Pioneering students and research in outdoor learning

Year 9 Pioneers – Getting ready for adventure

There was a palpable buzz in the air as Year 9 Riverview boys arrived at the College to join Pymble girls for a meet and greet event a few days before embarking on the inaugural long-stay residential program at Pymble’s outdoor education campus, Vision Valley. Pymble Ladies’ College has held many outdoor education camps at various locations, but this will be the first group to stay for four weeks, combining academic learning and experiential outdoor learning in our very own beautiful outdoors environment. The program culminates in The Great Return; a five day trek where small groups of students and staff apply skills of teamwork, resilience and problem-solving to make their way from the Central Coast back to the Pymble campus.

Lining up the research

While the students were busy getting to know each other, there was another flurry of action among the researchers. Working together are:

the Pymble Institute team of Dr Sarah Loch and Victoria Adamovich,
the Pymble Outdoor Education team of Stuart Clark, Director of Vision Valley, and Nick Wilkesmann, Head of Outdoor Education,
Pymble’s Year 9 team lead by Tom Riley, Head of Upper School,
and the researchers from Western Sydney University, led by Professor Tonia Gray.

The research team has designed pre-and post-surveys for participating Pymble students to explore themes of resilience, persistence, coping strategies, confidence and bravery. In addition, complementary surveys for parents of the Pymble students will collect data to understand valuable parent perspectives and to see what they notice in their daughters in terms of resilience and confidence.

Collecting data in a tech-free zone

The data collection process is a fine art and science of timing, ethics approvals, participant consent forms, and in our case, technology! One of the main intents of the month-long program is a digital detox for the students, so completing online surveys at Vision Valley was something the team tried to avoid. Yet, collecting data on paper forms would mean considerable data entry time. Thankfully, the flexibility of the Upper School team helped save the day as we gathered students at school to complete the pre-survey before they left.

Another critical methodology being applied in the research will come through focus groups with students while they are in the long-stay environment, both at Vision Valley and when away on expedition. We are extremely lucky to be working with research assistants from Western Sydney University who are not only highly skilled educational researchers, but are also trained and experienced outdoor educators. They will walk alongside the students and engage them in discussion while participating in a range of exciting and challenging outdoor activities and more day-to-day tasks. This methodology is inspired by Peter Renshaw’s (2021) research into creative and impactful ways of walking and talking alongside children as they explore the natural world.

Aside from collecting feedback from the students who are pioneers in the Pymble long-stay program, canvassing parental expectations and feedback is another important part of the research. Special consideration as to the timing of data collection was considered, especially about questions exploring whether parents had noticed changes in their daughters following the camp.

Students as researchers

There are many stakeholders in the results of the research. These include students themselves who are interested to see if their own attitudes and traits changed before and after the program. The research team looks forward to working with our students to design further research where students take the lead in asking questions of most value to them. Parents will have a chance to reflect with their children on the outcomes of the program.

Looking ahead

The Head of Outdoor Education at Pymble, Nick Wilkesmann and his tireless team will certainly look at results to inform decision-making for the second Year 9 residential camp in two months time. St Ignatius College, Riverview are also eager to learn from our research to help formulate their outdoor education program in the future.

There is a real excitement around this inaugural outdoor education program for students – we cannot wait to learn from the data and use the research results to make future iterations of outdoor learning more beneficial for the learning and wellbeing of young people.

References

Renshaw, P. D. (2021). Feeling for the Anthropocene: Placestories of living justice. The Australian Educational Researcher 48 (1), 1-21.