Jewish summer camps must hire quality counselors each year. Staff retention is crucial to achieving the mission of Jewish camping; the challenge is that it is often a struggle to retain counselors for more than one to two summers. This study aimed to understand and increase counselor retention for young Gen Z staff, ages 18-22, beyond one to two…

Background: Despite representing half of approximately 1.5 million camp counsellors in the United States, women in outdoor experiential education (OEE) continually face barriers that constrain them to lead according to restrictive gendered expectations. While scholars have studied this issue across a variety of OEE contexts, summer day camps are…

Perhaps one of the most formalized ways that 4-H has fostered agricultural innovation and practical education has been through their outdoor youth education program, more commonly known as 4-H Camp. Although 4-H Camps were first created for local clubs, camping events soon expanded to the state and national levels. In fact, three years after…

Summer camps are an $18 billion industry while providing over 14,000 individual programs in the United States in 2015. Camp counselors, like other outdoor workers, are at risk of occupational solar exposure. Occupational solar exposure increases an individual's lifetime accumulation of solar radiation, leading to skin damage and higher rates of…

Although they commonly are associated with recreation, summer camps for children can be seen as educational arenas that both supplement and challenge school education. Summer camps provide education in a broad sense of "bildung." The article aims at describing what is experienced in summer camps and proposes various theoretical frames…

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the online delivery of an affective curriculum for gifted and talented youth to gain further understanding of its effectiveness and perceived advantages and disadvantages of delivering affective curriculum online. Using convergent parallel mixed-methods design, we evaluated data from 38 secondary…

Outdoor recreation has many benefits for youth. Benefits may be more profound in youth with visual impairments as the involvement in outdoor recreation activities provides improved self-determination and socialization. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to comprehend each participant's lived outdoor recreation experiences,…

High levels of teacher self-efficacy are positively correlated with more job satisfaction, less burnout, and a greater commitment to the profession, however sources of teacher self-efficacy outside of teacher preparation programs are rarely examined. Because formal teacher preparation programs and alternative teacher certification pathways account…

Today's environmental challenges present us with the opportunity to enhance our ability to hear the voices of the more-than-human world. This was an aptitude that was central to our ancestral practices. Efforts to develop pedagogies that redirect our ways of being in the world are emerging under the broad title, "wild pedagogies." This…

This was an exploratory sequential, mixed-methods study that answered two research questions related to how campers defined the camp experience and how exposure to these experiences can be measured. The research questions were divided into two corresponding phases. The first phase employed youth participatory, grounded theory research methods to…

This study investigated the influence of gender, age, and camp type on outcome achievements for children (aged 6 to 10) at summer camp. The outcome achievements measured were affinity for exploration, affinity for nature, camp connectedness, friendship skills, independence, perceived competence, problem-solving confidence, responsibility, and…

In response to academic and healthcare restrictions from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pirate Wellness Program (PWP), a recreational therapy telehealth program, was developed and implemented in May of 2020 by East Carolina University Recreational Therapy (RT) faculty to provide virtual services and interventions to quarantined individuals with…

Although multiple studies have considered women's experiences in the outdoor adventure education field and the impact on women's notions of gender, little research has been conducted on men's ideas about gender in the outdoors. This research explores male-identifying outdoor leaders' notions about masculinity and how they may shape their practice.…

Finding meaning and purpose is critical to emerging adult development. Work can be a setting primed for meaning-making among emerging adults. Meaningful work is work one believes is significant, positive, and adds meaning and purpose to life. Although a robust meaningful work literature exists, little is known about emerging adults' perceptions of…

This research aims to develop the environmental recreation camp activity for youth in Roi-Et province of Thailand, to compare environmental knowledge, environmental attitudes before and after participating in the camp, as will as their participating in Environment Recreation camp activities during and after participating in the camp of youths with…