Our third day trip with the Norwegian friluftslivclass was mainly about orienteering. We walked up to “Øvre Jegersbergvann” in Jegersberg and were split in eigth diffrent groups. I was in a group with Melanie, Timon, Markus and Martin. We were handed a mao of Jegersberg without legend but with several checkpoints on it. Our task was to find this checkpoints and find the hidden symbols of the legend. Each of us took terms in navigating the group through the forrest. It was fortunate for our group that melanie is guite experienced in orienteering and she would help everybody out in case of a problem. At one checkpoint it took our group about 20 minutes to find the hidden symbol, because it was hidden in the wrong location. Two other group were also stuck on this checkpoint. We assembled our group around the found object and discussed if we should put the object to its actual location or leave it where it is. Three members of our group voted for leaving it where it was. The other two voted to put it where it is marked on the map. Although the decision had been made to leave it one of us took the object to the place where it was actually marked on the map. This led to a big discussion between two of the opposing parties. It did not influence our group performance because we stayed focused on the task but it surely changed the behaviour among the group members and how we would handle future decisions. Referring two the four Stages Tuckman describes one could say that we were definetly in the storming phase, trying to figure out how to lead our group, come to decisions and the moral behaviour of our team. However I would argue that our group was not together long enough to agree on common norms (Tuckman, 1977).
When we came back to the start, we had to explain the different symbold we found at the checkpoints. For every symbol we explained correctly we received a letter of the alphabeth. Out of those letters we had to arrange English words. After that we assebled around the two bonfires that had been created and had lunch and chatted.
After the lunch Break we stayed in the same groups and where confonted with four other task or competitions, which were rather focused on teambuilding than on orienteering.
- Matching symbols of the map with their actual meaning
- Throwing Stones in different buckets to gain points
- Turning in the right cardinal directions while beeing blindfolded
- A connect four tournament including running between the startline and connect four field
Although our Team was not content with its performance we ended up winning the connect four tournament as well as the overall tournament. The competition created a good atmosphere withing our group and although not everythiong worked as wished the team was cheerful and had fun.
The tasks of the day where especially helpful in three ways. First of all it helped to gain confindence in leading groups with a compass and a map. Secondly is helped learning different symbold of the map an their meanings. And third of all it offered an insight in the different group dynamics of the teams.
References
Tuckman, B.W. and Jensen, M.A.C. (1977) ‘Stages of Small-Group Development Revisted’, Group and Organization Management, .