Evidence Based Coaching Handbook

CHAPTER 10

An Adventure-Based Framework for Coaching

TRAVIS KEMP

 

 

ADVENTURE PROGRAMMING IS a specialist field of practice within experiential education that shares close affiliations and informing bodies of knowledge with pedagogy, andragogy, counseling, psychotherapy, and psychology. A still embryonic subdiscipline within the broader field of adventure programming known as adventure therapy is increasingly being utilized within a range of clinical and developmental settings and with a diverse range of client groups. Like coaching, adventure programming continues to accumulate an empirical, efficacy-based body of knowledge while practitioners continue the process of defining it as a distinctly unique developmental intervention method. To date, the theoretical and case-based evidence exploring the outcomes of adventure programming appear promising, and the potential applications to a coaching context continue to emerge, driven by the many similarities, potentials, and opportunities for methodological cross-fertilization that exist between these two practice frameworks.

In this chapter, I explore the historical and contextual development of adventure programming and therapy, provide an overview of the informing bodies of knowledge central to their practice, and detail its subsequent application to a coaching context. Through the exploration of potential individual and group-based applications of the adventure method to the two selected coaching case studies, I explore how this ...