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The action of education reform today has impelled schools to take part in the development of mountaineering education, which includes the ‘Mountain Education’, a project developed jointly by me (the Researcher) and an educational sector (the Subject). The course aimed, in one year’s time, to equip a class of 6th graders with certain learning experiences by leading them to prepare for climbing a 3,000-meter mountain. The approach of action research was employed to on the one hand inquire into the social meanings behind the practical experiences of mountaineering education and on the other hand explore what experiences were expected for students to acquire from mountaineering education. Furthermore, the perspective of ecofeminism was adopted to criticize even liberate the knowledge and skills of modern mountaineering, i.e. to examine the patriarchal ideology and the dualism as well as to identify the objectives of mountaineering education in order to equip students with the competency required for ensuring a sustainable and coexisting ecology.
When climbing the mountain, due to limited resources, students had to reprioritize their needs for materials; they were also expected to engage in introspection during the course of learning while leaving behind their convenient lifestyle. Although this research regards the uncertainty featured in mountains and plains as a critical juncture to experience learning in a natural way, mountaineering instructors cannot merely focus upon safety and security issues hence ignore the accumulation of environment-specific experiences while passing on mountaineering knowledge and skills; otherwise, the acquisition of mountaineering gears, knowledge and skills will drive us further down the road of feeling unsafe and unsecured. Departing from the abovementioned inference, mountaineering will only be conducted under the shelter of modern materials and even boost more material consumptions.
The entire teaching crew, i.e. mountaineering instructor(s) and homeroom teacher(s), should firstly teach students to learn mountaineering from their everyday-life experiences in order to acquire the continuous and interactive experiential education then pay attention to the issues making impacts upon their progress and learning. Students ought to be guided and/or inspired to gradually cultivate the capability to adopt a nature-based perspective while thinking or taking actions, acquire experiences from the interaction between their physical bodies and the environment, develop a community of shared life experiences, examine the capability of reflecting upon one’s need for a material-based life and create passion for exploring the environment in order to construct the type of education shaping up the eco-society.
It has been discovered from the mountain education in question that only when mountaineering education included Mother Nature into its core could the learning that lead to an eco-society be happening. Due to the environmental characteristics of mountains and plains, the interaction between mountain climbers and the mountain does make us reflect upon our interpersonal relationships, and the experiences of living in the mountain urge us to further probe into the independence and the commonality of human beings. When a social relation becomes dynamic, when the social relation is the way for human beings to coexist with Mother Nature, that is the meaning of commonality.
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