From Leader to Educator: How university graduates enrich and professionalise outdoor environmental education

Using the National Outdoor Education Threshold Concepts, we offer specific examples, from multiple Australian tertiary institutions, of how university graduates can continue to advance, regenerate, and challenge the thinking and practice of outdoor and environmental education.

We outline some of the expected professional understanding and capabilities of university-trained outdoor educators, with a focus on contemporary trends and thinking, with the following threshold concepts.

- experiential learning (and the contested nature of the experiential learning cycle),

- specific outdoor pedagogies that empower transformative learning,

- place-specific and place-responsive methodologies,

- environmental and social justice advocacy, and

- fatality prevention approaches, among others.