Can the Mountains Speak for Themselves?

Thomas James, Colorado Outward Bound School - 1980

Several years ago, a course director named Rustie Baillie coined the phrase, "Let the
mountains speak for themselves". He was reacting against pressures in the Colorado
Outward Bound School to verbalize student experience on courses and to use
counseling techniques to manage the group process of patrols. Baillie was not the first
to react. In interviewing staff and trustees from the early years of Outward Bound in
this country, I discovered that the issue was as vehemently debated then as it is today.
In fact, the debate began right after the first season in 1962 when there was a falling
out about whether to instill an "intellectual element" in courses, and since then there
have been plenty of historical examples of the rift. In 1964 the school director required
nightly staff debriefings on the meaning of each day’s activities in the base camp at
Marble, and one staff member of those years told me that instructors breathed a sigh
of relief when it came time to go on the six-day alpine expedition. In 1966 the chief
climbing instructor tried to introduce a written guide to counseling techniques. In 1967
or so there started to be readings and other written materials available for use in the
field. By the next year there was an outline to help foster spiritual awareness.

In the years since then there have been other examples of the urge to intensify the
counseling, teaching and therapeutic aspects of working for Outward Bound. For those
who were not sympathetic it was all cant and crud they had to clear away to run a
straightforward Outward Bound course. For those who were sympathetic, the school’s
support for this kind of skill was not anywhere near adequate. Many felt, and still feel
today, that there would have to be a great expansion of human relations techniques in
Outward Bound before the program could offer its students personal growth that
would transfer to their lives back home.

The issue has been around long enough to make me conclude that it is one of those
defining tensions that is built into the identity of Outward Bound and will never go
away. At the risk of offending many people who have strong feelings and a lot of their
own lives wrapped up in the issue, I am going to summarize a few perspectives that I
have heard or witnessed. I will add a couple of thoughts of my own, for whatever they
might be worth to others. Finally, I will sum up the issue in a way that I hope will be
conducive to further discussion among staff. The purpose of this paper is not to fix one
point of view as right and good. It is merely to give others some tools for thinking
about their own roles as Outward Bound instructors. I hope my thoughts will be a
stimulus to continue the discussion wherever it may lead, not to end it or demand a
certain outcome.

To begin with, it seems to me that the people who are saying anything equivalent to
"Let the mountains speak for themselves" are also saying something more, which is
that instructors can rely on the overall structure of the Outward Bound course to give
their students a good experience. They can rely on a training sequence, a way of
grouping students and committing them to task performance, activities like solo and
the rappel etc. In an evening discussion on Kurt Hahn last winter, course director Chris
Brown put it well when he said that no matter what else might be added on, he always
comes back to the tried and true activity structure of the course. The rappel works; the
expedition teaches; solo asks the questions that need to be asked.

So the point is not exactly that the mountains do the teaching. It is that the training
sequence we are using is a remarkably effective way to help people to learn in the
mountains. When it is applied in a straightforward way, then the mountains, which we
might as well translate to mean "Necessity" or "Natural Process" , do in fact teach
their valuable lessons to all who are willing to make the effort.

This is what Jon Waterman was driving at in the last Staff Newsletter when he said that
"a patrol’s experiences need relatively little ‘instructor facilitation’ in the realm of an
intensive twenty-two day mountain expedition". The experience happens naturally if
instructors are skilled enough to take their students safely through the adventurous
activities that make up Outward Bound, and when they do that, the mountains are
extraordinary teachers indeed. From what I have been able to gather as a newcomer
to Outward Bound, this is what the British instructors have generally represented in
the Outward Bound movement in America: strong, taciturn, no-nonsense
mountaineers who look like the type who have saved lives and mastered impossible
situations, but who would never want to make a big deal about it. They want students
to know by experience. They want to keep other activities and "head trips" from
hampering the direct experience of mountain wilderness, teacher extraordinaire.

Having said that much - and I think it is obvious that much more could be said - I want
to add only two points about this perspective. To begin with, on the positive side,
mountaineering per se is an activity that requires a high degree of consciousness and
self-scrutiny. The same is true, I believe, of river running. Sometimes it is tempting for
educators and psychological buffs to depict the action side of Outward Bound as
devoid of reflection, when in fact that life of actions is often composed of mental
activity of the most significant kind. As I see it, the so-called "rock jocks" are not
pushing a low-consciousness activity. From an educational standpoint, I would interpret
their point of view to be saying that the learning that takes place naturally and
integrally on an Outward Bound course does not need elaborate verbalization and
testing in a controlled group process in order to be conscious, useful and transferable.

On the negative side, letting the mountains speak for themselves means that the staff
may be transmitting little culture and few values other than those of mountain living
and expeditions. There is a danger, cited by a staff member in another Outward Bound
school a few years ago, that this kind of teaching could amount to saying, "We are the
people and this is the life." The lesson then would be one of self-absorption: "We are a
strong, beautiful, alienated elite that treasures above all else this lifestyle and these
awesome mountains. Don’t you want to be like us?" I am putting the argument in an
extreme form to make a point. There may not be a single person in the whole Outward
Bound movement who exemplifies the extreme. But there cannot help be some
tendency that way in anyone who loves the mountains and is young. Moreover, in a
program in which formal ideology is to teach through the mountains and not for them,
any instructor worth his/her salt is going to assume that you have to do a lot of
teaching for before you have a safe and adventurous context to teach through. Yet, if
the learning ends at mountain living, then is it not at least debatable whether the life-
stylist may have given their students short shrift?

Usually during the past year when I have heard people talking about this issue, they
put "rock-jocks" (or some more or less derogatory phrase) on one side and "touchy
feelies" on the other. I hope I have said enough about the former so that anyone who
is not sympathetic to them will take a fresh look at their point of view, perhaps seeing
in a new light the excellences and depths of human response that they are capable of
bringing to an Outward Bound course. Similarly, I hope that what I am about to say on
the other side will give pause to those who are intent on letting the mountains speak
for themselves, a pause long enough to consider why some people might want to
explore other possibilities on a course. One surprising discovery I made this year while
researching the history of the Colorado Outward Bound school was that student
impressions of courses are remarkably consistent even where different styles of
instruction were involved. It seems that all kinds of instructors can impel students into
a good Outward Bound experience. This suggests to me that no one has a corner on
the best way to do Outward Bound. Ultimately, the differences do not represent
conflict so much as they reflect creativity. What this says to me is that no one stands
to lose from greater communication and a wider range of sympathies.

So why do some people want to spend more time verbalising the experiences of
students on an Outward Bound course? If we ask this question, we might as well also
ask another one: Why has this school, which was originally staffed mostly by
mountaineers and ex-military men, drawn so many educators and social worker types
since the mid-1960s? The answer to the latter question is that these people have
found an intensity of learning and being in Outward Bound that usually does not exist
in conventional institutions. Isn’t this what has brought us all to Outward Bound? But
they also look for a connection between that intensity and the life to which students
return. This is really what is meant by teaching through the mountains and not for
them. And this is why, in the model developed by Vic Walsh and Jerry Golins, and also
the similar one developed by Ron Gager, to explain the learning process of Outward
Bound, they say that the outcome of the stress, challenge and mastery in an
unfamiliar environment should be to reorient the meaning and direction of the
learner’s life experience. Direct experience is the key, but there must be some way to
help the student beyond immediate consumption of experiences to the greater
challenges of improving their lives back home. The usual label is "transference",
helping students to transfer their newfound competence and confidence back to an
environment that may not sustain them so excitingly as Outward Bound did.

The people who talk about education and personal growth and group process are not
denying that challenge and adventure are the bedrock of Outward Bound. They are not
seeking verbalization and reflections instead of action, but in addition to action, as an
enhancement and not as a substitute. Now, as I did with other perspectives, I’d like to
make only two additional points here, one positive and one negative, though of course
there is much more than could (and I hope will) be said.

On the positive side, the verbalising point of view is sensible because it reflects the
way most people go about learning and making changes in their lives. I will first say
what I mean by this in the abstract; then I will describe how it might appear on a
course in the field. In the abstract (and please bear with me if you are not sympathetic
to this kind of talk about Outward Bound), educators are apt to follow John Dewey’s
notion that the challenge of any form of education is to select present experiences
that will live fruitfully and creatively in future experience. Few would disagree with
this. Dewey, who was probably the greatest educational thinker ever produced in this
country, wrote of learning as an experiential continuum, a continuity of growth
experiences. But here is where the disagreement begins, because he characterized
learning not as the experience itself, but as thinking about experience. So a form of
education like Outward Bound that provides intense experiences also needs to provide
tools for thinking about those experiences, for tying what has happened on a course
into the experiential continuum of those who have passed through it. Another equally
abstract way of saying this comes from social scientists who have studied learning
behaviour and concluded that the experience of the learner must be generalized into
the learner’s repertoire of skills and knowledge. Students need help to draw
inferences, to see the pattern that connects their continuous experience. And this is
precisely why we have schools, even those as informal and far-flung as the Colorado
Outward Bound School.

In a less abstract vein, the process of thinking about experience doesn’t have to be
either a church social or a Mazola party. It can be as integral to the experiences as is
skills instruction, if handled skillfully It might be only a well-placed word here or there
on a course, some perspective on nutrition or safety or physical exercise, a sincere but
non-judgmental suggestion of the possibilities back home, perhaps just an openness to
someone who is thinking out loud about the past - and beyond this, some knowledge
of things that work in helping students to reflect on their experience. This could be as
simple as an initiative game or as elaborate as an intensive journal, depending on the
circumstances. It could be a chat about energy use while doing the dishes or a
nightlong rap on philosophy and previous lives around glowing embers. As in the
teaching of skills, it is crucial to maintain the pace and authenticity of the experience,
not interrupting adventure with contrived interactions. But the process of thinking
about experiences does not have to be contrived, though I suspect it does require
more energy from instructors than they would have to put out for a straightforward
expedition with no extras.

Much of what the educators and personal growth advocates are talking about is
remarkably similar to what all instructors are trying to do in their own way. In a recent
paper on working with small groups, Candice Chrislip described it as helping student
"to isolate a particular success on the course, to identify the process they went
through, and to make this success available to them as a future resource". Although I
must admit to a bias in that direction because I am an educator in my own values, I
still would find it hard to argue on any ground that her statement was not central to
Outward Bound. And the more tools we have for carrying it out, the better.

On the negative side, it may be pretentious to expect that Outward Bound can do any
more than give its students what course director Ron Gager has called a "short-term
turn-on". The standard course is only twenty-three days long. Instructors have no
formal training in counseling, therapy, communications, human relations etc. In fact,
what instructors are trained to do is let the mountains speak for themselves by guiding
a patrol into the wilderness, building up its skills for outdoor living, and then
confronting it with a characteristic set of problem-solving tasks. Students coming to
Outward Bound are looking for this very thing. For the most part they will not ask of
more (especially the adolescents). Certainly there are very few who are ready to give
the profound emotional assent and perseverance that is required for therapeutic
healing in any meaningful sense beyond the "short-term turn-on". Most are looking for
action and they want more than anything to learn that they can do more than they
thought they could. What I am driving at is that the mountaineers are making an
important point by demanding a more limited set of expectations for an Outward
Bound course. Perhaps that point is that we should do what we do best, which is to
deliver students into an extraordinary experience of action and adventure, leaving
them to make of it what they will. We can provide the spark, as Kurt Hahn said, but it
is up to others to keep the flame alive.

Obviously, the dichotomy or "defining tension" I have described is too simple.

Everyone is in the middle somewhere, partaking of both sides, but I hope what I have
said will be useful in firing up others to think about the possibilities of Outward Bound.
It may be that someone who has been a hard-core skills person for a few courses will
find it interesting to experiment with new techniques in human relations, just to keep
the job interesting and find out why people make such a fuss over "touchy feely". On
the other hand, for those who came fresh from highly verbalized settings and are
ready to charge into the millennium of human potential, it might be interesting to ease
off for a bit and savour the excitement of Outward Bound in its most austere and
economical form. Meanwhile, the school will probably continue to do what schools
always do in staff development, which is to push people to build up the
complementary side of their skills and knowledge, either to strengthen hard skills if
they are weak in that area, or to soften up a bit if they are so hard as to be antisocial.
Hooray for our differences!
Fonte: http://www.wilderdom.com/facilitation/Mountains.html