The Comfort Zone - Model or Metaphor?

The Comfort Zone

Does the Comfort Zone work as a way of learning? 

A person’s comfort zone is perceived to be when their skills set and their activities match. Mike Brown (2008) This implies that everyone’s comfort level is different.  Brown(2008) suggests that the Comfort Zone Model, when related to Outdoor Adventure education, is based on the belief that people respond to stressful situations by ‘overcoming their hesitancy and grow’. This implies that all students will respond to being ‘stretched’ under pressure and learn from their experiences by moving out of their comfort zone into the growing /learning area. 

Luckner and Nadler (1997) suggest that for people to learn, they must be pushed to ‘the edge of their comfort zone’ through ‘the use of perceived and actual risk’.  Brown (2002) expresses concern about educators stretching participants too far by ‘engineering situations’ so participants are forced from their comfort zone into the growth zone, thus ‘inventing new activities that are higher, steeper or longer’.

In contrast, Jane Vella(2002) 12 Principles and Practices of Learning contradicts this, suggesting that students learn through ‘Ideas, Feelings and Actions’ and through ‘Safety in the Environment and the Process’.  These contradictions can make a significant impact on the way we teach and the conceived way students learn and experience Adventure Education.

When applied to the workplace, many adventurous outdoor activities give a sense of risk, fear, anxiety and of course a rush of adrenaline which many students may want to experience. However, I have found from experience that moving out of the comfort zone does not necessarily result in learning from the experience itself, indeed it could have the opposite affect and prevent a student from wanting to progress. 

In reality, it is conceivable that a nervous skier, performing out of their comfort zone, may not wish to revisit the experience due to overstretching and being forced into the panic zone, due to the nature of the terrain and a conceived bad experience. They may indeed feel all they have learned is that they do not want to experience it again.  Indeed Leberman and Martin (2003) suggest that peak learning is unlikely to happen when someone is pushed outside of their personal comfort zone. 

 Surely a person should move gradually from one zone to another, steadily expanding their own personal comfort zone.

References:

Brown, M. (2008). Comfort Zone: Model or metaphor? Australian Journal of Outdoor Education, 12:1, 3 – 12.

Leberman, S., Martin, A. (2003). Does pushing comfort zones produce peak learning experiences? Australian Journal of Outdoor Education, 7(1), 10-19.

Luckner, J., Nadler, R. (1997). Processing the Experience: Strategies to enhance and generalizing learning. Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company

Vella, J. (2002) Learning to Listen, Learning to Teach - The Power of Dialog in Educating Adults. John Wiley & Sons Inc. USA, San Francisco.