Soft Skills Facilitation Blog 2

Soft Skills Facilitation Blog 2

By Md Aizat

Experiential Learning

 Experiential learning is something outdoor educators use extensively in the outdoors, but do we know what they meant by experiential learning? Experiential come from the word experience, James Neil (Neil, 2006)defined experience as a nature of events of which someone or something has gone through, something in the past that has happened and experiential learning (Neil, 2005) as learning by your own and learning through structured experiential programs and activities.

Experiential education as mentioned by Neil (Neil, 2004) is based on experiential learning and is on a few basis: students are actively involved in their learning or activity, educators operate on a mindset that educational goals can be met by letting the natural cause of learning, in this case experience to take place and facilitate the learning and can be applied to a wide variety of disciplines or topics.

The point of the students getting involved in the learning process is about getting the student to have first-hand experience on a certain topic, for example, traditional teaching with talking about how hard is it to kayak in the sea in classroom while an experiential educator would bring that same student out to the sea to kayak and let the student experience it first-hand and created a theory or concept regarding the topic, hence making the teacher involvement here minimal and letting the student do the learning on his or her own. This same point was further supported by Berry (Berry & Hodgson, 2011) that the learner is placed at the center of the experience, making the value of new knowledge, skills or understanding more obvious and immediate benefits to the learner.

The Model

Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle (Kolb, 1984 cited in Berry & Hodgson,2011) talks about a learning cycle that starts off with concrete experience following by reflective observations followed by abstract conceptualization , active experimentation and the cycle restarts. Kolb Cycle (Kolb, 1984 cited in Berry & Hodgson,2011) explains that the cycle can being at any phase and the cycle should be viewed as a spiral with each stage building up for the other, hence recurring. It has been without it’s critiques, some as mentioned by Smith (Smith, 2010) such as the model doesn’t give much attention towards the reflection process, the model doesn’t account much on different cultural experiences. The four stages gave birth to four learning styles (Honey & Mumford,1986 cited in Berry & Hodgson,2011) which is the pragmatist whose the problem solver, activist who enjoys doing, theorist who takes ideas and forms theories and the reflectors who prefer to observe and collect facts before reaching a conclusion.

Application & Conclusion

However, Neil (Neil, 2004) listed down all the benefits of experiential learning ranging from equality, developing relationships quickly, meta learning, encourage risk taking, diversity of strengths and many more. Experiential learning with reference from my work place has a lot to play a part on the students learning as the experiential model is able to provide that spiral of learning and at the same time able to cater to a broad range of learning styles. For me I believe outdoor education is best supplemented by experiential learning as a mean for learners to maximise from outdoor activities. Studies have shown that experiential learning gives a more impactful learning and gets the student to direct his or her own learning with the right guidance from facilitators.

References

Berry, M. & Hodgson, C., 2011. Adventure Education: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Neil, J., 2004. What is Experiential Education?. [Online]
Available at: http://wilderdom.com/experiential/ExperientialWhatIs.html
[Accessed 6 December 2013].

Neil, J., 2005. What is Experiential Learning?. [Online]
Available at: http://wilderdom.com/experiential/ExperientialLearningWhatIs.html
[Accessed 6 December 2013].

Neil, J., 2006. Experiential Learning & Experiential Education: Philosophy, theory, practice & resources. [Online]
Available at: http://wilderdom.com/experiential/
[Accessed 6 December 2013].

Smith, M. K., 2010. David A. Kolb on experiential learning.. [Online]
Available at: http://infed.org/mobi/david-a-kolb-on-experiential-learning/
[Accessed 6 December 2013].

For futher reading

Student Learning in Outdoor Education: A Case Study From the National Outdoor Leadership School: http://www.health.utah.edu/prt/nols/paisleyjee.pdf