Why Outdoor Adventure?

Simon Knight and Dave Anderson

Why spend large amounts of scarce cash on sending young people away, to try activities that the vast majority of them will never try again and may not enjoy doing, getting cold, wet and muddy in the process? What's more, why use up curricular time to do this when the are so many 'more important' uses to be made of it?
George Mallory, the Everest pioneer, when asked for his motivation for attempting to reach the summit of the highest mountain in the world, and answered, "Because it's there". No further justification was necessary.

In the past, we could answer our question "Why Adventure?" with, "Because it's enjoyable and satisfying" or maybe just, "Why not?". The wider agendas of Education and the consequent demands and expectations, had not yet been heaped on to it. The benefits of Outdoor Adventure were implicit and could be left at that. Today, Mallory's answer would unfortunately not generate the necessary funding for his expedition, and we too must, to an extent, play justification game as well.
Proponents of Outdoor Adventure must be able to explain what benefits their activities bring to participants. Particularly the ones who are paid for from the public purse.

The Active Ingredients of Outdoor Adventure

Change of Environment:

A change of environment can impact on young people in many ways. The residential experience alone can be the first time away from home for many. Away from their parents and siblings, young people have to act in a more self sufficient way. Adjusting to new routines and expectations exerts pressure to be more practically and emotionally independent. Being away from home, closer to nature, brings a variety of new challenges. I've lost count of the times I've been asked where the toilet is, when at the top of some mountain. But thinking ahead for yourself and dealing with situations as they arise, are important developmental steps.

Emotionally too, a degree of self sufficiency is needed. For young people who are use to having their parents close at hand, there is a certain shock at what is now expected of them. The realisation that now, they have to function to a much higher degree, as an independent individual draws out aspects of their character that they were unconscious of before.

The new demands, of the outdoor environment, help bring out other new strengths, in young peoples well. Just because you're not the best at football, maths or fighting, doesn't mean that you have to be scared of heights or can't pull up your own body weight. Very often, different participants shine, allowing them acknowledgement from their peers that they have never experienced before. We find that, in general, being out in a strange, often alien situation, is a great leveller. This aspect of the outdoors can draw out unexpected outcomes. It's up to the adults to manage them, if necessary.

Facilitative Leadership:

Balancing leadership style can be very difficult. Many activities, such as climbing or gorge walking, require a qualified adult to be central to the group. Less specialist challenges or problem solving and group building activities often depend on minimal adult intervention for their success.

There is a level of debate around this area though. Many outward bound theoreticians maintain that, although other elements contribute to learning, it is the Instructor to student and the Instructor to group interactions that are central to the growth experience, (Kalisch, 1979). But it is fair to say that just as many express the exact opposite, (Hunt,1989). Roger Greenaway, the prolific writer on everything related to the outdoor adventure experience holds that, "....staff tend to over-rate the impact of their direct influence." (Greenaway, 1995).

There can be little disagreement with the need for instructors if we only consider skills. To perform you need skills and you learn these from someone who knows. When looking at other areas of development however (the areas that many of us as, non-club orientated providers, are interested in), leadership needs to take a step backwards and adopt more of a facilitative role.

Group processes tend to occur naturally on outdoor programmes. Apart from safety and maintaining a level of useful 'task' direction, leaders must leave enough space for interaction by young people to continue relatively unfettered. Not only are the young people away from home, but there is an opportunity to lift the oppressive supervision that stifles many children these days. Much of this aspect is independent of the particulars of the activity.

Supportive Group:

"A common experience shared by a group should never be underestimated for it's ability to facilitate a sense of unity and belonging."
(Bunting, 1990)

To adult observers, groups of young people can appear to be anything but supportive. They 'slag' each other all the time and often do pretty unpleasant things to each other.

'Support' however, can take different forms that are not necessarily intended to be supportive. Thinking back to the levelling nature of the environment, the exchange of banter that accompanies the 'weakest' group member succeeding where the 'strongest' failed, is a learning experience for all involved. Support or pressure, as it is sometimes negatively understood, can have physical as well as emotional aspects.
The group pressure to attempt an activity that perhaps terrifies, can lead to success, where individually failure would have occurred. Often situations like this occur during inter-group competitions. Winning is based not on the first but the last to complete the task. Resolving individual desires with group needs, (or 'citizenship') experientially cultivates interpersonal skills that are much harder to teach traditionally. In fact despite the effort that goes into citizenship classes in school, it is true to say that, most of this learning can't be taught but has to be experienced.
Thinking back again to the impact of 'environment'. The residential setting brings with it a range of shared experiences for young people also. In addition to it's individual aspects, close group living brings the need to share day to day tasks, duties and the lighter moments of community accommodation.

Overcoming A Fear:

This is perhaps the most individualistic component of outdoor adventure that we have identified. It is self orientated and internally measured, but the process allows further participation.

The model above describes the 'feelings' aspect of the Outdoor Adventure process as it relates to ability. The objective of Outdoor Adventure activities, is to take people from the 'comfort zone', where they can easily cope with an activity without feeling anxious, into the 'adventure zone', where thrills and spills can excite. Make the activity too challenging and you enter the 'panic zone', and the activity can become dysfunctional.

As each skill or experience is attempted and accomplished, the elasticity of the 'adventure zone' comes into play. Previous activities become 'comfortable' and move correspondingly from the 'adventure zone' into the 'comfort zone', while the 'adventure zone' draws on activities that were previously within the 'panic zone'. It is a model of increasing competency.

Mastering skills allows young people to move through this model. The journey comprises of physical and emotional aspects, both allowing participants to generate a sense of accomplishment. Many of the skills developed during outdoor adventure are transferable and lead to a young person being better able to cope with everyday life, e.g. perhaps being called names at school can be better contextualised if a young person has survived a rapid water capsize.

Adventure and fear can happen at different levels and in various situations. Theme park rides are specialist 'thrill' machines, but quite unidimensional for our purposes. They do, on the other hand, allow participants to 'prove' their valour by testing themselves against a fear standard, which is a growth experience.

Areas Of Debate

"Adventure education has a responsibility for that area of curiosity, wonder and experiment that formal education could not and should not provide."
(Charlton, 1985)

Social Panacea:

Education is seen today as a kind of social 'panacea'. What was a process of equipping children with knowledge that they needed for adult life, has today, been reposed as the solution to social problems, or 'social exclusion' as issues are collectively termed. Apart from placing unreasonable expectations upon teachers and youth workers, this new role pressurises time, space and activities, that for young people were once informal and 'free'. We are already seeing the American trend towards reducing break time or 'recess', or formalising it entirely by reprogramming it as 'physical education', beginning to happen this side of the Atlantic. Informal, unregulated, unsupervised time is essential for children to develop certain social skills (Youniss, 1999).

Outdoor Adventure is under the same kind of pressure and this leads to additional problems. What was once an informal extra, a week away from school during term time, has become drawn into the curriculum. Where, in addition to individual developmental gains, it was a useful supplement to teaching and smoothed pupil/teacher relationships, it now has to meet prescribed demands, such as environmental and personal and social development courses. Core skills of communication, cooperation, trust and emotional wellbeing all need evidence of competence. This 'over programmes' time, resulting in a squeeze on informal learning.

If the developmental aspects of Outdoor Adventure that we have already highlighted: change of environment; facilitative leadership; supportive group and overcoming a fear, are also made 'core', check listed and given boxes for each participant (that need to be ticked), then the farce of formalising the informal becomes stark. Does a child pass or fail the 'overcoming a fear' component? Were they really scared? Can a supportive group be guaranteed? How to measure it's supportive aspects if we get one?

In formalising Outdoor Adventure the industry gains much kudos and much needed patronage, but we need to balance this against what may be lost in the process. When we formalise, we often lose the fun that an activity had. Learning that is important and necessary doesn't automatically have to be 'serious'. Fun for young people is a major motivating factor.

Further to the loss of fun, is the reduced level of control that young people have. If young people know that they are involved in a monitored activity, then they will behave very differently than if they were on their own. They don't control what's going on and therefore develop social competencies that would be needed if here were no adult around.

Social Vaccine:

If Education, by Government decree, has become a panacea, then the active agent in this cure is 'self esteem'. Helping young people develop their self esteem is now a major aspect of Education, not least the outdoor curriculum. In fact the Government has made developing self esteem the key component of the Outdoor Adventure part of the curriculum. This represents a shift in focus from past understanding of the benefits of the outdoors and one that is to the detriment of young people.

Self esteem is a very elastic term. There are as many definitions of it as there are people who try to define it. Generally however, it is understood within the context of 'problematised youth'. As an understanding of the reasons why, with equality of access and encouragement and assistance to pursue socially acceptable directions, certain young people are still exhibiting socially problematic behaviour. Lack of, or low self esteem, is commonly accepted as the reason behind these problems, with initiatives to redress the deficiency as the solution.

Self esteem, by definition, is a very personally based concept. It can only ever be subjectively measured and improvements in it, as a goal, turn young people in on themselves, i.e. personal changes rather than social comparison. Outdoor Adventure on the other hand has always been about orientating young people to external criteria as a source for their identity. Terms from the past, such as 'character building' and 'self reliance', had the wider world as their reference point, providing young people with a social measure of their progress. The self esteem model is 'feelings' determined and thus can be entirely separate from reality.

With self esteem as the goal, Government sponsored Outdoor Adventure has a much narrowed focus and in fact loses it's adventure agenda altogether. The necessity for esteem generating, guaranteed success, results in the abolition of potential failure. What's left is outdoor banality, boredom within the 'comfort zone'. In circumstances of constant success, young people also derive an unrealistic opinion of their abilities. Failure is an important rendezvous with reality and acts as a spur to improve ones self next time.

In the rarefied world of self esteem, young people can grow up thinking that they are much more competent than they actually are. And that their own happiness is of paramount importance. Their narcissism will often have little connection to reality and the adult world increasingly validates this self referencing.

Danger In Safety:

"...risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing,
the person who risks nothing does nothing, has nothing, is nothing.
They may avoid suffering and sorrow,
but they cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love or live.
Chained by their certainties they are slaves,
they have forfeited their freedom.
Only a person who risks is free."
unknown author
quoted by Peter Barnes in 'Theory Into Practice'

The developing 'compensation culture', in which we all operate, has to be challenged. Not only is it impacting dramatically on what activities adults are making available to young people, it is changing provision, thus losing the real growth opportunities that we have tried to explore. The fear and deference to guidelines and insurance statements that it creates in adults who do attempt to offer outdoor activities and trips, engenders informal learning in young people that is destructive. Compensation culture promotes suspicion and conflict and directly undermines relations of trust and a sense of personal responsibility.

Risk and danger are an intrinsic part of outdoor adventure. Parents are understandably concerned about their child's safety - but perceptions and reality often diverge. Listening to children's stories develop on the minibus going home, you would think that death had been but a whisker away - parents' jaws must drop when they hear the child's version of events. But here's the secret: outdoor adventure has the potential to be dangerous but is in fact very safe. Because of the potential for accidents workers have always assessed risk with a view to being safe.
Increasingly tight insurance requirements, demanded due to the prevalence of the 'if in doubt claim' ethos, have acted to reduce the level of adventure that can be offered. Correspondingly the beneficial experiences available to young people are diminished and become mundane.

Further more, defensive action by service providers, who often tighten up activities unnecessarily, create a sense of, "what was wrong with it before?", with parents. This undermines trust in the professionalism of outdoor workers, youth workers or teachers who run trips.

The compensation culture doesn't believe in accidents. All mishaps have a traceable line of cause and thus are avoidable. Cause leads to fault and so on to blame. And blame equals compensation. In this context the system of no win, no fee action by certain lawyers, results in a diminished sense of personal responsibility. People are encouraged to search for someone else to blame for their misfortunes. Growing up is partly about learning to take responsibility for yourself, compensation culture 'babifies' young people (see Furedi 2001).

End Of The School Trip?

Despite Outdoor Adventure's new found popularity, fear of litigation is pushing youth work professionals away from taking young people away. Teaching unions have advised against school trips also. In the near future discussions about the gains to be made from Outdoor Adventure and other organised extra mural learning, may well become academic. Young people are going to miss out 'big time' unless there is some form of organised resistance to this trend. What can we do?

References

Peter Barnes, 'Theory Into Practice', Scottish School of Sport Studies (University of Strathclyde), 1997.

Jon Barrett and Dr Roger Greenaway, 'Why Adventure?', Foundation for Outdoor Adventure, 1995.

Frank Furedi, 'Courting Mistrust', Centre for Policy Studies, 1999.

Frank Furedi, 'You Can't Ban Accidents', spiked!, 24/08/01, (www.spiked-online.com)
John P. Hewitt, 'The Myth of Self-Esteem', St Martin's, 1998.

Colin Mortlock, 'The Adventure Alternative', Cicerone Press, 1984.

James Youniss, 'Children's Friendships and peer Culture', in 'Making Sense of Social Development', edited by: Woodhead, Faulkner and Littleton,Routledge, 1999