Outdoor leadership education: Do recent textbooks focus on what is important to effective practice?

My research, exploring the theories and practices of facilitator educators, raises some questions about some potential gaps in a number of outdoor leadership texts published in the last five years. Do the authors and editors of these texts focus on the things that are really important to the effective practice of outdoor leadership? Using a naturalistic inquiry approach, I developed a theoretical framework that categorised the different facets of facilitator education programs. One of these facets, the person-centred facilitator education dimension, described the importance of the person of the facilitator when working with groups. In this dimension of facilitator education emerging facilitators are encouraged to develop their self-awareness and an awareness of the ‘importance of being.’ This paper compares the foci of facilitator education programs in my study with the foci of four popular outdoor leadership textbooks. My analysis of the content of these four texts reveals that none of them provide any real focus on what I categorise as the person-centred dimension and the implications of this gap are discussed