Researching outdoor education with Western Sydney University

Last year, Stuart Clark, Director of Vision Valley, and Pymble Institute Director, Dr Sarah Loch, initiated a joint project with academics from the School of Education at Western Sydney University. The goal was to establish a baseline to allow the College to measure how learning and wellbeing changes over time as the outdoor education campus, Vision Valley, and our program of outdoor education becomes more established.

Franklin D. Roosevelt reflected that “a smooth sea never made a skilful sailor”. The College’s commitment to developing students’ emotional intelligence and character through experiences beyond familiar environments include ones that create challenges to personal comfort zones and act as catalysts for the development of new inter and intra-personal skills. This is the foundation of Pymble’s experiential outdoor learning continuum and a guiding vision for the programs we are establishing at our new bushland campus, Vision Valley.  

It is important to look ahead in research and predict what will be needed to guide decision making but designing a future-focused research project is a significant task. In the area of outdoor education, we were fortunate to connect with a team of experienced, passionate and highly skilled educational researchers in Professor Tonia Gray, Associate Professor Jacqueline Ullman and Dr Christina Curry from the School of Education at Western Sydney University.

The result is a longitudinal research project titled, ‘Assessing the Impact of a School Outdoor Education Long-term Initiative at Pymble Ladies’ College’, which has commenced with Year 7 2022. We aim to have Year 5 to 12 students involved as their outdoor education experiences occur and to follow each year group through over subsequent years. Participating students – which we hope will be the whole College, making this a very large data set! – will be asked to complete a short survey before and after their outdoor education experience. The questions are designed to explore themes of resilience, persistence, coping, confidence and bravery. 

We are grateful to Professor Tonia Gray and her team for working with Pymble to set up the project and look forward to many years of research together.

For more information on research at Pymble contact Dr Sarah Loch, Director – Pymble Institute, pymbleinstitute@pymblelc.nsw.edu.au.