Experiential education

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Experiential Education is a philosophy in which educators purposefully engage with learners through a variety of experiential methodologies in direct experience and focused reflection in order to increase knowledge, develop skills and clarify values.

Experiential education is the process of actively engaging students in an experience that will have benefits and consequences. Students make discoveries and experiment with knowledge themselves instead of hearing or reading about the experiences of others. Students also reflect on their experiences, thus developing new skills, new attitudes, and new theories or ways of thinking (Kraft & Sakofs, 1988). Students may also relate existing knowledge and theory to their experience to better understand the existing theory or modify it.

Contents 1 Historical development 2 Examples 3 Change in Roles and Structures 4 Helping with the transition 5 Summary 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Historical development

Experiential education as a philosophy cites directly to three historical figures. John Dewey the progenitor of progressive education is a clear figure in the articulation of a philosophy of education in which experience is a central element. Kurt Hahn a German born educator is another historical figure in the articulation of this philosophy in which students are actively involved in their learning. Finally, Paulo Freire a Brazilian educator is the third person often cited in relationship to this philosophy who was also concerned with the active involvement in students in real experience and liberation. All three saw education as needing experience of the students to be a central part of the educational process. For all three the ultimate aim of education was about developing and enhancing capacity to participate in democracy (active citizenship).

Experiential education differs from much traditional education in that teachers first immerse students in action and then ask them to reflect on the experience. The philosophy of experiential education informs a number of educational methodologies (e.g. adventure education, service learning, cooperative learning, active learning, place-based learning, etc.) Experiential education serves as an umbrella for linking these diverse practices in a coherent whole. Similarly, experiential education is also closely linked to a number of other educational theories including but not limited to: progressive education, critical education, empowerment-based education, feminist-based education, constructivism, etc). The development of experiential education as a philosophy is intertwined with the development of these other educational theories and have helped articulate and clarify elements this philosophy. Experiential education is related to the constructivist learning theory.

In traditional education, teachers set the knowledge to be learnt (including analysis and synthesis) before students. They hope students will subsequently find ways to apply the knowledge.

Despite the many efforts at progressive educational reform, reports by researchers such as Goodlad (1984) and Sizer (1984) suggest that most teaching, particularly at the high school level, still involves the teacher as purveyor of knowledge and the student as passive recipient.

[edit] Examples

Examples of experiential education abound in all disciplines. In her 1991 book Living Between the Lines, Lucy Calkins states, "If we asked our students for the highlight of their school careers, most would choose a time when they dedicated themselves to an endeavor of great importance...I am thinking of youngsters from P.S. 321, who have launched a save-the-tree campaign to prevent the oaks outside their school from being cut down. I am thinking of children who write the school newspaper, act in the school play, organize the playground building committee.... On projects such as these, youngsters will work before school, after school, during lunch. Our youngsters want to work hard on endeavors they deem significant."

There are other examples. High school English classes in Rabun Gap, Georgia have published the Foxfire books and magazines for over 25 years (Wigginton, 1985). Students research the culture of the Appalachian Mountains through taped interviews and then write and edit articles based upon their interviews. Foxfire has inspired hundreds of similar cultural journalism projects around the country.

One widely adopted form of experiential education is learning through service to others (Kielsmeier & Willits, 1989). An example is Project OASES (Occupational and Academic Skills for the Employment of Students) in the Pittsburgh public schools. Eighth graders, identified as potential dropouts, spend three periods a day involved in renovating a homeless shelter as part of a service project carried out within their industrial arts class. Students in programs such as these learn enduring skills such as planning, communicating with a variety of age groups and types of people, and group decisionmaking. In carrying out their activities and in the reflection component afterward, they come to new insights and integrate diverse knowledge from fields such as English, political science, mathematics, and sociology.

Presidential Classroom, a non-profit civic education organization in Washington D.C. is open to high school students from across the country and abroad, where they meet and interact with government officials, media correspondents, congressman, and key players on the world stage to learn how public policy shapes many aspects of citizens’ lives. This form of experiential education allows students to travel to Washington and spend a week hearing from controversial speakers, meeting with interest group spokesmen and touring the nationals capitol. Students participate in a group project directed by experienced and engaging instructors, and have mediated debates on current issues facing the country. The focus of the week is to give students a hands-on introduction to how real world politics operate, and allow their classroom to come to life.

Other approaches at the university level include laboratory courses in social sciences and humanities that seek to parallel laboratory courses in the natural sciences. In social science laboratory courses, students combine theory with tests of the theory in field settings and often develop their own social models in disciplines as far ranging as history and philosophy to economics, political science and anthropology (David Lempert, 1996).

Friends World Program, a four-year international study program operating out of Long Island University, operates entirely around self-guided, experiential learning while immersed in foreign cultures. Regional centers employ mostly advisors rather than teaching faculty; these advisors guide the individual students in preparing a "portfolio of learning" each semester to display the results of their experiences and projects.

Another example is Chicago Center for Urban Life and Culture, the only nonprofit and independent experiential educational program for college students in the United States. The Chicago Center is distinguished by its unique experiential seminars characterized by a 'First Voice' pedagogy, its intentional location in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, and relationships with several hundred internship sites in Chicago.
While many of the students who attend Chicago Center grew up in cities, the majority of participants are from suburban, rural and even and farming communities. In addition to its Semester, May Term and Summer Session, which individual students sign up for, the Chicago Center designs and staffs what it calls "LearnChicago!" programs for groups, which promise non-tourist Chicago experiences.

Other projects and "capstone" programs have included everything from student teams writing their own international development plans and presenting them to Presidents and foreign media and publishing their studies as textbooks, in development studies, to running their own businesses, NGOs, or community development banks (David Lempert, 1996).

At the professional school level, experiential education is often integrated into curricula in "clinical" courses following the medical school model of "See one, Do one, Teach one" in which students learn by practicing medicine. This approach is now being introduced in other professions in which skills are directly worked into courses to teach every concept (starting with interviewing, listening skills, negotiation, contract writing and advocacy, for example) to larger scale projects in which students run legal aid clinics or community loan programs, write legislation or community development plans.

[edit] Change in Roles and Structures

Whether teachers employ experiential education in cultural journalism, service learning, environmental education, or more traditional school subjects, its key idea involves engaging student voice in active roles for the purpose of learning. Students participate in a real activity with real consequences for the purpose of meeting learning objectives.

Some experts in the field make the distinction between "democratic experiential education" in which students help design curricula and run their own projects and even do their own grading (through objective contracted standards) and other forms of "experiential education" that put students in existing organizations in inferior roles (such as service learning and internships) or in which faculty design the field work (David Lempert, 1996).

Experiential learning uses various tools like games, simulations, role plays, stories in classrooms. The experiential learning mindset changes the way the teachers and students view knowledge. Knowledge is no longer just some letters on a page. It becomes active, something that is transacted with in life or life-like situations. It starts to make teachers experience providers, and not just transmitters of the written word. Students become knowledge creators (for themselves) as well as knowledge gatherers.

Besides changing student roles, experiential education requires a change in the role of teachers. When students are active learners, their endeavors often take them outside the classroom walls. Because action precedes attempts to synthesize knowledge, teachers generally cannot plan a curriculum unit as a neat, predictable package. Teachers become active learners, too, experimenting together with their students, reflecting upon the learning activities they have designed, and responding to their students' reactions to the activities. In this way, teachers themselves become more active; they come to view themselves as more than just recipients of school district policy and curriculum decisions.

As students and teachers take on new roles, the traditional organizational structures of the school also may meet challenges (Zemelman, Daniels, & Hyde, 1998). For example, at the Challenger Middle School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, service activities are an integral part of the academic program. Such nontraditional activities require teachers and administrators to look at traditional practices in new ways. For instance, they may consider reorganizing time blocks. They may also teach research methods by involving students in investigations of the community, rather than restricting research activities to the library (Rolzinski, 1990). At the University Heights Alternative School in the Bronx, the Project Adventure experiential learning program has led the faculty to adopt an all-day time block as an alternative to the traditional 45-minute periods. The faculty now organizes the curriculum by project instead of by separate disciplines. Schools that promote meaningful student involvement actively engage students as partners in education improvement activities. These young people learn while planning, researching, teaching, and making decisions that affect the entire education system.

At the university level, including universities like Stanford and the University of California Berkeley, students are often the initiators of courses and demand more role in changing the curriculum and making it truly responsive to their needs. In some cases, universities have offered alternatives for student-designed faculty approved courses. In other cases, students have formed movements or even their own NGOs like Unseen America Projects, Inc., to promote democratic experiential learning and to design and accredit their own alternative curricula (David Lempert, 1996).

Other university level programs are entirely field-taught on outdoor expeditions. These courses combine traditional academic readings and written assignments with field observations, service projects, open discussions of course material, and meetings with local speakers who are involved with the course subjects. These "hybrid" experiential/traditional programs aim to provide the academic rigor of a classroom course with the breadth and personal connections of experiential education. Organizations offering these courses include: the Wild Rockies Field Institute, Wildland Studies, and the Sierra Institute.

[edit] Helping with the transition

At first, these new roles and structures may seem unfamiliar and uncomfortable to both students and adults in the school. Traditionally, students have most often been rewarded for competing rather than cooperating with one another. Teachers are not often called upon for collaborative work either. Teaching has traditionally been an activity carried out in isolation from one's peers, behind closed doors. Principals, used to the traditional hierarchical structure of schools, often do not know how to help their teachers constitute self-managed work teams or how to help teachers coach students to work in cooperative teams. The techniques of experiential education can help students and staff adjust to teamwork, an important part of the process of reforming schools.

Adventure education is one form of experiential education that is highly effective in developing team and group skills in both students and adults (Rohnke, 1989). Initially, groups work to solve problems that are unrelated to the problems in their actual school environment. For example, in a ropes course designed to build the skills required by teamwork, a faculty or student team might work together to get the entire group over a 12-foot wall or through an intricate web of rope. After each challenge in a series of this kind, the group looks at how it functioned as a team. Who took the leadership roles? Did the planning process help or hinder progress? Did people listen to one another in the group and use the strengths of all group members? Did everyone feel that the group was a supportive environment in which they felt comfortable making a contribution and taking risks?

The wall or web of rope can becomes a metaphor for the classroom or school environment. While the problems and challenges of the classroom or school are different from the physical challenges of the adventure activity, many skills needed to respond successfully as a team are the same in both settings.

These skills — listening, recognizing each other's strengths, and supporting each other through difficulties — can apply equally well to academic problem-solving or to schoolwide improvement efforts.

For example, the Kane School in Lawrence, Massachusetts has been using adventure as a tool for school restructuring. The entire faculty — particularly the Faculty Advisory Council, which shares the decisionmaking responsibilities with the principal — has honed group skills through experiential education activities developed by Project Adventure. These skills include open communication, methods of conflict resolution, and mechanisms for decision making (High Strides, 1990).

[edit] Summary

Experiential education can change schools because it requires new roles of students, teachers, and administrators. It can provide a different, more engaging way of treating academic content through the combination of action and reflection. Experiential education empowers students to take responsibility for their own learning. Experiential education can also provide a process for helping all those involved in schooling become more comfortable with the unfamiliar roles commonly proposed for restructured schools.

[edit] See also

• Laboratory school
• Outdoor education
• Experiential learning

[edit] References

• Calkins, L. (1991). Living between the lines. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books, Inc.
• Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Collier Books.
• Educational Writers Association. (1990). Lawrence grows its own leaders. High Strides: Bimonthly Report on Urban Middle Grades, 2 (12). Washington, DC: Author.
• Fletcher, A. (2005). Meaningful student involvement: Students as partners in school change. Olympia, WA: HumanLinks Foundation.
• Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. NY: Continuum.
• Goodlad, J. (1984). A place called school: Prospects for the future. NY: McGraw Hill.
• Kielsmeier, J., & Willits, R. (1989). Growing hope: A sourcebook on integrating youth service into the curriculum. St. Paul, MN: National Youth Leadership Council, University of Minnesota.
• Kraft, D., & Sakofs, M. (Eds.). (1988). The theory of experiential education. Boulder, CO: Association for Experiential Education.
• Lempert, David and others (1996). Escape from the ivory tower: Student adventures in democratic experiential education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
• Rohnke, K. (1989). Cowstails and cobras II. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company.
• Rolzinski, C. (1990). The adventure of adolescence: Middle school students and community service. Washington, DC: Youth Service America.
• Sizer, T. (1984). Horace's compromise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
• Wigginton, E. (1985). Sometimes a shining moment: The Foxfire experience. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
• Zemelman, S., Daniels, H. & Hyde, A. (1998). Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

[edit] External links

• Association for Experiential Education
• SoundOut - Promoting student voice in schools
• OutdoorEd.com - experiential education in the outdoors
• Experiential Learning & Experiential Education: Philosophy, Theory, Practice & Resources
• Changing Schools through Experiential Education. ERIC Digest. The original version of this Wikipedia article is based on the public domain text at this site.
• Experiential Learning in Higher Education: Linking Classroom and Community. ERIC Digest.
• Incorporating Student Voice into Teaching Practice. ERIC Digest.
• Improving Evaluation in Experiential Education. ERIC Digest.
• Outdoor, Experiential, and Environmental Education: Converging or Diverging Approaches? ERIC Digest.
• New Horizons for Learning.
• http://www.presidentialclassroom.org/
• Otter Valley Experiential High School - A high school who's core philosophy is based on Experiential Education.
• Experiential Learning in the UK.
• Wendigo Lake Expeditions Inc. - Canada's Leading Provider of Experiential Adventure Wilderness Therapy.
• Nicodemus Wilderness Project - Provides global volunteer opportunities that empower youth to help save the environment.