Tag: Landscape

The Fire and the Knife and the Peak Experience

This blog post is fascinating, and this looks, from the lovely website, to be a great example. It would not be my intention to do down a setting so clearly that states:

…we pride ourselves on helping your little adventurers be the best they can be. Part of this shared journey involves providing appropriate risks for them to face, encouraging them to learn how to overcome them independently.

At the same time I return to the principal idea in the blog post, staring from its headline photo and title: “Our Forest School sessions have revolved around using a variety of different tools for different purposes.”  My issue is the one I raised on this blog about what Outdoor Learning is for. The farming and teaching background at Welton Free Rangers gives it a particular, and very rich slant on countryside appreciation. Their sessions are described as having “revolved around using a variety of different tools for different purposes.” In other words there is a purpose behind the sessions.

I’m not wanting to quibble here, but simply to add (for my students, whose essays on risk in Early Years are due this week) a query about the more dramatic elements of Forest School: knives, fires and the like.  Are they the essential element to Forest School? “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?” … What do we ask children to do when we take them outside? do we take children out for peak experiences or something more subtle? Or is it that the week-by-week experience builds into something less instantaneous but just as momentous?  I worry that when we talk about knives and fire we diminish the slower learning that for me is at the heart of being outdoors.  “Red Fox” (Ed Harding) makes it very clear that at Welton Free Rangers time is on their side, but is spent wisely. The last lines are lyrical:

By providing the time and space for them to experience failure, to experience losing their balance, they learn to get back up, to try again, and to succeed. They will grow up stronger, and safer for it. Come on everyone. Let’s get risky.

Let the reader understand: risk is often experienced over a longer term than the immediate hazard, and the benefits are deeper than simply mastery of a tool.

 

Return to…

A return to Garner country is demanded. I will confess here what Mat already knows: I dream of Ludchurch and spend a lot of sleep time in Thursbitch.

It is unfulfilled business, I guess, that takes me back. While these chaps seem to have done the things we might have I am left feeling that there is more to do, more to say. Is this because I am looking for a “safe” way of looking at the experiences we had, a tame Analytic Autoethnography (Anderson, Journal of Contemporary Ethnograph, 2006: thanks to Jon Reid for the source)? Am I just fighting shy of the overwhelmingly evocative? Would categories and Digimaps tame our experience? A lengthy quotation follows, although I would discourage this in a student essay:

Evocative autoethnographers have argued that  narrative fidelity to and compelling description of subjective emotional experiences create an emotional resonance with the reader that is the key goal of their scholarship. The genre of auto ethnographic writing that they have developed shared postmodern sensibilities—especially the skepticism toward representation of “the other” and misgivings regarding generalizing theoretical discourse. Evocative autoethnography requires considerable narrative and expressive skills..

and these are skills beyond me, or maybe the hugeness of the experience simply dwarfs my skills.

It is as if (clumsy extended metaphor alert) I foolishly took up a challenge and find the Big Thing (Garner’s translation of þurs)  bigger and more humbling than I had expected, and the Gawain quest provides a suitable framework.

Lud
Lud

In the comfort of Camelot the quest was achievable, but in Thursbitch I found something- a project, an attraction, a something that cannot be reduced to analysis. I note Garner talks about the bigness of the þurs…  So this brings me to the ambiguity of the relationship between Thursbitch and Gradbach. In Ludchurch we met up with the big, slow awesomeness of the Green Knight, but just because it is big, is this Thing the þurs? My instant reaction is to say that if Ludchurch is safe, Thursbitch is danger, the Valley of the Living Dread in Erica Wagner’s tricksy phrase,  and for me maybe Ludchurch is (as I’ve said before) masculine, and Thursbitch, feminine: Sarastro and the Queen of the Night.  Lost on the moor, in the fog, lost in the folklore, and in some hinterland of Jung and Freud… Two different big things – lots of different big things – in my mind. Continue reading “Return to…” →