Authors: Helen Jeffery, Amanda Smith, Kaye Richards, Federico A. Borroel, Christine Norton, Anita Pryor, Ben Knowles and Alexander Rose
The training and development of international adventure therapy practitioners has had somewhat limited critical examination from cross cultural perspectives. While in-dividuals and organizations have collaborated internationally for decades, to the au-thors’ knowledge, there has not yet been a concerted effort to examine core training for wide international scope, nor co-develop core cross-cultural training parameters. Given this backdrop and gap, directly before the 8IATC in Sydney (Australia) in 2018, a group of 24 AT practitioners from 11 nations gathered for three days in a ‘Cave’ to ex-plore international perspectives on the necessary ingredients of training and devel-opment of adventure therapy practitioners. This paper explores the overarching out-comes of this ‘Cave Think Tank’, along with feedback from participants of a workshop at the 9IATC in Kristiansand, Norway in 2022 and reflections afterwards, to consider the question in the title of this paper. The five key themes arising in the ‘Cave Think Tank’ and explored in the workshop include: 1) Values (shared and held by adventure therapy practitioners), 2) Ways of being (as an adventure therapy practitioner), 3) Foundational knowledges (theories and bodies of knowledge that inform adventure therapy practice), 4) Skills (required for safe ‘good enough’ adventure therapy prac-tice), and 5) Interventions (commonly used strategies or micro-interventions that are appropriate in adventure therapy practice). These core ingredients, which were agreed as important across diverse cultural contexts, demonstrates the value and benefits of cross-cultural collaboration, and will no doubt continue to be enhanced by dialogue and collaboration.
