Experiential Learning

“In its simplest form, experiential learning means learning from experience or learning by doing. Experiential education first immerses learners in an experience and then encourages reflection about the experience to develop new skills, new attitudes, or new ways of thinking (Lewis & Williams, 1994, p. 6).

It’s necessary for learners to attach a new piece of information to an old one through the process of reflection and relation. According to me, why experiential learning works is because it is the process of acquiring and experience and not just information. If a student acquires new information that’s unrelated to anything already stored in his brain, it’s hard for the new information to get into those networks because it has no scaffolding to cling to (Opencolleges, 2017).

 Experiential learning is also built upon a foundation of interdisciplinary and constructivist learning. Experiential methodology doesn’t treat each subject as being walled off in its own room, unconnected to any other subjects. Compartmentalized learning doesn’t reflect the real world, while as the experiential classroom works to create an interdisciplinary learning experience that mimics real world learning (Wurdinger, 2005, p. 24).

 Schwartz outlines nine characteristics that should be present in order to define experiential learning experiences. One of the nine characteristics is:

 Engagement in purposeful endeavors: In experiential learning, the learner is the self-teacher, therefore there must be “meaning for the student in the learning.” The learning activities must be personally relevant to the student.

 Relevant learning is effective learning, and that alone should be enough to get us rethinking our curriculum and lesson plans. As it turns out, the old drill-and-kill method is neurologically useless. Relevant, meaningful activities that both engage students emotionally and connect with what they already know are what help build neural connections and long-term memory storage (Opencolleges, 2017).

“Experiential learning is aligned with the constructivist theory of learning” in that the “outcomes of the learning process are varied and often unpredictable” and “learners play a critical role in assessing their own learning” (Wurdinger, 2005, p. 69). How one student chooses to solve a problem will be different from another student, and what one student takes away from an experience will be different from the others.

Engagement in purposeful endeavors

Let us take this Scenario to depict the third characteristics Schwartz outlines Engagement in purposeful endeavors,

How to make any activity purposeful and relevant to a learner so that he sees the meaning attached to his real life? In a lesson plan containing Math sums of addition and subtraction being taught to a 1st grader, the student will be completely disinterested in the beginning. He will see numbers and get confused. Many schools including mine would show them some sticks and do “Takeaways” for Subtraction.

In order to turn this knowledge into an experience for the learner and make it real to him, so that he acquires and assimilates this experience, the school can arrange a small class visit to the school canteen. Students can be sent with a small sum of money from home. The teacher first demonstrates how she asks for the price of the food item she wants to buy. How she then looks for how much money she has. How much she hands over at the counter and what change she receives at the end along with her food.

Then each learner goes through the experience of relating, identifying, calculating, subtracting, receiving and reflecting.

Conclusion

When learners go through this real life process, they not only relate, reflect but assimilate and make the experience as their own and easily grasp concrete concepts. This in itself is the process of learning by experience or learning by doing in accordance to laws of “Experiential Learning”.

 

References

Opencolleges. (2017, March 24). How to make learning relevant. Retrieved from

https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/how-to-make-learning-relevant/  

Schwartz, M. (2012). Best practices in experiential learning. Retrieved from https://www.mcgill.ca/eln/files/eln/doc_ryerson_bestpracticesryerson.pdf

Gollub, J. P., Bertenthal, M. W., Labov, J. B., & Curtis, P. C. (2002). Learning and understanding: Improving advanced study of mathematics and science in US high schools. Retrieved from https://www.nap.edu/download/10129#