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LIST OF ABSTRACTS
Chair: Wendy Gill
Cara Aitchison
Lynsey Parrott & Esther Pettit
Hayden Gabriel
Pauline Couper & Su Porter
Chair: Sean MacBlain
Zenna Kingdon, Lisa Spencer-Woodley & Jan
Gourd
Lynda Dawson
Julie Evans
Chair: Ian Gilshespy
Mark Leather
Paul Sutton
Sue Cooper
Chair: Paul Foster
Gill Golder
Jo Trelfa
John Blakeley
Venue: Room 15
Tourism Impacts of Wind Farms: How to develop
a research and consultancy portfolio
‘I feel like a normal person’ reflections on
adventurous activities
Narrative Discourses of Ecological Dependence
and Sustainability
Self-awareness, environmental awareness and rock climbing: using auto-ethnography to enhance graduate attributes in Outdoor
Adventure Education
Venue: Room 16
‘Flourishing’: Three Contributions of perspectives
on Early years
An ethnographic study of the experiences of
secondary aged girls in school
‘Mobile’ data collection: finding new ways of
capturing children’s voice in the research process
Venue: Room 17
A Critique of Forest School – Seeing the woods
from the trees
Fearful Asymmetries of Assessment
Transformative evaluation: combining learn &
accountability through participative practice
Venue: Room 18
Action Research & the Trainee Teacher
What is a Professional act?
Michael Hall
The politics of adaptation: Derek Jarman’s
Edward II (1991) & Christine Edzard’s As You Like
It (1992)
Bilingual Education, a Training Perspective

Cara Aitchison: Tourism Impacts of Wind Farms: How to develop a research and consultancy portfolio
The last 20 years has witnessed the exponential growth of on-shore wind farms as the UK has sought to meet European, national and local targets for renewable energy. Most wind farms are sited in remote rural upland areas that are also popular destinations for tourism, outdoor recreation and sport. The impact of wind farms on tourism has been cited increasingly as grounds for refusal of planning permission.
Robust research evidence of the impact of tourism on wind farms is limited. Over the last 10 years, and resulting from commissioned research at 10 existing and proposed wind farm sites, the author has undertaken extensive primary research combined with analysis of secondary data and policy research.
This pecha kucha presentation (20 slides with 20 seconds per slide) draws on this body of evidence to demonstrate that wind farms have, to date, had no negative impact on tourism volume, experience or expenditure within rural economies. The presentation also highlights the development of a new research methodology that has been employed to assess the tourism impact of wind farms at a local scale and which is now being developed by the Scottish Government and Welsh
Government to identify impacts at a national scale. The presentation will conclude by introducing the concept of ‘the tipping point’ for wind farm developments; the point at which development becomes so prolific that tourism does experience a negative impact and the need to develop a research methodology that predicts this point.
Lynsey Parrott & Esther Pettit: ‘I feel like a normal person’ reflections on adventurous activities
There is a growing literature about how experience of the outdoors provides ‘good memories’ that endure. The experiential nature of outdoor recreational learning offers novelty, sensory experience, incidental learning as well as enjoyment and can have positive effects on self-concept which benefit the individual in the longer term. It also provides ‘something to talk about’. Children in the UK will usually take part in at least one residential adventurous activity week (camp) as part of their school life. Using semi-structured interviews we explored the attitudes towards, and recollections about outdoor adventure, of a group of adults with cerebral palsy, most of whom rely on augmentative communication systems as their primary mode of communication. Of particular interest were the residing memories, lasting impact and significance of outdoor recreational experiences as identified by this group
Hayden Gabriel: Narrative Discourses of Ecological Dependence and Sustainability
Which stories might we be telling now in the hope of forming part of a coherent and useful response to environmental crisis – is the question that underpins Hayden’s on-going PhD work. The presentation will include a reading of a short story as an example of one of many ways in which it is possible to answer this question and will include discussion of the theoretical frameworks that have led to the resulting work

Pauline Couper & Su Porter: Self-awareness, environmental awareness and rock climbing: using auto-ethnography to enhance graduate attributes in Outdoor Adventure Education
The BA Outdoor Adventure Education degree aims to develop well rounded outdoor learning practitioners, who are academically, socially, ethically and technically capable. The programme has long included some geographical content and pedagogy, focusing primarily on the development of students’ environmental awareness through a science-based physical geography/recreation ecology mode of study. However, this ‘environment-as-object’ epistemology does not sit well with the rest of the degree, which foregrounds humanistic and interpretative modes of enquiry and emphasises reflective practice and experiential learning. This year (February-May) we trialled a different approach, asking the students to produce an auto-ethnographic account of rock climbing. Taking
Brown and Dilley’s (2012, 37) assertion that “a ‘responsible’ [outdoor] subject…is held to be a
‘knowing’ subject”, we hoped that this exercise would provoke a development of the students’ selfawareness, environmental awareness and – crucially – self-in-environment awareness. Our presentation reflects on the success, or otherwise, of this exercise, offering a tentative response to
Nicol’s (2013) question: “is autoethnography a useful approach for outdoor educators in promoting pro-environmental behaviour?”
Zenna Kingdon, Lisa Spencer-Woodley & Jan Gourd: ‘Flourishing’: Three Contributions of perspectives on Early years
We approach this symposium with a shared a collective concern about the impact that policy agendas can have on children and families, particularly where policy agenda seems to be working in direct antagonism to those that they were initially intended to support. We discussed what we thought that policy should be enabling children and families to do. We were all agreed that policy should be about supporting practitioners, children and families to flourish. It was as we read further that we engaged with the work of Martin Seligman, an American psychologist. His recent text
Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being (2011) describes flourishing as an approach that is underpinned by PERMA: Personal Enjoyment, Engagement, (Positive)
Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment (Seligman 2011). We feel that we want to consider in detail the ways in which policy agendas and the pedagogy of practitioners enable children to flourish.
Lynda Dawson: An ethnographic study of the experiences of secondary aged girls in school
Julie Evans: ‘Mobile’ data collection: finding new ways of capturing children’s voice in the research process
This paper will outline some of the methodological issues of using mobile technologies to capture children’s voices within primary educational settings. The basis of the paper will be to locate data generated from an Economic and Social Research (ESRC) funded project ‘Opportunities afforded by
the outdoors for alternative pedagogies as children move from Foundation Stage to Year 1’ which looked at the ways in which outdoor contexts may elicit the use of different pedagogies to those that more traditionally occur in indoor contexts; in essence whether ‘different places’ offer ‘new possibilities’ for young children’s learning. The presentation will outline the opportunities and challenges of using innovative mobile methods of collecting audio data from 4-6 year-olds in school settings and to explore how more ‘naturalistic’ data might be captured by the removal of the presence of the adult researcher.

Mark Leather: A Critique of Forest School – Seeing the woods from the trees
In this paper I critique the development of ‘Forest School’ in the UK. I argue that ‘Forest School’ has much to offer all outdoor educators, in terms of pedagogy and underpinning philosophy. However, it appears that this has been adopted by practitioners and advocates in a simplistic fashion, without acknowledgment of its international antecedents and theoretical base. The discourse around the integration of Forest School into British educational culture is problematic appearing dogmatic and overstating the claims about its efficacy. Preliminary research into children’s experiences of a Forest
School find that children make meanings about themselves, others and the environment through their own ‘inward journey’, and this raises questions about the value of assigning specific learning outcomes to Forest Schools. In this paper I argue that valuable lessons could be learned by all outdoor educators and Forest School practitioners; by engaging in research and ‘hearing’ the children’s voice’ along with a fuller theoretical exploration of the construct ‘Forest School’.
Paul Sutton: Fearful Asymmetries of Assessment
For some learners fear is a barrier to engagement with assessment. Building on earlier work (Sutton
2011, 2012), in this research paper I use an Academic Literacies approach to analyze how and why fear emanates from asymmetries of power within the complex social relations and practices of assessment.
My analysis has three interlinked dimensions. Firstly, at the macro level, fear is a product of the subordinate position occupied by many learners in an educational structure oriented to reproducing the interests of the dominant cosmopolitan elites of networked societies (Castells 2000). Meso level fear emerges from the difficulties learners experience with the peculiarities of assessment culture in higher education with its particular “disciplinary practices” (Foucault 1979), conventions and rules.
Thirdly, at the micro level of individual lived experience, fear is engendered by a perceived mismatch between the difficulty of the assessment task and learner ability. This often manifests as feelings of self-doubt, insecurity and uncertainty. Such fear, I contend, is a patterned response to both the macro and meso dimensions of assessment.
Sue Cooper: Transformative evaluation: combining learn & accountability through participative practice
This paper, informed by empirical research, presents an innovative evaluation methodology that focuses on the learning and development functions of evaluation. Evaluation in the context of managerialism has been reduced to upward compliance, and this research was driven by a concern that the learning and development functions of evaluation are being eroded. Using an ‘insider’ approach, a new participatory evaluation methodology was developed and implemented in a voluntary sector youth organisation in the UK. Data were gathered via individual semi-structured interviews before and after the implementation of the participatory evaluation and an inductive thematic analysis was used to identify emergent themes.
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Gill Golder: Action Research & the Trainee Teacher
Action research could be most simply describes practitioner based research, it is used extensively in education by teachers to improve practice. Over the last three decades Initial Teacher Education
(ITE) in England has undergone significant reforms. The introduction of competences (DFE, 1992;
1993) and then standards for the award of qualified teacher status (DFEE, 1997; DFES, 2002; DFE,
2012) accompanied the strong shift of responsibility and resources from higher education to schools have all contributed. Most recently with the DFE (2011) ‘Training our next generation of outstanding teachers – implementation plan’ that argues for a ‘strong link between the quality of teacher training and high quality school-based activities based on demonstration and peer review’ (p11). The standards for qualified teacher status (DFEE, 1997; DFES, 2002) and now the slimmed down standards for teaching (DFE, 2012) all refer to the importance of teachers being reflective and able to evaluate their own teaching to identify priorities for professional development. Hagger et al
(2010) suggest that the most popular model of learning to teach remains that of the reflective practitioner. This presentation outlines examples of how trainee teachers on secondary PGCE and
B.Ed programmes are empowered to become reflective practitioners
Jo Trelfa: What is a Professional act?
Previous research with current and past students on professional programmes at two HEIs regarding their engagement with reflective practice revealed how they lie, exaggerate and censor reflective accounts in response to dominant constructivist discourses within HE that value individual experience but explicitly and implicitly tell them how and what to 'experience' in order to pass
(Trelfa 2011). In essence, my PhD focuses on ‘if not this, then what'? In this paper I consider what it is that professionals (and thus, students on professional programmes) reflect on, what is a professional act? Using a vignette, I discuss role and responsibility (Shapiro 2010), context (Coulter
2001; Biesta 2007) and the dominance given to cognitive processes. I highlight a dichotomy between facets professionals draw on in their creation of a professional act compared with those emphasized within literature and dominant discourse, a situation that mirrors the student experience and my critique of reflective practice, raising queries about, and direction for, reflective practice itself.
John Blakeley: The politics of adaptation: Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991) & Christine Edzard’s As
You Like It (1992)
Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989) heralded a mini-boom in mainstream Shakespeare related filmmaking in the 1990s. I propose to consider the work of two independent film-makers, both of whom,
I will argue, respond to the renewed interest in filming Shakespeare occasioned by Branagh’s film.
Jarman antagonistically challenges what he terms Branagh’s ‘Lego-Theatrics with the Royal Seal’ in his angry and irreverent take on Marlowe’s play.
1 Edzard maps the divisions of post-Thatcherite
London on to the multiple binaries of Shakespeare’s text. Both film-makers in different ways use their sources to give voices to communities marginalised and occasionally demonised by the mainstream. These films thus demonstrate the potentialities of Early Modern Drama for a politically self-aware film-maker, and as such offer a distinct model for adaptation in concordance with the agenda of the historicised criticism prevalent in the early 1990s.
1 Derek Jarman, Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman (London: Vintage, 1991), 147.

Michael Hall: Bilingual Education, a Training Perspective
Bilingual education has many forms and labels – immersion, CLIL, English-medium instruction, etc. - and serves a variety of purposes within education systems: transitional bilingualism (e.g. for Hispanic immigrants in the USA), the integration of distinct and sometimes antagonistic speech communities
(Canada), the maintenance of heritage languages, and the balancing of national and international aspirations (Malaysia and Singapore). Bilingualism, and by extension multilingualism or plurilingualism, can have different meanings and values at the levels of family, school and society.
There is a wide range of attitudes towards bilingualism: whilst some see it as an economic asset, others may regard it as a cultural inconvenience.
The key facet of bilingualism in education is the teacher. It is in the classroom, in terms of pedagogic interactions and more tacit messages about languages in society and learning, that the success of bilingual learning is formed. Thus the knowledge, skills and attitudes of teachers are central to the success of any bilingual education initiative.
Over the past few summers my university in the UK has delivered programmes for bilingual teachers from various regions of Spain. The learning goals of these courses have focused on three key areas particularly relevant to the bilingual classroom:
 language skills enhancement
 teaching skills enhancement
 cultural/intercultural knowledge and awareness enhancement
In this talk I describe our approach to preparing teachers for effective implementation of bilingual education programmes. By drawing on programme evaluations by both tutors and teacher participants, I reflect on our experiences in order to explore the specific needs of teachers working within bilingual education systems. I discuss our findings in the context of the traditions and particularities of education in Spain, whilst drawing comparisons where appropriate to other bilingual education contexts.
The findings suggest that the successful features of such intensive courses typically include the development of:
 a repertoire of classroom activities
 skills in task instruction and guidance to students
 strategies for ongoing language learning
 visual aids to support language comprehension in the classroom
The key outcome however is the fostering of positive attitudes towards bilingualism amongst children and the community, and the emergence of a bilingual identity amongst students. (351 words