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Camp Information

The Outdoor Education Program focuses on an embodied sensual experience of engagement with place, self and others. It utilises various practical modes of experience, including bushwalking, canoeing and sea kayaking amongst others. The activity is always used as a medium through which to explore relationships with the place, others, and ourselves, not as a focus in it and we only use one activity for the duration of each trip. An imperative in the planning of trips is to deliberately avoid being busy, as many of the sensory and soulful responses to place and one another for which we are planning, are fragile and easily crowded out. The mode chosen for each trip is a specific response to the place we are visiting and the age and nature of the class for whom the trip is being conducted. The trips are responsive at their very core and intend through, valuing reciprocal interactions with place, to cultivate a deep awareness of others and ourselves around us.

Outdoor Education is a powerful medium for contributing to the creation of a culture of care, so important if we are to establish a sustainable society. As a society, Australians have been well provided for, in terms of information about the state of our world and the necessity for change and yet these facts have motivated surprisingly little change, in the context of the amount necessary. We suggest that what’s missing is not more facts, but emotional engagement to engender caring. Through embodied, intimate, reverent experiences in the places we visit, we hope to engender in students an empathetic attitude towards all of the “more than human” (Abram, 1996 p16) world, in the broadest sense, on which they will act throughout their lives.

“It is easy to underestimate the power of a long-term association with the land, not just with a specific spot but with the span of it in memory and imagination, how it fills, for example, one’s dreams. For some people, what they are is not finished at the skin, but continues with the reach of the sense out into the land. If the land is summarily disfigured or reorganised, it causes them psychological pain. Again, such people are attached to the land as if by luminous fibres; and they live in a kind of time that is not of the moment but, in concert with memory, extensive measured by a lifetime. To cut these fibres causes not only pain, but a sense of dislocation.” (Lopez, 1986 p 279)

We passionately believe, as a product of experience, that it is possible to establish an intimate, sensory, knowing, attentive, soulful, reverent, reciprocal relationship with a place, where one temporarily escapes the confines of one’s body to feel a part of the more than human world that surrounds us. Steiner students who undertaken a program founded on the same principles have reported such experiences and have seen the empowerment and motivation, which flows from them. David Abram discusses at significant depth the philosophy that underlies this possibility of escaping our skin-encapsulated form in an encounter with the infinite.

A further consideration in programming is that experiences need to be age appropriate to the children for whom they are planned. In this aspect of planning we derive inspiration from Rudolf Steiner in his major indication about education, where he suggests that education should be delivered as a response to the child as a developing being (Steiner cited in Carlgren, 1981 p18). Our classroom is the bush, which is an extraordinary context in which to encounter learning. The experiences we provide aim to meet the child in their particular stage of development, providing very young children with play, older children with adventure and senior children with opportunities to encounter and explore self. We try to provide consent to the broadest possible range of responses in the children, valuing them for who they are as individuals and nurturing their capacity and identity as it emerges.

Anywhere in nature there is the potential to engage with place in such a way as to encounter eternal truth. The inexplicability of the experience of spirit in rocks and landscape, the awe felt in the presence of the beauty of a Pardalote, the majesty and lightness of being felt when watching an eagle ride an invisible wind, the transience encountered in scrambling over 400 million year old sandstone. These are all experiences that can lend us new ways of knowing our own lives. The more open we are in place, the greater the potential to challenge or supplement existing ways of knowing. Empathy as an ideal makes encounters with the infinite possible.

“landscape shapes mindscape”

This landscape needs to match the needs of the developmental stage of the child. As they grow and mature they are able to experience different ways of experiencing places and soon learn that;

“mindscape shapes landscape”

This newfound ability where the older child learns to impact on their living environment is an important step into becoming an adult. It is imperative for our society, our living world and the children themselves that this ability is nurtured.

“A phenomenological approach to learning place requires us to sing, write, walk, speak, paddle, cook, build – to live places into existential centres of meaning. In doing so we not only save ourselves from a life of placeslessness, but we revive and sustain our places” Brian Wattchow, 2001*

  • Outdoor & Environmental Educ Prog DownloadDownload

CLASS 11 CAMP INFORMATION – 2012

CLASS 8 CAMP INFORMATION – 2012

  • Clothing & Equipment List DownloadDownload
  • Education Outdoors Allergies Form DownloadDownload
  • Education Outdoors Asthma Management Form DownloadDownload
  • Education OUtdoors Fitness to participate DownloadDownload
  • Education Outdoors Student's Medical Form DownloadDownload
  • Gear Hire Form DownloadDownload
  • Permission Note DownloadDownload

CLASS 9 CAMP INFORMATION – 2012

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