Adventures in education

By Kay Ben-Avraham `08

Paddling down the Susquehanna River in their canoes, 14 students, one fun-loving
instructor, and a small boy are enjoying themselves immensely. “It was easier taking him on the canoeing portion of the trip,” Dave Tanis recollects of his then-five-year-old son
Benjamin. “We did backpacking, then canoeing, then backpacking. The backpacking
might have been tough on him, so he just came along for the canoeing part. If he got
bored, we could pull over and find some rocks for him to throw in.”

Many parents would opt for less risky trips on which to take their young sons. Not so for Tanis and his family. Their taste for adventure reveals itself in Tanis’ choice of vocation: director of adventure programs at Messiah College.

Tanis hails from California. He and his wife, Tricia, became a part of the college community in 1995, and they now live in Dillsburg with their children: 7-year-old Benjamin, 3-year-old Hannah, and Peter, who will be 1 in August.

Tanis’ responsibilities as director of adventure programs include teaching courses within the College’s adventure education major as well as establishing the policies and procedures of all campus adventure activities. At Messiah, that means his job entails activities such as Canoe-a-thon, an annual event in which students canoe down the Yellow Breeches to raise money for summer missions; clean-up of the Yellow Breeches
during Service Day; and the activities of the Outdoors Club. “I love it,” he says eagerly. “It’s a great job.”

When he first arrived at Messiah after involvement in the Coalition for Christian Outreach (CCO) in Ohio, Tanis was the director of Issachar’s Loft, an on-campus organization that works with groups of students to foster teamwork and communal identity through canoeing, rock climbing, caving, and
other outdoor “adventure” trips. As director of adventure programming, Tanis still leads many such trips, some of which are actual college courses, like three week intensive wilderness immersion courses in locations such as Hawaii and Texas.

Tanis enthusiastically explains the passion he has for his work. “It’s really something about the holistic nature of the wilderness,” he says. “You’re immersed in each others’ lives, without the distractions that we normally use to isolate ourselves from each other.” There are no cell phones or computers; students live, eat, sleep, and interact with only one another for the entire journey. In his experience as a trip leader, Tanis has seen significant growth and learning take place among—and within—students who take the leap and divorce themselves from modern conveniences. He
describes the experience as “a powerful medium” in their lives.

As an instructor, witnessing this “powerful medium” at work is what he loves best about his job. As much as he loves the outdoors, it is the people with whom he travels that lend spice to his line of work. Of his many journeys, the ones that stand out are those on which he took unique groups whose interactions evolved into something rich and surprising.

Some of them, like the Susquehanna River canoeing trip, involve family members. One trip, which Tanis co-led with his wife and another staff member, took a hand-picked group of students to the canyons of southern Utah. The trip shines in his memory, again mostly because of its participants. “Their paths would never have intersected otherwise,” Tanis says, “and it’s really the combination of students that make a trip stand out to me.”

Sometimes the nature of his work is misunderstood, and Tanis likes to distinguish between outdoor recreation and adventure education: amusement versus learning. “There’s a place for both,” he says, “but with adventure education, you really focus on the inter- and intrapersonal dynamics of a group: building them, seeing what comes out of them. That’s what defines an adventure education experience; the wilderness
is just the backdrop.”

Against that backdrop, Tanis continues to infuse new generations of students with a love of the outdoors, a respect for it—and for one another. His passion for adventure and team-building has followed him from coast to coast and continues to propel his efforts wherever he goes. As he sees it, all the spectacular “backdrops” that he encounters are really only a means to that end: learning to become part of a team.