Kayakers: Gery Lovász
Viristar’s Director, Jeff Baierlein, has been invited to give a keynote presentation at the 2023 Outdoor Forum for South East Asian Schools (OFFSEAS) conference, to be held next month at Tanglin Trust School in Singapore.
The theme for the gathering is Current Trends in Outdoor Learning—A New Age. Workshops are focusing on the resumption of trips and outdoor travel experiences as COVID-related restrictions are relaxed in Asia and globally.
Jeff’s presentation will be on International Adventure Standards and Risk Domains.
The presentation will explore how incidents occur on outdoor programmes, and how they can be prevented. It will take a look at models of incident causation, including AcciMap and the Risk Domains model, and explore what the best available contemporary safety science says about designing risk management approaches to prevent and mitigate incidents on outdoor adventures.
The keynote will also cover how schools and providers can use international adventure standards to understand good safety practice. It will look at activity-specific (governing body) standards like those of Singapore Sport Climbing and Mountaineering Federation, industry association standards like those from OLAE and AEE, and international consensus standards like those from ISO and CEN.
Participants will understand how to design an outdoor safety system applying relevant standards and contemporary models in incident prevention.
Outdoor education in Bali, Indonesia. Image: Kenny Peavy
About OFFSEAS
OFFSEAS provides a platform for outdoor educators, field trip organisers and outdoor practitioners to learn, share and gain new inspiration in the field of outdoor education. OFFSEAS helps outdoor education professionals develop collegial relationships and camaraderie, and support the outdoor education sector across South East Asia and beyond. The organization is led by volunteers, often coming from international schools in Thailand, Singapore, and other East Asian locations.
OFFSEAS was founded in 2012 by a group of outdoor educators from seven South East Asian international schools who sought to create a platform to share good outdoor education and experiential learning practice, for the benefit of the thousands of K-12 learners in the region. Since its establishment, OFFSEAS has been growing rapidly, and has seen participants from the Maldives, India, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and across Asia and beyond.
OFFSEAS is typically held every year, but was interrupted by the pandemic. Viristar attended the last in-person OFFSEAS event, in May 2019, which was held at the Shrewsbury International School Bangkok Riverside. Viristar also presented at the virtual OFFSEAS event in May of 2022.
Viristar has a partnership with OFFSEAS where members of the OFFSEAS community can get an attractive discount on Viristar’s Risk Management for Outdoor Programs course. Outdoor and experiential professionals in the OFFSEAS network and in over 50 countries around the world have participated in Viristar’s acclaimed outdoor safety training.