A young man called Angulalik Pedersen, from the western Nunavut Community of Kugluktuk, won a scholarship to attend high school at Upper Canada College in Toronto. A dream that emerged in the south was to one day take a few of his classmates to his home town. James...
When legendary Canadian solo canoeist Herb Pohl died tragically on Lake Superior in 2007, friends found on his desk a rough memoir about 40 years of wilderness travel that he intended to publish in a book he wanted to call The Lure of Faraway Places. James knew Herb,...
Back in 1909 when educational philosopher Thomas James lamented that the "bracing oxygen of effort" had been surreptitiously removed from education and called for "The Moral Equivalent of War" to compel youth to rise to the challenges of the day with character and...
One of the most often quoted poems in the annals of expeditionary learning is Alfred Lord Tennyson's Ulysses wherein an old sailor is looking back on his life and says "All experience is an arch wherethro' gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades forever and...
Central to James Raffan's educational philosophy is that "you never learn anything of consequence in the fat comfortable middle of what you know ... it is only on the edges of knowledge that you can cross into new learnings." This talk, designed for adventure leaders...
As a leader in Outdoor and Experiential Education, James has often challenged the status quo, insisting that these forms of education will remain marginal until and unless their proponents willingly and enthusiastically enter the educational main stream. This...
As a life-long and award winning experiential educator, James Raffan is a powerful advocate for risk as a central driver of effective education. Using the distinction between public knowledge and personal knowledge, in this engaging keynote—originally prepared for...
This presentation was originally prepared in conjuction with the writing and creation of an exhibit at the Canadian Canoe Museum of the same name that was developed around the appearance, 27 years after the Temiskaming tragedy, of Père Lallemant, one of the four 22'...