Group Processes Within Adventure Education: Case Study of the South Downs Walk

1700 Words7 Pages
Group Processes within Adventure Education: Case Study of the South Downs Walk This assignment aims to identify and address the appropriate group processes that were present during the planning, execution and post South Downs walk. The walk itself had to be at least 15 kilometers in distance and the groups had to finish at the Queen Elizabeth Country Park between 14.30 and 15.30. Route cards detailing the plan had to be submitted prior to departure to ensure the route was acceptable. All other planning was left up to the groups to decide upon. As simple as the term group sounds, it can be difficult to define and has numerous variations. A sound definition put forward by Shaw (1976) describes a group as “two or more individuals who are interacting with one another in such a manor that each person influences and is influenced by each other person”. The groups for the South Downs walk were decided upon alphabetically and as our group consisted of the last names on the register, we gained an extra member in comparison with the other groups, totaling six. This in itself may have affected our group’s productivity as Stiener (1972) suggests using the Size Impact Model (See figure I). He argues that as group size increases, so too does the potential productivity however, the number of group processes or interactions decrease. This results in an actual productivity that increases sharply as group size begins to increases and then plateaus and as group size continues to increase the actual productivity starts to fall. This process was apparent during our planning stage of the walk. To begin with all six members were present and the route planning process was taking a long time, each member was able to input less and out of politeness and unwillingness to cause conflict the contrasting ideas about the route and length of route were not being
Open Document