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Hello Outres, I was a little guilty of overstatement :-[ - there are many good adventure messages in OAE that do _not_ 'promote the lifestyle of a risk junky'. I was falling into an 'either/or' argument, whereas my position on these issues is closer to 'both/and': it is interesting BOTH to look at the different kinds of adventure messages that can result from participation in OAE, AND it is interesting to look at how 'adventure' is a catalyst for various processes of learning and development (that do not necessarily carry 'adventure' messages). Some examples may help - (and perhaps you have examples to share?) I once witnessed a Norwegian youth group performing their own play at a conference. They had arrived on a tall ship moored just outside the conference centre. Before joining the crew, all of these young people lived extremely isolated lives - typically staying in their bedrooms all day, truanting every day and not even having any friends to truant with. Their achievement in working together on the ship and then working together to perform the play in front of a large audience were remarkable. These young people were clearly becoming more socially integrated with their peers. I was more familiar with the contrasting problem where young people were so fully integrated into their peer group that they would drift with their peer group wherever it went - typically into trouble of some kind. Risk-taking was strongly embedded into these groups. OAE was the medium through which we worked with these young people. The primary purpose was to get these young people into the habit of thinking of the consequences of their actions and giving them the confidence to stand up to negative peer pressure. 'Adventure' helped us to tune in and connect with these young people - and we would then try to take them in a _different_ direction and enable them to make more responsible choices. I think these contrasting examples show OAE working very differently as a process and resulting in very different outcomes. I think these examples are more about adventure as a _medium_ than adventure as a _message_. In other situations the adventure message may be more important than the adventure medium. But what interests me most are examples of OAE in which adventure is an important part of the process but is of much lesser importance as an outcome. Such examples might provide a useful way of developing some strong alternative storylines to the mainstream adventure storylines that (I believe) present a misleading caricature of OAE (and its full potential). Roger Roger Greenaway Reviewing Skills Training http://reviewing.co.uk/