to-day work and have done for decades, but considering these unfamiliarities as part of a dialogue about why landscapes seem unfamiliar or familiar, might be one way to think about the assumed hierarchies of the landscape.

4

Adults, Coaches, Guides, Parents

The chapters in this book have all centred around some degree of intervention: a planned, often pedagogically informed interaction between young people and adults in the outdoors. Indeed, at the crux of the arguments in this book have been the relationships between adult mediators, young people, and landscapes. By interrogating a range of these relationships, our hope is that this book has contributed to understanding the significance of this mediation, from the cultures adults pass on to young people, to how their guidance can be a significant steer, if not the most significant contributor, to how young people experience the outdoors.

23 Whose Unfamiliar Landscape? Reflecting on the Diversity …

561

The cultures around outdoor guiding, coaching, and teaching are central to all of our conversations with practitioners. Sunita Welch (Chapter 9) discussed how the outdoor activity sector is male- and White-dominated and this underpins masculinist cultures of physical conquest. Structural factors also play a part in reinforcing this, she argues, as wages in the sector are often low, and years of voluntary experience may be required to secure paid positions, thus excluding the less welloff or those with caring responsibilities. Both Sunita Welch (Chapter 9) and Phoebe Smith (Chapter 14) advocate for an alternative ‘enjoy not endure’ principle or a more ‘nurturing’ approach. For Dwayne Fields and Phoebe Smith (Chapter 9), the White, male, and middle-class dominance of the sector means those from contrasting backgrounds can be made to feel like ‘traitors’ to their respective communities. They highlight how media representations can suppress young people’s aspirations, as Phoebe (Chapter 9: p. 213) puts it: ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’. These comments are not to take away from the complex, persistent and searching work that many in the outdoor education and activity sectors are doing to redress these cultures, which have contributed to exclusions and, in some cases, may have turned young people away from engaging with nature and the outdoors. The contributions by the practitioners in this volume are testament to this, and there are many examples of projects instigated by their organisations, such as the Mosaic project discussed by Sunita (Chapter 9) and Leicester Young Ecology Adventurers (Chapter 11). What the chapters in this volume reveal is the need for deeper reflection amongst adults about their roles, recognising how significant they are in curating the experiences young people have, and reconsidering how they are coaching young people not only in successfully ‘getting through’ outdoor environments but also in cultures of being and dwelling in the outdoors. As Hickman Dunne (Chapter 2) describes concerning outdoor instructors, they choreograph the journeys young people take through landscapes, like directors of a play. This choreography makes the experience fast or slow, a pleasure or a pain, memorable or forgettable. For Campbell-Price (Chapter 3), teachers and instructors are the scaffolds built around the experience. Many experiences recounted here are positive, creative, and engaging, whilst also sensitive to the needs and realities of young people. In Morgan and Freeman’s

562

T. A. Smith et al.

contribution (Chapter 4), teachers adapted their fieldwork experience, enabling young people to adopt new creative ideas and providing space to reflect on an otherwise ‘busy’ period of collecting field data. However, we also find moments where the control that this curation entails can restrict young people’s experimentation and liveliness: Wilkinson and Wilkinson (Chapter 19) show adults policing rules around speech production for young people on the radio, whilst Winks (Chapter 5) recounts when young people felt discomfort spending all day on a hot beach to collect data under the watch of adult instructors. Taken together, what these chapters tell us is that an important element of the adult educator, instructor, or guide’s role is to recognise when to step back and allow freer engagement, without adult direction (Skar et al., 2016). For adult guides, instructors, and teachers to connect with young people remains a challenge, particularly when they are of different gender, race, or class. How can these connections be made? Of course, greater representation is needed, both in media coverage of outdoor recreation and the day-to-day work of outdoor education and activities. Making connections is sometimes complex work for adults too. Recognising young people’s own assessment of what is valuable about a natural environment seems key, particularly as young people may actively seek escape from adults through venturing outdoors (Bell et al., 2003). But this is not to say that connections cannot be made, even if fleeting. Toby Clarke (Chapter 21), reflecting on his work for the New Deal, described one of the most critical elements as finding connection with the young people, to discover how they connected or engaged with the outdoors. His recounting of a young participant passing him bird drawings on a bus after a challenging trip speaks to the ways that unscripted connections are made not only between young people and nature but also between young people and adults. Sunita Welch (Chapter 9) describes how instructors would visit young people in their schools before they would travel to an outdoor education centre to better connect to them in a more ‘familiar’ space. At times then, unfamiliarity between adult guides and instructors may contribute to the scripting of places as unfamiliar. For many, although not all young people, some of the most familiar adults in their lives are their parents and families. As with instructors, teachers, and guides, the role of parents and families might be

23 Whose Unfamiliar Landscape? Reflecting on the Diversity …

563

both productive and restrictive to young people as they encounter unfamiliarity. Some of the young people in Campbell-Price’s contribution (Chapter 3) found that parents restricted their attempts to change familiar practices of the home to make them more sustainable through, for example, recycling. Young people may lack agency in the adultcontrolled familiar home space, so gaining distance from home and family can establish independence and mould their future practices. Chapter 6 (Dunkley and Smith) demonstrates parents’ ongoing work to care for children in unfamiliar terrain and how parents do pedagogic work in parallel with care and play. These micro-geographies show how family interactions in unfamiliar spaces keep children and young people safe, moving along and enjoying their time. We highlight the vital role of parents in deciding where families can go outdoors in Chapter 12 (Smith and Pitt). Here we find that parents from the Somali community in Leicester are highly conscious of what greenspaces they visit based on where they are comfortable. Therefore, families and parents can be important mediators of where young people go, responding to societal injustices of feeling marginalised in outdoor spaces, and through their direction of young people on the day. As Toby Clarke (Chapter 21) argues, family is increasingly central to thinking and practice of engaging young people with the outdoors, rather than conceiving young people in isolation, a comment increasingly pertinent to research on the interdependence of children and young people (Abebe, 2019). For practitioners, we hope this book will inspire some rethinking about the unfamiliarity and familiarity of relationships between adults and young people in outdoor settings. From the cultures embedded in and communicated through these relationships, to how they mediate connection with nature and landscape, to how they—in turn—denote the familiarity or unfamiliarity of the landscape itself, these relationships are critical to young people’s immediate and future lives.

5

Discomfort and Injustice

In this book, we have addressed feelings of discomfort, often in an immediate, experiential sense, and how some of these discomforts are products of, and productive of, broader societal injustices around access to outdoor

564

T. A. Smith et al.

space and nature. Many chapters reflect on how discomfort might be experienced as part of an unfamiliar sensorial environment, alongside the discomforts associated with being an unfamiliar body in any landscape, because of socially ingrained prejudices about who should be where and who should be doing what. Race, gender, and class featured prominently and were essential for all of our practitioners’ assessments of how prejudices manifest in their work. The intersection of these is essential, as Phoebe Smith argues (Chapter 14): being a woman from a workingclass family presents multiple barriers to accessing and feeling familiar in outdoor, wild spaces, even if these are close to home. The young women in MacBride-Stewart’s research (Chapter 13) express similar sentiments about the expectation of their place and identity performance as working-class young women. Several of our practitioner contributors identify that racism, sexism, and classism all still exist in the outdoor sector. As confirmed by much of the research shared here, many of these prejudices reflect broader injustices, as we find in Chapters 10 (Scott) and 11 (Broch), where racism acts to exclude young Black people from the ski slopes. However, these chapters also reveal the specific ways in which outdoor activities and education might reinforce racial exclusions. Yet this book also contains hopeful accounts, where practical, if sometimes imperfect responses have been shaped to increase minoritised groups’ presence in the outdoors (Broch, Chapter 11; Smith & Pitt, Chapter 12; MacBride-Stewart, Chapter 13), to sensitively improve young people’s wellbeing and feelings of familiarity (Britton et al., Chapter 15; Hooykaas, Chapter 18), and to build their skills in unfamiliar spaces (Wilkinson & Wilkinson, Chapter 19). In these chapters, we find practitioners and young people skilfully navigating the difficult terrain between familiarity and unfamiliarity to address these injustices. For Britton et al. (Chapter 15) and their work with young asylum seekers, they find that the unfamiliarity of surfing, the dynamic nature of learning and playing with others, created a sense of connection, relational wellbeing, and greater integration for young people in the transitional and marginal position of living as asylum seekers. Toby Clarke (Chapter 21) reflects that this chimed with his own experience of working-class and marginalised young men, where a ‘low dose’ of unfamiliarity felt appropriate as a means to find a connection to the outdoors

23 Whose Unfamiliar Landscape? Reflecting on the Diversity …

565

and nature. For Hooykaas (Chapter 18), at-risk young people from urban contexts could find space to express their doubts and fears, to come out of their shell, through the unfamiliarity of being away from home in the backcountry. Small steps into unfamiliarity then, carefully coached by adults, can begin to address the minoritisation young people experience. It may be crucial for their future selves in feeling accepted in spaces where they are normatively deemed unfamiliar. However, one of the core contributions of this book is that we challenge assumptions that such introductions to the unfamiliar, no matter how careful, will be unproblematic or indeed achieve their intentions, as Kraftl discussed in his reflections (Chapter 22). Introducing young people to unfamiliar landscapes can be embedded in raced, gendered, and classed assumptions about the benefits of connection to ‘nature’ and endurance in the outdoors (Dickinson, 2013). The project that Smith and Pitt evaluate in their research (Chapter 12) highlights how, despite addressing the intersection of race, gender, and class through introducing young Somali people to unfamiliar waterways in Leicester, the work may still reinforce some of these norms, assumptions, and prejudices. Broch (Chapter 11) highlights similar issues with the project she works on taking young Black people skiing, whereby racial prejudices have the potential to be reinforced, rather than positively addressed, on the slopes. Such discussions bring to the fore how the discomforts and injustices highlighted during their projects are embroiled in everyday life beyond the unfamiliarity of the intervention. As Dwayne asked about the project featured in Smith and Pitt’s contribution (Chapter 12): what happened after it ended? Everyday family attempts to get out to greenspaces were not tackled head-on in this project, yet may be more significant in terms of ongoing access to urban and rural green- and blue spaces. In essence, many of these chapters challenge us to look beyond the interventions, projects, or experiences, to see how they reach into wider familiarities and unfamiliarities, injustices and discomforts. Whilst the introduction of outdoor pursuits to young people has often been couched in an ethos of challenge and endurance, ultimately necessitating some discomfort (Lipscombe, 2007), the chapters in this volume often point to the importance of safety for young people when encountering the unfamiliar. Toby Clarke, in his reflections (Chapter 21),

566

T. A. Smith et al.

recounts how his own experience in Glasgow, and other colleagues’ experiences in Belfast, may find that some areas of the city can be deemed unsafe by young people, making green spaces, facilities, or amenities in them out-of-bounds. Similar themes are reflected in Smith and Pitt’s chapter (Chapter 12), as families feel unsafe or threatened in particular city greenspaces because of their ethnicity, whilst Boyd’s university student participants (Chapter 17) found certain greenspaces threatening and unwelcome, either due to visible discomforts, such as litter and vandalism or due to rumours of crime and antisocial behaviour. In the urban context, practitioners need to understand these mappings of threat and discomfort for young people, contributing to their unfamiliarity with specific spaces. However, it is also essential that discourses of threat and safety do not become barriers to young people accessing the unfamiliar. As MacBride-Stewart (Chapter 13) finds, young women can be constrained in exploring the unfamiliarity of non-normative femininities precisely because many environments are assumed to be ‘unsafe’ for them. Discourses of safety are highly gendered and racialised and should be navigated with care to protect from threatening aspects of unfamiliarity, without allowing normative discourses of ‘safety’ to themselves become a barrier. As practitioners and researchers alike have recounted throughout this book, the challenges of addressing discomforts and unfamiliarities that are gendered, racialised and class-based are deeply systemic, meaning time-bound, sometimes piecemeal interventions can only play a small part in challenging and addressing these issues. Our practitioner contributors recognised that resource constraints for organisations, educational institutions, and young people and families themselves are ongoing, particularly as intervention is often only possible through new and time-limited projects. One contribution of this book has been to draw attention to these often more tangible constraints which entangle with the cultures, norms, and prejudices that reproduce injustices, limiting engagement with the outdoors and nature. Recognising and addressing privilege (Toby Clarke, Chapter 21) may be an essential part of unpacking outdoor and nature-based activities and educational opportunities with young people. The self-searching, critical and reflective analysis that has carried through all of these chapters is essential

23 Whose Unfamiliar Landscape? Reflecting on the Diversity …

567

for longer-term, systemic, and cultural change when introducing young people to unfamiliar landscapes.

6

Connecting the Unfamiliar and Familiar: Beyond the Nature Disconnect

The unfamiliar and the familiar are a continuum through which to analyse and evaluate interventions with young people. Unfamiliarity and familiarity move away from thinking about young people’s relationship with the outdoors and nature as one of ‘disconnect’. The idea that disconnection from nature is at the core of young people’s problems, and that therefore they are unconcerned with sustainability and environmental crisis (e.g. Louv, 2005), at best simplifies the complexity of issues many young people encounter in their lives, and at worst proscribes exposure to ‘nature’ as ‘fixing’ problems for young people (Birch et al., 2020). This book has demonstrated that it is often connections to the familiar that matter, and that understanding what is happening in young people’s ‘familiar’ lives is as, if not more, important than pushing them towards the unfamiliar. At the root of the discussions of unfamiliarity and familiarity in this book are the deep-seated societal injustices, prejudices and in places misunderstandings about young people and what they want, require, or desire to access and feel comfortable in unfamiliar landscapes. By unpacking and interrogating what unfamiliarity and familiarity mean to young people across diverse circumstances, this book has challenged assumptions about what it means to be unfamiliar, and preconceived ideas about unfamiliar landscapes. It is often not the ‘disconnection’ from nature that is the problem for many young people, it is the societal injustices, embedded in access to landscapes and their everyday lives, which prevent them from gaining the benefits from these landscapes that more privileged people enjoy. Yet this book has also evidenced the significance of young people’s reaching towards the unfamiliar when the familiar is itself uncomfortable, or worse. The unfamiliar can offer hope, it might be something to strive towards, to look forward to, to excite, a space of openness, learning, reflection, silence. Where hopefulness and comfort, or the right amount

568

T. A. Smith et al.

of unfamiliarity to find enjoyment or enskillment, can be located in landscapes, should be determined with young people. This is why continuing to interrogate the unfamiliar and familiar remains an important trajectory for practice and research alike. Practitioners and researchers might work to continue to trouble the unfamiliar, questioning why certain landscapes are sustained as unfamiliar through practice and representation, how they were made unfamiliar, in the contemporary context and historically, and why these unfamiliarities matter to young people now. Practitioners may continue to question how their roles in coaching young people in and through landscapes might propagate inclusion, engender comfort and enjoyment. Thinking through the unfamiliar landscape is a powerful way to challenge normative ideas about the ‘nature disconnect’ for young people, and to address wider injustices of landscape access.

References Abebe, T. (2019). Reconceptualising children’s agency as continuum and interdependence. Social Sciences, 8(3), 81. Bell, S., Thompson, C. W., & Travlou, P. (2003). Contested views of freedom and control: Children, teenagers and urban fringe woodlands in Central Scotland. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 2(2), 87–100. Bell, S. L., Leyshon, C., Foley, R., & Kearns, R. A. (2019). The “healthy dose” of nature: A cautionary tale. Geography Compass, 13(1), e12415. Birch, J., Rishbeth, C., & Payne, S. R. (2020). Nature doesn’t judge you— How urban nature supports young people’s mental health and wellbeing in a diverse UK city. Health and Place, 62, 102296. Bracken, L., & Mawdsley, E. (2004). ‘Muddy glee’: Rounding out the picture of women and physical geography fieldwork. Area, 36 (3), 280–286. Byrne, J., & Wolch, J. (2009). Nature, race and parks: Past research and future directions for geographic research. Progress in Human Geography, 33(6), 743–765. Conradson, D. (2005). Landscape, care and the relational self: Therapeutic encounters in rural England. Health & Place, 11(4), 337–348.

23 Whose Unfamiliar Landscape? Reflecting on the Diversity …

569

Dickinson, E. (2013). The misdiagnosis: Rethinking “nature-deficit disorder.” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 7 (3), 315– 335. Freeman, C., van Heezik, Y., Stein, A., & Hand, K. (2016). Technological inroads into understanding city children’s natural life-worlds. Children’s Geographies, 14 (2), 158–174. King, K., & Church, A. (2013). ‘We don’t enjoy nature like that’: Youth identity and lifestyle in the countryside. Journal of Rural Studies, 31, 67–76. Lipscombe, N. (2007). The risk management paradox for urban recreation and park managers: Providing high risk recreation within a risk management context. Annals of Leisure Research, 10 (1), 3–25. Louv, R. (2005). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Algonquin Books. Milligan, C., & Bingley, A. (2007). Restorative places or scary spaces? The impact of woodland on the mental well-being of young adults. Health and Place, 13(4), 799–811. Moran, K. (2011). (Young) men behaving badly: Dangerous masculinities and risk of drowning in aquatic leisure activities. Annals of Leisure Research, 14 (2–3), 260–272. Mycock, K. (2019). Playing with mud-becoming stuck, becoming free?... The negotiation of gendered/class identities when learning outdoors. Children’s Geographies, 17 (4), 454–466. Pitt, H. (2014). Therapeutic experiences of community gardens: Putting flow in its place. Health and Place, 27 , 84–91. Skar, M., Gundersen, V., & O’Brien, L. (2016). How to engage children with nature: Why not just let them play? Children’s Geographies, 14 (5), 527–540.

Index

A

Access 2, 6, 12, 13, 19, 20, 136, 171, 208, 214, 229, 284, 287–289, 291, 292, 302, 303, 309–311, 314, 320, 323, 328–330, 348, 370, 371, 382, 384, 385, 419, 519, 520, 527–529, 532, 540, 542, 545, 552, 553, 557–559, 563–568 Adventure 9, 12, 34, 55, 62, 164, 166, 167, 221, 284, 310, 341, 344, 351, 353, 360, 446, 559 Agency 16, 24, 25, 34–36, 43, 84, 88, 105, 135, 137, 142, 143, 153, 156, 162, 237, 378, 380, 407, 412, 467, 490, 504, 509, 510, 542, 556, 563 A-level 84, 90, 92, 118, 216, 224, 225

App 18, 23, 102, 135, 138–143, 145–147, 150–152, 154–156, 227, 228, 423, 425, 489, 558 Archaeology 17, 18, 140, 146, 160, 161, 163, 168–171, 178, 182 Asylum seeker 4, 13, 22, 286, 299, 366–371, 379, 382–385, 545, 555, 556, 560, 564 At-Risk Youth 442–444, 446, 450–452, 454, 455, 565 Authenticity 171, 468, 469, 482, 516, 528, 529, 560 Authentic learning 380 Awayscape 17, 87, 89, 90, 92, 97, 99, 101, 102, 104–106

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Unfamiliar Landscapes, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94460-5

571

572

Index

B

Backcountry 250, 442, 443, 448–452, 454, 455, 531, 541, 555, 560, 565 Beach 17, 47, 50, 51, 101–103, 121, 220, 224, 366–368, 377–380, 562 Belonging 11, 17, 86, 163, 239, 260, 265, 268, 276, 290, 373, 381, 382, 451, 465, 469, 516, 526, 527, 559 Black 11, 20, 235, 236, 238–243, 245–251, 270, 275, 279, 280, 302, 340, 343, 344, 349–353, 355, 360, 361, 369, 547, 554, 564, 565 Black cultural studies 238 Black geographies 236, 237, 240–242, 244, 249, 251, 541, 545 Blue space 7, 284, 365, 367–369, 373, 376, 384, 385, 565 Bodily/body 9–11, 13, 14, 18, 19, 34, 35, 37, 38, 43–45, 50, 52, 53, 55, 137, 182, 237–239, 241, 251, 284, 287, 290–295, 299–301, 303, 304, 321, 357, 367, 369, 383–385, 394, 453, 490, 491, 501, 506, 533, 547, 552, 554, 564 Bothy 352 Brecon Beacons National Park 315, 356, 557, 560

C

Camera 24, 25, 95, 99, 101, 140, 145, 487, 488, 490–493, 495–500, 503–507, 509

Canal 8, 13, 19, 284, 292, 293, 295, 298, 300, 302, 303, 354, 369, 532, 543, 557, 558 Canal and River Trust 291 Canoe 13, 19, 20, 23, 41, 44, 46, 220, 225, 242, 291, 293–295, 298, 353, 442, 445, 449, 451, 455, 525, 526 Care 24, 61, 114, 136–138, 147–149, 155, 161, 163, 164, 167, 171, 182, 192, 194, 198, 202, 214, 223, 263, 360, 448, 522–524, 531, 563, 566 Care Farms 193, 207 Caring 148, 149, 155, 166, 207, 441, 449, 452, 561 Cave 10, 18, 159–166, 168–171, 175, 181, 541, 554 Childhood 6, 7, 15, 134, 138, 152, 153, 182, 198, 290, 401, 402, 420, 422, 426, 490, 510, 516, 547 Children’s geographies 34, 488, 489 Class 4, 9, 11–14, 18–21, 26, 188, 195, 197, 208, 214, 217, 260, 270, 348, 349, 356, 519, 540, 546, 547, 562, 564–566 Climate change 62, 68, 111, 118–120, 219, 222 Coaching 3, 6, 14, 155, 481, 552, 561, 565, 568 Collaborative learning 125 College 463, 464, 470, 474, 475, 479, 526, 532 Comfort 22, 122, 214, 223, 227, 228, 286, 288, 294, 295, 298, 300, 301, 303, 322, 341, 353, 357, 451, 454, 560, 567, 568

Index

Conservation 25, 216, 241, 515, 517, 518 Countryside 2, 11, 188, 189, 192–195, 197, 203, 204, 208, 214–217, 225, 229, 242, 290, 351, 352, 355, 518, 519, 552, 553, 559 Cross-country skiing 20, 237, 243, 250, 259–263, 265, 276, 277 Culture 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 14, 16, 35, 214, 223, 226, 229, 246, 284, 290, 291, 298, 300, 348, 382, 405, 445, 466, 522, 530, 560, 561, 563, 566 Curricula/curriculum 16, 59–63, 76, 77, 89, 94, 104, 105, 115, 122, 225, 320, 404

D

Digital 13, 24, 73, 138, 152, 155, 408, 409, 466, 479, 481, 487, 488, 490–492, 509, 510, 532, 533 Discomfort 2, 7, 9, 13, 17, 20, 26, 112–115, 117–119, 122–126, 214, 223, 224, 226, 283–288, 291–298, 300–304, 312, 426, 454, 541, 544, 547, 558, 560, 562, 563, 565, 566 Displacement 22, 77, 391–401, 406, 409, 410, 412, 445 Diversity 181, 214, 215, 229, 246–248, 286, 296, 301, 347, 368, 369, 468, 551 Dwelling 8, 9, 36–38, 40, 43, 45, 48–50, 53, 70, 135, 138, 153, 155, 162, 446, 561

573

E

Ecopedagogic/ecopedagogy 8, 134, 138, 150, 153–155 Embodied 3, 10, 19, 20, 26, 34, 35, 37, 43, 44, 52–54, 137, 142, 144–146, 269, 295–297, 309, 372, 377, 383, 489, 504, 510, 511, 540–542 Emotion/emotional 20, 26, 40, 42, 48–54, 86, 101, 103, 114, 260–263, 266, 269, 272, 278, 283, 284, 292–294, 296, 303, 366, 368, 370, 380, 385, 409, 419, 422, 426, 443, 455, 489, 499, 501, 504, 540, 541, 552, 556 Environmental education 8, 111, 114, 115, 117, 123, 125, 153, 213, 214, 218, 219, 289, 491, 547, 551 Environmental learning 126, 382 Ethnicity 26, 91, 262, 266, 288, 289, 296, 300, 540, 546, 566 Ethnographic/ethnography 39, 40, 115, 140, 173, 291, 374, 488, 491, 505, 506, 508, 510, 532 Exclusion 2, 9, 11–15, 19–21, 86, 113, 250, 251, 279, 285, 289, 290, 301, 313, 315, 318, 337, 368, 370, 371, 373, 378, 399, 553, 554, 556, 557, 561, 564 Experiential learning 83, 123, 283, 379, 444, 472, 523, 525

F

Families/family 18, 71, 133, 136–138, 141–143, 145–147, 149, 150, 152, 154–156, 192,

574

Index

197, 198, 203, 207, 215, 227, 228, 271, 296–298, 300, 303, 304, 326, 340, 348, 354, 359, 407, 410, 411, 444, 446, 453, 516, 524, 534, 535, 555, 556, 562–566 Farm 18, 187–195, 198, 200, 205–208, 226, 298 Femininity 19, 21, 312, 313, 321–325, 327–330, 566 Field school 18, 160, 162, 178 Field trip 15, 17, 83–86, 89, 93, 94, 96–99, 103, 105, 106, 116, 122, 230, 543 Fieldwork 16, 17, 85, 86, 91, 93, 96, 102, 103, 105, 106, 117, 122, 177, 179, 261, 562 Film/fliming 24, 25, 99, 145, 238, 291, 488, 493, 494, 500–506, 508–511 Filmmaking 24, 487, 488, 492–494, 500, 507, 510 Formal learning 8, 17, 93, 95, 102–106, 463

G

Gender/gendered 4, 11–14, 19–21, 26, 113, 149, 214, 217, 219, 221, 236, 238, 250, 251, 266, 295, 309–315, 320, 321, 325, 326, 329, 330, 346, 355, 359, 399, 412, 428, 540, 546, 547, 562, 564–566 Geocaching 21, 141, 315, 316, 325, 330 Geocoaching 14, 34, 38, 43, 54 Geographical learning 104

Geography 17, 83, 84, 87, 89–91, 93, 94, 102, 104, 139, 225, 238, 242 Green space 9, 188, 208, 304, 356, 377, 416–418, 421, 425, 426, 428–433, 527, 566

H

Health 2, 23, 25, 61, 113, 193, 195, 200, 201, 203, 208, 365, 368, 369, 378, 379, 398, 418, 422, 426, 431, 447, 519, 527, 532, 542 Health inequalities 418 Heritage 17, 18, 138, 160, 161, 163, 167, 168, 170, 171, 182, 228, 244, 262, 291, 299, 300 Hiking 46, 67, 244, 260, 275, 353, 357

I

Identities/identity 11, 21, 69, 86, 99, 171, 238, 239, 243, 244, 246, 247, 250, 260–263, 266–268, 270–272, 276–279, 291, 296, 302, 309, 310, 312, 314, 320, 321, 324–326, 330, 381, 445, 472, 490, 541, 545, 552, 555, 564 Immersion/immersive 35, 83, 223, 368, 374, 377, 380, 446, 448, 451, 453, 454, 464, 488–490, 526, 530 Inaccessibility/inaccessible 289, 329, 330, 349 Inclusion 2, 9, 19, 181, 315, 338, 368, 369, 385, 465, 466, 568

Index

Independent roaming 6 Inequality 2, 188, 285, 302, 310, 315, 546, 554 Informal learning 84, 87, 89, 90, 99, 104, 106, 228, 463, 464, 473, 474, 481 Injustice 20, 284, 285, 288–291, 301, 302, 304, 516, 519, 557, 563–568 Instructing/instructors 13, 15, 16, 34, 42–44, 46, 51–54, 66, 73, 75, 77, 78, 221, 230, 248, 293, 296, 300, 303, 304, 341, 354, 367, 369, 373, 379, 525, 561, 562 Intersectional theory/Intersectionality 250 Interview 40, 68, 78, 140, 291, 316, 399, 400, 470, 473, 489, 495, 496, 500, 501, 503 Surf-Along 376

J

John Muir Award 25, 300, 515, 523–526, 531

L

Learning 14, 16, 35, 38, 40, 60, 61, 65, 67–69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 84, 85, 87, 96, 106, 112, 114, 122, 124, 135, 136, 146, 150, 153, 161, 167, 177, 178, 180–182, 214, 221, 224, 228, 240, 269, 271, 276, 285, 294–296, 298, 303, 304, 315, 317, 360, 361, 369, 380, 382, 384, 404, 431, 444, 448, 465,

575

473–475, 479, 516, 522, 532, 534, 543, 545, 554, 555, 559, 567 Learning for sustainability 532

M

Marginalisation 113, 395, 465, 469, 540, 546, 547 Masculanist 561 Masculine/masculinity 35, 39, 250, 284, 290 Memory 14, 34, 38, 43, 44, 48, 50, 54, 68–70, 73, 78, 79, 95, 99, 104, 169, 183, 220, 266 Mental health 2, 6, 21–23, 288, 366, 368, 370, 379, 384, 391, 392, 394, 398–400, 404–407, 409–412, 416, 417, 420, 422, 431, 443, 453, 527 Minoritised/minority 4, 12, 35, 216, 230, 264, 276, 289, 292, 299, 343, 348, 349, 355, 369, 371, 374, 545–547, 564, 565 Mobile device 138, 139 Mobility 48, 134, 136, 139, 145, 149, 150, 153, 156, 311, 313, 445, 466 Moral Geography 6, 136 More-than-human 52, 111, 112, 116–118, 125, 126, 372, 377, 381, 545, 547

N

Nature 10, 23, 35, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46–51, 53, 54, 136, 146, 188, 200, 208, 219, 220, 222, 240, 243, 269, 284–290, 301, 304,

576

Index

312, 318, 329, 373, 382, 385, 416, 419–426, 431, 432, 448, 479, 487–492, 495, 496, 502–506, 508–510, 515, 516, 518, 519, 521, 526, 528–530, 532, 534, 535, 543, 544, 552, 553, 557, 558, 561, 564, 566, 567 Nature-based Learning 383, 543 Nature/culture 7, 34, 490 Nature connection 2, 6, 7, 62, 77, 111, 112, 122, 180, 225, 290, 418–420, 423, 424, 432, 488, 489, 492, 493, 495, 504, 518, 529, 530, 534, 535, 557, 558, 563–565 Nature Deficit Disorder 290 Nature disconnect 33, 567, 568 New-materialist 33, 34, 36 Non-human 10, 24, 34–37, 43, 47, 54, 397, 490, 491, 502, 504, 509, 510, 534, 542, 545, 546

O

Outdoor education 3, 4, 12, 15, 16, 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 43, 44, 49, 53, 54, 59–63, 112, 214, 216, 218, 285, 516, 532, 561, 562 Outdoor education centre 259, 261, 562 Outdoor learning 4, 14, 16, 34, 38, 40, 62, 63, 84, 106, 114, 136, 161, 214, 218, 219, 225, 229, 285, 534, 559 Outdoor recreation 12, 21, 214, 235–237, 240, 241, 244, 246, 248, 250, 289, 290, 298, 299, 301, 302, 304, 382, 449, 562

Outward Bound Trust (OBT) 16, 35, 38, 39, 218, 534

P

Parent(s) 13, 72, 74, 88, 136, 137, 142, 144, 153, 154, 187, 190, 192, 197, 224, 225, 227, 228, 269, 288, 296–301, 303, 304, 327, 328, 535, 562, 563 Park 7, 88, 215, 237, 241, 286, 289, 368, 415, 416, 420, 421, 424, 426–430, 433, 448, 492, 493, 505, 529, 534, 543, 558 Participatory 291, 373, 383, 467, 470, 489, 490 Pedagogies/pedagogy 17, 60, 61, 79, 89, 113–115, 123–125, 137, 146, 153, 155, 161, 180, 181, 286, 465 Photography 40, 399, 400, 402, 490, 491 Place attachment 138, 368, 376, 382, 384, 416, 420, 433, 445, 449 Place-based education 85, 97, 446–448, 452, 455 Place connection 384 Play 11, 42, 43, 139, 141, 145, 146, 154, 155, 169, 171, 188, 271, 313, 318, 322, 324, 325, 327, 329, 330, 371, 377, 379, 380, 382–384, 481, 490, 491, 493, 494, 503, 523, 526, 527, 556, 563, 564 Post-digital 533 Post-human 33, 490, 502, 545, 546 Power 24, 35, 87, 89, 136, 189, 194, 206, 242, 251, 260, 263,

Index

265, 274, 276, 278, 280, 287, 367, 407, 412, 481, 540, 541, 543, 545, 546, 554 Prejudice(s) 12, 14, 21, 279, 337, 552, 564–567

577

Rural Idyll 193 Rural/rurality 6, 7, 11, 12, 18, 22, 91, 95, 188, 192, 194, 197, 203, 204, 207, 208, 215, 242, 289, 290, 298, 300, 304, 371, 392, 396, 443, 557, 565

R

Race 4, 11–13, 19, 21, 113, 214, 236, 237, 240–242, 244, 245, 249–251, 262, 285, 288, 290, 291, 302, 361, 546, 547, 562, 564, 565 Racism/racial 2, 12, 20, 237, 239, 241–243, 245–248, 250, 264, 265, 272, 275, 285–287, 289–291, 296, 297, 301, 302, 304, 345, 349, 369, 545, 547, 564, 565 Radio 13, 24, 463–468, 470, 472, 474, 477, 478, 481, 543, 555, 560, 562 Refugee 4, 13, 286, 355, 368, 369, 373, 384, 385, 393, 395, 398, 399, 555, 560 Remote 16, 18, 60, 63, 66, 71, 73, 76, 78, 195, 199, 442, 531, 541, 543 Residential Fieldwork/Outdoor Activity 39, 63, 64, 86, 220 Risk 9, 12, 113, 114, 137, 147, 149, 155, 161, 165, 172, 173, 178, 182, 187, 192, 200, 203, 250, 272, 279, 284–286, 288, 310, 311, 313, 314, 328, 356, 369, 385, 479 Risk assessment 541 River 44, 222, 355, 369, 492–494, 509, 517, 524

S

Safety 12, 20, 62, 86, 113, 147, 149, 200, 201, 240, 268, 287, 288, 298, 300, 309–315, 326–330, 356, 358, 365, 369, 373, 428, 445, 448, 449, 526, 541, 553, 565, 566 School 4, 8, 15, 16, 20, 59, 61, 64, 72, 83, 90, 94, 103, 187, 188, 190–193, 206, 207, 217, 221, 223, 225, 227, 230, 299, 320, 340, 342, 348, 357–360, 398, 402, 404, 406, 407, 411, 443, 453, 463, 464, 532, 543, 562 Sea 10, 22, 44, 95, 96, 101, 103, 118–120, 191, 365–369, 371, 372, 377–379, 381–385, 556 Secondary school 40, 60, 65, 112, 404 sense of place 22, 23, 104, 263, 272, 393–398, 400, 405, 407, 409, 410, 442, 445, 448, 450, 452, 455, 523, 527, 528 Situated Learning 167, 464, 473, 481 Ski/skiing 13, 19, 20, 235–237, 240–248, 250, 251, 259, 266, 267, 272, 275, 277, 290, 349–351, 545, 554, 564, 565 Skill/skilled 6, 24, 34, 41, 59, 61, 64, 65, 68, 73, 75, 76, 78,

578

Index

102, 103, 111, 115, 122, 150, 191, 219, 224, 226, 230, 236, 240, 250, 276, 321, 379, 384, 451, 452, 455, 466, 469, 473–476, 482, 518, 524, 541, 564 Slow adventure 22, 52, 73, 97, 241, 247, 249, 351, 359, 445, 455, 533 Slow ecopedagogy 18, 135, 137, 138, 146, 153, 155 Smartphone 18, 95, 96, 102, 106, 139 Social difference 26, 540, 544 Social justice 3, 113, 123, 126 Social media 97, 445 Sonic 24, 477 Soundscape 13, 24, 464, 477–479, 481, 555, 560 Student-led Learning 102 Supportive learning 61, 73 Surf/surfing 22, 366–369, 371–373, 377–381, 383, 384, 523, 525, 556, 564 Sustainability 6, 8, 16, 62, 63, 65, 68, 71, 113, 285, 447, 532, 567

T

Technology 6, 10, 13, 15, 18, 24, 25, 61, 73, 95, 97, 102, 106, 134, 138, 141, 145, 153–155, 188, 206, 214, 227, 408, 410, 445, 481, 516, 532, 533, 543–545 Terrain 17, 141, 142, 146–150, 153–156, 183, 346, 358, 377, 464, 481

Therapeutic 9, 22, 48, 51, 188, 189, 192–194, 200, 203, 204, 207, 208, 286, 292, 371, 373, 376, 384, 385, 426, 552, 554, 555 U

Unemployed 516, 518 University 4, 23, 415–417, 419, 421, 422, 425, 426, 428–432, 463, 475, 566 Urban 11–13, 17–19, 22, 23, 91, 102, 187–189, 192, 194, 195, 197, 203, 204, 207, 208, 214, 221, 236, 238, 241, 242, 248, 261, 284, 289, 290, 292, 338, 353, 377, 392, 395, 396, 416–421, 427–431, 433, 443, 448, 452, 487, 492, 493, 528, 529, 542, 543, 553, 557, 558, 565, 566 Urban nature 422, 529, 530 Urban-rural binary 199, 208 V

Video 92, 98, 99, 101, 140, 141, 145, 147, 490, 491, 506 Volunteer 216, 300, 303, 371, 373, 463, 464, 472, 473, 475, 478, 482, 516, 518, 529 W

Walking 47, 134, 136, 141, 142, 145–147, 155, 164, 284, 288, 315, 327, 357, 358, 361, 421, 489, 491, 496, 516, 517 Walking Interviews 316, 318, 323, 329, 489

Index

Water 20, 22, 42, 46, 103, 147, 222, 288, 291–293, 295, 296, 300, 303, 304, 368, 369, 371, 377, 379, 380, 382, 383, 499, 509, 556 Waterway(s) 20, 284, 288, 291–293, 295, 296, 298, 300, 302, 303, 565 Well-being 2, 6, 9, 21–23, 25, 48, 111, 112, 135, 161, 193, 251, 315, 365, 366, 368–370, 372, 380, 384, 392, 394, 398, 400–402, 404, 409–412, 416–419, 421–424, 426, 427, 431, 433, 443, 446, 450, 455, 541, 545, 555, 559, 564 #WeTwo 21, 337, 559 White 2, 4, 9, 11, 12, 14, 19, 20, 215, 217, 235, 236, 241–249, 251, 262, 264–266, 270–272, 276, 277, 280, 284, 287, 289–291, 298, 300–304, 340, 342, 344, 346, 350–352, 354, 355, 361, 545, 561 Wild 2, 6, 134, 139, 284, 359, 422, 446, 515, 518, 522, 523, 527,

579

528, 533, 541, 542, 545, 557, 558, 560 Wild camping 341, 357 Wilderness 23, 237, 241, 243, 244, 248, 284, 286, 289, 290, 301, 310, 329, 443, 446, 450–452, 454, 530, 532, 534 Wilderness therapy 443, 444, 451–453, 455 Wildspaces 25, 455, 487, 492, 541, 544, 557–559 Winter sports 235, 237, 241, 244, 246, 247, 249, 280

Y

Youth 14, 15, 18, 39, 89, 98, 106, 160, 163, 165, 187, 188, 191, 206, 208, 235–237, 240–242, 245, 246, 250–252, 261, 265–267, 270, 272, 276–278, 338, 369, 443, 445, 447–451, 453, 455, 465, 474, 476, 479, 516, 518, 529, 530, 545, 547, 553, 554 Youth-led 24, 463, 464, 470, 481 Youthscape 87–90, 98, 99, 105, 555 Youth voice 468, 469, 479, 482