Our place in outdoor environments

A way of knowing is an approach to understanding a place through knowledge, values, relationships and practices. The syllabus asks you to describe the listed terms and compare Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives using evidence. It does not require you to assign every person to one fixed outlook. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have diverse, living cultures and knowledge systems; non-Indigenous people also hold varied views.

Use a particular speaker, organisation or text when explaining a perspective, and distinguish its account from a generalisation about everyone.

Country, usually capitalised, refers to ancestral connections with lands, waters and skies and relationships involving people, other living things and cultural knowledge. Common Ground explains that meanings differ among First Nations. Kinship refers to culturally organised relationships and responsibilities, including family networks; the appropriate people and responsibilities differ by community. Learn local meanings from authorised knowledge holders rather than inventing them. Nature has different uses: a text may contrast it with human construction or include humans within ecological relationships.

Explain the meaning used in the particular text instead of treating one definition as every non-Indigenous person’s belief.

Outdoor environments in this study include places with differing degrees of modification, including local school grounds and urban parks as well as more remote settings. Wilderness is used for relatively little-modified landscapes and sometimes for a designated management category. It does not mean a place lacks Indigenous history, care or cultural significance; consult the relevant jurisdiction’s designation rather than assuming a label proves untouched land. Managed parks have management arrangements and visitor rules.

Some Victorian parks are jointly managed with Traditional Owners and held under Aboriginal title, so management, ownership and public access should not be conflated. Private land describes a tenure category; a school must establish the actual access arrangements and permissions for its visit.

Urban environments are town and city settings, which can include waterways and parks. Built environments emphasise human-constructed spaces and structures. These labels can overlap: a school oval may be a built space within a town and also the setting for an outdoor experience. Outdoor experiences are the active or passive activities through which students encounter environments.

The study includes guided activities from local fieldwork to journeys; experiences that replace human effort with weapons or motorised devices are unsuitable under the study design.