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The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014) called for 'a new vision of education that seeks to empower people of all ages to assume responsibility for creating a sustainable future' (as cited in Eames, Barker, Wilson-Hill, & Law, 2010, p. 1). The implications of such a call have yet to be realised across many fields within education, particularly outdoor education. In the last decade, slow progress has been made towards more critically and socio-ecologically informed notions of outdoor education, despite the work of numerous academics and practitioners calling for approaches informed by sustainability, human-nature relationships, and place-responsiveness. In Aotearoa New Zealand, and parts of Australia, much traditional or mainstream outdoor education is underpinned by notions of adventure, risk, challenge, and personal development as central tenets, as argued by authors such as Payne and Wattchow (2008), Lugg (2004), and Boyes (2012). While outcomes based on these tenets may be admirable, I contend that they remain somewhat distant from the goal of educating for a sustainable future. Meanwhile, despite significant progress, environmental education/education for sustainability (EfS) in Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand schools, have been a low priority, or exist primarily on the periphery of school curriculum, as suggested by Tilbury, Coleman, and Garlick (2005), and Eames, Cowie, and Bolstad (2008). It is into this space that intersections between sustainability education and outdoor learning provide potential for realising new visions of education that work towards a sustainable future.
I use the terms 'sustainability education' and 'outdoor learning' deliberately here. Drawing from Sterling (2010), sustainability education is used in this article as a catch-all for environmental education (EE), education for sustainability (EfS), and education for sustainable development (ESD). Sustainability, in this context is articulated by Sterling (2010) as 'implying economic viability, ecological integrity and social cohesion but also necessitating an operating ecological or participatory worldview which recognises these qualities or system conditions as mutually interdependent . . . sustainability is both a process and a broad direction' (p. 512). Consequently, sustainability education can be seen as a process and direction for developing attitudes, understandings, skills, and motivation to actively participate in bringing about more sustainable systems. Here I acknowledge the contestation and debates surrounding discourses of sustainability...