PAMELA CUSHING: If you look over the top of the stacks of transcribed interviews, tapes, and field-notes, you will find Pamela engaged in reading the collection of self-narratives she has generated with Outward Bound (OB) students for her thesis. Pamela is a graduate student in Cultural Anthropology at McMaster University. She also does research for the Canadian Outward Bound Wilderness School (OB). Current work involves analyzing how students' stories, before and after their OB course, explain how they experienced the course, and what factors catalyzed changes they perceive in themselves.
It is hoped that this work will be useful to OB staff, in that it provides; 1)a diachronic view of the student experience not normally available to instructors, and 2)an explanation of the course itself as an emergent, fluid cultural environment. I will show how the experience is embedded in a larger life context, and use cultural anthropology models to decentralize the dominant individualistic, psychology-based models. In this way, I hope to create a more accurate record of students' experiences.
This project, conducted on Black Sturgeon Lake, has been a pleasure as it allows me to spend more time outdoors and in closer proximity to trails and paddling than school life normally permits. Living in Hamilton does mean easy access to a lovely part of the Bruce Trail, for long runs and relaxed hikes (with plenty of trail mix for both!). Listening to these youths' stories (15-21 years old) has also been a refreshing reminder of the complexity and sincerity of the reflections of people of all ages, and of the particular value of the narrative form for communicating local knowledge and personal beliefs.
Thanks to Cory Silverstein, Ed Koenig, and Bob Henderson for their critical reading of this paper and to the outward bound students and staff who have given generously of their stories and time to me.
"I don't know what the soul is. But I imagine that somehow our bodies surround what has always been."
A. Michaels - Fugitive Pieces
A central strategy of those concerned with changing the status quo approach to ecological issues, is to increase the number of people who empathize with eco-centric values through cultivating their ecological consciousness (Devall & Sessions 1985: 8, 162; Merchant 1990: 46-64). Any prescription for educating for deep ecology in the West must address how it will work to deconstruct the prevailing myths about the wilderness and humans' relationship with the wild. The proposed curriculum then, must have both un-learning and learning aspirations. Active student involvement in their own learning should also be part of the prescription because the one-way, transmissive inflexible "schooling" approach (Gato, 1996) is apparently not deep enough to encourage the radical change in action that is desired.
In this paper, I discuss how the Outward Bound Wilderness School (OB) courses could be a useful element of such a curriculum because they are structured to: 1) give people an engaged, direct experience of the wilderness that challenges their existing culture-bound understanding of it, and 2) encourage a culture of transformation, or change. While OB was not designed to promote a specific eco-perspective, it can be seen as overlapping with aspects of the deep ecology movement.
To demonstrate how OB is a useful model, I will draw on theory from education, anthropology, cultural studies, psychology and history, as well as empirical analyses of outdoor experiential education and OB. My perspective and position as author derive from working for the Canadian Outward Bound Wilderness School (COBWS) and from my ethnographic research there. I worked with 20 students to record their self-narratives before and after their OB course in order to understand why the kind of changes that have often been cited, such as improved self-confidence, interpersonal skills, leadership, communication and decision-making skills, perceived locus of control, and physical fitness, might have occurred. (OB Australia 1990) Student quotes in this paper have been drawn from my current research.
Experiential education , often referred to as "learning by doing", is a pedagogical approach which recognizes the value of experience as a basis for learning (Dewey 1938: 18). It encourages active learning on the grounds that "the most effective way to stimulate learning is to link it to students' own experiences and concerns" (Udall et al 1990: 3). It falls into the broader category of "progressive education" which aims to provide students with the ability to develop solutions on their own in response to the changeable environment. This philosophy contrasts with traditional education that treats knowledge as a finished product to be transmitted to students who will "bank" it, but not be encouraged to grapple with or challenge it.1
The Outward Bound Wilderness School mission is, "To promote self-reliance, care and respect for others, service to the community and concern for the environment." (Blackford 1995) The school applies outdoor experiential education theory to work towards its mission and facilitates a cultural environment where participants can achieve "personal transformation" in these four areas. OB originated during W.W. II in the UK as a means of preparing young, merchant seamen for the stress of working in waters alongside German enemy submarines. (James 1980: 7) While today's students face different kinds of hardships, the original learning objectives are still effective in strengthening and empowering students to re-envision themselves. A standard OB course is a 3-4 week camping trip in the wilderness and involves a mix of canoeing, hiking, campcraft, rock climbing, kayaking, and orienteering skills. These physical, or technical skills, are a framework through which students gain experience in developing the interpersonal skills outlined in the mission. There are usually ten students, and two instructors. The instructors gradually become less central as the group learns, through the process, to lead themselves.
Perceptions of nature feature more prominently in student tellings of their course experience than one might expect, given that cultivating environmental concern is but one of four goals. This is likely a result of being immersed in the wilderness which inevitably promotes direct and metaphorical learning opportunities. For example, a sudden thunderstorm could be used by an instructor as a direct lesson on teamwork, if the group's inability to work together before the rain started resulted in a night of wet sleeping. Alternatively, the storm could be used as a metaphor for a discussion on unpredictability and change in other areas of students' lives. With wilderness as classroom, teacher, and subject, OB courses offer an intriguing potential way to educate from deep ecology.
"The purpose of education is to show students how to define themselves 'authentically and spontaneously in relation' to the world." T. Merton (Hooks 1994: 118)
Since ecological sensibility entails a cognitive, affective and sensual knowing, (Drengson 1994: 13-14) then it follows that education aimed at developing this sensibility would also operate from these levels (ie. be holistic). This is a difficult task in the current North American schooling context which encourages a mechanistic "mind / body split" (Hooks 1994: 114) and leaves any notion of the body as a learning "frontier" outside the classroom door. Deep ecological sensibility entails knowing that "we are part of the world, and the world is part of us", but if one has little experience of being in the natural world, cultivating such an understanding is rather difficult (Drengson 1994: 13). Outdoor experiential education, as practiced by OB, provides the opportunity for holistic learning. Anthropologists, educators and feminists are just a few of the groups which recognize the value of first hand experience in enhancing one's understanding. Anthropologists use participant observation as the central way to develop a sense of how the local people view the world. Progressive educators' work further supports how learning is catalyzed and deepened when it is connected with relevant experiences in students' lives. (Freire 1985, Erikson in Bacon 1983: 5-12)
In addition to direct holistic experience, feminist theorists have identified a "bodily" level of learning. In researching American attitudes towards health and illness, Martin found her fieldwork was necessarily grounded in "visceral learning ... non-linguistic, felt experiences," and being "bodily in these contexts." (Martin 1994: xv) Increasingly, researchers argue that experience is indeed a knowledge-producing act, despite the fact that it has been derailed and marginalized by the positivist tradition in education. Okely points to how crucial "embodied knowledge" is to the anthropological fieldworkers' ability to empathize with the people they write about, and how this knowledge is produced and reproduced in the holistic experiences of laboring, eating, living and generally "sharing the rhythm of co-residence" with a people (1992: 16-7).
Outward Bound facilitates embodied knowing of the natural world and can thus enhance people's ability to resonate with deep ecological perceptions. I use "resonate" as Wikan has defined it to mean a combination of feeling and thought (neglah keneh in Balinese) with which you grasp or connect with a notion, or in her case, people of a different cultural background (Wikan 1992: 462-5). In ecological terms, experiential learning gives individuals a way of resonating and viewing themselves as part of the circle of the eco-system, where they have previously considered themselves outside and on top of it (Jasen 1995; Leopold 1989 [1949] in Koenig 1995: 3) As one student says; "You can get more into the rhythm of nature on course." These kinds of responses to the OB experience embody the promise of OB as a means of education towards a deep ecological perspectives.
There are 38 OB schools in the world, and each uses roughly the same course structure, within which instructors arrange various activities, in order to meet particular educational objectives throughout the course. While there are some culturally-specific assumptions built into the model, the structure has been used successfully in many different cultural settings through appropriate modification by the local school. For example, the Canadian school in Ontario puts extra emphasis on diversity and community responsibility as reflected in original programs for aboriginal youth, seniors, differently-abled people, women survivors of cancer and abused women. The simple version of the OB structure outlined below introduces the reader to the basic course elements.
1. Training Phase
Activity: school philosophy, focus on needed technical skills, high instructor involvement
Development: group "forming,"2 settling apprehension, technical skills, understanding expectations
2. Expedition Phase
Activity: group embarks usually on canoeing, climbing or hiking; lower instructor involvement
Development: increased exposure to situations requiring group decisions & hard choices, individual and group effort and thus opportunities for success or failure; group "norming" (feeling out how to work together) and "storming" (more honest about what they don't like/ anger); leadership is transferring from instructors to students
3. Solo Time
Activity: 2-3 day period where each student camps alone with minimal provisions; post-debrief
Development: time for personal reflection on self, self-in -relation-to-group, and regular life; often framed as a time to consider differences between course and regular life.
4. Final Expedition
Activity: Ideally, if a group is ready, the final days of their expedition will be unaccompanied
Development: group should move into "performing" stage here (productive decision-making and action); time to apply learning and move from students to leaders, often an "acid test" of the group's actual development.
5. Concluding Phase
Activity: Service, "marathon" challenge, reflection on course, closing banquet
Development: Learning importance of helping others; final physical "success"; time to think about how to transfer learnings back to one's regular life; emotional break from co-participants
There are at least five core levels on which the OB course is designed to create a culture that encourages transformation (change in self, not necessarily toward an emerging ecosophy or ecological self). First, the pre-course expectations of students that they will be changing in some way is often significant in setting the stage for actual transformation. However, an in-going predisposition to change is not a necessary factor. A number of students I interviewed did the course because their parents made them, and expected to be "bored out of my mind," and yet emerged from course feeling that they had learned and grown. My work concurs with other research into OB courses (Suchman 1992: 79).
The second transformative element is the implicit and explicit use of metaphoric education to connect one's experiences on the course with one's everyday life. The notion is based on the theory that human interaction with reality is mediated by previous experiences, and similarly, one's present experience, if different, can work to re-cast past beliefs of self. (Bacon 1983: 6-8) As such, the course is designed to ensure opportunities for successful experiences. Through these experiences, students develop a positive base of experience connected to taking emotional and physical risks, being a leader, being a team player, or even for developing the strength to say "no" to a request. Ideally, the student's self-concept, or self-narrative changes as a result of this embodied experience of success.
The transformational capacity of the OB structure is also directly linked to how it fits into students' broader life contexts. The course represents a "rite of passage" for students during which the conditions are right for a change in social position. Van Gennep, (1960 [1908]) argues that life includes many transition periods of heightened activity that are vital for our regeneration and growth, but also cause some social disturbance. As such, they need to be bracketed or cushioned by certain rites that he has found to be structurally similar cross-culturally. Rites of passage typically include three stages: Separation from one's peer group and existing norms (often spatial and social), a Liminal/Transitional period where norms are unclear and one undertakes the emotional, spiritual or physical changes expected, and finally Re-aggregation into "regular life" and norms. In the transitional period, the student is on the "limen" or threshold between two worlds and is an active agent in deciding whether to proceed and grow or remain the same. Students easily recite what instructors respond when asked what should be done - "It is up to you - it is your course".
Students on OB and other outdoor courses have commonly stated that they felt they were "away from it all," and less hampered by social conventions, and more open to change as a result (Henderson 1995: 82). This is what Turner calls the mood of possibility (1988). This spatial separation combines with the often unfamiliar people, the wilderness setting, and the lack of normal expectations of urban life to enhance the feeling of liminality and change. During the course, rites that facilitate transition include the formation of spontaneous community, and identifying the time as special, through both discussion and reflection, about one's changing perspective on the life from which one has been separated. To ease students into the regular stream of life again, they are brought back into a base camp for a closure period involving clean-up and the common incorporation rite of sharing special food with people outside their "group." (Van Gennep: 29) Although the course is not a "ritual" in the sense of formally admitting them into a clearly delineated new group, or culminating in a service to society as in Joseph Campbell's prototypical "heroic quest," it is undeniably a period of transition.
Liminality is connected to the physical and social distance of the course from one's regular life. This makes for a critical reflective position as one becomes positioned on the margin of convention. The marginal position gives them the critical distance to see their lives from a new angle, and hence see how their lives might be otherwise. Kundera gives an indication of how difficult this task actually is by revealing, in his novels, the way people ascribe the weight of "Es muss sein,, (It must be so), to their lives as a way of sustaining the belief that it (the culturally derived way) has meaning. (1984: 32) Freire also draws on the notion of margins in describing how literacy that uses generative and relevant themes can be emancipatory because it provides people with a new language and hence a new position as "border intellectuals" of their own lives. (Janmohammed 1994: 242; Freire 1985: 15-17)
As discussed at the outset, the un-learning of old beliefs is needed to make a place for new ones to establish themselves. Reflection during the Solo time is a particularly important aspect of the course in this regard for many, though not all, students: "Solo gave me time to think about my family - that I appreciate them, but I don't think about that when I'm at home." "I was pretty bored on Solo - I preferred getting to know people." "I guess it was on Solo that I realized that when I don't open up during circles. It's the same as what my friends say at home. So after Solo I tried to tell the group more about me, but it was hard."
OB also encourages this kind of reflection through cultural rituals of sharing thoughts and feelings throughout the course, such as discussion circles and debriefings. During these public reflections, links with parallel issues at home may be hinted at or made explicit, but either way the understanding is that the course learnings have relevance beyond the course itself. Instructors work to create the right balance between reflection and activity, but Suchman's work with students revealed how some students felt that they could not process their learning sufficiently because of over-emphasis on the activities. (1992: 89)
Outward Bound courses are structured to give students the opportunity for self-determination (potentially with an increased ecological sensibility). The outline of the standard OB course, discussed above, is intended to show, 1) how an OB course works and, 2) how this structure sets up potential to "cultivate ecological consciousness" (Devall & Session, 1985). It must be remembered that to cultivate ecological consciousness is not a direct mission tenet. "Concern for nature" is one of the tenets, and this concern, in an intense decontextualizing (of the dominant paradigm) experiential education carried with it much possibility for the individual willing to explore new ways of ecological/holisitic eco-centric thinking and acting. The other three mission tenets strike a common chord in synch with the sentiments of deeper ecological thinking and living: again, they are self-reliance, care and respect for others, and service to the community.
As was stated at the outset, the meta-narrative of dichotomous human-nature relations is so deeply engrained in Western culture that bringing people to deep ecological sensibilities will require a radical shift in our worldview. In order to use the Outward Bound model, a practitioner must consider what role they see for human interaction with nature, and from there, envision how a deep ecological exploration will inform this role. Through this process, each educator will come to see how they can inter-weave their educational objectives through the OB model. The challenge of negotiating deep ecology theories with the reality of teaching people to live "in" the wilderness should also lead to a more accessible, workable philosophy. OB does provide a sound experiential educational structure on which to overlay a deep ecological approach. Increasing interaction between experiential education and the deep ecology movement may eventually have a fundamental effect on OB's ecological philosophy.
In closing, some levity. If, as Cree elder Raven Mackinaw said, "Wilderness and story-telling are the same thing" (Sheridan 1995), then perhaps the simplest approach of all is to encourage more folks out into the wilderness to generate some stories of their own!
1. Note that the use of Experiential Education as a complement to our conventional education is primarily a Western phenomenon, given that in most cultural groups, EE is the primary means of education and enculturation to the ways of the group.
2. Forming, norming, storming, performing is a standard outdoor education typology. The timing of these stages can vary substantially by group.
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