Climbing High
Adventure learning can benefit your group
By Risa G. Merl, senior editorial assistant

Let’s Get Physical
Adventure learning, also called active learning, takes problem solving and teamwork games to a physical level. Since it incorporates more of the body’s senses in the learning process, the retention level tends to be higher than with traditional learning. Activities start out with basic props, and at the extreme point includes challenge ropes courses.

“These activities provide a uniform experience for a group of people to go through together,” says Jim Cain, director of Teamwork and Teamplay, an adventure-learning consulting agency. Some simple prop activities Cain uses are done with a 15-foot long piece of webbing that’s called a “raccoon circle”. “One of the activities is called inside-out. We have the group stand inside the circle and we instruct them to get out by going underneath the circle. Then we challenge them to accomplish this without using their arms, shoulders, or hands,” Cain says. The important task here is to make sure that everyone gets involved, understands their task, and knows what needs to be done to accomplish the challenge and to optimize maximum effectiveness as a team.”

Go Team, Go!
Cain says that we live in a team-oriented environment, and there aren’t many tasks these days that people accomplish on their own. “Spider web” is a low ropes activity that is a prime example of this theory. In the activity, wire or rope netting is strung up between two trees creating a spider web formation. The mission of the group is to pass through these holes, some as high as five feet off the ground, and have every member make it to the other side with no one using the same hole twice. Most of the time the holes are located in such a way that it is next to impossible to complete the task individually. “There is a clear message here: to be successful in life it’s going to take more than just me,” Cain says. “Activities like the spider web show that if we work together good things can happen, and we can all be successful.” This team idea of everyone understanding and taking an active role in the project has similarities to what we want to happen in the real world.

Get Real
"In adventure learning, it’s important to have a fun activity but also have it relate to something that is practical,” Cain says. The phrase he goes by: you get more done when you’re having fun. The reason for this could be that adventure activities challenge people but put them in an unrestricted state of mind where it’s okay to make mistakes, and no one is keeping score. “Because it’s refreshing and different, people associate that with being fun,” Cain says. “I also think it’s great for people to have activities where it is okay to make mistakes and they can look back and say, ‘I can’t believe I did that!’”

Some of the activities are actually set up so you can learn more from the failure than you can from the success. People begin to respond to activities with things like, “I never would’ve thought of it like that,” or “I wouldn’t have considered that, but now I know a brand new way I can try it!”  Eventually, group members start to relate the activities to a real-life project or problem they experienced. “They’re able to take this artificial event you did and tie it into a real life experience,” Cain says. “That for me is when the real value comes in, when people find skills in the artificial setting, and they work in the real world.” Developing skills like these is as important in student organizations as it is in the workplace.

Score Your Goal
Before you begin any adventure-learning activity, it’s important to have a clear goal of what you want to accomplish. “I always ask people what kind of things they would like to see their group do, so at the end of the day they could say, ‘that was wonderful and a valuable use of our time!’” Cain says. Often, a leader might have an idea, but the activity won’t turn out the way they had hoped because they weren’t aware of the group’s expectations. Cain advises leaders of student organization to poll their groups before the activity in order to get a realistic idea of what each member hopes to accomplish. If you know your goals beforehand, you can usually arrange activities with the facilitator that will be best for fulfilling those expectations. Any activity that incorporates consensus, getting a group to come to agreement beforehand, can be very helpful to student organizations.

However, student organizations shouldn’t feel that they need to be experts to try many of the prop activities. “There is great room for originality, so they don’t need to be carbon copies of the last person that was successful,” Cain says. A list of the many different activities for raccoon circles is available at Cain’s web site. The raccoon circles aren’t copyrighted, so student organizations can use any of the activities free of charge.

Welcome to the Real World
Developing the skills learned in these activities doesn’t just pay off in the college years; it can pay off for the rest of your life. Often times, they are referred to as building life skills, rather than technical skills, because many skills in our society depend on having to work well with different groups of people. “I don’t think these activities can solve all the world’s problems, but it certainly helps to develop skills in the right way, and those skills can solve all the world’s problems,” Cain says.

Copyright © 2005 Oxendine Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved