Adventurous Learning
A Pedagogy for a Changing World
A pedagogy for a changing world
Keeping learning real, giving children power and responibility, fewer predetermined outcomes, opportunities to develop lifelong skills.
The adventurous learning framework
A readily applicable framework for your efforts to reshape your educational landscape.
Re-appraisal of adventure
‘Adventure’ has so many meanings. We break it into four key elements: authenticity, agency, uncertainty, and mastery.
What is Adventurous Learning?
Adventurous Learning is an approach to teaching and learning based on a re-appraisal of ‘adventure’. In contemporary society adventure has become a ubiquitous term that is applied to a range of products and services (e.g., think clothing or package holidays). Much of what is ‘sold’ as an adventure is a hollowed-out and shallow version of the ‘real deal’. We believe that adventure has an important role to play in the development of citizens who can learn to thrive in an increasingly complex, unpredictable and rapidly changing world.
Adventurous Learning builds on four key elements: authenticity, agency, uncertainty and mastery, and explains how these features can be incorporated into educational practices. Adventurous Learning provides guidance on how to ground one’s teaching in accessible theory. Educators can adapt and tailor these guidelines for indoor and outdoor teaching in their own contexts.
By engaging with the material on this site, and the associated resources, you will be able to design and implement programmes based on sound principles that have deep and enduring meaning for your students.
A powerful book that speaks across outdoor and adventure education and mainstream schooling. Simon Beames and Mike Brown cogently argue for pedagogies for diverse purposes and contexts in order to meet the challenge of rapidly changing societal needs.
- Sue Waite, Plymouth Institute of Education, UK
A revitalizing adventure agenda for inside the classroom and out. In times when education for neoliberal replication is the norm, Adventurous Learning embraces education for change…and refocuses on the passions and agency of the learner.
- Mike Boyes, University of Otago, New Zealand
Adventurous Learning is a real gem for educators of all stripes. Purposefully designing elements of uncertainty and ambiguity into educational experience may seem counter-intuitive, but...these elements are essential to the engaged and transformative 21st-century school and classroom.
- Jay Roberts, Earlham College, USA