The Relevance of Real Experiences in the
Development of Young People and the
Quantification of Their Personal Gains
Derek T. Jackson
Abstract—Within the United Kingdom the author has experienced
practical difficulty in dealing with the general enquirer’s understanding of the rationale and justification for experiential education
and how it relates to the developmental needs of young people. This
is within the context of growing up in today’s society and acquiring
the skills needed to earn a living and to be successful in getting and
holding down a job in a highly competitive environment. There is
also a need to set out arguments for educators, employers, and
potential funders/sponsors as to why they should support outdoor or
adventure education in terms of time, funds, and resources.
This paper addresses the questions of increased use by environmentalists and outdoor enthusiasts, and of the terms “wilderness”
and “wilderness education.” To those outside this field, the word
“wilderness” often holds a negative connotation more synonymous
with emptiness, low value, the preserve of individuals driven more
by emotion than practical understanding, lacking economic relevance, and suitable only for demanding recreational and holiday
purposes. It is also felt that for many it is not seen to be a word that
suggests value.
These issues are addressed in a non-tendentious way through
concentrating on the here and now and the practical. It focuses on
the young person at school in a changing society where the days of
unchallenged social values, the family, and development of children
through outdoor play and interaction with others involving firsthand experiences is diminishing.
Over the last three decades, life in all aspects has changed
immeasurably. It is arguable that childhood, the play, and
experiences my generation enjoyed have disappeared. Childhood is fast disappearing. Children have almost become an
endangered species. Nowhere is this more evident than in
the world of recreation, fashion, pop, and the media. Children become superficially adult overnight as opposed to
“precocious” as adults used to say. “Precocious” is a word now
seldom heard.
In: Watson, Alan E.; Aplet, Greg H.; Hendee, John C., comps. 2000.
Personal, societal, and ecological values of wilderness: Sixth World Wilderness Congress proceedings on research, management, and allocation, volume II;
1998 October 24–29; Bangalore, India. Proc. RMRS-P-14. Ogden, UT: U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station.
Derek T. Jackson is Outdoor Education Consultant and Program
Director, Palanquin Education, Palace Yard, Priory Road, Wells, Somerset,
BA5 1SY, UK, and representative of the Wilderness Trust (UK), e-mail:
Derekjackson@tesco.net.
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Children _______________________
As soon as children can hit a switch (or batteries), in my
experience as young as four, they can tap into the explicitness of the adult world. Nowhere is this more evident than
in the publication of the children’s version of the Starr/
Clinton report, which simply gave rise to more enquiries.
Children are thus long in knowledge but very short on
experience to handle that knowledge, much of it gathered
secondhand from electronic imagery and databases.
As an example, a recent survey in the United Kingdom
showed that the average British child watches TV/videos for
22 hours per week, largely a passive activity even when
shared. This means 23,000 hours of viewing by the age of 17,
as opposed to 21,000 hours of schooling where it is estimated
that teachers will be speaking for over 60 percent of the time.
Many other life experiences are secondhand, derived indoors in an increasingly urbanized world where parents are
fearful of children out of sight, at play, or isolated on upper
floors of flats or apartment blocks. While children can
interact indoors sharing what they do, it is generally one-toone with a best friend who can often be someone else’s best
friend! This is in stark contrast to the instant and compelling
feedback from activities in the outdoors and what this
conference refers to as the wilderness. Indoors they rarely
have to come to terms with interpersonal factors such as
cooperation, communication, and working together to make
things work. They can withdraw to their bedroom, to their
earphones or screen, and blank the problem out, never
dealing with the real issues.
Bridging the Gap ________________
There is a need to bridge the gap between contemporary
life and formal learning to enhance the personal capabilities
of young people and to help balance their lives. This is in a
way that cannot easily be achieved in the classroom or at
home with its varied and sometimes isolated patterns of
living, so aiding their progress through life.
Home, the classroom, and secondhand experiences are not
sufficiently conducive to gaining emotional literacy, particularly where both parents work and are under pressure to
progress their careers, or with the confusion of divorce, now
running at over 33 percent in Britain.
To me there is an absence of balance in learning to handle
events and emotions in a world of short attention spans and
cliches like “Whack My Soul.” The need is to balance the yin
and the yang through experiences that can combine achievement, catching the imagination, pleasure, handling the
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routine, and overcoming the apprehension that invariably
surrounds the unknown, with life; life as it is really lived—
a truly holistic approach.
A few years ago, I saw a piece of truly thought-provoking
graffiti, particularly because it was on the wall of a 19th
century factory, now redundant and formerly used by a
multi-national company to produce synthetic fibers (but
temporarily in use as a training center for the young unemployed in its catchment area, a clear indicator of change). At
that time, local unemployment rates were around 73 percent
for those under 23. The reason why this has reduced very
considerably is complex but largely due to a higher take-up
in further and higher education through incentives that are
politically inspired, but nevertheless of merit. However, this
merely extends the time spent in the class or lecture room.
Also, if you are unemployed and living on government or
someone else’s money, you tend to treat it as free income over
which you have little control. Thus the state tends to replace
the parent and learning through the realities of the workplace. Adolescence is extended with all the disadvantages to
the maturing process.
The graffiti said, “If Education is for Life: How come I
didn’t do it at School?” In short, I’ve left school without the
skills to get through life—how do I cope? It begs the questions, “Where do I get these skills?” “How do I learn to apply
knowledge, make things happen, and earn a living?” “Where
are my three “R’s?”
The Three “R’s”
The Three “R’s” stand for Reading, Wrighting (wheelwright, arkwright, shipwright, etc.), and Reckoning. They
are not the oft quoted and corrupted three R’s of academia—
reading, writing and ‘rithmatic, which can be interpreted as
knowledge for knowledge’s sake. They are:
• How to read an instruction.
• How to make something from it.
• How to calculate size, strength, weight, flotation,
stability, etc.
In short, how to make things happen, apply knowledge,
make things, and earn a living. These principles were
originally included in the indentures of apprentices until the
turn of the 19th century.
I recognize that there are enormous shifts in schools
through project work to provide a more practical education,
but this still involves class-based work of gathering practical
information and its theoretical or modeled application. It
does not necessarily develop personal skills.
One way of achieving this is through an outdoor, or
possibly expedition, experience over an extended timeframe
where the individual finds it difficult to opt out of what is
going on. However, this requires a light-handed approach
and high-quality staff. In some ways, an expedition is similar to going to war in terms of accelerated growth for those
involved.
An expedition evokes the same emotions and similar
challenges as war, but without gunfire and death. It has all
those ingredients that move the 18 or 19 year young man to
adulthood overnight. With an outdoor experience, fear, an
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essential ingredient in concentrating the mind, is replaced
by apprehension, and happily includes young women to
mirror the reality of life. Feedback and (self) analysis of
personal performance as opposed to finding yourself alive or
dead further enhance this! What then are the needs to be
met?
The Need
The need is to offer a range of firsthand experiences. This
has to be in a form that enables personal growth to be
measured and quantified, and that provides feedback relevant to the needs of individuals and in a form that is
understandable.
But what is the best way to balance formal learning, create
new life experiences, and learn how to manage them? To me,
it is very much in the outdoors, if you like, in the wilderness—
a classroom without boundaries and predictability (but it is
not a church or shrine at which to worship nature—again the
“whack my soul” approach). However, it is clearly an environment to be in and in awe of nature. But—and it’s a big BUT—
the mountains and wilderness do not have a voice. They need
someone to interpret the outcomes and benefits from being
among them. These can be summarized as:
• Evident emotions and reactions to real situations through
experiencing pleasure, success, or falling short.
• Turning failure into success from seemingly no second
chance.
• No escaping the issues by not being able to withdraw
from events.
• Having to live with the outcomes—good or bad.
• Discomfort and having to handle consequences of the
unavoidable and don’t likes.
• Self-discovery from seeing the effect of individual input
and behavior on events and others.
What does all this add up to? Individuals welcome being
stretched (stretched but not torn) emotionally and physically. There is a need to pace activities to ensure that people
are not taken out of their depth. This is to avoid individual
energies and emotions being focused solely on personal
survival, thus preventing reflection, enjoyment, and having
time to support the needs of others. The outdoors is not some
moral gymnasium; to make it work it needs some magic
ingredients:
•
•
•
•
•
Fun
High activity
Excitement
Apprehension, not fear
Stretched but not torn
These ingredients replace the common perception of an
unrealistic struggle against nature, which can be summed
up in a slogan on a t-shirt I once saw: “ I faced the ecosystem
and survived.” What needs to be fostered is the attitude
“relax and melt into it to enable discoveries to be made.”
John Ridgeway, the first to row the Atlantic, when interviewed by BBC World Service, was asked, “What’s it like to
have beaten the Atlantic?” His response: “We didn’t—it left
us alone.”
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The key to all this is the facilitator and the person who
evaluates the events and outcomes. I will return to this
point.
For me, the outdoors is rather like a databank of memories—memories of how we handled things in the past. As an
example of this, ask the question, “Do individuals have
enough experience to handle the skids of life?” Let’s look at
a skid in a car. Ask a man if he can control a skid and the
answer will be yes. But ask him how many times he has
skidded and the answer is likely to be “never.” A real man
never skids! Ask a woman and she is likely to ask you what
you mean; “I don’t know—I’ve never had one” is often the
reply. If you have skidded, you are unlikely to forget; every
sense comes alive. With an outdoor program, you can arrange the number and nature of skids to suit the learning
objectives.
I believe the databank of memories (or skids) in our heads
is akin to an on-board computer. For example, the service
engineers at the main IBM service station in the United
Kingdom have 30 minutes to fix an onsite problem. If they
can’t, they call in and ask the central databank:
•
•
•
•
Have you seen this problem before ?
How was it solved?
How long did it take?
What parts were needed?
Similarly, when confronted with a problem, I ask my onboard computer if I have seen this before and what did I do
or learn? I also believe my computer is as much in my heart
as in my mind. I call it gut feeling, and it often works better
in the outdoors when I feel I am really alive! To me, it is worth
listening to my heart with all its emotions, feeling good or
feeling bad, and if it is bad, whose fault is it? We rarely accept
that it might be our own. I rely a great deal on my gut feeling,
which I see as a micro-seconds distillation and comparison
with the whole of my life’s experiences, good, stupid or bad,
and having had to live with the results of my decisions and
behavior; thus it is pretty accurate.
We now have a whole industry in Britain for quick fixes
and emotions, but one that appears to avoid allocating blame
(really avoiding taking responsibility for the results). For
example, farm visits are now deemed by the Department of
Education to put young people at risk, not from machinery
but contamination from animal feces, although there appear
to be no deaths. It’s all rather theoretical or secondhand.
We even have a prescription in the United Kingdom for
young people called the “Pathway Award” for theoretically
plotting one’s way through life. Although it appears experiential, it seems to offer no feedback or evaluation on an
individual’s ability to handle life. Instead, to me, it is just
badge- or certificate-collecting with all that it entails.
But what if our minds are young and not too full of life’s
skids? I believe the best pathway is the outdoors, although
it is not the only way. To me, it is the best way to balance
formal learning or training. For example, the head of a
school I visited earlier this month said they use the outdoors
as a lubricant. “When we get the pupils outside the classroom, share an experience with them and it works, then we
have their attention and mutual respect in the classroom.
Thus to us the outdoors is an essential component of achieving classroom success.”
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It is the outdoors that can provide the learning to assimilate the skills of life. We know how it works. We see it and feel
it and smell it through the elements. In short, it works
through the intrinsic value of practical learning:
• I hear and I am aware.
• I see and I know.
• I do and I understand.
Evaluation and Measurement _____
But how do we measure the change? So far I have not seen
any published methodology of measuring individual growth
or performance, though there are copious examples of program, activity, and group analysis backed by anecdotal
evidence and personal and parental testimony. Sometimes
this is also the work of what I call outdoor groupies “who
have climbed to touch the face of the stars” to produce
somewhat subjective and observational assessments.
But what about individuals themselves? It was seeing the
t-shirt with the “I faced the ecosystem and survived” slogan
that made me think. Rarely have I seen individuals drawing
conclusions themselves, reflecting on their experiences and
recording their own performance.
A method I have developed, and to me the most valuable,
is to get young people to ask truly adult questions about
themselves, about the way they have performed. This should
be about specific experiences over a measurable time span
involving a series of events and personal changes, not on-off
experiences. Through asking themselves questions, reflecting on their answers, and giving themselves feedback, individuals can see how they dealt with reality and are able to
analyze their own performance. Thus in a nonjudgmental
and noncritical way, possibly avoiding any self justification
to refute perceived criticism, they can see the truth about
themselves or know if they are dodging the issues. The
situation under review needs to allow for this and must
include:
• Time to reflect on what happened and for the individual
to see how they reacted.
• A program that is not so active and stressful that all the
time is taken up with personal survival, leaving no
energy for reflection.
• Open situations promoting new discoveries.
We can enable individuals to review their performance
through a detailed questionnaire that promotes self-inquiry
and can only be answered from firsthand experience and
(growing) emotional literacy. Such an approach sets up a
cycle of questioning and inquiry:
• Reviewing: Thinking over and reflecting on the
experience.
• Drawing conclusions: Realizing what the experience
meant and what was learned.
• Planning: Reflecting on the conclusions and preparing
to take action on the discoveries.
• Getting things done: Putting plans and discoveries into
action.
The questionnaire looks like this: First an explanation to
set the scene and second the questions themselves (fig. 1).
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In this section we ask you to reflect back to how you felt at the
time of your initial briefing and decision to join the expedition.
Think about your feelings at the briefing, imagine what you were
like then, and put a symbol in the appropriate column to indicate
your thoughts:
a. If you were pleased with your performance.
b. If it was adequate but you would like to do better.
c. If you were disappointed and want to see an improvement.
Repeat the exercise on the second copy of the questionnaire,
recording your feelings at the end of the expedition. Lastly, hide
the sheet away for up to 3 months and then fill in the final column.
When you make a record of your thoughts, it is best not to look at
your answers so you are not influenced. After completing each
questionnaire compare it with the previous ones. Has the picture
changed? Why do you think this is? Were you pleased or dissatisfied about this? What action can you take alone or with others to
change things? You may even talk it over with your “best friend.”
That may take courage.
These can be varied to suit the learning and development
aims. Most importantly, they are asked over predetermined
intervals from before the experience, during, at the end, and
say 3, 6, or 9 months after events (fig. 2).
By comparing the answer changes, an individual’s development, and hopefully enhanced ability, becomes self-evident and the truth addressed in private! This is far preferable to a third party making a subjective assessment, which
may be taken as criticism.
The most amusing example I can give, accepting that the
process requires absolute personal honesty, was the young
man who, when reflecting, said, “I hate my mates doing
experiments on my brains,” when trying to decide how to
assess his ability to work with others. One very good question I often include is: How well do I understand what is
going on around me, or do others listen to what I have to say
(and if not, why not)?
Conclusion _____________________
Figure 1—Explanation to set the scene for selfassessment.
As in so many things, the best person to make judgements
is often the person involved. I also believe there is enormous
scope to research to develop this area. However, as most of
us may know, it is much more interesting to express an
opinion about others.
THE QUESTIONNAIRE
ABOUT MYSELF
Briefing
EXPEDITION
Begin.
End
Post
1. How effective were my contributions to
events and discussions?
2. How good am I at listening to others?
3. How good am I at communicating and
putting my ideas over clearly?
4. How successful was I in getting others
to join in and contribute to tasks
and discussions?
5. How good am I at working with other
people to make an effective team?
6. How good am I at helping others to achieve
success for themselves?
7. How well do I handle difficult people?
8. How good am I at influencing others?
9. How good am I at gathering the information
needed to make a contribution?
10.How well do I cope with problems?
11.How good am I at coming up with ideas?
12.How good am I at learning from others?
13. How much do I know about what is going on?
Figure 2—Self-assessment to promote self-inquiry.
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