CASE STUDY: ADVENTURE – TOURISM, ADVENTURE and EDUCATION
Edventure – The alternative adventure (18-25) club?
‘A lot wilder than Ibiza’
(Earthwatch advert, Global Adventure Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 2, 2002).
As we have explored elsewhere in the book the term ‘adventure’ also generally implies an educational or recreational activity that is exciting and physically, intellectually, spiritually and emotionally challenging, and adventurous journeys are now increasingly being used for both youth and adult development programmes throughout the world. It is this educational element that is of particular interest in this case study of adventure tourism. Whilst mainstream study exchanges, overseas work placements and learning vacations have existed for some time the market is now broadening and diversifying. There is an increased use of adventure travel for personal development, educational and career development opportunities (Beard and Wilson, 2002). These new ingredients are all being packaged up to attract a new niche of customers and this we have coined edventure.
There are now many more organisations offering these packages in the advertising spaces at the rear of adventure magazines. Numerous organisations now trade their products that offer this unusual new combination of educational and experiential ingredients. Greenforce, Frontier, African Conservation Experience, Green Volunteers, Global Vision International, Biosphere Expeditions and Earthwatch are just a few of the organisations that aim to help improve wildlife and community environments.
Greenforce for example emerged as a post Rio-initiative (Earth Summit), inspired by the global political commitments made in 1992 to identify and protect the biodiversity of the planet. One of their brochures is titled Work on the wild side! Conservation Expeditions. Volunteers are offered the chance of ‘learning valuable skills’ on ‘an experience of a lifetime’. But more significantly there was a growing global interest in environmental courses in the late 1990s, when many graduates were keen to carve out a career but found that the experiential opportunities to do so were few and far between, and often required extensive experience before a being considered for a post. These and many other practical environmental organisations have to a large extent grown out of this demand for the need for action learning, for ‘real educational experiences’.
So-called Fieldwork Assistants receive special attention:
As a Fieldwork Assistant you will gain practical experience in a wide range of techniques from sampling in vegetation plots to tracking elephants... Greenforce is committed to the development of our volunteers. Many people who join a Greenforce Expedition are embarking on a career in environmental conservation and have found employment in the area difficult to obtain without relevant field experience.
Frontier is also a not-for-profit organisation promoted by the Society for Environmental Exploration and in its year 2000 brochure commented that:
Taking part in a Frontier expedition is a once-in-a-lifetime experience... Future employers will be impressed with your achievements both in getting there and in succeeding in your project. Many former volunteers have used their expeditions as the basis for project and dissertation work for Bachelors Degrees and Masters Degrees. Frontier is also a ‘Sponsoring Establishment’ for Research Degrees through the Open University, the ONLY volunteer conservation organisation to have achieved the status of a field university. If you want a career in conservation and overseas development work, Frontier is the only option. With all volunteers eligible for a level 3 BTEC qualification in Tropical Habitat Conservation just on the strength of ten weeks of training and work on a Frontier expedition, becoming a volunteer gives you a chance to kick start a career in this highly competitive field. A recent survey found that 62% of ex-Frontier volunteers have achieved such careers thanks to their experience with Frontier.
(Beard and Wilson, 2002)
Why expeditions?
Wilderness programmes in America and Australia also use expeditions that last over one hundred days, and these are used for people to re-appraise their life. They often result in powerful life-impacting learning and as such, expeditions are still used by many organisations to offer development opportunities for young people in growth, self-development and active citizenship. In the USA there are Family Expedition Programmes to assist families coping with at-risk youth. The expedition becomes the opportunity to construct a microcosm of the family life journey so that it can be re-appraised and re-navigated in real life.
Expeditions emerge as a key market term used to attract adventurers. In 1978 Operation Drake was launched in the United Kingdom, and following its success, Operation Raleigh followed in its footsteps in 1984. Its aim was ‘quite simply, to develop leadership potential in young people through their experience of the expeditions.’ (Blashford-Snell and Tweedy, 1990, p.16). Operation Raleigh, re-named as Raleigh International, now sends ‘venturers’, between the ages of 17 and 25 years old, on ten-week expeditions. Although expeditions have a long reputation as being character building, for some people these expeditionary voyages might also be perceived as safer alternatives to backpacking.
Allison (2000) discusses some themes emerging from an extensive empirical study of young people returning from expeditions. Allison was able to draw out several themes that clearly relate to the individual sense of being, where young people clearly see the world in a very different light when they return home. Among the themes were:
o Increased tolerance and patience
o Increased awareness and appreciation of more basic things in life
o A change in environmental values, e.g. recognising how people use their cars to travel very short journeys that are easily walked
o An understanding of the intensity and nature of the new friendships and the comparison of those with friends at home
o Better relationships with siblings
o A greater sense of personal and spiritual perspective on life
o A sense of service and giving
o A change of self-concept.
(adapted from Allison, 2000, in Beard and Wilson, 2002)
Whilst he addresses the need to re-examine epistemological and ontological perspectives used for research into experiential learning, his study also focuses on phenomena of post expedition re-adjustment. Allison argues that this can be seen in a very positive light, although the condition has been likened by some as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Whilst this adjustment period might be due to a form of grieving, Allison suggests that the loss of friends, the loss of community and the natural environment might simply indicate the adjustment pains of positive personal growth brought about by such powerful experiential learning.
Biosphere Expeditions was founded by Mathias Hammer, a German parachute regiment and special air forces soldier, now based in the UK Broads National Park.
Looking for an adventure with a conscience and a sense of purpose, unlike any tourist or eco-tourist will ever have? We run real conservation expeditions world-wide... no tours, no safaris – just pure science and sheer adventure...
Adventures with a conscience. Those interested in wildlife conservation now have the chance to join conservation expeditions and make a difference to their holidays. The term ‘expedition’, although much used and abused by the tourism industry today, still carries a whiff of adventure, far-flung continents, discovery, research and perhaps a bit of danger. Biosphere Expeditions Ltd is committed to running real wildlife conservation research expeditions to al corners of the Earth. Our projects are not tours, photographic safaris or excursions but genuine research expeditions. To achieve this BE will only collaborate with reputable scientists, research institutions and educational establishments and economies. BE pledges a voluntary Earth tax of 1% of all its profits to the preservation and restoration of our planet’s biosphere.
There is thus much evidence of the market attracting students about to enter or already engaged in higher education. Project Orangutan in Borneo offer four to twelve week expeditions and make specific reference to GAP and school expeditions. There is a GAP year magazine in the UK, and GAP year adventure and touring around the world are now almost considered as rites of passage by some young people especially given cheap travel. Operation Wallacea, set up in 1995, say that 20% of their volunteers are students doing their dissertation at masters or undergraduate level. In the year 2000 Operation Wallacea had nearly three hundred volunteers, mainly university students completing final year Honours and Masters level projects, working together with twenty scientists. Science is often used to enhance the reputation and credibility of such organisations. Operation Wallacea is an organisation named after the great explorer naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, a person credited with simultaneously and independently conceiving the evolutionary theory whilst in a fit of malarial fever and stranded en route to New Guinea. He wrote to Darwin and his letter apparently inspired Darwin to go public as the letter from Wallace read like an abstract of Darwin’s own unpublished papers. The organisation was a winner of the 2000 Tourism for Tomorrow National Parks category.
Coral Cay Conservation specialise in expeditions for reef and rainforest conservation. The top of their 2001 brochure has a repeat sequence of advertising words: adventure, teamwork, training, conservation, adventure, teamwork, training... The term expedition features as significant, and appears to act as a key interface between the basic journey and the ingredients of wildlife conservation, adventure and social or environmental concern. Expeditions form the basis of Coral Cay work, an organisation that uses the name and support of Professor David Bellamy, OBE, for legitimacy and claims to provide ‘resources to help sustain livelihoods and alleviate poverty through the protection, restoration and management of coral reefs and tropical forests’. Here we see the closeness of the boundaries between social and environment work are evident.
The Earthwatch Institute, formed in 1972, is a USA based volunteer programme that allow volunteers into one hundred and forty field projects in over fifty countries as scientists’ field assistants. The organisation is said to promote sustainable conservation of natural resources and cultural heritage by creating partnerships between scientists, the general public, educators and businesses. Earthwatch education programmes appear to take a number of forms. The most obvious is the ‘education that every Earthwatch volunteer gets through participation in the field’.
They are said to not only learn a large number of facts but, perhaps more importantly, they get a context for these facts and a perspective that Earthwatch feels is essential for creating a sustainable future. However, the extent to which these adventure travel projects remain almost exclusively for those who have, or can raise, the necessary funds is unclear. Earthwatch feels that this kind of education is so important, that they offer ‘scholarships to teachers, students, and in-country conservation workers to multiply the effect of their experience through their constituents’. Rather interestingly these adventure travel products are being offered to other groups undergoing education; one market niche is that of executive education and development:
We also have programmes for corporations to send their executives to the field for environmental training and programmes to put disadvantaged young people on projects. Altogether, the Earthwatch education programme has produced dozens of new scientists, inspired legions of students, created international partnerships, and produced new corporate policies and school curricula.
Operation Raleigh also offers such projects in the international dimension of their development programmes:
Challenges in the outdoors, and involvement in community or environmental projects, are well established as a successful means of developing staff. Combining these with an intensive international work in remote areas, Raleigh creates a framework within which learning can be transferred to the workplace. Working and living with people from different backgrounds for an extended period helps equip employees for today’s fast-changing and demanding business environment. Working in real time, generating solutions to real problems, the experience proves sustainable and effective at developing the following qualities: team-working, leadership, interpersonal skills, confidence, motivation and assertiveness, initiative, flexibility and resilience, adaptability, maturity, awareness of self and others.
(in Beard and Wilson, 2002).
Whilst some providers talk of using ‘real scientific research’ the reality clearly lies within the nature of the social or environmental projects. The degree to which activities or the learning environment itself are seen as real by students is clearly a significant factor used to enhance the marketing of the edventure programmes. Beard and Wilson (2002) explore the nature of reality in experiential learning and note that altering levels of reality both up and down can provide opportunities to unlock greater potential to learn from experience. The degree to which reality is perceived as real and the extent to which reality is manipulated is a key consideration in the marketing and design of edventure learning.
Activities use in traditional higher education practice or in executive management training are often perceived as not real and simply ‘simulated’. However the learning process, for example, how people actually learn from such a simulated event, can be very real. Edventure projects are only real to a degree as reality applies to many different dimensions of experiential learning, including the learning process itself, as well as the reality of the activities provided and the learning environment that they take place in. Few students will end up working in the jungles or the mountains and so whilst the learning environment might be perceived as real, it isn’t necessarily so.
So-called real projects or activities can include environmental or community work, however simply providing activities that are perceived as either real or not real isn’t the only way to influence the learning processes. Levels of reality can easily be lowered or raised to induce more effective learning, but making the right choices requires practice from professional educators as well as a clear understanding of the processes involved. This is a strong experiential learning component in edventure marketing but the extent to which these edventure learning programmes involve professionally trained educators or facilitators to enhance real learning, is made less clear, thus the learning process might be more by unconscious processes than by trial and error.