Way of the Peaceful Warrior - a Character Development Course in the OB Czech Republic

Way of the Peaceful Warrior - a Character Development Course in the OB Czech Republic

Way of the Peaceful Warrior - A Character Development Course in the OB Czech Republic

Petr Kubala

In this article, I would like to present one course from OB Czech Republic that is a little bit different from all the others we do in our country. It definitely has something to do with character development. I would like to introduce the story of the project including history, dramaturgy and the outcomes.

How is this project different from the others? The target group are disadvantaged youth from Prague. They are not severe deliquents. Mostly, they come from socially disadvantaged or incomplete families. Some of them might have problems with their parents, others with school, minor delicts, minor drug problems or smoking. Some of them are gypsies. All of these children are taken care of by one social worker, who chooses 14-15 of them each year to take part at the 5-day OB course.

The project started 3 years ago, when son of the social worker took part at another OB course and enjoyed it. OB was contacted to offer a course. Since then, there was course each year, that influenced life of several young people. Goals and themes stayed pretty much the same, concrete programs differ according to the team of insturctors.

Dramaturgy

Dramaturgy started with the target group and their needs. Afterwards, goals and themes for the course were set. Then, programs were chosen in accordance with goals and themes and other dramaturgical rules.

Goals of the course:

  • To stimulate interest in positive and active life style,
  • Through intensive experience motivate participants to work on themselves,
  • To show healthy activities as fun, interesting and „cool“,
  • To enable participants experience the feeling of winning and personal uniqueness.

Themes

Themes differ a bit in the courses, however you would find themes like friendship in the positive sense, responsibility for my own life, choices, values, creation vs. destruction, to be „myself“, etc. Uniting theme is the „Way of the Peaceful Warrior“ (inspired by a book by Dan Millman). For the needs of the course, the main idea can be interpreted in the three words:

Warrior – the one who decides about his/her life, who is strong, fair, self-disciplined, etc.

Peaceful – this means looking for peaceful ways of doing things, solving problems and conflicts, redirecting one’s own aggression in positive way.

Way – the life journey, past, presence and future, as well a symbol for open future and our option to lead and control it.

Program

The concrete programs were different because of several reasons. Place, instructors in the team, and the fact that some of the participants took part in the previous course. However, it is worth to mention couple of them. Generally, our courses take part in residential setting and there is a team of 5 instructors taking care of the program for 15 participants. Along with the goals of the course, we try to offer great variety of programs, i.e. not only physical and challenging ones like low ropes, high ropes, climbing, absailing and camping. There is a lot of space for creativity and arts, drama and communication activities. We are trying to create various environments where participants can express themselves, find something they like. Anything that awakens their interest, opens gates to their mind and creates space for thoughts and discussion, anything that helps them realizing something about themselves or gives them feedback, anything that works along with the goals of the course.

I want to skip the description of the classical OB programs like dynamics, low ropes, leading to the challenging high element or abseiling. There were some others that also worked very well with this group.

Evening ritual – every evening, the last program of the day was a 20 minute ritual, where everybody sat in the circle having a candle in front of them. Everyone had a ribbon and there were 4 colors of beads in the middle. Everyone could give to anyone 1 bead of each color with explanation. Each color stood for something (e.g. „Thank you for…“, „You made me laugh, when…“, „I appreciate…“, or „You hurt me, when…“). We found this ritual evolving every evening and it seemed to work as a good way of feedback as well as a way to learn express one’s own feelings in a positive way and to accept feedback from the others.

Discussion time – another interesting program lasting about 30-45 minutes each day. There were 3 themes/questions (e.g. What do I not have money for?, What is my dream?, etc.). Participants sign themselves under the themes into three groups. One instructor is with each group and moderates the discussion. This program also evolves within the time. First, participants have problems with expressing themselves, they feel unsecure to talk, but later they make a good use of that time, when they can talk confront their opinions with others in safe environment.

Outcome

At this point we don’t have any sofisticated tool to measure outcomes of the course. However, we have some feedback from the social worker, who keeps taking her youth to our courses. We can observe some other outcomes by ourselves. We know, that one of the boys started climbing after our course. We could see a change in the participants comming second or third time. An agressive and stubborn boy became a leader of the group in a way. He was able to say his opinion about negative feelings, he would help us with preparation of equipment without being asked. All of the returners enjoyed the discussion time, that they didn’t like the first year. Especially from the returners, we could experience cooperative and enjoyable attitude towards the program, readiness and willingness to challenge themselves and greater responsibility for their own lives.

What’s next

We would like to continue in this project and find ways to offer it to other similar groups. We would also like to get deeper into connecting the course with daily life of the participants, i.e. helping them find options to continue their development when they come back to their old environment.