Adventure Education and Resilience
Posted on 2008 under Adventure as usual, Children's Programmes, Experiential learning |15 Jul
Children naturally enjoy the outdoors. Apart from exercise, and health, adventure education helps children develop natural resilience from experience. Learning through experience is a natural state of being for a child, and while imparting information and training is necessary, it is important that a child gets to explore the world on his or her own terms, learning to cope with consequences or celebrate them from personal experience.
A young girl on one of my camps was rapt with attention during the introductory rappelling session. She came up with this exact question “Do soldiers use these same tactical rappelling techniques?” Tactical rappelling techniques!!! I had never considered this term before.
Another child from the same session asked “Why do we call abseiling rappelling?”
The questions in themselves are not particularly significant. No particular knowledge is involved, and knowing those particular answers is not going to change anyone’s life.
What I found satisfying about them was that “my kids” had stopped simply swallowing information, and were now exploring it.
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