Michel Foucault Goes Outside: Discipline and Control in the Practice of Outdoor Education

Abstract

This paper is concerned with if, and how, measures of discipline and control are involved in outdoor and experiential education. Using the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, author of Discipline and Punish (1975), we shall explore how educational practice may be used to control people and to render them into “docile bodies.” We follow this with an examination of what Foucault calls the three means of correct training used for the creation and maintenance of docile bodies: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgments, and examination. Through the use of examples we will proceed to argue that outdoor and experiential education programs do exercise mechanisms of control that may at times operate contrary to purported goals. Thus, using Foucault as our guide, we examine the question of discipline and control, together with the concomitant issue of the relations of power within our society. While recognizing that discipline and control are, at times, necessary and desirable, we will argue that outdoor and experiential educators should understand how negative relations of power operate so that they may avoid unwittingly incorporating them into their practices and programs.