„Wir fühlten uns wie eine kleine Familie“: Gruppenprozesse und Geborgenheit in erlebnispädagogischen Expeditionen

For about fifteen years, the idea of ‚challenges‘ has been spreading among schools as school-based de-schooling projects that give students the opportunity to take on self-chosen extracurricular challenges on their own responsibility over a period of several weeks. However, the required exploration, the resulting uncertainties and the critical-reflexive confrontation with oneself require a sense of comfort and security, which should and will be made more difficult by the framework conditions of the projects themselves. This article now takes a look at the effects of experienced comfort and security through the perception of one’s own group on the results of participation in this experiential education intervention. For this purpose, data were collected from 270 students before and after participation in a challenge. In the preparation phase of the challenge, multiple correlations of the perception of the group work with group characteristics, espe-cially the degree of familiarity of the group members with each other, were found. After the challenge, students were more likely to say that it would have been easier to do the challenge alone, but also perceived their group as more supportive than before, which can be explained by the attributions of success and failure of the challenge.