Outdoor environmental education in the anthropocene: beyond in/out

Recent literature on the Anthropocene and Environmental Education criticizes the disembedding of late-modern education from time, space –– and most profoundly the Earth. According to this critique, the Earth is reduced to a mere scene, background or pile of resources, something you learn how to manipulate or at best visit now and then as something exotic ‘out there’. Further, this critical literature calls for a deconstruction of the distinction between indoor and outdoor education, and thus between inside and outside, suggesting that outdoor education in late-modern societies has mainly functioned as a mere supplement to teaching within closed and decontextualized classrooms –– which has institutionalized earth-forgetfulness, separated culture and nature and marginalized more-than-humans, interspecies dialogue and place-based learning. From this ‘anthropocene perspective’ this chapters seeks to explore, discuss and envision radical Outdoor Environmental Education (OEE) that goes beyond the inside/outside distinction and re-situate and re-embed education as such in the earthly life-critical zone. Different kinds of more or less radical OEE are exemplified, analyzed and discussed from this perspective.