Outdoor Adventures | National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education | Teen Adventures | EMT Training
  • About
  • Videos
  • Blog
  • Contact

(910) 399-8090

  • Courses
    • Alaska
    • Patagonia
    • Ecuador
    • Himalayas
    • North Carolina
    • Pacific Northwest
    • Instructor Course
  • Medical Training
    • Emergency Medicine
    • Wilderness Medicine
  • Custom Programs
  • Become an NCOAE Field Instructor
September 22 2017

Staff Profile: NCOAE Fall 2017 Intern Adam Parish

By NCOAE Headquarters on September 22, 2017 Leave a Comment
  • Posted in:
  • Staff Profiles
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

North Carolina native Adam Parish hails from a coastal town called Newport that is located about 100 miles northeast of our headquarters in Wilmington. He attends the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, where he is majoring in recreation, sports leadership and tourism management — a degree he expects to pick up next spring.

Prior to accepting an internship position here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE), Adam was a marine science technician with the United States Coast Guard. Our newest intern says his favorite pastimes include surfing, hunting, kayaking, and exercising.

As we often do on our blog, today we offer a brief and very informal synopsis of our newest NCOAE staffer. With that being said, and the only serious question posed at the outset of the interview, below are some winsome, hardly worthwhile queries we placed before our new intern. They’re included here mostly for our edification and entertainment, as well as for “look back material” that we can reference when Adam makes it to the big time in the field outdoor- and adventure-based experiential education:

NCOAE: Why did you apply to be an NCOAE intern, and what do

…

Continue Reading
September 06 2017

2 Words When Natural Disaster Threatens Your Outdoor Campus: Be Prepared

By NCOAE Headquarters on September 6, 2017 Leave a Comment
  • Posted in:
  • Risk Management
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

For those of us who work day in and day out at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education’s (NCOAE) headquarters in Wilmington, N.C., tropical storms and hurricanes are part of our environment.

Just last year, Hurricane Matthew paid our campus a visit — right in the middle of a three-week campus-based course. But just like the Boy Scouts, we place a great deal of stock in their motto: Be Prepared.

By the time that hurricane came roaring through, we had battened down the hatches at our headquarters facilities and moved everyone enrolled in the three-week training to the Raleigh Durham area where they finished out their course. By communicating that potential change far enough in advance, no one was surprised. Our students finished their certification program on time and were safe in doing so.

And now Hurricane Irma looms on the horizon, threatening to make landfall along our coastline sometime next week. According to the latest National Hurricane Center reports, Florida could face direct impacts, with potential paths for the storms including a move further east to encompass the Carolinas and the East Coast. Mandatory evacuations have already been ordered for the Florida Keys.

Outdoor education programs — especially those accredited by the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) — are well versed on what to do in the case of a backcountry emergency or disaster. But how do you prepare for a natural disaster on your own property?

Below are 14 tips that we undertake and suggest for other outdoor education programs facing a disaster that might affect their properties:

Continue Reading
August 25 2017

Your School’s Next Custom Outdoor Education Program Starts Soon

By Stephen Mullaney on August 25, 2017 Leave a Comment
  • Posted in:
  • Custom Programs
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

You don’t have to look at a calendar to know summer is quickly drawing to a close. Look at the traffic in your hometown. Notice anything different? How about the roads leading to and from local or regional shopping malls and big box stores? With most kids and their parents hitting the stores — or the Internet — in order to get properly outfitted for the school year, the telltale signs of the fall semester are all readily available.

What’s equally important as preparing for a new school year is planning ahead for personal end-of-year adventures that can keep you motivated over the next three-and-a-half months (or in the case of spring semester adventures — eight-and-a-half months) of textbooks, term papers, quizzes, and preparing for 45-minute lectures.

Outdoor Education Student Circle

With some wise planning and a vow to battle procrastination, you can have a pretty good notion as to how you’re going to spend your next holiday or seasonal break from the classroom. And by having all your ducks in a row way before the end of the year, you’ll be rewarded by having that much more time to daydream about the adventure ahead.

As for group programs at the end of this coming academic semester or year, private schools and public school districts all across the nation have already designed and implemented

Continue Reading
August 14 2017

Education Shouldn’t Stop Once We’ve Returned from the Trailhead

By Stephen Mullaney on August 14, 2017 Leave a Comment
  • Posted in:
  • Experiential Education
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Outdoor and adventure-based education programs are designed to take students out of their home environment and place them in outdoor settings where they can experience adventures — adventures that highlight challenges, the need for having empathy for others, as well as the need to develop characteristics that can result in a new generation of community leaders and stewards of our environmental resources.

A huge task to be sure, but one of the ideas behind everything we do here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE), is that our students (and adult course participants) will walk out of the backcountry feeling stronger — both mentally and physically.

Following an adventure-based experiential education experience, we tell those we teach and guide that they are now better-prepared to go out and apply what they have learned in order to protect the natural environment, improve their own communities, and accept the challenges and rigors associated with their own education. But what happens when high school seniors brush themselves off at the end of such an adventure and decide they want to make that move to enroll in a college or university, only to discover the doors are shut to them.

What if the obstacles to their future success include

Continue Reading
July 22 2017

A Photograph Is Seldom Worth Even One Outdoor Education Experience

By Stephen Mullaney on July 22, 2017 Leave a Comment
  • Posted in:
  • Outdoor Education
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Here’s an exchange that recently occurred between a tourist and myself:

“What kind of camera do you use?”

“What?”

“What kind of camera do you use to show people what you’ve done?”

“I don’t,” I replied as I stepped onto the beach, board tucked under my arm, ready to paddle out to the surfline.

The woman appeared a bit confused by my answer, possibly perplexed that I wasn’t carrying a GoPro or waterproof camera on my morning adventure.

I recall as a kid we used to watch documentaries in school and read articles about cultures where the inhabitants refused to be photographed for fear it would steal their souls. We were amazed — and a little amused — that a primitive tribe or ancient community could believe that a small box that lets in light could actually snatch a soul.

NCOAE student on a recent Education Without Walls course in AlaskaNCOAE student on a recent Education Without Walls course in Alaska

Nobody’s stealing souls, we said. We all just seek memories. Something to show others where we’ve been and what we’ve accomplished, uncovered or learned. And, while flipping through magazines, that’s what we saw. Other people’s adventures.

But today, things are becoming a little more like the tribes fearing the loss of their souls.

Whether in the surf, on the trail or gazing at the pristine surroundings from atop a mountain, we’re constantly surrounded by people actively

Continue Reading
June 22 2017

Summer Vacation: When the Real Education Begins

By Stephen Mullaney on June 22, 2017 Leave a Comment
  • Posted in:
  • Outdoor Education Research
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

The final bell has rung and children at public and private schools across the nation have cleaned out their lockers and headed out the doors and hopefully, outdoors.

Some of these children are departing schools that rarely allow their students to get down and dirty in the outside world — such as Polaris Charter Academy on Chicago’s West Side, where the school’s 450 students had been kept indoors due to fears associated with gun violence. In other parts of the country, fewer students get the opportunity to truly explore the world outside the playground or even lie down in the grass and point out the significance of cloud formations above.

These same schools, for a variety of reasons, don’t take the time to schedule impromptu short excursions to neighboring parks and wilderness areas, teaching students the names of native birds, plants and trees, pointing out urban and suburban wildlife, or following a slow-moving creek to a larger, more rapid tributary.

But just because most schools don’t fill that obligation doesn’t mean families can’t take over the job now that summer has arrived. The objective is to send these kids back to school in the fall — freshly cleaned up and rested — with heads full of new connections to the natural world.

So how do our children and students truly benefit from outdoor and adventure education? Here’s a short list of the positive attributes of wilderness exploration:

Continue Reading
June 06 2017

How and Why to Remove Junk Food from Your Backpack

By Stephen Mullaney on June 6, 2017 Leave a Comment
  • Posted in:
  • Backcountry Prep
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

“What’s fructose? What’s GMO? What do these words mean?

These are some of the questions my 9-year-old daughter asked me last June as the family shopped for good snacks for a backpacking trip. By July, my daughter had vowed to stop eating food with “junk” in it. And to date, she has kept her word.

Take a tour of your local grocery store, and peruse the list of ingredients on the back or side of the packaging of many of those so-called healthy snacks. You might be unpleasantly surprised to find that an abundance of these products tout themselves as containing all natural ingredients, when in actuality they contain just the opposite.

It’s a bad habit, but often when we shop for those “in-between foods” (between meals), we’ll grab up what looks good or is easy to pack. Or we find ourselves purchasing items out of habit or convenience. But the truth is on the trail:
Sugary, high-calorie snacks never translate into positive energy.
Time for Change

We’ve all experienced the benefits of using

Continue Reading
Prev
  • 1
  • …
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • …
  • 14
Next

Get Blog Posts by Email

Categories

  • About NCOAE (11)
  • Academic Credit (4)
  • Adult Courses (4)
  • Adventure Education (3)
  • AEE (3)
  • Backcountry Prep (8)
  • Blog (1)
  • Campfire Conversations (1)
  • Conferences (6)
  • Custom Programs (8)
  • Education Without Walls (10)
  • EMT Training (3)
  • Experiential Education (2)
  • Funding News (4)
  • In The News (4)
  • International Expeditions (4)
  • Land Management (4)
  • Life At NCOAE (7)
  • NCOAE Curriculum (8)
  • NCOAE Recommends (10)
  • Outdoor Education (5)
  • Outdoor Education News (5)
  • Outdoor Education Research (3)
  • Outdoor Educator Training (3)
  • Outdoor Equipment (2)
  • Risk Management (4)
  • Staff Profiles (15)
  • Student Profiles (1)
  • Teen Courses (4)
  • Training & Certifications (4)
  • Wilderness (3)
  • Wilderness Cooking (5)
  • Wilderness First Responder Training (1)
  • Wilderness Medicine Training (3)
  • Working at NCOAE (9)

Search

Recent Posts

  • Give the Gift of Adventure This Holiday Season December 4, 2019
  • Winter Camping Offers an Exciting Challenge to Your Comfort Level November 18, 2019
  • NCOAE Recommends: Outdoor Films for Thanksgiving Consumption November 4, 2019
  • Shoulder Season Doesn’t Mean You’re Doomed to Binge-watching Netflix October 17, 2019
  • Recommended Reads: Turning the Page on Adventure September 27, 2019

Tags

A-EMT Training Accreditation AEE AEE International Conference Alaska AMGA Annual Meeting Backpacking Bears Ears Campfire Celine Adair College Credit Custom Course Donations Education Without Walls Elizabeth Shirley Employment Opportunities EMT-Basic Holly Goddard Jones Hurricane Florence Instructor Candidate Course Julius McAdams Leave No Trace Matt Evans National Park Service NCOAE Curriculum Nepal Osprey Packs Outdoor Educator Course Outdoor Industry Association Outdoor Retailer Patagonia Risk Management Stephen Mullaney Summer to School Transition Tents The Salt Line UNCW University of North Carolina Wilmington Vertex Outreach Services Vertex Railcar Corp. Wesley Hawkins Whole Foods Market Wilderness First Responder Wilderness Risk Management Conference Zac Adair

Archives

  • December 2019 (1)
  • November 2019 (2)
  • October 2019 (1)
  • September 2019 (2)
  • August 2019 (1)
  • July 2019 (2)
  • June 2019 (1)
  • May 2019 (2)
  • April 2019 (2)
  • March 2019 (2)
  • January 2019 (1)
  • December 2018 (2)
  • November 2018 (1)
  • October 2018 (2)
  • September 2018 (2)
  • August 2018 (1)
  • July 2018 (1)
  • June 2018 (2)
  • May 2018 (3)
  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (2)
  • January 2018 (1)
  • December 2017 (2)
  • November 2017 (1)
  • October 2017 (1)
  • September 2017 (2)
  • August 2017 (2)
  • July 2017 (1)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (2)
  • January 2017 (2)
  • December 2016 (3)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (2)
  • August 2016 (1)
  • July 2016 (2)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (2)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (2)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (1)
  • November 2015 (1)
  • October 2015 (1)
  • September 2015 (1)
  • August 2015 (3)
  • July 2015 (1)
  • June 2015 (1)
  • May 2015 (2)
  • April 2015 (2)
  • March 2015 (1)
  • February 2015 (2)
  • January 2015 (1)
  • December 2014 (2)
  • November 2014 (3)
  • October 2014 (3)
  • September 2014 (4)
  • August 2014 (6)
  • July 2014 (5)
  • June 2014 (1)
  • May 2014 (2)
  • April 2014 (2)
  • March 2014 (2)
  • February 2014 (5)
  • January 2014 (3)
  • December 2013 (1)
Outdoor Adventures | National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education | Teen Adventures | EMT Training
AEE Accredited since 2015
AEE Accredited since 2015
  • Contact
  • Phone: (910) 399-8090
  • Fax: (888) 399-5957
  • Email: info@ncoae.org
  • Admissions Disclosures
  • Refund & Transfer Policy
  • Essential Eligibility Criteria
  • Quick Links
  • About
  • Videos
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Courses
  • Medical Training
  • Custom Programs
  • Become an NCOAE Field Instructor
  • Communicate
  • Contact
  • Website Feedback
  • Leave a Review
  • Submit Testimonial
  • Affiliations and Resources
  • Request a Catalog
  • Blog
  • Upcoming Education Courses / Limited Availability
  • Image of NCOAE students whitewater rafting.

    Pacific Northwest | Backpacking & Whitewater | Teen Adventure

    • 14 days
    • Jun 19, 2020 - Jul 02, 2020
    • Jul 10, 2020 - Jul 23, 2020
    • Jun 18, 2021 - Jul 01, 2021
    • Jul 09, 2021 - Jul 22, 2021
    • 4 Spots Available

    Patagonia | Gap Year/Semester

    • 84 days
    • Sep 01, 2020 - Nov 23, 2020
    • 2 Spots Available
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions of Use

©2019. The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE). All rights reserved.

  • Courses
    • Alaska
    • Patagonia
    • Ecuador
    • Himalayas
    • North Carolina
    • Pacific Northwest
    • Instructor Course
  • Medical Training
    • Emergency Medicine
    • Wilderness Medicine
  • Custom Programs
  • Become an NCOAE Field Instructor
  • About
  • Videos
  • Blog
  • Contact