Blowin in The Wind, Old Farts in the Heartland

The Earth Has Just Shifted !

2009-01-22T05:35:00Z

What a wonderful couple of days. Michelle said during the campaign that this was the first time she was really proud of her country. There have been times before when I have been proud politically, but not for what feels like way too long. I have been predicting that Obama would be President ever since he gave the speech at the Democratic convention four years ago. We in Illinois have had the advantage of seeing him close up for a long time, so the increasing sense of the adults being back in charge does not surprise us. We have seen it coming.

Anyway, we have a lot of difficult issues to deal with, but it is an exciting time to be an experiential educator, because their has been a siesmic shift in our direction. The President has made it clear that service will be a central aspect of this administration, and I believe that also means that there will be a much greater emphasis on direct experience and on all of the practices that we know really make a difference.

I hope we are ready respond to the call that is definitely coming.

Colons and Creativity

2008-12-16T00:55:00Z

I promise, those other old farts will contribute to this thing, it is just taking a little while to get them to give up the old Smith Coronas. We are all getting together on Thursday, and we will post something from Borders,

"You will have to release some of the air we pumped in before you can leave" Then all around the recovery room, behind every circled curtain, I could hear the sound of air being released. It was almost like a Christmas chorus. As usual, my contribution was slightly out of tune. It is hard to imagine anyplace which more closely matches the title of this blog. It was in fact, the aftermath of a colonoscopy. It is a surreal and humbling experience to watch as someone explores your colon. Fortunately, what was blowing in the wind didn't seem to have its normal fragrance, but I was still happy be able to get out of the wheel chair and walk through the door. These days, you have to be happy every time you can do that.

Ironically, instead of these days, my thoughts for the last week or so have taken me back thirty or forty years. It began with a conversation with Karl last week (I hope Karl will write something about this as well). We were talking about some of the risk averse changes he had to make in the latest version of Silver Bullets. The TV Show Survivor can design two or three new initiatives for every show, but i still see a lot of Karl's thirty year old initiatives still in use. When we old farts started out, no one sweated the small stuff. Now there are standards and protocols for everything. I think we all would agree that we are a lot safer at least in theory, but what have we lost in creativity, and in the opportunity to learn from our own mistakes?

Conscious Use of Metaphor or Thinking Outside of the Experiential Box

2008-12-09T05:43:00Z

One of the great things about being an old fart is that we get to blow quantities of fragrant hot air about whatever we want. So here is my first attempt to clear the room:

Last spring, I represented the Board of AEE at the opening of the Lenzate or Leadership and Challenge Center at the University of Monterrey in Mexico. (see video at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UjANXtaCGg> The Center is a wonderful facility which includes several high and low ropes courses, a specifically designed support building with offices classrooms, equipment Center, and a wide ranging experiential program including international field courses, adventure education and service learning. I have never seen a facility in the US that compares. The center is so accepted by the establishment that the opening ceremony included representatives from about fifteen of the best known universities in the US, the Mayor of Monterrey, numerous legislators , and business persons from Monterrey and Mexico. This is clearly an experiential education facility that has been fully embraced by both the Mexican and the American mainstream.

What I couldn't help asking myself is why experiential education has never achieved that level of acceptance in the US. It is a question I and others have struggled with for a long time. In a recent video interview Dan Garvey said “I cant' imagine that we are ever going to be embraced in main stream education because what we are essentially saying is that the dominant paradigm of educational instruction is less effective than what we are doing in experiential education, and I think we are offering an approach that is almost diametrically opposed to the orthodox consensus”.

Dan could be right, but I cannot help thinking about a number of instances in which some pretty similar experiential approaches have achieved much greater degrees of acceptance in much shorter periods of time. These would begin with the No Child Left Inside/Children In Nature Network, which has attracted thousands of members and even passed legislation, all in less than four years.   Then there is Service Learning, which has become mainstream in about fifteen years, and Environmental Education, which has taken maybe thirty years. Similar cases can be made for International Education and Internships. Like us each one of these approaches began well outside of the mainstream and unlike us, each is now fairly well on its way to being accepted as a mainstream methodology. What accounts for the fact that experiential education seems to lag behind?

We have been told for many years that mainstream acceptance will come when we have sufficient supportive research, and we continue to expend significant resources towards that end. In the same interview, Dan expressed doubt about this, and I must agree. I have never felt that such decisions are that rational. If they were, how does one explain the predominance of lecture in mainstream education, when every beginning education student is taught that it is just about the worst way to teach anything, and the existing research actually confirms this. Certainly the economics of mass education are a significant factor here, but clearly research has not been a factor.

What is it then that accounts for the seemingly greater degree of acceptance of each of these experiential approaches, movements, or programs?   I believe that the one common factor is a compelling metaphoric title. In each case the title metaphor creates an immediately favorable reaction, and also gives a fairly clear indication of what the program represents. Since we previously established that decision makers in our field do not always make decisions based on research or rationality, it would seem that an initially favorable emotional reaction might be extremely important. Consider how many times you have been asked what the term experiential means, and how many times experiential has been confused with experimental. I believe that this misperception, and the essentially negative connotation of experimental causes either an initial confusion or even a negative reaction, and that a more favorable initial perception to what we do would be much more likely to create “Decision-makers who value and support experiential education” as envisioned in AEE's new ends.

Our field has long known how important the emotional reaction to a well crafted metaphor is, but
Isn't it ironic that a field which prides itself on being able to frame sophisticated metaphorical therapeutic interventions has not applied the same sophisticated skill to its own most important metaphor.   Mike Gass said “A metaphor posses value when:

it is able to interpret the right experience
in a manner that provides the right picture
that produces the right words
that have deep meaning
for that particular person”

I submit that “Experiential education fails on every specification.

Experiential education” does have what might be called a large installed base of people who over time have come to understand its meaning, and for this reason it would not make sense to completely abandon the use of the term. So I have struggled with the need for change and the simultaneous need for continuity. So how might we replace an ineffective metaphor with one that passes the tests.

I may have a solution. I suggest that we follow the lead of our Mexican colleagues, and adopt the terms “leadership” and “challenge”as our lead marketing metaphors. It seems to me that these terms pass Mike's test. We might accomplish this by creating an Institute for Leadership and Challenge. (ILC)” within AEE. The institute could house all future outreach activities of the Association. I believe that this would finally give us the compelling and instantly recognizable brand/metaphor while at the same time maintaining continuity with the original AEE brand. The Institute would become the marketing arm of the Association. Using the terms leadership and challenge would give us two powerful positive metaphors that would finally provide us with an effective way both to market and seek funding for Association activities.

Regards,

Tom Lindblade
Rockford, Illinois

Blowin In the Wind ! Old Farts in the Heartland.

2008-12-08T04:50:00Z

The four of us Cliff Knapp, Tom Smith, Karl Rohnkke and Tom Lindblade have all ended up retiring around the stateline between Wisconsin and Illinois. Doesn't seem like outdoor adventure guys would end up here, but the little known fact is that we live in the midst of some of the most amazing scenery in the midwest. Karl lives near Gelena in the northwesten tip of Ilinois. Galena is a little known gem of a former lead mining town set in the southern edge of an area that didn't get squashed flat by the last glacier, The scenery there is off the charts! Cliff lives in Oregon Illinois on the Rock River another of Illinois best kept secrets. Oregon is everyone's favorite fall drive because the combination of fall colors, the river, and the famous Larado Taft Blackhawk statue on a bluff just north of town. Tom lives in Geneva Wisconsin on Lake Geneva which has been one of the best known summer destinations in the midwest for 150 years. The lake is one of the largest and most beautiful in Wisconsin and still has many of the huge old Ninteenth century mansions along its shores. I live in a wonderful older neighborhood in Rockford Illinois. Rockford is an old industrial city on the Rock River, and we get to take advantage of a central location between Madison and Chicago, they are both about an hour away. Rockford is small enough that We can still get accross town in 15 minutes at rush hour, a huge improvement over the Chicago suburbs.

So, that is where we are. About three years ago, Cliff realized we were relatively close to each other, and suggested we get together occasionally, and we have been doing that ever since. We have done several paddles together, you can see a video of the last one called "Old Fart Olympics" at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBnR2hXIfrQ>. Cliff Knapp, Tom Smith, and I all have profiles posted on the OFA page Karl Rohnke has yet to put one together. I have a website at http://WWW.hauntedbywaters.com, with a lot of travel, paddling, and AEE videos.

Finally, with this blog, we hope to start a conversation between ourselves, and any readers we might acquire. Each of us has a lot of years in the field, the total for the four of us is somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 years, and all of us continue to teach, present, write and volunteer. We are passionate about experiential education and a lot of other things, and hope to write about most of them.

Tom Lindblade
Rockford IL
1/7/08