The Evolution of Metacognition during a Vocational Undergraduate Degree in the Outdoors: Curriculum Development to Enhance the Transfer of Learning

Abstract

For the outdoor sector to fully realise its potential to facilitate inter-and intrapersonal growth, increasingly employers are recruiting for sophisticated communication, critical thinking and refined reflective practice skills (Hickman and Collins, 2014). Along with underpinning the transition from undergraduate to outdoor practitioner (Gray, Hodgson and Heaney, 2011), reflective practice is regarded as the space where emergent concepts of professionalism are processed and articulated (Cooper and Stevens, 2006).

The project aimed to; 1) characterise student perceptions of their reflective development over the course of an undergraduate degree in the outdoors and 2) analyse how these evolutions can be best engineered within curriculum to develop professionalism.

The study employed a qualitative methodology to collect open-ended and emerging data. Rather than testing prefigured data, this study used an interpretivist approach to achieve its aims (Arthur, Waring, Coe and Hedges, 2012).

Following an open-ended questionnaire with outdoor undergraduates (n=28), a semi-structured focus group was directed to a purposive sample from the same cohort (n=3). This informed an open-ended questionnaire with (n=5) and a semi-structured Skype interview with (n=1) industry employers. The Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, designed to understand ‘participants lived experience within a specific context’ (Pietkiewicz and Smith, 2014) was selected to analyse the data.

The central theme found and explored in this project concerns reconceptualising the practitioner's role as an ‘enabler’ of inter-and intrapersonal growth to enhance industry professionalism. It was argued that central to this agenda is the development of undergraduates reflexivity through mentoring and critical friendship.

The study has argued that whilst reflexivity may help to nurture industry professionalism, a greater synergy between industry stakeholders is required to avoid a ‘glass partition’ (Man, 2007) dividing and inhibiting unanimity of progress.