Critiquing EOTC in Aotearoa New Zealand: Whiteness and Ideological Framing in Deploying Outdoor Education for Leadership and Teamwork

In Aotearoa New Zealand's educational landscape, Education Outside the Classroom (EOTC) programs are widely celebrated for fostering student engagement, curriculum enrichment, and real-world learning. These initiatives, which include outdoor activities like hiking, camping, and adventure challenges, aim to build key competencies such as resilience, confidence, and 21st-century skills through experiential learning. Programs like the William Pike Challenge Award exemplify this approach, combining EOTC with community service and passion projects to develop leadership among Year 7-8 students. However, a closer examination reveals how EOTC is deployed as an infrastructure for teaching and evaluating teamwork and leadership, often embedding and perpetuating whiteness in its ideological framing. This blog post critiques EOTC's role in NZ school education, exploring the values it centers and the erasures it sustains in a multicultural and bicultural nation.

The Roots of Whiteness in EOTC Deployment

EOTC in New Zealand draws on traditional outdoor education paradigms that have historically been dominated by white, Eurocentric perspectives. Outdoor recreation often projects the "white experience" as the norm, marginalizing minoritized groups and reinforcing exclusionary practices that hinder cross-cultural engagement. In a country where outdoor spaces bear colonial histories—lands dispossessed from Māori iwi and hapū—the emphasis on "exploring New Zealand’s outdoors" can romanticize these environments without acknowledging indigenous connections or ongoing colonization impacts. While EOTC guidelines encourage bicultural elements, such as using te reo Māori terms, this often remains superficial amid broader systemic whiteness in NZ education. The education workforce is predominantly Pākehā (73% in 2021), normalizing curricula that prioritize white norms and leading to discomfort when addressing colonial histories. In EOTC, narratives of triumph through adversity echo colonial tales of conquest, contrasting with collective Māori concepts of resilience tied to whakapapa and whānau.

EOTC as Infrastructure for Leadership and Teamwork: A White-Coded Measure

EOTC serves as a key infrastructure for teaching and evaluating leadership and teamwork, positioning outdoor activities as essential for developing self-belief, collaboration, and problem-solving. Pursuits like mountaineering, camping, and group challenges are framed as universal rites of passage, where leadership emerges from physical endurance and risk-taking. Yet, this infrastructure is deeply structured by whiteness, rooted in colonial influences that tie participation to ideals of exploration and mastery over nature—narratives from European imperialism. For Pākehā participants, these align with accumulated cultural capital, valuing rugged individualism often coded as white and masculine. However, it normalizes outdoor activities as unbiased metrics for leadership without interrogating barriers like socioeconomic costs or cultural relevance, disproportionately affecting Māori, Pasifika, and ethnic migrant families. This perpetuates hierarchies, requiring minoritized students to adapt to white-dominated norms for "success."

Upholding White Misogyny and Patriarchy in EOTC Structures

The structures of EOTC not only embed whiteness but also uphold and perpetuate white misogyny and patriarchy, often by encouraging and rewarding behaviors such as dominance, bullying, and aggression as markers of leadership. Rooted in colonial and patriarchal ideals of conquest and mastery, outdoor activities like mountaineering and group challenges privilege masculine-coded traits—physical strength, risk-taking, and hierarchical command—positioning them as essential for "strong" leadership. This framework intersects with whiteness, as these norms are historically tied to white male explorers and adventurers, normalizing a leadership style that equates dominance with success while marginalizing women, gender-diverse individuals, and people of color.



In practice, EOTC environments can foster aggression and bullying as perverse behaviors that are inadvertently rewarded under the guise of "building resilience" or "team dynamics." For instance, competitive challenges may encourage assertive or domineering actions to "lead" the group, such as overriding others' input or using intimidation to push through decisions, which are then praised as decisive leadership rather than critiqued as harmful. Such dynamics perpetuate white misogyny by reinforcing patriarchal hierarchies where white male participants are more likely to embody and benefit from these traits, while women and people of color face microaggressions, sexual harassment, or exclusionary comments that undermine their contributions. Research highlights how outdoor education fields are rife with sexist slurs, suggestive comments, and microinequities that marginalize participants, turning what should be inclusive spaces into ones that reward behaviors antithetical to equitable leadership. In a multicultural and bicultural world like Aotearoa, this is particularly problematic, as true leadership should emphasize collaboration, cultural humility, and relationality—values rooted in mātauranga Māori and diverse ethnic perspectives—rather than dominance that silences voices. By failing to interrogate these structures, EOTC risks perpetuating cycles of harm, where perverse behaviors like bullying are normalized as "toughening up," ultimately eroding the potential for inclusive, transformative education.

Disenfranchisement of Brown Girls: Intersections of Racism and Sexism in EOTC

EOTC structures, when deployed as measures of leadership, can particularly disenfranchise brown girls—Māori, Pasifika, and other ethnic migrant girls—by perpetuating intertwined systems of racism and sexism that undermine their participation and potential. In these white-coded environments, brown girls often face compounded barriers: cultural disconnects from activities rooted in colonial exploration narratives, alongside gendered expectations that devalue their relational leadership styles in favor of aggressive, individualistic traits. This disenfranchisement manifests in lower engagement, exclusion from decision-making roles, and exposure to racist and sexist microaggressions, such as assumptions of incompetence or hyper-scrutiny of their bodies in outdoor settings.



A critical focus on racism reveals how it becomes normalized within EOTC, particularly through teachers who lack proper pedagogy, skills development, and antiracist training. Predominantly Pākehā educators, operating within a system steeped in white supremacy, may unconsciously uphold racist practices by enforcing white norms as universal, such as prioritizing individual achievement over communal support, which alienates brown girls whose cultural values emphasize whānau and collective well-being. Without antiracist training, teachers fail to interrogate their own white privilege, allowing biases to manifest in differential treatment, such as overlooking brown girls' contributions or attributing their challenges to personal deficits rather than systemic inequities. When the whiteness of these programs is pointed out, responses often veer into white fragility—defensiveness, denial, or deflection—that shuts down dialogue and reinforces the status quo, further entrenching racism and leaving brown girls to navigate hostile spaces without support.



Moreover, reading EOTC and leadership programs as akin to running a survival TV show in the classroom can be exhilarating for some, with its emphasis on high-stakes challenges and endurance tests mirroring shows like "Alone" or "Naked and Afraid." Yet, this analogy highlights a profound lack of understanding of what leadership means in a bicultural and multicultural world. Survival shows prioritize individual grit and competition in contrived scenarios, often dramatized for entertainment, which parallels EOTC's focus on "overcoming adversity" but overlooks the relational, community-oriented values essential for future leadership—kindness, care, love, and collective support that honor diverse cultural epistemologies. In a nation grappling with colonial legacies, this thrill-seeking model fails to prepare students for equitable, empathetic leadership needed to address climate change, social justice, and cultural reconciliation.

Ideological Framing in EOTC Deployment

EOTC is framed as a vital tool for school leadership, providing resources for exceptional experiences aligned with the NZ Curriculum. It promotes a neoliberal ideology where leadership and teamwork are measured by individual adaptability and group perseverance. Yet, this critiques colonial legacies, where education assimilated Māori through white settler norms. Calls for decolonization emphasize mātauranga Māori and challenging white supremacy, but EOTC often individualizes hardship, deflecting from structural inequalities. Resilience in EOTC implies "bouncing back" without addressing root causes like institutional bias. This aligns with white privilege, framing adversity as personal rather than collective oppression.

Values Centered: Individualism and Voluntarism

EOTC centers values like resilience, perseverance, and community service, prioritizing individual growth and self-reliance through adventures and projects. Service emphasizes voluntarism aligned with white, middle-class charity, not transformative justice. This Pākehā worldview perpetuates attitudes from denial to superficial engagement, without dismantling dominance. It aligns with neoliberal reforms favoring child-centered philosophies in teacher training.
Erasures Perpetuated: Indigenous and Migrant Perspectives

EOTC's infrastructure erases by standardizing whiteness, absent explicit Māori epistemologies or histories of land sovereignty. Generic "exploration" treats whenua as neutral, ignoring spiritual significance. It erases collective endurance, like Māori resistance, for depoliticized stories. This mirrors white supremacy persisting through normalized curricula avoiding privilege confrontation.

For ethnic migrant communities and communities of color, EOTC standardizes white norms in teamwork and leadership architectures. Mountaineering and camping, tied to colonial conquest, evaluate through individualism and hierarchy—traits of white supremacy culture like urgency and perfectionism—marginalizing communal approaches in Pasifika, Asian, and other groups. This erases cultural strengths, imposing assimilation and reinforcing underrepresentation due to discrimination and access barriers.

The 2023 Aotearoa New Zealand Histories curriculum underscores addressing colonial impacts, but EOTC can induce "moral liminality" for teachers grappling with whiteness. Without decolonization, it perpetuates superficial equity.
Toward a More Inclusive EOTC

EOTC inspires many, but its deployment demands scrutiny to avoid entrenching individual grit over collective justice. True resilience requires decolonized approaches: integrating mātauranga Māori, confronting white privilege head-on, and sustaining diverse cultures. Only then can EOTC evolve into equitable platforms.