Urban youth and outdoor learning: Including environmental justice perspectives into sport-for-development programming


Greg Yerashotis, Trent University

This article examines the learning experiences of urbanized immigrant youth who took part in an outdoor education component of a Sport-for-Development (SfD) program. Operated through an intersectoral partnership between the City of Toronto and the University of Toronto from 2017-2019, youth spent multiple weekends at the Hart House Farm, a University of Toronto-owned education facility located on the Niagara Escarpment. Drawing from participant-observation, focus group interviews and photo voice, we analyze if, how, and why participation affected youth at personal, social, and political levels. The findings of the study speak to calls from within SfD for a renewed environmental politics, namely by showcasing how augmenting traditional SfD programs with aspects of outdoor education can lead to more ‘transformative’ forms of social learning and development. In more detail, the findings of the study were threefold. First, we found that providing urban youth with access to the outdoors facilitated a new appreciation of the natural world. Previously, many of the young people in the study had an aversion to spending time in ‘the outdoors.’ These negative preconceptions about outdoor leisure highlight how barriers to environmental access emerge not only from restrictive structural forces—i.e., exclusion through class or race—but also from culturally enabling memes that lead youth to consciously avoid seeking available opportunities. Providing youth with opportunities to break through these intersecting barriers was therefore a critical first step to any potential benefits they may garner from access to the outdoors. By bridging structural and cultural barriers to the Canadian outdoors, it enabled youth to form new appreciations for how to live with and alongside the natural world. Second, we found that the trip supported youth’s sense of wellness. We found that the trip afforded and provided youth the time they needed to gain some perspective on their life stressors and the space to undergo forms of self-reflection/introspection. This often occurred through ‘holistic’ natural experiences, which allowed them to find transcendental forms of meaning that are known to support emotional wellness and facilitate personal growth. Third, the study highlights how the trip fostered what we refer to as a form of ‘ecological thought’ in youth. By this, we mean that in forming a deeper connections with the natural world and with each other, their experience at Hart House Farm expanded their political worldviews around matters of environmental justice and sustainability. The context in which it occurred clearly demonstrates how non-formal learning environments are well-suited to promote feelings of social responsibility in young people, which formal educational environments often fail to impart on them (Breunig and Rylander 2016). In this case, we found support for preliminary investigations into how programming in the outdoors can foster an awareness of issues around environmental justice (e.g., Maria-Jose Ramirex et al. 2020). These findings speak simultaneously to two calls from within the SfD field. Namely, the results address the need to establish deeper connections between SfD and issues of environmental justice (Darnell 2019; Giulianotti et al. 2019; Millington and Darnell 2020), and to generate more ‘socially transformative visions’ for sport-based youth programming (Coakley 2011; Hartmann and Kwauk 2011). Augmenting a traditional sport-for-development program with non-formal outdoor education and recreation generated unique program effects that are unlikely to occur in traditional sport spaces (Coakley 2011), or even in classroom environments (Breunig and Rylander 2016). The initiative described here not only supported youth’s wellness and provided a platform for personal growth, but also extended beyond the individual level to include socio-political development. Integrating non-formal outdoor education into sport- plus -development program models (Coalter 2013) may therefore be an important resource for SfD to make meaningful contributions to the environmental movement. Indeed, while other studies have highlighted the potential role of SfD programs in teaching social responsibility on communal levels (Kope and Arellano 2017; Wright 2016), we extend this finding to include the actual acquisition of socio-environmental justice perspectives. These findings also align with core themes of this year’s conference, namely regarding the relationship between diversity and racialization with sustainable futures. Indeed, given the diverse backgrounds of the youth involved in this study, we must also appreciate these findings in light of the growing criticisms of the environmental movement and outdoor education as being comprised of predominantly ‘white,’ middle-class individuals (Curnow 2017; Gauthier, Joseph and Fusco 2021; Gibson-wood and Wakefield 2013). Our study has shown that when programs provide access to, and opportunities for diverse youth to connect with the natural world, concerns over environmental justice may positively respond to the limiting categories of race, culture, and class. Providing equitable access to natural environments should therefore be regarded as a social right of citizenship that all young people should be afforded in Canada— not only for the benefit of those youth, but also for society at large.

Non-presenting author: Simon Darnell, University of Toronto

This paper will be presented at the following session: