War Stories

When outdoor instructors gather after work, and perhaps after refreshment has been taken, conversations sometimes turn to "war stories". Usually these are entered into in a spirit of sharing, of informal CPD and "what might I have done differently?", rather than just negative bitching about the job. This one is of the "not bitching" type.

Recently a colleague talked about a group of clients, "young people at risk of offending" as they are described. Often it's more accurately the case that such clients are "young people at risk of getting caught offending again" and they can be difficult to engage.

My colleague told how the group he was assigned to refused to take part in the planned hillwalking activity and they returned early to the centre. He told how frustrating it was that they couldn't see how engaging with the challenge would bring them reward and how surprised, perhaps a little dismayed, he was to find them occupied in damming a stream near the centre that afternoon. "Like 6 year old kids", he said. I can empathise here and, until my own Forest School training, would have felt the same.

It struck me, though, that a Forest Schools practitioner wouldn't necessarily have seen this as a problem. Following the principle that behaviour can be the expression of an unmet need, perhaps the actions of the group are less surprising.

The lives of young offenders are often characterised by degrees of anxiety. Where others might regard the opportunity to climb a mountain as a challenge to lift the monotony of a humdrum routine, young offenders may have a bellyful of challenge and uncertainty in their lives. No matter that many of their challenges and anxieties are the self-inflicted consequences of a career of wrongdoing (though the home lives of many young offenders are also flavoured with a chaos not of their own making).

The unmet need may have been for orderly, restful, absorbing play. Perhaps an expression of one of the group's long remembered happy childhood afternoons? A subconscious desire to return to a guilt-free state?

And the dam building? From a Forest School perspective this is an example of participant-led activity. The practitioner's role would be to support safe practice, to model (perhaps by joining the play) and to facilitate extension of the activity, responding to the group's developing interests. In time, as the group developed their sense of competence, confidence and explored their surroundings, they may have ventured up the mountain of their own accord.