ABSTRACT
Many workers engaged with youth justice programmes, youth work and alternative curricula have taken the activity-based approach, seeing adventure learning as route to individuals growing healthier emotionally, socially and spiritually through informal learning. Embedding adventure learning into a curriculum involves curricular, cross-curricular and extra-curricular learning; in other words, adventure learning is holistic, not only teaching a topic in itself, but linking it with other subjects and developing knowledge and understanding beyond that which may lie in the curriculum. When responsibility for the adventure learning session is delegated outside the learning organisation, when it is handed to a professional organisation with a menu of pre-determined activities, teachers see it as break from their normal routine and disengage from it. Physical education is wedded to adventure learning through the process of actively engaging in an activity, but there the similarity ends; it is an integral part of the school curriculum, but within the silo method is designed towards team sport and competition.
