Key Note Speaker Eeva Mäkelä

Resilience – Adventure Educator’s Future Competence in a Changing World

Traditionally outdoor and adventure educator’s competencies are divided into hard and soft skills. Hard skills include competences in technical skills and risk management. Soft skills are often considered skills for instructing and leading. When educators combine these skills in practice and aim for a meaningful educational process, one also needs facilitation skills with reflection knowledge.

When training future adventure education professionals, it is important to recognize also the new needs for competence selection. The aim in training is to convey such competences to the students that give them abilities to plan and execute activities in a safe and goal-oriented manner, and give them the tools and understanding to face people in this constantly changing and unstable world. In training program curricula, we should add growing emphasis on topics such as self-reflection, resilience and emotional intelligence, in order to better support students for uncertain future. Studying and understanding the importance of these topics will benefit our future adventure and outdoor educators themselves and especially give them competencies to work with their future target groups.

My presentation will enlighten how we at Humak bring up topics such as tolerance for adversity and uncertainty and resilience, and how the theoretical basis of the studies is incorporated with the experiences from our field trips.

Speaker:

Eeva Mäkelä (M.Soc.Sc) works as a senior lecturer at Humak University of Applied Sciences and teaches adventure and outdoor education. She started her educator career with National Outdoor Leadership School and has been teaching and co-developing Humak’s adventure education programmesfor 20 years. She also works an avalanche instructor and ski guide in Northern Scandinavia.