Paper on Community Building in An Experiential Context
“WhiteWater:"
An Alternative Community Embedded
in Local Suburbia
Dustin Kunkel
Introduction
By nature, this paper may differ substantially from others presented. This is due primarily to my experience as an educator, which allowed me to skip the placement. I will be drawing on my four years as a Director of Youth and Education at
This paper will examine the community building processes (primarily amongst 9th through 12th grade youth) that I initiated during my time as the Director of Youth and Education, with critical references to pertinent theory and literature in both the social sciences and outdoor education. The outcome will be to present the contributions of this particular approach to OE theory and practice, review some basic questions asked in “community building,” and highlight that there are many (even contradicting) ways Outdoor Education is used to develop community. My writing is fuelled by the belief, like Allison and Telford’s, that “varied practices and conceptions of outdoor education can learn from each other despite the often radically different beliefs and desires regarding the role, purpose and practices of outdoor education” (2005).
Programme Summary
History and Context: Embedded in a Community in the Suburbs of the Western World
When I arrived at Trinity, I was presented with the main job of re-working the high school programme for youth. This had previously involved some kind of weekly meeting, usually in the “youth room” of the building, and a major annual trip of some kind to “have fun” at an amusement park. A small group (about 10 students) had also travelled to
My perspective on community was quite different from this. I believed that community must in some way mean a link to the greater web of relationships in which young people are found. As an educator in post-modern society where meta-narratives were disappearing, I was in search of authenticity (Allison, 2000), first for myself, but also for others as well. I did not see my job as “baby sitter for a few hours.” Western culture—and increasingly, world culture--is dominated by “ations:” specialisation, mechanisation, media saturation, and separation of relationships (Gatto, 2003; Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Palmer, 1977). The sociologist, George Ritzer invented a word (rooted in the worldwide restaurant of the same name), “Mcdonaldization,” (2000) that is essentially about a paradigm rather than the restaurant. He claims it is “. . . the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of the American society as well as the rest of the world” (p. 1).
In 2001, I had not read Ritzer’s book, but I was enthralled with exactly these issues in my work with youth—both indoors and out of doors. I noticed that many of the approaches we (youth workers in general) were using to “educate” youth were fundamentally the same as the ideals used to run fast food restaurants and Disney theme parks. Young people were savvy consumers and we were trying to meet them with a product that they wanted to consume, on an emotional, physical, even spiritual level. To do so required a specialised, fast-food-like approach reminiscent of a highly efficient, technologically “hip” factory. More recently, a number of education writers—both in and outside of OE--have questioned these capitalist-driven or highly specialised approaches to working with young people (Allison & Higgins, 2002; Brookes, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c; Gatto, 2003; Loynes, 2002; Lynch & Moore, 2004; McDonald, 2000; Vokey, 1999) whilst others continue to promote the benefits of applying specialised or technical models to outdoor education (Bell, 2003; Boyes & O’Hare, 2003; Mathur, 2002; Priest & Gass, 1997; Wurdinger & Paxton, 2003). I didn’t like what modernity (or postmodernity) was requiring of “education” amongst young people, and I wanted to do something different. Fundamentally, I believed there was a better way to live than “Mcdonaldised.” I agreed with Gatto that there is a major distinction between being an educated person and being a cog in the modern “schooling” system (2003).
The Family ‘Web’
The first thing I did was take time to listen. Zink points out that OE researchers may not be listening well enough, and recommends that we “explore what is. . . rather than what should be or ought to happen. Taking flippant comments seriously opens space . . . “ (2005). I met with parents, students, and families in a variety of settings. I met with them in their homes, at athletic competitions, in cars as we travelled, at coffee shops, and of course at the church building. During this time of listening, the major question I asked, in a variety of ways, was “Why are we doing youth community building?” I received a variety of answers, and many of them were in line with the research done by the Search Institute. This research focused not only on young people, but their family systems, and I noticed in my conversations that parents and youth were both asking for their relationship “webs” to be strengthened. Search Institute substantiates this:
Finding #1: A majority of the parents we surveyed are going it alone in the vital and challenging task of raising children and teenagers. Most say they don’t often turn to their extended family, friends, and community resources for support in parenting . . .
Finding #2: A key—but often lacking—resource for parents is a strong relationship with their spouse or partner. The parents we interviewed who experience an excellent partner relationship—regardless of whether they are married—are more likely to feel successful and up to the challenges of parenting. Parents with a strong partner relationship were more likely to say they do things to help their kids grow up strong and healthy, feel successful and confident as parents, experience fewer challenges as parents, and be open to other support and learning. Despite the importance of this relationship for parenting success, only half of the parents interviewed (54 percent) said their relationship with their partner was excellent (2002, p. 1)
I realised that if I was going to support healthy community, I would need to move beyond just “working with kids,” and find ways to support their families as well. I received training as a Love and Logic Parenting Class Facilitator, and began a regular series of parenting classes during the rest of my tenure. I noticed another troubling finding in the Search Institute research. Search looked at the discrepancy between what adults thought was important for young people, and what adults actually did. The greatest discrepancy was in the area of conversation: “Have meaningful conversations—Have conversations with kids that help adults and young people ‘really get to know one another’” (2001). Search found a massive divergence between how many adults thought it was important (75%) and how many admitted to doing it (only 34%)—a difference of 41% in their ability to act on what they thought most important. Regardless of the reasons for this, it seemed highly important to grow a community that helped adults and teens have conversations in which they ‘really get to know one another.’
Busy, Busy, Busy
Another critical issue that came to my attention through listening to parents and teens was how busy everyone seemed to be. There was an over-all approach by parents summarized in this statement: “If I keep my child busy, he or she will not have time to ‘get into trouble.’” Whether it was solely this attitude or a combination of this with the fast-food, fast-paced lifestyle and other factors, I found that young people were absolutely “maxed out” -- as they referred to their time. Every part of their day was covered by some kind of activity. This included their weekends as well. Most of them held part-time jobs so they could pay for their cars so they could drive to the places they wanted to go. If they did anything with their little “free time” it often involved getting into those same cars and driving twenty miles to the biggest cinema for a late show. This was a generation of young people who did not know how to simply “be,” nor did they know how to “be together” without the aid of some kind of entertainment or consumption.
WhiteWater: A Picture of Community
The River & Rafts Metaphor
It was during this “listening” time that someone used the river metaphor whilst talking about “the journey of life.” Rivers surround the suburban community in which we lived, and the greater Northwest area is a river-filled region. It was a natural progression to begin to think of building community within a metaphor (or picture, if you will) that rested on a common language we already knew. I knew that another youth director in
We began to meet once a week, sometimes more. Over a period of three years I saw prevailing changes. I saw young people who did not know how to hold a conversation, doing it every Sunday evening in their “raft.” I saw adults who didn’t think they had anything to offer, enthusiastic about students. I saw people “being people to one another” in a caring and respectful atmosphere. I saw young people beginning to explore their questions in groups that were confidential and caring, challenging yet “safe.” All of these findings fall in line with
Young people need help in order to integrate the vision into their own hearts and minds and to develop their own inner freedom and choices, learning little by little to be led inwardly by love, rather than from the outside, by rigid laws. They must be led to true community where they can become men and women of prayer and compassion, open to others and to the world, particularly to the poor, the oppressed, the lost, and the vulnerable, and thus become artisans of peace (1989, p. 5).
Artisans of Peace
Any time you make choices in group relationships and community building, there are other choices that are disregarded. By choosing to focus on the development of relationships through small groups led by caring adults, we did not have time for other things. We didn’t do much entertainment, but instead, we played together. We didn’t watch many films or play Xbox, but we did talk about films and Xbox, and their impact on our lives. One other important part of WhiteWater was the service orientation: we would serve monthly in our local community, and at least once a year participate in an extended “service trip” with a singular motive: “do everything in your power to serve and encourage every community you enter.”
Expecting God to Show Up
Christian spirituality is found inside the attitude of Jesus, whom Christians believe is the tangible presence of a real God. In fact, Jesus’ purpose was to bring all creation and people into the relationship he shares with the Father and Spirit. By tying relationship with God to the concept of community Jesus brought theophany (the appearance of God) into the center of the rugged, daily relationships between people. He said, “In as much as you do it to the least of these, you’ve done it unto me.” In WhiteWater, we began to expect God’s presence, not in some display of blinding light, but in the day-to-day conversations and presence of the people with whom we traveled.
Chile
Not Therapy
Furedi points out that “therapeutic culture is not so much the promotion but the distancing of the self from others . . .[it] both reflects and promotes the trend towards fragmentation and alienation. . . it does so by systematically stigmatizing informal relations of dependence” (2004, p. 21). This diagnosis of western culture is helpful in recognizing what we were not doing via WhiteWater: We were not conducting therapy, in any sense of the word. We were simply getting caring older people together with younger people to serve, talk, and travel through life together. This seems radically different than some of the current claims for OE’s use as a therapeutic tool (Berman & Davis-Berman, 2002; Pryor, Carpenter, & Townsend, 2005; Stolz, 2000). These claims, although helpful in particular situations, may not make a broad foundation for OE’s future if we give Furedi’s claims any validity. By focusing instead on the simplicity of “being together,” we began to experience freedom from needing to consume things to receive pleasure. If young people “worked through their problems” (the claims of therapy), this occurred as a byproduct.
Core Values
Our core values included the following list, and emerged through conversations as a group about what we considered most important (what we were not willing to compromise): spiritual, confidential, accountable, friendly, “safe” or “refuge-like”, able to say anything without fear of “judging”, small groups, interactive, trained raft guides, listening and acceptance, and multiple generations. The core value of having “trained raft guides” meant that we set up a regular schedule of training events, attended outside training events for youth leaders together, and met after or before every group event to attend to practical application of our core values. I also set up an interview process and background check that was part of the application to become a guide. Young people were expected to take on responsibilities in the groups, emerging as leaders in their own right.
The Indoors/Outdoors Dichotomy
An interesting development in my understanding of community was that the indoors/outdoors dichotomy disappeared. Students and guides began to practice care not only for one another, but care for the spaces we inhabited—indoors and out of doors. None of this was a sudden massive shift. There were many exceptions to this rule, because we were an inclusive community that welcomed every young person who showed up – regardless of behavior or attitude. This made for a messy journey together. However, the overall growth of the group was towards a more caring approach towards people and places. Partly due to this, my concept of indoors and outdoors as separate entities underwent a radical shift. I began to think of others and myself as people on journeys that took place primarily out of doors, but not exclusively. We needed shelter from time to time, and places where we could be comfortable, but I found the concept of “shelter” very different from the concept of the “indoors” and “outdoors.”
Lynch and Moore (2004) consider the paradox of adventure education: the “industry” of personal development and/or ecology rooted in a capitalistic paradigm that includes domination, competition, and conquering nature as part of its core pursuits. They find it interesting many outdoor educators do not wrestle with the issues that arise from this history. In my case, it could be said that when we were outside we did not plan for competition, on any level. We did not climb mountains or raft rivers to conquer them. We went there to leave the city behind, and learn to “be” without consuming, to “be together” without artificial entertainment prosthetics attached to our conversation. In addition, we went there to engage in a communal activity with nature, herself.
The “Us” and “Them” Dichotomy
One of the fundamental sticking points in community is the inevitable human desire to define the community with a line drawn between “us” and “everyone else who isn’t us.” We certainly found this to be true in WhiteWater as well. However, we found the metaphor, itself, became a helpful tool in developing inclusion ideals. The main idea went something like this: “you wouldn’t just sit and watch anyone float by in the river towards the crashing waves of a big rapid if you were in a boat and had room for them, would you?” This picture allowed young people to begin to recognize inclusion as a vital passion for helping others feel “safe.” In welcoming others, they were participating in something bigger than themselves. To return to the central importance of the
Teaching and Learning Processes: Engaging Points of View
Both teaching and learning occurred “in the midst” of everything else we were doing, rather than as a particular programme. As guides built relationships, and opened their hearts to young people, they also began to open their lives. Students would get help on their cars from adults, help with homework, help with interpersonal issues. Undergirding all of this “help” was the deeper core of WhiteWater, a community of people sharing points of view. This need for being in community in order to listen and be listened to, to develop meanings based on the interactions between people and the interactions we have with objects has been delineated by researchers and theorists from a variety of disciplines including expeditions in the outdoors, scientific philosophy, sociology, education, and spirituality (Bacon, 1983; Blumer, 1962; Gatto, 2003; Goffman, 1997; Mead, 1934; Polanyi & Prosch, 1975; Vanier, 1989). A strength of the WhiteWater metaphor, then, was its simplicity and “space,” its ability to give young people a chance to “try on” different perceptions of themselves and what they considered “real.” Maybe even a chance to see themselves the way God supposedly viewed them. It was a chance to step away from treadmill lives and walk an alternative path with others, developing understandings of meaning, beliefs, and values on the way.
Research, Theory, and Practice: Key Connections
Embattled theories
In Beame’s research on young adults working as volunteers in Africa with Raleigh International, he rests his analysis on Blumer’s symbolic interactionism, noting that “peoples’ thoughts and behaviours are influenced by those around them, in a constant dynamic relationship that shapes who they are” (2005; Blumer, 1962). He points out that community functions as the mirror by which we continually interpret other’s perceptions of us, and utilise that interpretation power to develop identity. This might be construed to be at odds with social capital theory, a major theoretical stream that frames social science and education research (Coleman, 1997; Stoddart, 2004).
It is certainly simpler to give each social interaction a corresponding numeracy, placing it within the existing western-dominated paradigm for growth -- a criticism of social capital theory. Indeed, social capital studies may miss key understandings about human interaction, since they are based on an underlying notion of reciprocity – that people engage in actions expecting them to be reciprocated at some point in the future (Bourdieu, 1997). Although a generally coherent assertion, there are still too many exceptions and explanations that invalidate its claims as overarching social theory. Stoddart claims that social capital “involves the existence of social networks which empower individuals in communities to gain access to different opportunities” (2004). Again, a question arises: is there more to social interactions than ‘access to different opportunities?’ It might be suggested that reciprocity misinterprets the actual nature of human interaction by giving us a convenient monetary handle for the multiple and potentially immeasurable levels of human society.
Subtexts
Another realm for critical exploration is subtexts that occur within OE literature. Some writer/s purposefully use data to substantiate pre-existing notions of community. (I am certainly not free from this bias.) Underneath the assertions, interesting contradictions appear. For example, the role of social capital in Stoddart’s study narrows her research, making it manageable, yet potentially limits her own abilities to interpret her findings. By focusing on “social exclusion” she does not account for the young peoples’ family systems or situation-specific behaviour that may be occurring only within the OE context. A greater irony is that she did not follow any students who dropped out of the programme, further undermining her analysis of “social exclusion” issues in the greater Cumbrian community. It might be instructive to know what those students think, and why they are not involved.
In other literature, Berman and Davis-Berman make claims for a “comprehensive model” for crisis management in a wilderness setting and “hope that many of its elements can be applied cross-culturally” (2002). Yet, they submit an approach that rests on American cultural norms of voice, expression, body language, and so on. This, of course, is the antithesis of cultural relevance -- people communicate, interpret, and think differently depending on their background and language (Hofstede, 2001). Boyes and O’Hare present a “model for outdoor adventure decision-making” using a mechanistic flowchart model (2003). Among other projects, O’Hare is presently conducting research for NASA on pilot decisions and training for its safety programme (
It might be suggested that a good place to start new research is not in more studies on contested outcomes, nor on theoretically-slanted projects, but rather community-based education projects embedded in local relationships among a particular group of people. With the world developing greater diversity of community based on non-geographic connections (internet groups, myspace, global corporate communities, etc.) a potential strength of OE might be its local embeddedness.
Conclusion: Red Flags – And a White One
An issue not addressed adequately in present OE theory and research is that OE seems “caught between a rock and a hard place” when it comes to community building: on one hand we act like we’re the experts at changing lives, on the other hand, we continue to remove youth and adults from their home communities for experiences and often don’t follow them back to those communities. We are faced with a problem: are we “experts at changing lives” if we’re doing this kind of work in one or two week increments with different groups of people, and then rarely see them again? It might be helpful to make a clearer distinction about our expertise: we are often builders of short-term communities that do not last. The “expert” part is also arguable, particularly due to the ambiguities of “professionalism” that haunt our particular sector (class discussion, professional practice, 2006).
A second “red flag” facing “community building in OE” at large is the preponderance of research focusing on outcomes, lending validity to the suggestion that some outdoor educators are trying to bolster the credibility of the work we do by claiming it really does make a difference. The issues that arise include investigator bias; scientific, methodological, and logic haziness; and a problem-solving approach that keeps itself “in the box” via methods that close off other avenues of inquiry and/or thought (Brookes, 2004d; Zink, 2005). There remains little research that follows young people home for any extended amount of time -- excepting Martin and Leberman (2005), who suggest it is the activities rather than instructors who are remembered post-course. So much, instructors, for any sense of worth. We may continue on course indefinitely, measuring situational responses, coloured rather vividly by our short-term “community building” (Brookes 2003a, 2003b, 2003c).
One suggestion this paper makes is that an Outdoor Education community need not be separated from its greater web of relationships. What if we raised a white flag and “made peace” with the local communities from which we extract young people? What if Outdoor Education embraced its strength of place, whilst rejecting commodification? In a transient global community, OE could offer localised, embedded communities centred in “place.” It might mean that practitioners take small steps away from providing OE like fast food and start considering how to cook a good OE meal that lasts longer than a week. Without a doubt, WhiteWater had its share of “warts,” because people are messier than machines or computers. But people can become artisans, and machines and computers . . . . Cannot. My experience with this particular approach is that it was one of the more humane ways to be community together.
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