Conceptualizing Skill Within a Participatory Ecological Approach to Outdoor Adventure

Abstract

To answer calls for an ecological approach to outdoor adventure that can respond to the crisis of sustainability, this paper suggests greater theoretical and empirical attention to skill and skill development as shaping participant interactions with and experiences of environments, landscapes, places, and inhabitants. The paper reviews calls for ecological approaches as well as phenomenological analyses of outdoor adventure. The paper then outlines a heuristic perspective that positions humanity as belonging within environments and highlights the performative and movement orientation of outdoor adventure. Ingold’s work is outlined as an informative ecological ontology and, integrating it with the literature reviewed, alternative conceptualizations of skill, activity, and outdoor adventure are provided. These understandings enable a first step in formulating and researching a participatory ecological approach to outdoor adventure education, recreation, and tourism.

Keywords

place movement socioecological outdoor education theory

Introduction

This paper concerns skill as it relates to environmental engagement in outdoor adventure, which I understand as bridging recreational, educational, and touristic contexts as Humberstone (2000) does with the “outdoor industry.” Having made a socioenvironmental case for skill within outdoor adventure (Mullins, 2014), this paper begins with a review of calls for ecological approaches (Beringer, 2004; Hull, 2000; McCarthy, 2002; Nicol, 2003; Nicol & Higgins, 2008). Beringer (2004) has advocated an “ecological paradigm” (p. 52) in adventure therapy and education that would recognize the social and environmental relationships that support programs, respond to contemporary social and environmental issues, and heal a perceived division between adventure and environmental programming. Others have used the term socio-ecological (Hill, 2012; Pryor, Carpenter, & Townsend, 2005) and/or socio-environmental (Mullins, 2009; Mullins & Maher, 2007) to similarly recognize outdoor education, recreation, and adventure therapy within human and environmental systems. Here, my use of environment and sustainability includes social and biophysical relations. Odum and Barrett (2004) noted that ecology derives from the Greek roots oikos and logos, meaning household and study, respectively, and thus the field of ecology studies “life at home” (p. 2) and is concerned with understanding the patterns of relations among organisms and with their environments. Thus, an ecological approach situates human development, activity, and experience in relation with an environment that is always already social and biophysical (Beringer, 2004; Gibson, 1986; Ingold, 2000).¹ From my perspective, an ecological approach should not be misinterpreted as focused on “nature” or understood as necessarily fostering positive “environmental” values.

In making a case for skill as central to an ecological approach, I bring together three key areas of research showing how, in outdoor adventure activities (a) movement is embodied, (b) experience is choreographed, and (c) personal and landscape meanings can be cultivated through travel. I then outline Ingold’s (2000, 2007, 2011) work as providing an ontology with foundational concepts for an ecological approach to outdoor adventure. Finally, integrating the literature reviewed, I offer alternative conceptualizations of skill, activity, and outdoor adventure as an initial heuristic step toward a participatory ecological approach to the theory and practice of outdoor adventure. The implication, following Ingold (2000), is that the skills people learn enable and shape their ability to perceive and act in the world. Thus, understanding skill may help experiential educators, researchers, and outdoor leaders critically evaluate and creatively build theory, practice, and capacity to comprehend and engage issues of sustainability through outdoor and adventure education, recreation, and tourism.

Adopting an Ecological Approach

Urry (2000) has suggested that understandings and issues of “global environmental change” (p. 202) now show the inseparability of society and nature. Cronon (1996) provided a highly influential history of wilderness, showing it to be socially constructed in ways that have serious and potentially damaging implications for human–environment relations. According to Turner (2002), the history of using outdoor recreation to connect with nature in North America has been characterized by a simultaneous and progressive increase in visitation and decrease in human biophysical interaction with wilderness landscapes, ultimately typified in the late 1990s by the “Leave No Trace” ethic. So, how to theorize and practice outdoor adventure in a way that recognizes the inseparability of society and nature?

Outdoor adventure programming needs approaches to theory and practice that question and suggest alternatives to the Western distinction between nature and society that has, according to Beringer (2004), McCarthy (2002), Nicol (2003), Nicol and Higgins (2008), and O’Connell, Potter, Curthoys, Dyment, and Cuthbertson (2005) structured much of outdoor adventure theory and practice and is at the core of unsustainable human–environment relations. Fox (2000) called for diverse environmental relationships to move from marginal to central positions in outdoor recreation theory and practice. According to Fox, outdoor recreation theory has often taken the environment to be universal, unified, and singular rather than made up of diverse processes, flows, and strands. Fox (2000) argued that “given the rational, unitary, disembodied, autonomous and separate self within the ‘wilderness experience’ metanarrative, it is not surprising to find that the role of the ‘body’ has been left invisible in most Euro-North American philosophical discussions” (p. 53). Like Fox, Nicol and Higgins (2008) critically questioned notions of the environment and advocated for an ecological ontology “where the actions of humans are seen in direct relation to the environment they inhabit” (p. 238).

Mullins (2014) argued that outdoor adventure theory has not readily explored the centrality of skill despite it being a key educational and experiential element common to outdoor and adventure recreation, education, and tourism. A nuanced focus on skilled practice, approached ecologically, could help researchers and practitioners understand, critique, and improve the learning, meanings, and relations bound up in participants’ outdoor activities (Kiewa, 2000; Mullins, 2014). Here, I argue that skilled practice is one way of reinserting the lived body in the theory of outdoor adventure while challenging the nature–culture dichotomy.

Beringer (2004) has explicitly called for a paradigm shift in adventure programming to ecological approaches that account for human development. “Given that the individualistic, atomistic conceptualization of the self is one probable cause of the environmental crisis,” Beringer argued, “the relational or ecological self—the self embedded in, and defined by, human and nature relationships—is a more viable conceptualization for our time” (p. 63). Understanding how activities shape participants’ attention to and influence on their surroundings can “become central to adventure programming practice” (Beringer, 2004, p. 62). Clearly, skill and activity performance need investigation as subtle and complex processes of participant–environment interrelation and development.

There has recently been a proliferation of approaches to outdoor and environmental education that respond to place (see Baker, 2005; Harrison, 2010; Schlottmann, 2005; Wattchow & Brown, 2011), often using activities that move through landscapes. I believe that the relationship between place-responsiveness and travel needs to be central in both the theory and practice of outdoor and adventure education, recreation, and tourism within a sustainability paradigm. Synthesizing various literatures, Wattchow and Brown (2011) suggested that place demands an account of corporeal experience and responsive forms of travel; they also largely associate modern mobility with placelessness. In response to such placelessness, Payne and Wattchow (2009) encouragingly suggested a “slow” pedagogy focused on corporeal engagement. Some time ago Fox and McAvoy (1998) encouraged scholars to acknowledge a bias for place-centered, home, and local metaphors in Western environmental ethics and thought, and to also explore metaphors of movement and wayfaring as ways in which people connect with environments. Further attention to the physicality of travel may foster understandings of skill and movement as interrelated with place, and as important to environmental relations. Approaches to environmental engagement through movement seem intuitively appropriate for outdoor adventure activities but have received little attention. Studies (e.g., Beedie, 2003; Haskell, 2001) have focused on embodied engagement, how it is choreographed, and how this can enact and shape the personal and landscape meanings derived.

Moving Through Organic Bodies

Haskell (2001) described using outdoor activities for travel through familiar and unfamiliar landscapes as an interactive and flowing process involving experience, perception, intuition, and embodied knowledge. She highlighted performativity, a world of movement, and social and ecological knowledge as being established and expressed in nonverbal ways through human bodies learning and belonging within a variety of settings.

Payne and Wattchow (2009) suggested a turn toward corporeal and sensual engagements aimed at fostering embodied understandings of self in relation to the environment. Their “slow” pedagogy challenged many Western dualisms, such as mind and body, and—significantly—recognized that corporeal engagement with an environment is the precondition in which meaning, identity, and culture form. Wattchow and Brown (2011) noted the importance, from the standpoint of outdoor education, of “a renewed belief in the value of embodied ways of knowing” (p. 74). According to Nicol (2003), how embodied knowledge relates to greater environmental understanding and more sustainable action remains an important pedagogical problem.

A focus on skill and embodied knowledge may move beyond risk and relate to other contexts such as aesthetics and creativity, but it does not preclude risk. Skilled performance is itself uncertain. Risk can contextualize the development and practice of particular skills (e.g., reading weather), and is also produced through skilled performance (e.g., climbing rocks). Lyng’s (1990) participants in high-risk recreation regarded “the opportunity for the development and use of skills as the most valuable aspect of the experience” (p. 859). Risk in outdoor adventure activities and settings may demand skill, and skill development may alter the nature and degree of risks encountered (Lyng, 1990).

Lewis (2000) showed that by having to cope with the possibility of death, adventure climbers experienced their bodies in intensely organic, physical, and tactile ways that resisted their passive, ocular, and inorganic metropolitan experience. Moreover, “the frequent and sometimes distinctive way the climber utilizes her body,” through practice in situ, “begins to take on an embodied form” (p. 74): Muscles are built and hands are ripped and calloused, for example, in ways that further enable the climber to climb rock. Perhaps in this way climbers come to share an embodied knowledge, ability, and experience of their world. Skilled learning and performance shapes not only the landscape in which it occurs (the purview of recreation ecology and management) but also the performer (the purview of physical education, health, and gender studies). To me, these studies suggest that skilled embodied performance of adventure activities enable selves and landscapes to commingle.

Feminist research has shown that outdoor skills and activities are not transparent, neutral, individual, or divided along the mind–body split, nor should approaches to skill be valued and described as such (Michelson, 1996). Warren and Loeffler (2006) described a suite of social and biological factors influencing technical skill development among women. Social and physical contexts, as well as power relations, contribute to shaping skilled practices, identities, and experiences along lines of gender and class, which participants actively engage, express, and resist through their own performances (Fox, 2008; Humberstone, 2000; Kiewa, 2001; McDermott, 2000, 2004; Newbery, 2003). Diverging from masculine notions of risk and physical challenge, the women in Boniface’s (2006) study, for example, described outdoor activities as a way of experiencing well-being and their bodies in relation to environments, resulting in feelings of fear and freedom and as being part of a community. McDermott (2000) examined the dual experience of body consciousness as appearance and lived. Female-only canoe tripping, McDermott showed, provided women a positive, enjoyable, and engaged understanding of their bodies in ways that were not framed by the dominant ideologies of femininity or the objectification that occurs with concerns of appearance.

These studies imply that skilled practice and learning allow for developing senses of self in relation to particular landscapes and environments but within a structured activity and multiscalar social context that shapes the experience and outcome. Because participants’ skilled learning and performance are embodied, they happen and interact with a dynamic environment that is at once biophysical and social.

Choreographing Organic Adventure

Groups of participants have been shown to create and shape social spaces and choreograph physical places in which they learn, experience, and practice physical skills. For example, Beedie (2003) as well as Jonas, Stewart, and Larkin (2000) have shown that, if present, outdoor guides and activity-specific institutions play essential roles in mentoring and educating participants’ experiences of landscapes, providing standards of practice, perpetuating and resisting social and ecological norms, and shaping identities that participants idealize and emulate as they become, for example, mountaineers or river runners, respectively.

McDermott (2004), Newbery (2003), and Kane and Tucker (2004) provided examples of paddlers producing and resisting identities through technical canoe and kayak skills in relation to their particular social and ecological settings. McDermott’s, Beedie’s (2003), and Seaman’s (2007) studies have shown that norms of practice and patterns of activity are established, perpetuated, and resisted through institutions and social relations embedded in the learning and practice of technical adventure activities.

Cultivating Meaningful Landscapes and People

McCarthy (2002) showed that while mountaineers do experience mountains as available for conquest, their senses of self and place also coincide in the physicality of mountaineering in ways that show people to be “intermingled units of a natural environment that includes storms and plants and glaciers” (p. 190). McCarthy insisted that the reality of such human–environment interrelations hint at an eco-consciousness obscured by dominant Western epistemologies. Brymer, Downey, and Gray (2009) showed that high-level performance in extreme sports can lead participants to understand themselves as a humble part of powerful natural environments, a possible precursor to adopting sustainability. According to these studies, skilled embodied practices and experiences of outdoor adventure activities may allow participants to understand themselves as inhabiting dynamic environmental systems. Different language, narratives, and theoretical foundations pertinent to such relationships are needed to further elucidate the complexity and diversity of human–environment relations enacted through outdoor adventure.

Michael (2000) showed that tools and technologies, including mundane products such as hiking boots, mediate the interrelation of travelers’ bodies and their surroundings and give rise to meaningful and storied landscapes. Drawing on Ingold’s (2000) notion of taskscape, Michael rejected the notion that technology is a societal intrusion on “pure” or “direct” experience of nature, as has often been argued. Tools and technologies, according to Michael, mediate human–environment interactions by (a) shaping where and how people travel, (b) being symbols of status and identity, (c) incurring meaningful experiences such as user pain or frustration, (d) being the product and means of environmental damage, and (e) facilitating experiences that encourage environmental protection. Thus, the various tools and technologies used in outdoor adventure shape skill, travel, place meanings, and resulting understandings of the interrelation of self and environment.

Communities of participants and educators in outdoor adventure, Stewart (2008) argued, have largely neglected their own and others’ multiple cultural and ecological histories and activities that story landscapes. Stewart encouraged participants and scholars to reflect on their position within colonial histories and to write new cultural and ecological stories through their journeys.

The notion that skilled performance involves embodied relations in choreographed activities that give rise to meaningful selves and landscapes suggests alternative ways of (a) teaching and learning, (b) critiquing and understanding, as well as (c) enacting and describing human–environment relations in outdoor adventure. While acknowledging that technical skills can distract from attention to place, Mullins (2014) reviewed literature suggesting that long-term skill development shapes participants’ knowledge of regions and attachment to places of practice. Such a process becomes clearer when understood through Ingold’s (2000) definition of enskilment as the “embodiment of capacities of awareness and response by environmentally situated agents” (p. 5). Enskilment occurs in specific settings and communities that develop, reinforce, and challenge norms of practice and meanings of places, as well as individual, social, and group identities (for better or worse). Thus, skill is social and ecological, and enskilment is experiential and political.

When combined with the literature reviewed here, Ingold’s (2000) perspective informs notions of skill as related to environmental learning and awareness in outdoor adventure activities. Taken together, these literature suggest a theoretical basis for exploring an ecological approach to outdoor adventure research and practice that is participatory: that is, such an approach would recognize and embrace—with concomitant responsibility—that people interact with and develop in relation to dynamic environments that are at once social and biophysical.

An Ecological Ontology

Nicol (2003) called for scholars and practitioners in outdoor education to explore ecological ontologies as necessary for developing diverse epistemologies appropriate to sustainability education. In Building Dwelling Thinking, Heidegger (1954/1993) described that only through engaged and pragmatic dwelling within our surroundings can humans imagine, think, and build a world that they can then approach as the subject of critical, distanced, and self-conscious reflection. Extending Heidegger’s notion of dwelling, Ingold (2000) framed an ecological ontology in which humans are “brought into existence as organism-persons within a world that is inhabited by beings of manifold kinds, both human and non-human,” and the relations among humans, he stated, “which we are accustomed to calling ‘social,’ are but a sub-set of ecological relations” (p. 5). Fundamental to his perspective, Ingold (2005) later wrote,

is the thesis that the production of life involves the unfolding of a field of relations that crosscuts the boundary between human and non-human. No-one, has made the crossing from nature to society, or vice versa, and no-one ever will. There is no such boundary to be crossed. (p. 508)

Yet, theories in outdoor adventure often rely on precisely such distinctions to frame environmental value and function as “getting back to nature” or having an “authentic wilderness experience” (see Borrie & Roggenbuck, 1996; Walle, 1997). Ingold’s (2000) approach anchors notions of experience in the skills and activities that structure people’s perception and frame the meanings they find. Ingold (2000) stated that “far from being inscribed upon the bedrock of physical reality, meaning is immanent in the relational contexts of people’s practical engagement with their lived-in environments” (p. 168). Ingold (2011) was particularly attentive to the nature of life and embodied perception “out in the open” (p. 138), as an intermingling of self with weather, sunshine, light, soil, and sound. These ideas provide a way of valuing being outdoors without deferring to “nature” and “wilderness,” which Cronon (1996) showed to be so problematic. Hence, peoples’ skills are keys to understanding the structures and meanings of their lifeworlds, and outdoor adventure activities are one way in which participants meaningfully incorporate diverse landscapes and environments into their lives. Ingold’s (2000) perspective provides an ecological ontology that (re)positions humans as participating at the center of their environment.

Ingold (2000, 2011) described the environment as the shared habitat of humans and other species, and as comprising dynamic and entangled cycles, patterns, and flows of energy and matter that sustain life. Landscape, from Ingold’s (2000) perspective, changes over time to embody the various human and nonhuman forces and activities within the environment. Landscape is the shifting form that people and animals see and negotiate with when they move about outside.²

For Ingold (2000), the character and meanings of a place emerge through the ways in which humans live with and build in their world through the activity of their lives. Ingold (2000) argued that “whereas with space, meanings are attached to the world, with landscape they are gathered from it” (p. 192). A place, then, is a meaningful center of activity in a landscape, occurring where paths meet and routines occur. Places and the activities that create them, therefore, are political because they occur within environments shared by many human and nonhuman inhabitants (Ingold, 2005). More recently, Ingold (2011) argued that “the path, and not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming . . . [and] that wayfaring is the fundamental mode by which living beings inhabit the earth” (p. 12). Thus, the interrelation of movement and place is essential to this ecological ontology.

Skills, according to Ingold (2000), mediate human environmental relations. Skills are learned through practical “hands on” experience; they involve care, judgment, and dexterity in attuning one’s abilities to perceive and act relative to a web of relations within ever-changing environmental conditions that present limits and opportunities for action in accomplishing something (Ingold, 2000, 2001, 2011). Moreover, as seen in Lewis’s (2000) account of rock climbers, Ingold (2000) described skill as being developmentally incorporated into the functioning of a body through practice and experience in particular environments and with particular equipment. A skill, then, is an embodied knowledge of specific environments and landscapes, an attunement to particular elements or phenomena in the surroundings. Thus, skilled learning and practice are processes through which people shape and are shaped by their environment while coming to know the aspects of it intimately. From this perspective, the enskilment of participants in outdoor activities is crucial to the people, landscapes, knowledge, and meanings cultivated through recreation, education, and tourism.

Proposed Notions of Skill, Activity, and Outdoor Adventure

The understanding of skill presented in this section is based on Ingold (2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2011) and informed by the literature reviewed here and by Mullins (2014), along with my own experiences reading about, working, and traveling outdoors. To Ingold’s work, the field of outdoor adventure adds a focus on collective performance, interpersonal skills, the leisure context, and the political nature of skill and place. Skill can be understood as an intentional ability of an individual or group to create and/or maintain an outcome, product, experience, or relationship that is imagined in advance but can only be realized through performance of embodied capabilities of perception and action that involve the whole organic being(s) (indissolubly body, mind, and spirit) within a web of particular relations extending throughout and shaping an active environment and dynamic landscape that include other beings.

This notion of skill has five important implications that clarify the concept, its connections to literature in outdoor adventure programming, and possible future research. First, skill is always uncertain; uncertainty emerges in performance and in relation to an ever-changing environment. Second, skilled performance can be (but is not necessarily) enabled, shaped, and limited in various ways through tools, technologies, and equipment. Third, individuals and groups incorporate and cultivate skill through training and experience in situ with direct guidance from others and indirect guidance through stories of various types. Fourth, conceived in this way, enskilment results in familiarity with elements of the environment that are salient to performance but not necessarily an understanding of all the relations that contribute to or are affected by practice. Finally, skilled performance is potentially powerful: Skill is a form of self-expression, but it also acts on various beings, their surroundings, and their ways of dwelling.

Building on this proposed notion of skill, I understand an activity to be a choreographed suite of one or more tasks and skills, situated within multiple traditions, and having various typical and atypical patterns of practice.³ I conceive of outdoor adventure as practices of individuals or groups in developing, performing, and choreographing skills to actively inhabit and negotiate a dynamic outdoor environment in the production of an experience that has uncertain outcomes and shapes the environment and participant(s). Such experiences can be educational, recreational, and touristic.

Although these conceptions of skill, activity, and outdoor adventure intentionally foreground skilled practice and learning, they involve risk and uncertainty, and allow travelers to familiarize themselves with and relate to environments, beings, and people among whom they travel. Thus, outdoor adventure can occur close to home or far away; in urban, rural, or wild settings—as recreation, education, or tourism—and with diverse objectives and outcomes that are (a) political in that they shape people, beings, places, and their meanings in various ways and (b) related to personal, social, and environmental learning and relationships situated along paths and in place and time.

Toward a Participatory Ecological Approach

Ingold’s (2000, 2007, 2011) perspective can help practitioners and researchers in outdoor and adventure recreation, education, and tourism move beyond understanding skill as a technique of the body. The notions of skill, activity, and outdoor adventure outlined here will help scholars and practitioners further explore and develop theory and practice toward a participatory ecological approach to outdoor activities. This move is facilitated by conceptualizing skilled practice as enabling people to act within, shape, and be shaped by (i.e., interact and develop with) various, specific, and dynamic human and nonhuman communities, landscapes, and environmental processes that include the social, economic, and biophysical. Examinations of skill can potentially show the interrelation of biophysical and social worlds that commingle with the learning and performance of outdoor activities.

Future research toward a participatory ecological approach might examine, for example, how relationships with environments, landscapes, and places are sustained and experienced personally, collectively, and through traditions of practice functioning as overt or hidden curricula. Studies could assess the impacts of different tools and technologies on environmental knowledge and at different stages of enskilment; or whether and how institutions, educators, or leaders shape participants’ ignorance, understanding, and agency relative to social and ecological issues and histories. Such studies would explore questions related to how different skills, modes of travel, and tools and technologies combine to shape participants’ perception of, and impact on, their surroundings (e.g., Michael, 2000, on boots and walking; or Mullins, 2009, on canoe tripping). Other studies could focus on how particular communities, places, landscapes, or protected areas are shaped and lent character by local people’s, travelers’, and managers’ patterns of activity (e.g., Dustin, Schneider, McAvoy, & Frakt, 2002, on conflict at Devils Tower National Monument, USA). Researchers, educators, and practitioners could critically identify, interpret, and perhaps rework, for example, the various strands of social, ecological, and economic relations that support and/or are affected by outdoor adventure activities or trip structures.

The interactions among persons, beings, landscapes, and environments that occur through skilled activity help address calls within outdoor and adventure education to move beyond notions of the setting as a static backdrop (Wattchow & Brown, 2011), to recognize the vitality of participants’ surroundings within their experiences (Beringer, 2004), and take responsibility for the social and ecological influence of their travels and stories (Stewart, 2008). Theorizing and studying these interactions will require careful consideration of the nature of skill and social and ecological relations as they relate to place, environment, and landscape. Assessing the capabilities of perception and action, awareness and attunement, cultivated within the whole person and across various settings through and for outdoor adventure will be a central theme to studying and teaching skills within a participatory ecological approach. Finally, if sustainability is to be a core value of outdoor adventure, then teachers, scholars, institutions, practitioners, and participants must also recognize, acquire, and enable the skills needed to interpret their surroundings and act for a better future.

Conclusion

Outdoor recreation and adventure activities are one way that many people experience and shape, and are shaped by diverse landscapes, peoples, and environments. In addition, this is occurring in an age of globalization that has forced scholars and practitioners of outdoor adventure to reconcile their theories and practices with issues of sustainability (Nicol, 2003; Williams & Soutar, 2005). Global and local socioenvironmental issues require outdoor educators, scholars, and practitioners to move beyond dominant discourses of risk, skill, wilderness, nature, and society that may now impede educating for a sustainability paradigm in which humanity belongs to and participates in the environment (Mullins, 2014; Nicol, 2003; Wattchow & Brown, 2011).

Calls for outdoor adventure to move past the Western nature–culture and body–mind dichotomies (Beringer, 2004; Hull, 2000; Nicol, 2003; O’Connell et al., 2005) have in part come out of, and played into, debates over technical skill, place knowledge, and environmental learning (Martin, 2004; Thomas, 2005; Wattchow & Brown, 2011). There has not been adequate explanation of the necessity of teaching and educating for technical skill (Payne, 2002; Thomas, 2005). Mullins (2014) suggested that research into recreation specialization, place, and outdoor adventure activities show that skill provides a starting point from which to negotiate sustainability by using a participatory ecological approach, proposed here, to critically evaluate and creatively build forms of outdoor adventure that are situated socially and ecologically on various scales.

Outdoor education scholarship has largely focused on personal and social benefits and outcomes for participants (Thomas, 2005). The various scholarly traditions that I have reviewed approach and use skill in different ways but converge in the actual practice and learning of outdoor adventure activities. Despite this, relatively little attention has been given to the complexity of participants’ lived experience of learning and performing skills, or to developing theoretical approaches, concepts, and methodologies centered on skill and practice as important processes in and of themselves (Lyng, 1990; McDermott, 2004; Seaman & Coppens, 2006).⁴ The literature reviewed, including Ingold’s (2000, 2007, 2011) perspective, suggests that skill situates and shapes participants in relation to dynamic landscape features and environmental processes while involving complex social relations that build, challenge, and express individual, communal, and place meanings. By incorporating social and biophysical as well as individual and collective realities, studies of skill may contribute to a sustainability paradigm within outdoor adventure. A better understanding of skill will lead to better understandings of the ways in which outdoor activities alter people and places, as well as facilitate and limit the achievement of outcomes envisioned by participants, practitioners, educators, and scholars. So, rather than asking, “does outdoor adventure produce relationships with nature?” a participatory ecological approach asks “how do participants in outdoor adventure enact relationships with their environment and its inhabitants, and with what results?”

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Philip M. Mullins, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism Management at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada.

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