Adventure Expeditions as Innovative Educational Practice

Synonyms

Adventurous learning; Experiential education; High-impact educational practices; Outdoor education

In many educational settings, there is a trend toward enhancing student learning by adopting new and innovative educational practices. Commonly, these innovative practices encourage more active, engaged learning and compel students to participate in a variety of “hands-on” experiences such as Kuh’s (2008) “high-impact educational practices.” This move to innovate is partly motivated by the shortcomings of the mass delivery of education that evolved as a result of industrialization when parents began working in the wage economy and schooling was formalized and organized into what today is often known as primary, secondary, and tertiary (post-secondary) education. This shift changed what and how children learn. Rather than learning being a natural outcome of the process of living in family or community groups, learning, too, was industrialized: buildings were built, students were...