Terrain traps: barriers to effective reflective practice in undergraduate vocational outdoor leadership students

Outdoor practitioners widely embed reflective practice (RP) into the delivery of experiential education, but its contribution to their continued professional development remains under developed; by default, claims of its worth to the experiential education, they deliver must be approached with caution. Although the value of RP has been established in other domains, undergraduates on vocational outdoor leadership courses, in common with many other students, find engaging with RP problematic. This might be attributable in part to a focus on practicality and ‘doing rather than thinking’ but also to obstacles encountered in their work experience where data are captured for later critical analysis. This paper sets out to establish the barriers to RP experienced by undergraduates during one season’s summer employment. Data were gathered from focus groups, externally checked by two critical friends and subjected to interpretative phenomenological analysis. Extracts from reflective journals were used to illustrate the emergent themes. The results highlighted several commonly perceived barriers to RP in the outdoor workplace and have been used as discussion points in class to help students understand the nature of work in the outdoor sector and to identify and develop appropriate coping strategies.