Anyone who takes a group of people out of their traditional learning environment and provides them with an activity-based learning experience is an adventure learning instructor. If the activity is of a more adventurous nature, the instructor should be appropriately and adequately qualified, but beyond that, all adventure learning instructors should also have a range of personal skills, standards and strategies when dealing with participants because the instructor is pivotal to the success of the adventure learning session. The instructor is the personification of the activity and the participants will take their lead from the instructor; the way in which the instructor behaves, the way in which they care for their kit and the way in which they deal with issues will all present a particular image to participants that they will copy. As social beings, humans learn from one another, the commonest form of which is mimicry. The instructor must also have a particular personal code in their relationship with the participants. In adventure learning, the instructor is often faced with participants who lack strong positive role models and the intense emotions inspired by participation in adventurous activities may create the illusion of a close relationship that could become or be considered inappropriate. Adventure learning involves emotional as well as cognitive and skill development, therefore, relationships are a very important aspect of adventure learning but the boundary of the instructor/participant relationship is critical and the instructor must be clear with participants as to the nature of their relationship. The instructor can be like a friend but they cannot be a friend; friends share a closeness and an intimacy, they have personal lives that are closely entwined whereas the instructor is a professional with a duty of care. Instructors can offer moral support and even a degree of emotional support but they must be careful not to allow this to be translated into a deeper personal relationship with the participant.
Being an adventure learning instructor can seem to place a lot of pressure on the instructor at the start of the session, but some simple pointers can help alleviate that pressure and make the session more enjoyable for you, as instructor, as well as a positive experience for the participants:
As the adventure learning instructor, you are ultimately responsible for the safety and behaviour of the participants while out on an activity, irrespective of whether pastoral or other staff are with you. That responsibility starts right at the beginning of the engagement, which may be a while before the activity actually starts and may include the time spent travelling to the venue where the activity is to take place. Group management is a very important responsibility of the adventure learning instructor because it encompasses not only safety and behaviour but also participant interaction, presentation of the participants in public, the environmental impact of the group on the venue and the way in which members of the public will perceive a group and the adventure provider in the future. Whether in an urban or rural setting, sites where adventure learning activities take place may be very popular and frequently used. The impact on land of many groups attending the site and frequent use of natural features may ultimately be detrimental, particularly if instructors and groups are not careful about the after-effects of their attendance, for example leaving litter or damaging the ground. While delivering the activity, an activity instructor has to be mindful of the fact that the natural environment is publicly accessible and there will therefore be members of the public possibly around the group. The way in which the group behaves and the amount of noise they make will affect the enjoyment of the environment for other users and will influence the perception and reputation those people will build of the adventure provider, that instructor and the group. Being respectful and considering the experience of other users, whether alongside the group at the time or future users, is an important social education activity for young group participants, particularly ones with no positive role models or a poor understanding of environmental inheritance.
Adventure learning instructors are as fallible as anyone else; they are human and they have the capacity to get bored, over-confident, complacent or lazy. If you are working as a dedicated adventure learning instructor in a centre, you may find that you are required to run the same activities day after day, particularly where the group activities entail low levels of challenge; this means that boredom can be a dangerous issue, psychologically and physically to you and to others. Repetition can also bring you to become lazy and complacent, making assumptions rather than following process. Equally dangerous is the instructor who becomes over-confident or complacent, causing them to overestimate their skills and knowledge, underestimate the risks of what they are doing and hold an exaggerated belief in their ability to control the participants and events around them. Boredom or confidence bring you to lose focus, which heightens the potential for something to go wrong when you have the participants with you and are undertaking the activity. It is critical that you learn to recognise these traits in yourself and take steps to prevent them happening, otherwise the consequences may be serious, if not fatal.
Despite the best preparation and careful laying of ground rules with a group, there will still always be those participants who, for whatever reason, will behave wilfully and prove to be a sustained distraction to you as the leader and to other participants. How you handle this is crucial to the way the rest of the session will succeed; you have to deal with the situation but if you come down hard on the individual(s) immediately, you may lose group empathy and the rest of the session will be a disaster. There is no easy advice that can be given, other than to say that the harshness with which you deal with the situation depends on the circumstances and the group. Sometimes escalating the degree of strictness if insubordination continues after warnings may be appropriate, but sometimes starting out with strict enforcement and relaxing as the participants prove themselves is a more fitting approach.
Similarly, there will always be participants who decline even to attempt an activity or for some other reason cannot participate in the same way as the rest of the group. Again, there is no easy advice to be offered. The essence of adventure learning, as has already been mentioned, is challenge by choice, so theoretically a participant is entitled to decline joining in. However, it is important that you establish why they are standing back and try to find a way for them to participate with which they are comfortable; this may be for them to help timekeeping or scorekeeping, they may act as a ‘spotter’ if the activity is off the ground, or there may be another way they can participate alongside but not directly involved in the activity. The individual will learn from this and, if necessary, gain confidence such that later in the activity or at another time, they will feel able to participate.