“Outward Bound”: Psychology, Education, Activity & Environment
A conversation with Educational Psychologist James T. Neill, PhD from the Transnatural Perspectives Podcast
James T. Neill, PhD is an educational psychologist and professor at the Centre for Applied Psychology University of Canberra. Neill’s expertise and interests lie in outdoor education, adventure therapy, green exercise, experiential education and some more indoor type activities such as online education, open education, the psychology of social networking and program evaluation.
In the early 1990s, subjects like Ecopsychology and Adventure Therapy had not yet fully developed into professions or college degree programs. Neill paved his own way by combining his passion for outdoor adventure with the study of psychology. Neill is noted for his pioneering research with Outward Bound and other adventure therapy programs particularly as they relate to life skills, mental health, and adjustment to health and medical conditions.
Outward Bound is an international network of outdoor education organizations founded in the United Kingdom by Lawrence Holt and Kurt Hahn in 1941. For decades, Outward Bound has been the leading global provider of experiential and outdoor education programs for youth and adults and it has helped shape numerous other outdoor adventure programs. The program’s aim is to foster values of personal growth and social skills of participants by using challenging expeditions in the outdoors.
Neill’s research methods were as much hands on and in the field as they were data driven, splashed with incredible adventures on the high seas during his efforts to collect, which at that time was, quite elusive data on Outward Bound, as he reflects,
In 1992, a whole lot of tall ships sailed from Europe. To the U S and some Australian boats joined in for them… I was kind of by then looking for another sort of Outward Bound experience. So I ended up getting a place on a youth crew coming back from the US. I thought, okay, I’ll go over to the U S and visit some outward bound schools, try and extract their, research from them.
Neill went on to conduct comprehensive cross-sectional studies on Outward Bound and other Adventure Therapy programs around the world to gauge different aspects of their overall effectiveness in terms of program goals and biospsychosocial impact on individuals and groups. Neill’s further interest in Open Education Resources (OER) lead to the creation of the Wilderdom outdoor education website (currently on hiatus) that was a favorite among teachers looking for class activities that fostered critical thinking and improved group dynamics.
Most recently, as COVID-19 has put the global activity on hold, online education has become the norm and evolving climate change takes it’s toll on the environment, Neill remains optimistic:
A crisis is an opportunity really. We’ve got the opportunity for this perfect storm, which is, escalating climate crisis. COVID comes along from my point of view, just at the perfect time. Yes, we want to solve COVID, but you know what, if we don’t get a vaccine, we get another year or two of just slowing down and trying to live more locally and live more sustainably. I don’t want to be naive to say that this is somehow the magic solution and there’s a lot of environmental scientists warning that this isn’t the fix, but it does give an opportunity to sit back and think. How else were we going to get everybody to kind of slow down?
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