EDF3174 - Experiencing outdoor environments

This unit addresses a central question in outdoor education and environmental studies: how to understand and appreciate the relationship between nature and culture. It explores why some regard the dominant values and practices associated with culture as conflicting with those of nature; the aspects of nature and culture that are most closely interconnected, where, with whom and when people experience and understand connections that are intimate, intense, attaching or their converses. The unit focuses on the role and status of particular values and worldviews in shaping human interactions with diverse Australian outdoor environments (including alpine, marine, coastal, wetlands, grassland, forest and arid). Students critique a range of socio-cultural considerations in experiences of outdoor environments, including metaphors and exemplars that illustrate a range of culture-nature relationships in Victoria, Australia, and elsewhere (e.g. as playground, gymnasium, adversary, testing ground, museum, cathedral, machine, storehouse, sacred site). Students develop critical understandings of how relationships with Australian outdoor environments are expressed by specific Indigenous communities before and after European colonisation and how outdoor environments have been, and are, culturally, politically, economically and socially constructed, preserved, conserved and managed.