Roger Duncan, Deputy Principal and Head of Education and Therapy. Ruskin Mill College, Glos.

1. Working with Nature to bring about therapeutic change in adolescents; a practical guide. Roger Duncan, Deputy Principal and Head of Education and Therapy. Ruskin Mill College, Glos.

3. Working in the woods

4. Building a sense of community from the bottom up

5. Chop wood carry water

6. By working with animals Leave no waste

7. The Kettles on

8. Bringing Soul to nature

9. Working at a human scale .

10. Ensuring everyone is included.

11. The coppice 2007 Theatre

12. Poetry and Story telling

13. And time to go...

14. The reintegration of the body senses in adolescence can form the basis of a therapeutic process and this underpins the rationale of the Ruskin Mill Education Trust practical skills therapeutic curriculum Craft work

16. Wilderness experience

18. Walking is older than talking..

19. Learning spatial and social orientation

20. Learning to separate the essential from the non essential

21. working with a wide range of learning difficulty in post 16 specialist education Integration of peak experiences

22. Touching the edge of the psychological landscape

23. Vision quest as a wilderness rite of passage.

24. Meredith Little and Steven Foster The School of Lost Borders

25. Vision Quest~ a doorway to the imaginal world, ritual fasting alone in nature as an initiatory threshold

26. Preparing for a symbolic death

27. Severance~ letting go of the known

28. Threshold~ a liminal space

29. The return

30. Incorporation ~honouring of personal stories in your community

31. “ If the young are not initiated into the village they will burn it down just to feel the warm”. African proverb

32. There is evidence to suggest that there is strong case for a need for a contemporary rites of passage within modern youth culture. (Mahdi et al,1996,1998)

33. The way of love is not a subtle argument, The door there is devastation, How do birds learn to fly? They fall, and in falling, they are given wings Rumi

34. Thank you

35. The four shields of human initiation Foster and Little(1998)