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Dear Neil, Can I inform you about a European Union funded project that I am involved with. The project consists of partners from the Czeck Republic, Sweden, Scotland, Germany, Austria and England who represent academic and practitioner (and variations) in a range of professional settings. The task is to set up an outdoor education in-service training course for teachers. The issues that we are in the process of resolving may be of interest to you. We have resolved to develop a course which embraces the diversity found inter- culturally (between countries) and intra-culturaly (within countries). To do this we have had to take account of philosophical debates at a highly abstract level as well as understanding the many outlets and contexts that exist when people 'learn outdoors'. This has led us into what we consider to be the most important philosophical juncture which relates to the difference between outdoor education and education (or learning) out of doors (these two terms are loaded with cultural connotations). To give some examples our group consists of class-room teachers, who take their pupils out of the classroom to the school grounds, or local woodland, to pursue curricular outcomes. There are people who use outdoor games, there are people who pursue adventurous activities, there are people who adopt a 'sensitization' approach to the outdoors, there are people influenced by the Scout movement, principals from local authority residential centres, university lecturers, school teachers and people simply (not intended pejoratively) interested in learning out of doors. I do not intend to be exhaustive here in my rather poor description of cultural diversity. My intention was more to indicate that this project exists and these are the issues that we are wrestling with, and trying to resolve, in a way that embraces cultural diversity. The group will pilot this course in May 2001 by which time we will have developed a course handbook, rationale for the course, and bibliographic sources on which the course is based. A web site is soon to come on line and there will be contributions from partners which show their individual perspectives. We did have a web site but there is a new one on the way. Once this is available I will post it on this list. If this is of interest to you please come back to me. I could put you in touch with individuals from these countries and they could present you with their perspective. Best wishes, Robbie Nicol %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%