Mark F. Roark, PhD Candidate

1
Application of Staged Story Telling Experiences
to Promote In-situ Self-Determination among
Resident Campers
Mark F. Roark, PhD Candidate Gary D. Ellis,
PhD Cathryn Haas, PhD Candidate
To request ready-to-use Experience Plans contact
Mark at mfroark_at_aol.com
Introduction
I Can CARE
Competence building. Stage camp activities in
ways that attend to the psychological need for
competence. Competence is feeling capable of
doing some task. A persons competence can be
enhanced when a specific skill or ability is
recognized. Use genuine verbal responses that
include you following camper success in
activities and tasks. Examples are you are a
fabulous story teller or you had excellent eye
contact with the group. Similar language can be
applied in many camp situations. Autonomy
building. Autonomy is the behavior of being
self-directed. An effective way to build autonomy
is to take into account others perspectives by
providing camper self-relevant choices and
sharing of rationale (i.e., explanation) that
supports specific decisions. Relationship
building. Stage camp activities in ways that
attend to the psychological need for relatedness.
Include get to know you activities that allow
others to see their commonalities, such as,
interviewing partners, introducing partners to
group, grouping by like interests and the
relatedness lesson plan from this study. As camp
progresses, adjust accordingly for the level of
sharing. A question to ask is, What are we
intentionally doing to build positive
relationships? Eradicate incentives, coercion,
unnecessary surveillance, and sarcasm. Sarcasm
typically delivers a coded message that needs to
be filtered for its true meaning. Subsequently,
sarcasm is likely to be misinterpreted by the
receiver. Whereas, genuine and sincere
communication (GSC) more effectively delivers a
direct message removing the need to decode or
filter messages from the receiver. Simply put,
say what you really mean in a meaningful way. GSC
is a prime example of how to create an autonomy
supportive environment that meets the campers
psychological needs of CARE.
Residential camps are a sizeable industry that
serve over 11 million campers per year. Parents
and caregivers invest in camps not only to
provide their children with pleasant and
memorable experiences, but also with the
intention of facilitating personal development.
Developmental gains may be accelerated when camps
maintain autonomy supportive environments that
regularly involve campers psychological needs
for competence, relatedness, and autonomy (Deci
Ryan 1985, 2002). It is reasonable to assume
that gains could also be accelerated by routine
staging of situational recreation encounters
(specific camp activities) that engage those
psychological needs. Although previous research
has addressed Self-determination Theory-related
strategies for facilitating in-situ learning
experiences, similar research in camp settings is
lacking.
Abstract
A fundamental building block of developmentally
significant outcomes is the consistent provision
of specific, meaningful recreation encounters
over the course of campers days and nights at
camp. Such encounters that elicit
self-determination give rise to authentic
living which is central to well being and
optimal human development (Deci Ryan, 2002).
Just as public school teachers must structure
effective lessons in order to achieve learning
outcomes, so must camp counselors and activity
specialists carefully structure specific,
situational recreation engagements to produce
desired experiential outcomes that may, over
time, have significant developmental outcomes.
Little is known of the efficacy of such
techniques in camp settings. Self-determination
Theory suggests that camp personnel should attend
to competence, relatedness, and autonomy in
staging experiences for outcomes that are
self-determining. Therefore, this study examined
the effect of two strategies for staging (Pine
Gilmore, 1999) a story telling encounter on
situational self-determination of resident camp
adolescents ages 13 to 17 (54 female).
Methods
In a one-week resident leadership camp in New
York, campers participated in a story telling
activity on three occasions. Each occasion being
staged differently by camp leaders autonomy
support and competence or relatedness and a
traditional competent tutor practice (Bishop
Jeanrenaud, 1995). After each encounter,
participants completed a measure of
self-determination. Multilevel modeling was used
to test hypotheses.
Results
How This Research Can Help
Results suggest that camp experiences designed to
produce targeted outcomes can be effective in
camp settings. A significant effect (t2.74,
p.008, R2.06) was found of the activities
designed with autonomy support versus competent
tutor on in-situ self-determination (a .81).
In order to promote self-determination, camp
personnel can model behaviors that create an
autonomy supportive, relatedness and competent
environment on a continual basis in the camp
setting. This will subsequently enhance
self-motivation and provide campers with the
psychological needs for optimal development. Camp
personnel choosing to address the following
practical applications of CARE when staging camp
encounters will more likely facilitate authentic
living among campers.
2007 ACA Camp Research Symposium, Austin, Texas