Connecting with Courage (CWC) is a three-day Outward Bound self-discovery programme, designed by women for women. It was developed to bring feminist theory to bear on outdoor and experiential education (OEE). The re-thinking of OEE research from a feminist standpoint is less than two decades old. It began by challenging previous assumptions about participants in OEE as male and set out to explore women's different experiences and needs in OEE programmes. However while this new literature criticised the standard OEE literature for universalising male participants' experiences, it tended to provide a universalist and essentialist view of women's experiences and needs in OEE. More recently, this latter tendency has been criticised by a small number of writers within the women-and-OEE literature. This study examines women's experiences during and after four of Outward Bound's CWC courses in light of some branches of contemporary feminist theory. The study employs qualitative methodology placing the researcher at CWC as both a participant and observer, and carrying out individual open-ended, semi-structured, in-depth, ethnographic interviews with 21 women. The study explores the limitations of the standard OEE framework and the women-and-OEE literature. Its central contribution is to show how women's experiences at CWC and their subsequent understanding of these experiences can be interpreted differently depending on the theoretical framework used. The study highlights the potential of contemporary feminist theory in four respects. First it illustrates the value of re-thinking the universalist concept of woman by exploring how sexual identity, as one example of social difference, is relevant to experience. Second the study validates Carol Gilligan's notion of the self as relational while examining contemporary feminist theorisations of the self. Thus, third, it also demonstrates how far more nuanced and rich insights can be derived by employing a postmodern-inspired f
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.35867 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Cowin, Louise. |
| Contributors | Jackson, Nancy S. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Educational Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001655855, proquestno: NQ50134, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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