Teacher Education and Experiential Learning: A Visual Ethnography

Overview & Synopsis

This article reports research that critically examined our teacher education outdoor education pedagogy. The purpose was to use visual ethnography to critique our teaching over twenty years of annual five-day bush-based residential camps. The bush camps were situated in an outdoor education programme contributing to a four-year undergraduate teacher education Bachelor of Physical Education in Aotearoa New Zealand. The research method involved photo-elicitation of selected photographs representing students' experiences and our practices. We each wrote about the photographs using introspection and recall to create a layered narrative analysis reflecting on the educative focus of the images. We responded to one another's narratives, challenging and/or supporting the reflexivity, to interpret our joint perspectives about the learning context, pedagogic rationale and outcomes. The research highlights our teacher educator perspectives about experiential learning. Some of this learning was directly attributed to our intentional pedagogy and some to the unpredictable, incidental, situated experience made possible by engagement in the outdoor environment.