Education Outdoors: From Behaviour Management to Planetary Civics

Education Outdoors: From Behaviour Management to Planetary Civics  

At a Victorian college, Year 8 students and teachers weren’t communicating well. Relationships were frayed, low‑level conflict was constant, and engagement with learning was ebbing away. The usual responses like behaviour plans, restorative chats, and extra wellbeing lessons seemed to be doing nothing to disrupt the deeper pattern of disconnection.

Partnering with Up the Creek, the changed their approach: a term‑long outdoor learning program on Country, focused on relationships with self, others and the more‑than‑human world.

Phones were left at home, teachers stepped into co‑learner roles, and students took responsibility for real places and real tasks. Over the term, staff reported something that hadn’t shifted through internal interventions alone: communication changed, the cohort became more cohesive, and teacher–student relationships improved back at school as well.

For leadership teams, the key lesson is this: outdoor education only “works” when it addresses the actual conditions young people are growing up in. Not just their behaviour but also their place in a rapidly changing planetary system.

The real problem isn’t behaviour; it’s broken relationships  

Most schools can list the same pressures:

• Disconnection from learning and purpose, amplified by screen‑driven attention fragmentation.
• Rising anxiety, depression and overwhelm among students and staff, with wellbeing efforts often feeling bolt‑on or superficial.
• Social fragmentation: entrenched cliques, bullying, and year‑level divisions that have become resistant to rewards and sanctions.
• Ecological anxiety: students know the climate science but feel powerless to act in meaningful ways.
• Teacher burnout, making it harder to hold relationships in the midst of compliance, reporting and data demands.

These aren’t separate “problems to fix”; they are symptoms of a schooling model built for a different era. Young people are learning inside systems that disconnect them from their own bodies and emotions, from each other, and from the living systems that keep them alive.

Outdoor education that simply “lets off steam” rarely helps. Outdoor education that re‑threads those relationships can. Programs like Up the Creek are explicitly designed for reconnection: with land and water, with peers and adults, and with a wider sense of responsibility and agency.

What is planetary civics and why does it belong in school leadership conversations?  

Philosopher Rosi Braidotti describes our moment as being “caught between technologically‑driven optimism and ecologically‑based despair”. Young people live with astonishing digital capability on the one hand and accelerating planetary breakdown on the other. They can talk to anyone, anytime, but report record levels of loneliness and precarity.

Planetary civics is an emerging frame that responds directly to this contradiction. Instead of treating students as future workers in a national economy, it starts from a different question: What does it mean to grow up as an earthling in a damaged, interdependent planetary system? Drawing from posthuman and post‑anthropocentric thinkers like Braidotti and contemporary initiatives like the Planetary Civics Inquiry, it emphasises:

• The interdependence of all life forms, both human and more-than-human, is a basic civic fact.
• Responsibility extends beyond individual success or national interests to include ecosystems, species, and future generations.
• Systems thinking: understanding how actions in one part of a complex system (for example, a river catchment or a digital network) reverberate elsewhere.
• Collective agency: learning to act with others, across difference, in conditions that cannot be fully controlled or predicted.

In practical terms, planetary civics is not another content strand. It is an orientation to learning: students experience themselves as part of living systems, practice making decisions with ecological and social consequences, and develop emotional stamina for complexity rather than binary “right/wrong” answers.

Outdoor programs offer a rare opportunity to do this in embodied, memorable ways.

How outdoor education becomes planetary civics in practice  

Up the Creek’s work sits at the intersection of planetary civics, Aboriginal pedagogies and UNESCO’s “Learning: The Treasure Within” framework (learning to know, to do, to live together, and to be). For school leaders, three design features are crucial.

1. Place‑based, regenerative work
   Students don’t only “visit” the Birrarung; they return, observe, care and repair byplanting native species, removing invasives, monitoring water quality and noticing wildlife returning to restored habitat. This shifts learning from “about sustainability” to participation in regeneration. Planetary civics becomes muscle memory: what’s good for the river is good for everyone.
2. Student agency inside real constraints
   On the river, students confront tangible limits: weather windows, river levels, daylight, group energy, and safety protocols. Guided well, these constraints become curriculum: how do we make wise choices in a system we cannot fully control? How do we negotiate needs and risks in a group? This is planetary civics at an adolescent scale: practising judgement, foresight and cooperation in a complex environment.
3. Relational pedagogy: teachers as co‑learners
   When teachers and students cook together outdoors, troubleshoot a leaking tarp, or decide whether to push on or rest, status hierarchies shift. Teachers still hold a duty of care, but they become co‑participants in enquiry rather than distant managers. Research on place‑based and Indigenous‑aligned pedagogies shows that such shared work powerfully supports “learning to live together” and “learning to be”: identity, mutual respect, and collective responsibility deepen through experience.

What changed for Mt Clear College – through a planetary civics lens  

Seen this way, what happened with the Victorian school’s Year 8 cohort wasn’t just better behaviour on camp; it was a small-scale experiment in planetary civics.

• Communication: Students had to coordinate paddling, safety, set‑up, and ecological tasks. Talk became purposeful and situational, not just social. Teachers reported that back at school, this “functional communication” carried over into classroom problem‑solving and group work.
• Emotion regulation and resilience: Physical work, rhythm, and time away from phones created conditions where heightened emotions could be met with calm processes rather than instant escalation or escape into devices. This mirrors wider planetary civics goals: staying present and constructive in the face of unsettling realities rather than numbing out.
• Agency and hope: Instead of only hearing about ecological crisis, students saw degraded sites improve over weeks and months. Measurable change in a creek bank or habitat patch is a powerful antidote to abstract eco‑despair. Agency became something they felt in their bodies and not a vague concept.
• Teacher–student relationships: Working side‑by‑side on meaningful tasks made it easier for teachers to see “difficult” students’ strengths: physical competence, practical intelligence, humour under pressure, and care for peers. Those reframed identities gave staff new ways to engage those same students back at school.

For leadership teams, this is the core value proposition: structurally, nothing about the timetable, NAPLAN or reporting changed, yet a targeted, philosophically grounded outdoor program shifted communication patterns, resilience and cohesion in ways the existing internal levers hadn’t.

What school leaders should look for in “outdoor education that works”  

If your school is considering or reviewing camp partnerships, a planetary civics lens can sharpen your criteria. Ask:

• Does this program treat young people as emerging planetary citizens or as consumers of a camp product?
• Is the work regenerative and place‑based, with students making a tangible contribution to local ecologies?
• Are there clear links to curriculum, well-being, and culture, or is camp floating as an isolated event?
• Will teachers be supported as educators and co‑learners, not just supervisors?
• Does the provider have a coherent philosophical grounding , for example, Braidotti’s posthuman/planetary frame, UNESCO’s four pillars, or Indigenous pedagogies?

Up the Creek’s school partnerships are designed with these questions in mind: regenerative river‑based journeys, co‑designed with staff, that aim explicitly to address communication breakdowns, behaviour challenges, and ecological anxiety by practising planetary civics.