Adventure therapist Dr. Rod Nadeau ’87 helps REAL School alternative education students revise their personal narratives

Story and photos by Marc Glass

It’s fair to say that adventure therapist Dr. Rod Nadeau ’87 likes to work with troubled and learning-divergent adolescents outside their comfort zones.

Take, for instance, this bluebird February day, when Nadeau and 14 of his alternative education students from The REAL School on Maine’s Mackworth Island braved a wind-chill factor of 25 below to ski at Shawnee Peak in Bridgton.

On the first ride up the Summit triple chairlift, Jack, a REAL School senior, recounts an overnight sea kayaking trip he and his classmates took with Nadeau. (The September 2008 outing had to be cut short, Nadeau explains, when the remnants of Hurricane Ike roiled Casco Bay.) “That was the first time I ever rolled over in a kayak,” Jack says through an iced-encrusted balaclava. “It was fun.”

Asked if taking a swim off the Maine coast in autumn really is fun, Jack says, “Oh, yeah. I earned that trip.” Then, with perfect clarity, he explains the point-reward system Nadeau uses to reinforce appropriate behavior at The REAL School, where students with a range of behavioral and cognitive issues learn through an integrated, hands-on curriculum based on Maine Learning Results Standards.

At the peak, as poles are strapped on and goggles adjusted, Nadeau asks Jack, “OK, where are you going to take us?”

Jack shouts, “Headwall!” and from there, the student—who has skied no more than a dozen times in his life—conducts a carving clinic, putting a 50-meter gap on his counselor all the way down the black-diamond trail. At the bottom, he waits for Nadeau even though there’s no lift line. And as he drops the safety bar on the chair for the next ride up, Jack rates the run: “That was awesome!”

Nadeau, a registered Maine guide and wilderness first responder who majored in psychology at UMF and earned a Ph.D. in marriage and family therapy at the University of Connecticut, believes the round-trip sequence of events was more therapeutic for Jack than any session back in his REAL School office. Everything Jack did—politely engaging a stranger in a conversation, reflecting on how he overcame adversity during the kayak trip, explaining the causal connection between his behavior and today’s reward, and demonstrating patience along with his skiing prowess—helped Jack create a new story for himself. A story in which Jack, the protagonist, is likable, capable, and successful.

All of us, explains Nadeau, are guided by the stories we develop about ourselves based on our experiences. Put simply, if our experiences have been mostly positive, we see ourselves positively, which, in turn, enhances our confidence and resilience to adversity. But, says Nadeau, students who have not been successful in school “carry within them stories of failure, incompetence, and strife. Their internal narratives might sound like, I’m a bad kid who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. I’m not well liked, I don’t like many people, and if you try to teach me or get in my way, I’m gonna make your life miserable.” Those stories, Nadeau explains, can be self-fulfilling.

To help REAL School students revise their narratives, Nadeau introduces them to new outdoor adventures: biking the 180-mile Trek Across Maine, rafting the upper Kennebec River, and winter camping in White Mountain National Forest on a three-dog January night. Some behavior modification occurs up front, as the students must earn points for demonstrating appropriate classroom behavior to participate. But it’s what happens when students overcome the elements and master recreational skills that fosters new plots—ones in which they are triumphant rather than school troublemaker.

“By the time they have been referred, all the other counseling approaches haven’t worked,” Nadeau says of his students (who, according to the REAL School Web site, “might otherwise be sent to more restrictive institutionalized settings.”) “Because many of them have attention-deficit disorder, they can’t sit still for traditional counseling. The students can be very oppositional at first, but they eventually realize they can’t beat Mother Nature.”

And, says Nadeau, adventure therapy provides great story material long after the adventure is over. For instance, after catching students doing well, he recounts their successes and positive behavior around the campfire, to REAL School teachers (within earshot of students), and in letters sent home to parents. Gradually, he says, “preferred or alternative stories are created, and with time and persistence these preferred stories become the new, dominant stories for our students.”

Nadeau takes the narrative revision further by recording the students’ recreational skill development on video. “Initially, their success seems foreign to them and others around them, and it gets easily dismissed as a fluke. But when the students see [the videos], there’s no disputing what they’ve achieved,” says Nadeau, who, with student permission, shows the recordings at pupil evaluation team meetings, believing “everyone should bear witness to their success.”

Nadeau’s adventure therapy program has even shaped the career aspirations of at least one of his students. “I want to do this,” says Jack on the chairlift, referring to leading outdoor adventure trips after graduation. Nadeau nods in approval and then calls attention to New Hampshire’s second-highest peak, Mount Adams, off in the distance.

“Hey, Jack,” Nadeau says. “Do you remember climbing that last winter?”

“Yup,” says his student. “That was fun.”