Learning for the Future

Experiential Learning ....




This scene in the movie, The Guardian, is one of the best examples I've seen in film that portrays what experiential learning is all about. These coast guard trainees could have spent hours in the classroom studying the various stages of hypothermia and learning about what happens to a person throughout these stages but nothing replaces them actually going through the stages themselves and feeling what its like. That's experiential learning.

We're going to see a lot more of this kind of learning in the future. Students today want to not only gather head knowledge but they especially want to learn by experience. The more we can tailor education with continual opportunities for experiential learning the more success we will have in passing on the knowledge and experience to the next generation. The only way to truly ensure that what we teach others is absorbed and put into practice is to put the student into real settings that cause them to experience and so be able to explain from their own experience what they learn.

I know some may say right about this point that some things cannot be experienced. I'm trying to work that one out myself. What knowledge besides trivial facts that play no part in the real experience of everyday life, cannot be experienced? I understand that there needs to be class time and I'm not disputing it but when I want someone to get something I want to know that they got it. Simply hearing me tell others does not ensure they get it. When I hear others explain from their own experience then I know they get it.

One of the greatest ways of learning that has survived the ages is what we call today "job-shadowing." Making time for the novice to walk alongside us to watch what others do and to be involved with those who have spent years doing what the novice wants to learn to do as well. I think our co-op programs in our colleges and universities are capitalizing on this time tested method of learning. Mentoring programs facilitate this kind of learning as well. And those that have done an excellent job of teaching others have been masters at having novices hang around.

As a teacher, what moved me about what was portrayed in the clip above was that the instructor was involved with the students in experiencing something that he himself experienced many times before. Knowing the limits of such an experience and providing a safe, controlled environment to experience it, he gave those students something they would never learn in the classroom.

We need classrooms, and we need knowledge, but we also need to provide those who want to learn with the necessary experiences that will allow them to understand the reality of their world and their place in it. The future depends on it.