The week from the 9th till the 12th of May we were part of the Tangen collage project. Three classes from the last year of collage came in to the forest for one night and we prepared eight stations for them with different tasks.
. Abseiling
. Slackline with group dynamic tasks
. First aid (solving situations, reminding game)
. canoeing
. orienteering
. fire making
. group dynamic games
. amazing maze
One of us was the main organizer, who had to have an overview. Than we decided that we make teams of two or three and each group organizes an activity. That it gets not to boring, we wanted to change during the week.
As I see it, we were well prepared and everybody knew what to do. When on Tuesday the first students arrived, Timon welcomed them and explained how it works. The students seemed older than we expected and they were not very motivated. We tried our best and it turned out good. a few groups were talkative and we could have some conversations. I found out, that a lot of them didn’t sleep outside before and they are not used to go outside. It surprised me a little, that so many of them have no experience to be outside. I thought that in Norway most people like to go outside and being in nature.
It seemed to me, that in the groups the teacher made were friends together. Most groups had a good group cohesion and as far as I can tell they respected each other. But the problem was, that the motivated ones were all in the same group and the unmotivated all together. We had to adapt our way of talking and explaining all the time, because the groups were so different. As well as that, from class to class there were big differences. The last class was so unmotivated, they had big struggles to fulfill the tasks.
In our group as the organization team, we had sometimes some struggle too. We had big discussions about the changing because some stations were more liked than others. In the end, all of us had to do something they don’t like ones and also something they like. Discussing in a group with 18 people and coming to a result which are all happy about is impossible. You always have to make compromises. Something else I realized is, that the weather has a big influence on the mood and the motivation.