Adventure as Cultural Borderwork

Although fine-grained analyses of adventure education programs have recently become available by isolating specific features of the experience (e.g., McKenzie, 2003), and using more refined statistical techniques (e.g., Sibthorp, 2003), social processes and cultural contexts remain largely unaddressed at the level of theory (e.g., Kolb, 1984). Recent studies of social process in adventure education have shown how institutional scripts affect emotions in adventure activities (Holyfield, 1997), how leaders hold power (Brown, 2002; Jonas, 1999), and how leaders' tacit theories serve as guides to their practice (Hovelynck, 2001). With this study, I aim to further illuminate how adventure is constructed during a facilitated, small group experience.

Locus of the Study

Project Adventure, Inc. (PA) was established in 1971 to "bring the adventure home" to school children who otherwise would not have the opportunity to experience outdoor adventure pursuits (Prouty, 1991). This study is specifically focused on the "catalog workshop," in which professionals enroll to learn basic adventure practices. Workshops generally occur on challenge courses and through field activities, and are led either by a full- or part-time trainer (Project Adventure, 2002).

Methodology

Grounded theory methodology (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) was used for this study. As advocated by Charmaz, (2000) constructivist stance was adopted that locates theorizing in a broader social and historical moment, assuming varied and inconsistent individual perspectives.

Data Collection

Several methods were employed to collect data before, during, and after four-day Adventure Programming and Adventure-Based Counseling workshops:

1. Trainer interviews occurred using a semi-structured format (Fontana & Frey, 2000).

2. Field notes (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995) focused on: (a) participant interactions during activities; (b) how events are structured by rules, physical configurations, and frames; (c) how participants talk during reflections, including the ways trainers guide, assist with, participate in, or remove themselves reflection discussions; and (d) points at which the trainers intervene in events and participant actions subsequent to these interventions.

3. Naturally occurring talk (Silverman, 2000) was recorded during games, initiatives, reflection sessions, structured and unstructured group dialogues, and specific dyadic exchanges.

4. Participant interviews were conducted informally and conversationally. Interviews were conducted during meals, during free-time, and after the end of the workshop day. Questions focused on the workshop as a process, following the action emphasis made by Charmaz (2003, p. 316).

Data Analysis

A standard grounded theory approach was followed: (a) simultaneous data collection and analysis, (b) pursuit of emergent themes through early data analysis, (c) discovery of basic social processes within the data, (d) inductive construction of abstract categories that explain and synthesize these processes, (e) sampling to refine the categories through comparative processes, and (f) integration of categories into a theoretical framework that specifies causes, conditions, and consequences of the studied processes (Charmaz, 2003, p. 313). QSR NVivo software was used for coding and data management.

Results

Participant learning follows a trajectory similar to that outlined by Lave and Wenger (1991), whereby participants move toward full participation in a community of practice specific to Project Adventure, yet situated in the broader "field" of adventure education. Participants' progress along this trajectory is highly structured by the institution and monitored by the trainer, although it is not impervious to aberrations. In this view, "learning" follows interactions with institutional, cultural/historical and psychological tools (Kozulin, 1998; Vygotsky, 1987). The alignment of specific verbal codes with participant actions (i.e., through "reflection") is particularly important.

Social structures, most notably gender, were salient in the constitution of experience. While some aspects of the adventure experience hold the potential to transform how people interact with social structures, certain common discourses that are entrenched in the field (i.e., teamwork, the Experiential Learning Cycle [Kolb, 1984]) served to mask the reproduction of gender hierarchies, despite the intentions of the trainer.

Trainers routinely mediated participants' involvement in events, a condition that appears to be required in order to conduct the adventure experience. Despite claims that "the goal is not to impose or conform, but to bring order and coherence to the power of the human collective" (Wyatt, 1997, p. 84) during adventure programs, the structuring of other people's activities, and the act of facilitating them is a form of influence and is unavoidably power-laden (Hall, 1997). As Fenwick (2001) notes, experiential learning is "neither neutral nor innocent" (p. 3) in this respect.

Discussion

These findings, which will be increasingly fleshed out as the study is concluded in the spring of 2005, have several important implications. First, adventure educators inescapably handle power and contend with social structures. Claims to the effect that leaders are "largely removed from their roles as interpreters of reality, purveyors of truth, mediators between students and the world" (Chapman, 1995, p. 239) are increasingly untenable (cf. Brown, 2002; Holyfield & Fine, 1997). Instead, instructor influence is largely exercised through the provision of mediating artifacts (e.g., props, debrief techniques), creating a contradiction between theories that ignore the role of mediators (or claims that deny them) and practices that depend upon them. Therefore, advancing the pedagogy of outdoor adventure education would be aided by explicitly recognizing the role of mediating artifacts, as it is a primary aspect of adventure work.

Second, it is important to explore the implicit cultural and institutional situatedness of adventure discourses, especially noticing the practices and paradigms that may reproduce dominant social roles and work against democratic or emancipatory goals.

Finally, the conclusions drawn from this analysis continue to stress the limits of current theories such as the Experiential Learning Cycle (Kolb, 1984) to explain social phenomena occurring in experiential settings. I suggest that contextual analyses originating from Vygotskyan activity theory (e.g., Engestrom, 2003; Vygotsky, 1987), make important advances in understanding experiential education.

References

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Jayson Seaman, University of New Hampshire, Durham. E-mail: cb450k@juno.com

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