The Interface of Adventure Education and Religious Education: A Study of Curriculum Interrelations

Overview & Synopsis

This study looks at two curriculum areas; adventure education and religious education. Each is examined separately to establish common ground for the interface. This interface is then explored in some depth. This study seeks to show the contribution that religious education can make in developing and executing a response to issues that will arise within adventure education programs that are religious in nature, i.e., questions of personal meaning and purpose. The focus of philosophical research in religious education is often on issues related to its ethical appropriateness in an institutional setting. Little has been done to explore the ways in which personal experience can be used as metaphor for issues in the religious quest. This study argues that adventure education can make a significant contribution at this point, to religious education. These findings arise from a conceptual analysis of adventure education and religious education viewed as jointly concerned with human development. Within this analysis, special attention is given to religious education as a cyclic process. Key components of the more amorphous adventure education are identified, and it is deduced that curriculum enhancement flows both ways as a result. In short, the study concludes that adventure education and religious education interface through human development, that both religious education and adventure education can contribute to the other and that adventure education is in fact deficient without this contribution. (Contains a bibliography.)