Community-by-Doing

This qualitative study explores how community is constructed through communicative practices in the process of adventure-based experiential education during Outward Bound Wilderness programs. Using data collected during more than 250 hours of fieldwork, this study examines how adventure-based experiential education facilitates both verbal and nonverbal communication atypical of everyday activity and how such communication promotes a collective sense of community among participants. Specifically, this study links two adventure-based experiential education research camps -physical and relational- to two forms of communication exhibited in adventure-based experiential education practice -nonverbal/embodied forms and verbal/cognitive forms -to better understand issues of processing, reflection, and facilitation of community. The overarching purpose of the study is to bring education, and adventure-based experiential education, specifically, into focus as major issues of interest for scholarly communication research, and, in doing so, to uncover relationships among experiential education, communication, and community in the Outward Bound Wilderness organization studied.