Are they ready? A narrative literature review of pre-program physical and social-emotional preparation for adolescent outdoor education participants

In this narrative literature review, we describe the physical and social-emotional preparation activities utilised by outdoor education providers to prepare their participants for their programs. We aimed to gather best practice evidence from the literature to inform Australian and international educators as they prepare future outdoor education participants. We used a specific narrative literature review approach to increase the rigour of findings to discuss the data from studies that met our inclusion criteria related to pre-outdoor-education-program preparation. As a result of this approach, we categorised the data into two main areas (physical preparation and social-emotional preparation) and discussed their findings. We describe the study’s implications, make recommendations for practitioners looking to incorporate preparatory activities into their pre-program activities, and make suggestions for future research in this area.