The past few weeks have been really busy and I’ve found it hard to find time for dedicated backyard adventuring. So, instead of carving out time specifically for backyard adventuring, I’ve taken on a new approach. I’m calling it adventurfication. It involves taking everyday activities and making them adventures. This process embraces the idea that adventure is more about your attitude and less about where you go and what you do.

“You can turn anything into an adventure by getting curious, coming up with a challenge, embracing a bit of wackiness, and having a grand old time.”

From my Initial Free Inquiry Blog Post

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to approach everyday activities with this attitude and realized that I actually already do a fair bit of backyard adventuring in my daily life. Here are some examples of my attempts at adventurfication:

  • Bike Trailer Ridiculousness – We have a bike trailer that we use to haul around all sorts of ridiculous things. During a chicken coop renovation project at my parent’s house a couple of years ago, we used bike trailers to bring massive pieces of plywood and 2x4s back home. Recently, we’ve used our bike trailer to go grocery shopping and just two days ago, we used it to transport a guitar. There’s something super fun (and also, sometimes quite challenging) about taking something that is much more convenient to transport by car and instead, transporting it by bike.
  • Running New Routes – I run pretty regularly and even before this project, I’ve used running as a mode of exploration. My favourite parts of runs are finding new streets and paths I haven’t been down before and stopping to look in little libraries and free piles for books and treasures. The other day, I found a French press in a free pile on my run and spent the next 20 minutes or so running with it . Talk about embracing wackiness. I got some weird looks.
  • Exploring my Literal Backyard – My partner and I are lucky to have a backyard and a small veggie garden. Most mornings, I go out and water our greens and take stock of what has grown. In the past week, I’ve been trying to spend some more time in our garden tending to our veggies and experimenting with some new things.

Adventurfication and the Classroom

Despite my best research efforts, I’ve had a hard time finding resources for adventurifying classrooms. This may be due in large part to the language I’m using. Google seems to think that adventurfication is not a word (silly Google!). So, I’ve been trying to come up with some ideas on my own. How can we take daily activities inside and outside the classroom and make them more adventurous? I don’t have all the answers, but I think there are lots of ways that this question intersects with other topics we’ve been learning about. I think that including inquiry in a classroom is one way to introduce adventure because it introduces curiosity and challenge into learning about something new (which in itself, should be an adventure!). In Earth and Environmental Science classes, I think that getting outside is a necessary part of learning and, undoubtedly, an adventurous part of it. For example, if you were teaching a class about glaciers, you could take them on a field trip to a place like Cattle Point in Uplands Park, where you can see some of the traces that glaciers leave behind (e.g. glacial grooves). This type of place-based learning is adventurfication in action.

An alternative term I’ve come across in this research is “microadventure”. This term was coined by Alastair Humphreys, a round-the-world cycle-tourist and advocate for making adventure easy and accessible. I think of backyard adventures and microadventures as roughly the same concept but by different names. And, I was actually able to find some examples of how microadventures could be applied in a school setting!