Figure 19
The incident pit
Adventure learning is simply taking participants away from the activities in which they would normally engage, offering opportunities for active interaction, then reviewing the process and result. It need not always be large scale, high risk and adrenalin fuelled, but can be smaller, localised and more directly under the control of the group leader. The considerations are the same, irrespective of venue, only the instructor and the group leader are more likely to be the same person. Successful adventure learning sessions do not happen by accident, the instructor has to prepare in advance and plan not only the activities of the session but the surrounding features. This includes:
Adventure learning is an experiential learning tool, grounded in both formal and informal learning and communication is a crucial part of that educative process. It is essential that the instructor is able to communicate with participants, imparting necessary safety and activity instructions as well as engaging young people in the relational conversations that support their social education and personal development alongside their skill development and cognitive learning.
Participants are not always willing and compliant; the instructor may also be faced with challenging young people and they must have a constructive strategy of dealing with them. Young people become challenging for a number of reasons: fear of the unknown, nervousness at a new situation, wanting to appear a certain way to their peers, wanting to maintain their perceived group status or it may simply be an emotional, psychological reaction (otherwise known as ‘being a teenager’!). The instructor has to deal with the challenge in a positive way that does not undermine the young person, reinforces the instructor’s position as the authority figure, does not damage relationships with the rest of the group members and retains the adventure learning principle of ‘challenge by choice’.
Adventure learning is based as much on conversational interactions as it is on skill development and cognitive understanding; therefore, engaging challenging young people in conversation and understanding the root cause of their behaviour is a far more constructive way of dealing with the situation than becoming irritated or dictatorial. There is an old adage of ‘fail to prepare and you prepare to fail’ and this is certainly true of adventure learning; the essential core criteria to a successful adventure learning session are planning and preparation! Plan well and the session will be positive for the instructor as well as the participants, but a terrible plan is just that, no matter how carefully it is undertaken!
A good adventure learning instructor will make a poor activity a memorable and enjoyable experience, but equally a poor adventure learning instructor will ruin the best activity. The core question the adventure learning instructor should consider is whether they would be happy with the quality and quantity of planning and preparation if the activity were to involve their own child. The adventure learning instructor is in loco parentis during their time with the participant, meaning that they have to apply the same standard of duty of care as they would in respect of their own child. There are some fundamental points to remember when planning a session:
Risk management is a very important part of the background work associated with adventure learning sessions. All adventurous activities must be accompanied by regularly reviewed risk assessments that are understood by the activity instructors as well as their managers. A risk assessment is simply a document that breaks down each activity into its component parts, then considers:
The risk assessment then defines the mitigating actions that will reduce the likelihood of these incidents occurring. A competent adventure learning provider will have a set of generic risk assessments for every activity it provides; this means everything that could happen at every point of the participant’s time on site, travelling to and from an offsite venue and during any non-activity time, as well as the activity itself. These generic risk assessments are likely to be drawn up and reviewed annually by the provider but do not take account of every detail; alongside the generic risk assessments, the instructor should undertake a running risk assessment on the day in light of current weather, the particular participants and any relevant circumstances, such as perhaps works around the activity site. If the activities are to be delivered locally, that is by a local group leader rather than an adventure provider, responsibility for risk assessment rests with the group leader.
The nature of adventure learning is such that incidents and accidents will occur; by virtue of being outside and undertaking challenging activities, it is absolutely impossible (and highly undesirable!) to remove all risk and provide complete safety. A useful abstract way of dealing with incidents is the incident pit, a conceptual pit with increasingly steeper sides that converge to a point of no return; a seemingly minor incident can deteriorate over time into a spiral of increasingly worse incidents that become harder and harder to resolve, making escape from the incident pit less and less possible. First presented by E. John Towse at a Diving Medical Conference in Stoke Mandeville Hospital in 1973, the incident pit is a term used by scuba divers, engineers, medical professionals and technology managers to describe how to avoid being caught in an increasingly threatening situation (Figure 19).
Figure 19
The incident pit
Imagine an adventure learning instructor with a group of participants at the start of a climbing session. The instructor has not set up the ropes beforehand or got the harnesses and helmets out ready for the group so they are trying to set up the ropes, get all the participants into the equipment and get the session started because the group is becoming restless at having to wait around. The instructor gets the participants peer belaying (belaying each other) to get everyone involved; because the group are peer belaying, the instructor saves time by not putting on their own harness or helmet. They notice that a couple of participants have long, loose hair, have loose sweatshirts over their harnesses and have not fastened up their helmets, but as most of the participants have climbed here before, the instructor assumes that they should be able to put the harnesses and helmets on correctly and will know to fasten their helmets before they climb. They also only do a short briefing because the group have done this before and everyone wants to get climbing. All of a sudden, a shout goes up, a belayer has their long, loose hair caught in the belay device. The instructor rushes to help, becoming engrossed in the situation. Then another shout is heard from the other side of the wall, a participant had their harness loose under the sweatshirt and has it caught on one of the holds because the belayer forgot to have them face the wall in an ‘L’ shape to walk down and they swung round. The climber is panicking, while swinging round trying to free themselves their unfastened helmet comes off and they bang their head, cutting themselves in the process.
The situation here may not lead to death (although potentially it could!), but the point is that it could have been so easily avoided. Setting up the ropes and equipment beforehand would have meant that the instructor was not feeling stressed; they could have got the participants into their harnesses and helmets straight away and got the session started. Checking harnesses beforehand, making sure long hair was tied back, allowing no loose clothing over the top of harnesses and insisting helmets are fasted would have prevented an escalating series of problems.
Adventure learning sessions are not always going to be able to be undertaken on site, at the provider venue, many of the more adventurous activities are undertaken in natural environments such as rock crags, open water lakes or moorland. Planning to go offsite entails more planning but is potentially far more effective in the learning process. The instructor has to be responsible for ensuring that the group gets to the venue safely, that all necessary equipment arrives at the venue and that the activity is set up while the participants are not endangered by the instructor being otherwise occupied. For any young person, parental consent must be obtained before they can be taken off site; the consent form must contain details of the young person and their parent/carer, including contact details, and any necessary medical information of which the instructor must be aware in order to safeguard the welfare of that young person while on the activity. The instructor must also have a safety mechanism in place for being offsite, for example, landline contacts in case of emergency (perhaps at the administration office) and contacts who know where the group are and what time they plan to return. It is always crucial after the offsite trip has ended to let the contacts know that the group has returned safely.
Inclusivity is another critical element of both group management and social education. Adventure learning engages all the senses, allowing young people of a more practical nature to work on a more equal basis to those with strong cognitive skills; the natural order of the classroom becomes disrupted and new leaders emerge. Inclusivity is about ensuring everyone has an equal quality of experience, which does not necessarily mean that everybody does exactly the same activity in exactly the same way or has exactly the same personal goals. While a group may be set a single overall task, individual members of the group may have their own challenges, their own hurdles to overcome and their own objectives to achieve. Quality of experience and thus inclusion is again the responsibility of the adventure learning instructor.
An adventure learning curriculum embodies cognitive development, skill development and social development, meaning classroom learning (or formal learning) is combined with personal development (or informal learning). While the ultimate goal of the curriculum may be the eventual achievement of good examination results for a school, there are intangible outcomes that should be evidenced in other ways, for example photographs, video, personal statements and peer reviews. The curriculum itself can be delivered in a number of ways and to be most effective should be delivered such that it progressively allows the participants to assume responsibility for planning how they will achieve their set task. In the beginning, the instructor will play a more directive role, known as behaviourist teaching, where they will essentially instruct the participants on what to do and how to undertake their task. As the participants gain in knowledge and confidence they enter a cognitive phase, increasingly willing and able to think for themselves, plan for themselves and make their own decisions; they begin to assume responsibility and lose their passiveness. Ultimately, the participants enter the experiential learning phase, where the instructor becomes merely the facilitator, the participants require almost no instructor intervention and are able to think, try and make decisions themselves. Through trial and error, through success and failure, learning becomes meaningful and achievement has a much greater positive effect. Experiential learning through adventure learning is more than simply undertaking adventurous activities; if simply presented as an activity, then the participants will learn how to do that activity and nothing more, they may enjoy themselves and they may become quite skilled in that activity. However, they would have learned nothing more than the skills of the activity. Experiential learning involves undertaking the activity and then being supported to reviewing it: what went right, or wrong, how decisions were made, whether people listen to one another and whether the group made any positive progression throughout the session. Moving from a recreational adventurous activity to an experiential learning session relies on the instructor’s ability to see the activity not as the end in itself but as the means to a learning end.