The Palgrave International Handbook of Women and Outdoor Learning

This Handbook serves as a starting point for critical analysis and discourse about the status of women in Outdoor Learning Environments (OLEs). Women have chosen to participate actively in outdoors careers, believing the profession was a level playing field and that it offered alternatives to traditional sporting activities. Women entered outdoor learning primarily based on a passion for leading and teaching in natural environments and assumed the field was inclusive, rewarding excellence regardless of age, gender, socio-economic status, disability or ethnicity. However, collective experiences in outdoor learning environments suggest that many women feel relegated, marginalized and undervalued.  

In response to this marginalization, this Handbook celebrates the richness of knowledge and practices of women practitioners as a female unified body. Women scholars and practitioners from numerous fields, such as experiential outdoor education, adventure education, adventure therapy, and gender studies, explore the implications of their research and practice using poignant examples within their own disciplines.  These insights emerge from similar life experiences as women and outdoor leaders in the 1970s, 80s, 90s and now during the 21st century. Alignment of past experiences helps shape the female narratives within each chapter and provides the through line for this book. Social inequalities still abound in OLEs and the task of the book is to illuminate the contributions of women as well as the work that needs to be done to make these spaces inclusive.

Global in its perspective and definitive in content, this one-stop volume will be an indispensable reference resource for a wide range of academics, students and researchers in the fields of Education, Sociology, Gender Studies, Geography and Environment Studies.