Running Head: The power of storytelling 1 The power of storytelling in adventure therapy Tonia Gray Karen Stuart Abstract Storytelling, while universal across human cultures, has especially entered into educational and therapeutic practice as a technique for self-reflection and growth. The authors propose a pedagogical approach to using story that is developmental and cross- disciplinary. The research adopted a phenomenological case study approach in evaluating the benefits of storytelling. Our findings show that the pedagogies explored appeal to our primeval sense of story, to our innate need to ‘story’ our lives, and provided opportunities for participants of all ages, in all sectors of society to understand themselves and the world around them, and to complete developmental tasks on the basis of this understanding. Key words: Adventure therapy, Story telling, Narrative approaches, Resolution Introduction Stories are the closest we can come to experience as we and others tell our experience. A story has a sense of being full, a sense of coming out of a personal and social history…. Experience ... is the stories people live. People live stories and in the telling of them reaffirm them, modify them, and create new ones (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994, p.415). A good story moves us, teaches us, and transforms us (Campbell, 1968; Chisholm, 2000; Kouzes and Posner, 2003; Mitchell, 2005 ). By providing metaphors to challenge behaviour, Vogler (2007) maintains that stories become almost alive for listeners, who participate in the creation of a dramatic experience. The inherent power of stories is well known within child development and educational research (Bettleheim, 1976). Stories are also used as a tool for adult learning (Parkins, 2001), organisational development (Denning, 2005; Mitchell, 2005 ) and even as a discrete mode of research (Clandinin and