Learning a landscape enskilment pedagogy and a sense of place

Our goal in this chapter is to pose, and respond to, a deceptively simple question: How do learners learn a landscape? But of course it is, naturally, a deep and profound question that speaks to how humans relate to the landscapes in which they live. Crucially, the question also anticipates how teachers and learners relate to one another. In our role as outdoor educators of pre-service teachers we often find ourselves working in a range of localities using particu-lar activities such as bushwalking, sea kayaking, snorkelling and surfing. It is all too easy to treat the landscapes within which these activities occur as value-neutral venues, as simply a means to achieve personal, social and environmental educational outcomes (Wattchow and Brown 2011). These activities and the landscapes in which they are practised become ahis-torical, rather than activities and locations with long and fascinating cultural histories (Miles and Wattchow 2015). There can be a tendency to abstract learning outcomes and inoculate learners against the influence of the particularities and peculiarities of local places and the activities being undertaken. While this may be done with good intentions, like teaching for generalisable knowledge that can be applied anywhere, our concern is that the essence of doing, knowing and learning gets lost when it becomes disconnected from the land upon which it occur