STARTERS
SPECIAL
FEATURE
ALUMNI
INTO THE WOODS
“And I know things now, Many valuable things, That I hadn’t known before: Isn’t it nice to know a lot! And a little bit not . . .”
—Little Red Riding Hood from Into the Woods
The woods, in classic fairytales, are places of witches, wolves and spiders. They’re where people encounter what they fear most. What begins as a physical journey soon becomes a psychological—some might say spiritual—one in which a character must choose courage over cowardice. Collectively, in over 1,000 pages of independent research, these scholars have proven what we have known for years intuitively: that no one—not Little Red Riding Hood, not Frodo Baggins, not even a first-year college student—leaves the woods unchanged. From 1996 until present day, a group of independent researchers have put outdoor orientation programs (OOPs), aimed at helping first-year students transition to college, to the test. En masse, they interviewed 36 trip leaders and 1,581 participants (many representing La Vida and Discovery) to see not only if they had changed, but to determine how.
26 STILLPOINT | SPRING 2021
