Earthwalk

By

Amy Camodeca

MA Student in Counseling Psychology

December 2003

Earthwalk is an adventure based program for middle school age at-risk youth. It encompasses a one-week camping program as well as after school and in school group sessions. The belief of the program is that connecting the youth with the natural environment will help to decrease violent behaviors. The premise behind this belief is that nature would provide them with a sense of connectedness, which helps to decrease violence. The purpose of this review was to identify best practices of violence prevention programs and to answer questions with regards to the influences on expected and unexpected outcomes of the program as determined by an organizational evaluation.

By reviewing research related to the cognitive and social development of middle school youth, as well as research related to group therapy, the following best practices were delineated.

1. Parental involvement should be encouraged.
2. Questions, feedback, and goals need to be concrete and not require children to engage in metacognition (thinking about their own thinking).
3. Session/activity length should take into consideration the attention span of the children.
4. There should be more than one session. (6-8 sessions is ideal for one skill)
5. There should be male and female teachers/counselors.
6. Keep in mind issues that impact minority youth. (learning styles, resources, support needs)

When the program was evaluated, some results were disappointing. However, it was concluded that this was not a facet of the program itself; rather, it was because the evaluators were expecting the children to think about their own thinking, which is something that they would be cognitively incapable of doing. Further, unexpected differences between boys and girls in the program can be explained when one looks at the research on boys’ and girls’ social development; even at the same age, girls have relationships that are of different quality than boys. Also, female and male relational aggression differ, which was also cited as an explanation for observed differences.

I concluded that Earthwalk is an effective program for violence prevention. Earthwalk should continue with its nature based teaching plan as a method of teaching skills and facilitating development of self esteem, resiliency, and problem solving skills. However, the idea that being connected with nature will decrease violent behavior is not as well founded as the idea that being connected with the social community will decrease violent behavior. Earthwalk should incorporate the best practices where necessary (especially the practice of age-appropriate cognitive tasks for evaluative purposes).

I presented my conclusions to the program director in the form of a paper. She was very pleased with my findings. The results confirmed her own hypotheses regarding the outcomes of the program as well as providing her with new information that she utilized in improving the quality program. Hiring and funding decisions were made based on this research as well. I particularly enjoyed this research due to my interest in child and adolescent psychopathology. From this research, I learned more about the issues facing minority and at-risk youth. I also was able to utilize much of the knowledge that I had gained in previous classes relating to adolescent development and group therapy.