Ken has been involved in research and writing projects with Dr. Brad Daniel, Executive Director, and Dr. Andrew Bobilya, Director of Training and Education, for over 15 years.
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Ken has been an outdoor educator for over 40 years and is widely known due to his lifelong commitment to wilderness programming and camp ministry. He authored a popular textbook for leadership training titled The Role of the Instructor in the Outward Bound Educational Process. In addition, he has contributed to his profession over the years by conducting leadership training programs, presenting at numerous conferences, and writing journal articles.
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Ken served as assistant professor of Christian education and kinesiology, and year-round program manager at Wheaton College’s HoneyRock campus in northern Wisconsin for 30 years. Among many long-standing programs he developed there, the High Road Wilderness Program served thousands of teenagers, youth at risk, college students, and adults. Later, he served as a professor of outdoor education and outdoor ministry at Montreat College for 10 years, where he coordinated the Outdoor Ministry major and the leadership minor. His three favorite outdoor activities are backpacking, mountaineering, and canoeing.
From a young age, Paul found wild spaces, both local and remote, to be “sanctuaries of reorientation.” Now in his 15th year as an outdoor education professor, he delights in sharing these wild and liminal spaces with his students through travel by foot, ski, and canoe.
Identifying as an Outdoor and Environmental Educator, Paul celebrates the breadth of the Parks and Recreation curricula, noting that in few majors can one simultaneously address physical health, intra/interpersonal authenticity, environmental awareness, existential purpose, and ethical formation.
Much of his own formation has come through extended time in the wilderness, literally years of his life spent sleeping beneath the stars. However, with degrees in the humanities and sciences, not all of his time has been spent outdoors! Paul’s research interests, adventures of a different sort, lie in the relationship of moral philosophy and theology to outdoor experience. These interests culminated in a PhD in Outdoor Education from the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, where he examined character formation on wilderness expeditions from a virtue ethical perspective.
Dr. Stonehouse’s passion to integrate the intellectual life with the outdoor life has allowed him to develop a variety of skills. He has certifications, coursework, and experience in many specialties, including canoeing, Nordic skiing, mountaineering, rock climbing, long-distance hiking, Leave No Trace, and wilderness medicine instruction.