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Published in “Pathways” – the Ontario
Journal of Outdoor Education, 17(1), August 2005
The Value of Serendipitous Learning
Part 1 - A dawning critique of frontloading and metaphor in
adventure education
By Willem Krouwel
It’s Only Words…..
To start, a short excursion into lexicography: The Shorter Oxford
Dictionary defines the word serendipity as follows: “serendipity - /serr
ndippiti/ - Noun: the occurrence and development of events by chance
in a happy or beneficial way”. The American Heritage Dictionary
fundamentally agrees: “ser·en·dip·i·ty n. pl. ser-en-dip-I-ties: (1)
The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident (2) The fact
or occurrence of such discoveries (3) An instance of making such a
discovery”
You may wonder what this charming-sounding word has to do with
outdoor education. The answer, in my view, is “not enough”.
Every Picture Tells a Story…..
Let me illustrate: Back in 1979, as a Company training manager, I
was invited to attend an outdoor management programme. With thoughts
of a strenuous-but-paid vacation in the hills, I happily agreed. The
reality exceeded my expectations. We carried out a series of
absorbing and creative tasks; physicality was a welcome incidental -
adding fun, rather than exhaustion. The emphasis on process and
review was high. The exercises became more complex, culminating in
one lasting 24 hours in which we were able to explore layers of
task-complexity, choosing to adopt a managerial approach which
emphasised flexibility, communication, and the need to make
decisions on incomplete information.
The experience was deeply absorbing, and as time progressed I became
more and more engaged. Even now, I can recall specific moments from
the programme in graphic detail. Ask me if I learned, and the answer
is a resounding “yes!”. Ask me what I learned and I’d be hard put to
articulate it for you. My learning could not - and still cannot - be
summed up in an easy list of competencies or “tick-the-box” skills.
I had experienced (for one of only three times in my life) “a
profound kind of learning which is readily sensed, but can be
difficult to articulate…..learning which is fundamental, which is
holistic, which is closely linked to personality……. ‘Development’ is
typically less specific but more substantial and more central to a
person’s make-up than ‘learning’. (It is) a change in a person’s
core construct system” (Greenaway, 1995).
The point is, this very valuable and powerful learning experience
was unplanned and unexpected. And it literally changed my life,
knocking me off the rails of a predictable, secure and financially
comfortable career into a life spent wrestling with the challenge of
providing development opportunities for others in an unpredictable,
insecure and financially mercurial milieu.
What happened to me during the course was that I had an intense
period of reflection (informed by action and interaction) which led
to a feelings/values based decision to career in a different
direction. For others (on this and a series of similar programmes),
the outcomes were varied but appropriate to their situation at the
time. In some cases people initiated a process of moving on in their
personal lives. In others, they simply began to work at managing
their relationships with colleagues and friends. The process could
be uncharitably described as indeterminate, but is seen as
remarkably valuable by those who have experienced it.
Chimes of Freedom…..
In my early innocence as an outdoor facilitator, I assumed that
everyone wanted this serendipitous-but-powerful type of development,
and designed programmes intended to promote whatever learning would
meet the needs of people in the situations in which they found
themselves - what Mossman (1983) termed “Self-Development”, happily
combining this with courses with widely framed – but focussed –
outcomes around leadership and teamwork.
Over the years, I have evolved a methodology for doing this which,
for good reasons, I present as a Venn diagram. Development is an
untidy - even messy - process which doesn’t often conform to the
tidy step–models with which we sometimes attempt to corral it.
People reflect and even resolve during tasks; they break into their
reflections to get on with other things; they notice that they’ve
made resolutions some time after they’ve started acting on them.
Although far from perfect, a Venn diagram at least acknowledges the
chaotic nature of the experiential learning
process.
Making Plans for Nigel…..
Exploratory self-development isn’t the only option for educators and
trainers. There is another way. This is to tightly focus the
training on an agenda set by the educator, trainer or sponsor:
Across the outdoor education spectrum there is pressure to tailor
exercises and programmes in this way to meet sponsors’ pre-set
requirements. In Britain, a number of reasons exist for this:
Firstly, the national educational curriculum is a tightly focussed
piece of work. This focus may affect the way outdoor education
perceives its job. As the website of one outdoor centre - located in
breathtakingly beautiful country - puts it (www.ingleboro.co.uk):
“Opportunities abound for Primary School National Curriculum
projects in many core and foundation subjects, in addition to
Secondary school and College geography and more advanced geology
study” - which is just about as clinically focussed a use of the
outdoors as could be imagined, with no room for hard-to-assess
things like awe and wonder.
This tight focus extends to personal and group development
programmes, where an emphasis on shorter course durations has led to
a desire to ensure that the sponsors’ messages are effectively
conveyed by the training. Again, this is reflected in centre
rhetoric (Ackers Trust, 2000): “What will your organisation get out
of the day?” asks one brochure and rhetorically responds: “Improved
– Teamwork – Planning – Communication; Help employees manage change
within an organisation more effectively; A neutral base for learning
and team building; Cost effective and flexible training programme;
Help staff work towards a common goal; Course participants will
learn to think on a more lateral basis; Progress from working as
individuals in an organisation to working as a team”. Not bad for a
day’s worth of training. Whilst most centres aren’t as ludicrously
optimistic as this, many do work to ambitious and tight objectives,
and find it necessary to adopt special methods. These include:
·
Frontloading: Wherein, according to Priest and Gass
(1993), the instructor or teacher: “(before the briefing, possibly
during, or just after it) ….explains several key learning points.
These points may include, but are not necessarily limited to:
sharing the learning objectives for the activity and any related
motivational benefits, stressing the desired positive behaviours in
advance, warning learners of the consequences of negative behaviours
and asking learners to review or revisit earlier commitments to
change before beginning an activity”
and
· Isomorphically framing the experience
(Ibid): Making the experience into a metaphor for a work
or life situation, for example by reframing a “spider’s web”
exercise as a distribution network.
Such devices are made necessary by the current fashion in education
and human resource development for competence-based theories of
learning which, rightly or wrongly, are often used to emphasise the
importance of what you can do, not who you are, and of training
rather than development. Outdoor practitioners once had a choice of
approaches:
In the last decade we have seen many outdoor practitioners
privileging training (Quadrants 1 and 3) over development (quadrants
2 and 4). Why this might be is worthy of exploration, but may be
rooted in a lack of self-confidence on the part of educators and
trainers, or perhaps an acknowledgement of financial realities in
what, in Britain at least, is a very crowded marketplace. It may
also be rooted in the spurious idea of outdoor education as
metaphor.
Rehearsal for Reality?
Metaphoric transfer is defined by Priest (1993) as “an attempt to
narrow the gap between apparently different learning environments
through client realized metaphors. A metaphor is an idea, object, or
description used in place of another different idea, object or
description, in order to denote comparative likeness or similarity
between the two. By findings metaphors, clients can bring seemingly
different learning environments much closer together”.
It seems to me that the notion of metaphoric transfer is something
of a worm in the experiential apple. What Priest’s definition seems
to be saying is that outdoor activities have no inherent process
learning value of their own, and so must be portrayed in review and
elsewhere as being instructive parallels of reality rather than
reality itself. And yet, to me, what happens to people on outdoor
development programmes is just as real (but different) as what
happens to them in work, home, school or wherever. It’s real, but
not realistic – which makes it dramatically different from things
like business games, which are realistic – but not real.
I believe that in outdoor developmental programmes we can often
discover more of ourselves and of each other than in the indoor
alternatives. This is through exercise of all the senses in
interaction with one another and the outdoors - that
different-but-real place where trappings of rank and status aren’t
relevant. To attempt to make it “realistic” by, for example,
verbally redefining a rope spider’ web as a distribution network
demeans and undermine that marvellous medium. It replaces real
experience with a realistic-but-false simulation of another reality.
In the final analysis, this may be helpful to given businesses and
societies at given times, but is not helpful to a wider, deeper
version of human development. There is another way. In the next
issue we will explore it.
Bill Krouwel works for the outdoor charity dare2 and is undertaking
a PhD at the University of the West of England. He also maintains a
practice in outdoor management development.
References
The Shorter Oxford Dictionary, quoted on website
http://www.Askoxford.com
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth
Edition (2000). Houghton Mifflin Company.
Greenaway, R., 1995. Powerful Learning Experiences in Management
Development and Learning Unpublished PhD Thesis, Lancaster
University
Mossman, Alan (1983) "Making Choices about the Use of the Outdoors
in Manager and Management Development" Management Education and
Development" 14, 3 pp 186-192
From www.ingleboro.co.uk ,
the website of Ingleborough Hall Outdoor Education Centre.
THE ACKERS TRUST (2000) Is your team on the right track? Brochure
PRIEST, Simon and GASS, Michael (1993) Five Generations of
Facilitated Learning from Adventure Experiences in the Journal of
Adventure Education and Outdoor Leadership 10,3.
The website of Experientia : the experts in Experiential Learning (
http://www.tarrak.com/EXP/exp.htm )
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