Experiential Learning

This article presents an overview of the concept of experiential learning, an umbrella term that has encompassed a diverse body of educational theories and practices which share a common core of key principles. Although theories about experiential learning can be found in ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, the term assumed great public prominence in the 1960s with an intense public interest in alternative schools based upon student-centered curriculum and instruction. Experiential learning, since the 1960s, has been generally understood as a systematic approach to applied learning catalyzed by students extracting from various experiences, within and beyond the classroom, meaningful methods promoting lifelong learning.

Keywords Affective Learning; Applied Learning; Continuity of Experience; HOT (Higher-Order Thinking); Inquiry Method; Learner-Centered; LOT (Lower-Order Thinking); Progressive Education; Scaffolding; Service Education; Socially Constructed; Tacit Knowledge; Virtual Reality; Zone of Proximal Development

Educational Theory > Experiential Learning

Overview

Historical Relevance

Educators are in general agreement that the term "experiential learning" began with John Dewey's 1938 book, "Experience and Education," a concise distillation from lectures given late in Dewey's career as a philosopher of education. It is notable how often this single text is quoted by both proponents and opponents of experiential education nearly seven decades after its publication. Central to Dewey's understanding of experiential learning are a handful of key principles. These include the importance of offering students quality learning experiences since "experience and education can not be directly equated to each other" (Dewy, 1938, p. 25). Dewey defines a quality learning experience as one that moves a student forward progressively to learn more and more about a worthwhile subject of inquiry. For Dewey, any educational experience can either distort or block a student's curiosity, or enhance a student's intellectual energy so that he or she wants to advance. Sound experiential learning encourages what Dewey labels "the continuity of experience," (p. 28) meaning that a student's curiosity is constantly fuelled by engaging learning experiences so that a student wants to stretch beyond known boundaries. In terms of Vygotsky's theory of the "zone of proximal development," experiential learning offers students a painless way to stretch their intellectual horizons because they are encouraged to take their experiences as seriously as any assigned textbook or classroom lecture (Vygotsky, 1986).

Importance of Interaction

The other key principle underscored in Dewey's book is the importance of interaction in promoting the value of experiential learning. Learning in Dewey's world is primarily socially-constructed, meaning that learning is an intellectual and emotional energy generated from the quality of interactions between students, and between students and teachers. This view contrasts with a traditionally held view of learning in which knowledge is mined from the repositories of texts and class lectures offered to individual students under a teacher's authoritarian guidance. The acquisition of knowledge in terms of Dewey's theory is an active, questing process, an act of community construction from the building materials that established texts and lectures provide (Dewey, 1938).

Controversial Outlooks

Controversy has always surrounded these cornerstones of Dewey's definition of "experiential learning" for a variety of reasons. In terms of assessment of student achievement, how can teachers and administrators quantify what is essentially the quality of student learning experiences? Since so much of the history of twentieth century American education has been marked by reliance upon quantitative scoring of academic achievement through standardized testing, there has been a bypassing of the development of reliable and commonly accepted assessment tools to evaluate the educational value of quality, experientially-based learning experiences. These assessment issues have also presented complex challenges since experiential learning programs often utilize sites other than schools. For example, in service learning, students often learn how to practice problem-solving skills in environments with marginalized populations in need of social services, or in environmentally degraded areas in need of restoration. These "learning by doing" programs that are based on the premise that the classroom is the world raise the question of who functions as an evaluating teacher of student learning, and how such potentially life-altering learning experiences can be accurately assigned a grade.

Evaluation Tools

Although Dewey left the assessment issues surrounding experiential learning largely unanswered, proponents of experiential learning over the decades since Dewey's work have developed a number of evaluation tools including student generated portfolios and journals containing evidence of student academic achievement, as well as a variety of oral, written, and computer-based learning projects summarizing student learning from experience. Advocates of experiential learning often acknowledge that achievements realized by students through this approach often resist simple assessment. How can an educator quickly and accurately assess such achievements as independent thinking, flexible and creative thinking, and self-motivation to become a lifelong learner? Could a "one size fits all" standard be developed to assess students in such slippery and complex categories? The results of students undergoing learning from experience are not as subject to instant assessment simply because such learning plants potentialities in students. These potential bits of knowledge might not be manifest in an obvious way for months or years, unlike the achievement of students selecting the right answer to a multiple choice question on an exam based on a textbook reading assignment.

To offer another form of experiential learning as an example of the difficulty of assessment, the last half century in education has witnessed a large number of outdoor environmentally-centered learning programs. These range from after-school activities that entail cleaning up an environmentally polluted site to Outward Bound programs emphasizing survival skills in a cross-disciplinary fashion. Students and educators bring a variety of different assumptions to these programs, depending on cultural background and years of experience in urban or rural settings. A program in New York State in the 1970s that offered the experience for inner-city New York City teenagers of learning a variety of survival skills in a mountainous wilderness area was strongly criticized by a number of students and their parents for not adequately preparing students for a learning experience so alien to their previous experiences. This could serve as a reminder that proper timing, setting and preparation are crucial if experiential learning is to be achieved and retained by students. If a student is not properly prepared in knowing how to encounter a fresh learning experience, and able to integrate it seamlessly with previous learning experiences, then many of the potential advantages of experiential learning will be lost.

As Dewey's proponents and opponents often admit, Dewey loaded the word "experience" with thick layers of connotative (and occasionally vague) meaning. For example, in some of his writings, Dewey insists that students need to have learning experiences that carry much of the tradition of the accumulated wisdom of Western civilization. It has been debated whether such an idealized view of tradition-laden personal experience is realistically commonly found among most students. Further, students might not always be conscious of whether a learning experience is immediately interconnected to the Western canon of thought. Even more challenging is to be aware of whether the learner has thoroughly extracted all that could or should be learned from an experience. Thus, the need exists for teaching students how to comprehensively work with the multiple, and often paradoxically conflicting meanings attached to any learning experience. Learning how to interpret experience wisely calls for students highly motivated to get to the essence, the essential gist of what a life experience means, and that might be heavily dependent upon an intellectual and emotional maturity many students need to cultivate.

The "Real World" Problem-Solving Group Project Method

The most common technique used by educators embracing experiential learning methodologies is the "real world" problem-solving group project. With the rapid advance of computers in classroom, "real world" learning can also be used to refer to sophisticated computer simulations of objective reality created for educational purposes. These computer generated simulations of objective reality are called "virtual reality," and these immersive models of reality are increasingly described in the research literature of experiential learning as integral to experiential learning. Problem-solving education clearly predates John Dewey's theories of education by thousands of years. The ancient Greek word "praxis," found in ancient philosophical tracts denotes acting and following an action with critical reflection in order to learn. Connected to this understanding of the learner's need to transition from action to reflection is associated with the educational term "scaffolding," donating a temporary support mechanism built into lessons that is progressively withdrawn to help students gradually gain confidence in their capacity to actively teach themselves. Transitioning from a learning experience to critical reflections upon the meaning of that experience and then application is a characteristic of what educators today call "HOT" (higher-order thinking.). This refers to the capacity for analysis, synthesis, and evaluation by students. Opposite to this would be "LOT" (lower-order thinking). This refers to recall and comprehension of factual information. Current educational research indicates how a number of experiential learning strategies, including role-playing, outdoor education, and service education, can significantly positively affect higher-order thinking. Its impact on lower-order thinking appears to be not significantly different than that found with students involved with traditional learning methods.

The David A. Kolb Theory

Yet another spin off from the ancient Greek sense of praxis is the theory of experiential learning proposed by David A. Kolb (1985). Kolb described experiential learning as a four-part cycle that most often begins with students having a concrete experience. They then practice observation and reflection upon the concrete experience in order to comprehend the nature of their experience. They form abstract concepts that enable a single experience to be transferable to numerous other life situations, and then they test their understanding in a variety of life situations to see if their abstract concept functions in the real world.

Applications

Typical Classroom Setting

One possible generalization about classrooms where experiential learning is taking place is that there will be more sound stemming from interactions among students, and between students and the materials they are using to learn with (e.g. computers, craft materials, Camcorders) than in a traditional classroom where the sound of a teacher's voice might likely dominate. While an educator promoting experiential learning might, at appropriate moments, call a halt to such busy and noisy group activity to give a mini-lecture or read a section from a textbook, visible student activity marks a classroom where experiential learning is routinely practiced.

Programs

Paradoxically, the typical classroom where experiential learning is practiced might not be a traditional classroom within a school building. In one of the best known innovative experiential learning programs at the high school level, Eliot Wigginton and the Foxfire Fund encouraged students to research the lives of people living traditional lifestyles in the Appalachian Mountains by actually traveling with his students to remote locales. Students tape recorded life stories and compiled oral histories into a nationally bestselling set of books. This was called the "Foxfire Project," and it has spawned a variety of experiential learning programs in various high schools across the country (The Foxfire Fund, 1982). Another experiential learning high school program situated outside of conventional classrooms is the Presidential Classroom, which enables high school students internationally to meet and learn from public officials about the making of public policy.

Virtual Learning

Yet another type of classroom increasingly used for experiential learning is not a physical space but a place in a technologically-mediated realm popularly known as "cyberspace" or "virtual reality." Through the Internet, students in real time internationally can engage in active problem-solving projects through text messaging and video conferencing. While online education does not necessarily mean that experiential learning is occurring - traditional lectures can be delivered over a computer monitor or iPod during which students assume a passive or disinterested stance - innovative Experiential Education is increasingly being developed that requires more activity from students than occasional mouse-clicking on a screen icon. Several business education programs are experimenting with using online classes to simulate stock market and investment corporation activities that students can play roles within (Dolan & Stevens, 2006; Haytko, 2006).

Typical Classroom Assignments Supporting Experiential Education

Portfolio

A portfolio of individual and/or small student group work has often been used both for purposes of integrated subject matter and facilitating educator assessment of student learning. These can assume the form of scrapbooks, yearbooks, or print products supplemented by audio and/or videotapes. Implicit in the portfolio format is an educator's belief in the pedagogical value of having in concrete, often narrative, form a tangible record of what students have extracted from their learning experiences. Such a portfolio is also a crucial tool in enhancing the emotional maturity of students since students can learn to take pride in an accumulated, tangible record of their experiential learning. A portfolio is an open-ended exercise in affective as well as cognitive education since the portfolio engages not merely the intellectual voice of the student but also offers a space for visual expression that often carries emotional weight.

Role - Playing

Role-playing is another common strategy in experiential learning since it enables students to "try on" various perspectives other than their habitual ones. Role-playing strategies have included students acting the roles of mythological and folkloric characters in spontaneously improvised classroom skits and role-playing past or contemporary political or artistic figures caught in crucial conflict situations. A key figure for educators working to teach students how to improvise roles in the classroom is Viola Spolin, author of several books on teaching improvisation as a learning tool for students of all ages. A number of professional health science and social service programs, both undergraduate and graduate, have extensively used role-playing in order to help future helping professionals learn what it feels like to be a client in severe need of help (Edwards, 2003).

"Bare-Bones" Narrative

A particularly popular form of experiential learning in language arts and social studies programs involve the teacher introducing a "bare bones" narrative about a key historic or artistic figure - and then having students, individually or in small groups, "flesh out" the rest of the story through research and imaginatively informed speculation in order to complete an accurate and imaginatively fashioned, realized story. This assignment often leads to a discussion of how any famous person or event can be interpreted through a variety of interpretations, depending on one's political and cultural assumptions.

The Inquiry Method

A common characteristic of all classroom assignments guided by experiential learning is a temporary de-emphasis on absolute teacher intellectual authority and an evolving sense of student intellectual authority. This is furthered by teachers refusing to immediately answer all student queries and instead offering tools for students to discover answers for themselves through independent inquiry. The "inquiry method" is essentially a method actualized through teachers asking increasingly demanding questions of students while providing fewer immediate answers to those questions, done in a manner to motivate students to explore intensely their own key questions. This might be a contemporary version of the ancient "Socratic Method" in that educator questioning is the "fuel in the engine" that propels students forward in their thinking. The largest difference between the two approaches might come from the extraordinary plenitude of print and electronic resources modern students can draw upon compared to the heavy dependence ancient Greek students had upon their own sensory experience solely.

Viewpoints

Teacher's Authority vs. Student Authority

Decades of controversy surrounding experiential learning can be distilled into a few recurrent themes. Perhaps the key theme involves tensions between teacher authority and student authority. If an educator's primary role is to transmit with unrelenting authority culturally-acceptable subject matter to students whose role is to absorb this content unquestioningly and demonstrate mastery of this knowledge through standardized testing, then experiential learning has little to no relevance to classroom practice. On the other hand, if an educator's chief role is to provide the tools for students to transform themselves into lifelong, independent learners who assess truths in subjects through their own authoritative analysis of feelings and thoughts, then experiential learning has a legitimate place in classrooms.

Complicating this conflict of views is nothing less than the rationale for public education held by different individuals and groups. In the companion book to a public television series on the story of American public education, editors Sarah Mondale and Sarah H. Patton (2001) offer a spectrum of representative and often clashes views by respected liberal and conservative authorities on this issue. If public education is first and foremost the educating of future generations of workers, then the place of experiential learning might be limited to problem-solving simulations drawn from current job types. In fact, as Mondale and Patton indicate, those who assume that public education should be solely worker preparation see experiential learning as having led American education downhill (Mondale & Patton, 2001, p. 115). If public education is believed to prepare future workers - but also to prepare students for an active role as citizens in a democratic society - then experiential learning might expand far beyond job-centered exercises. American public education at the start of the 21st century seems to reflect chiefly a school-to-workplace orientation, with high-stakes testing based upon the content of rigidly defined subject categories. This tilt might easily change, as it often has throughout American history as liberal or conservative politicians at the Federal and State levels prevail, a fact noted by historian Larry Cuban in the PBS series (p. 117). The politically conservative position that public schools need a "Back to Basics" approach implies little to no involvement with forms of experiential learning since that educational approach only surfaced as a viable option in the public schools a little over a half-century ago and never emphasized a nostalgia for 19th century curricular content or teaching methodologies. On the other hand, the politically liberal idea that education should be as wholly student-centered as possible implies that public education has no responsibility to uphold the traditional political and economic values of the past. It also can create contradictions between parents who believe public school curricula should be largely shaped by young energy - but who usually insist on the primacy of absolute adult authority when it comes to task organization and forms of learning in the home.

In Conclusion - The Need for Better Tools

Both friends and foes of experiential learning might agree about the need for better, more precise and more comprehensive tools to assess student learning. While portfolio assessment of student work have been presented as an alternative to high-stakes yearly testing, many teachers of all educational philosophies report that assessing student portfolios is intensively time-consuming. No educator has invented a reliable and straightforward rubric to measure the worth of a huge range of types of student learning experiences. And since experiential learning often leads to gains in tacit knowledge - that informal, unconscious, non book-centered form of learning often achieved outside schools - our ability to test for gains in tacit knowledge is still in a primitive state. There is a huge difference in testing to determine a student's retention of a fact, say a date in history of a significant event, and whether a student has grasped the importance of thinking critically before offering an uninvited or unpopular opinion in an arena of heated community controversy. Some of what can be called categorized as "tacit knowledge" might fit under the umbrella term of "character education," or more simply be labeled common sense, the practically applied knowledge of how to get along successfully in the world.

Terms & Concepts

Affective Learning: Learning that deals largely with the emotions and psychological outlook of students. It has been labeled by the psychologist Daniel Goleman (1997) as "emotional intelligence."

Applied Learning: Any form of learning immediately put into the context of a real world, practical problem-solving context. It is often applied when analyzing vocational education programs.

Continuity of Experience: A concept offered by John Dewey that implies that a student's learning experiences should optimally be generative of increasingly more educative experiences.

Higher Order Thinking: Thinking skills reflecting a movement away from general knowledge skills to skills like synthesis, analysis, comprehension, application, and evaluation.

Inquiry Method: A methodology valuing the generation of student questions about a topic in ever-widening circles of levels of inquiry sparking student research.

Learner-Centered: A concept first clearly outlined in the writings of John Dewey who declared "the child is the curriculum," meaning that every child has unique learning needs demanding a variety of teaching methodologies.

Lower Order Thinking: Thinking skills reflects general knowledge skills like simple recall and recitation of remembered text.

Progressive Education: Progressive Education is a term, used to describe ideas and pedagogy that aim to make schools more effective agents of a democratic society. experiential learning has long been held in high esteem by educators in this movement, many of whom cite John Dewey's writings as encouraging experiential pedagogy.

Scaffolding: A temporary learning aid to help students gain confidence in their capacity to independently learn.

Service Education: This is a form of learning through student volunteer activity beyond the school coordinated with critical reflection upon the meaning of volunteer experiences.

Socially Constructed: A sociological and political term used by a variety of social scientists that proposed that knowledge is not so much a unique individual achievement as an achievement communally

Tacit Knowledge: A philosophical and educational concept categorizing knowledge that is practical and derived from experiences outside of formal schooling.

Virtual Reality: A computer-mediated parallel universe used for education, training, and education purposes in which objective social reality is shout-out so that an individual's entire sensory experience is electronically evoked.

Zone of Proximal Development: A concept proposed by the modern Russian educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1986) that suggests that there are crucial moments in a child's development when he or she can most effectively cognitively stretch to attain a new level of thinking, bridging the gap between current and future achievement actualized in a community context.

Bibliography

Chickering, A. A. (1977). Experience and learning: An introduction to experiential learning. New Rochelle, NY: Change Magazine Press.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & education. NY: Collier Books.

Dolan, R. C., Stevens, J. L. (2006). Business conditions and economic analysis: An experiential learning program for economics students. Journal of Economic Education, 37 , 395-405. Retrieved June 14, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=23427972&site=ehost-live

Edwards, C. (2003). Reality-play--experiential learning in social work training. Social Work Education, 22 , 363. Retrieved June 14, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=10465937&site=ehost-live

Foxfire Fund Inc. (1982). Gillespie, P. (ed.). Foxfire 7. NY: Anchor Books.

Goleman, D. (1997). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than I.Q. NY: Bantam Books.

Hansen, G. (2012). When students design learning landscapes: designing for experiential learning through experiential learning. NACTA Journal, 56, 30-35. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=85114494&site=ehost-live

Haytko, D. L. (2006). The price is right: An experiential pricing concepts game. Marketing Education Review, 16 , 1-4. Retrieved June 14, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=22149175&site=ehost-live

Keenan, D. S. (2013). Experiential learning and outcome-based education: A bridge too far within the current education and training paradigm. Journal of Applied Learning Technology, 3, 13-19. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=90043858&site=ehost-live

Kolb, D. A. (1985). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. NY: Prentice-Hall.

Lien, A. D., & Hakim, S. M. (2013). Two approaches, one course: An experience in experiential learning. Journal of Prevention & Intervention in the Community, 41, 128-135. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=86009696&site=ehost-live

Maclean, J. S., & White, B. J. (2013). Assessing rigor in experiential education: A working model from Partners in the Parks. Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council, 14, 101-108. Retrieved December 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=88352945&site=ehost-live

Mondale, S. & Bernard, S., eds., (2001) School: the story of American education. Boston: Beacon Press.

Spolin, V. (1986). Theater games for the classroom: A teacher's handbook. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and language - revised edition. Cambridge: MA: The MIT Press.

Suggested Reading

Baker, A. C., Jensen, P. J., & Kolb, D., (2005). Conversation as learning experience. Management Learning, 36 , 411-427. Retrieved August 2, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=19314567&site=ehost-live

Breunig, M. (2005). Turning experiential education and critical pedagogy into praxis. Journal of Experiential Education, 28 , 106-122. Retrieved June 14, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Educational Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=19364917&site=ehost-live

Cornu, A. L. (2005). Building on Jarvis: Towards a holistic model of the processes of experimental learning. Studies in the Education of Adults, 37 , 166-181. Retrieved June 14, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=18810437&site=ehost-live

Levine, M. (2007). The essential cognitive backpack. Educational Leadership, 64 , 16-22. Retrieved June 14, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=24666222&site=ehost-live

Rogers, A. (2006). Learning from experience. Adults Learning, 18 , 30-31. Retrieved June 14, 2007 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=22452239&site=ehost-live