The 21st Century belongs to Experiential Educators
Alice Kolb
A Focus on Learning
Experiential learning is often misunderstood as a set of tools and techniques to provide learners with experiences from which they can learn. Others have used the term to describe learning that is a mindless recording of experience. Yet experiential learning is above all a philosophy of education based on what Dewey (1938) called a “theory of experience”. He argued that while traditional education had little need for theory since practice was determined by tradition; the new experiential approach to education needed a sound theory of experience to guide its conduct.
Since their emergence in the early 1970’s, the principles and practices of experiential learning have been used to create curricula and conduct educational courses and programs. Many of the non-traditional educational innovations that have flowered during this period such as, college programs for adult learners and prior learning assessment have used experiential learning as their educational platform. As experiential, learner-centered education has gained widespread acceptance in the 21st Century, more and more educators are considering or experimenting with experiential learning practices such as service learning, problem based learning, action learning, adventure education and simulation and gaming.
Educating is a profoundly human activity
Becoming an experiential educator is about more than acquiring tips, techniques and methods for teaching. The current focus on educational programs, systems, technologies and techniques may have caused us to lose sight of the fact the educator relationship is above all a human relationship, where what the educator shows is as important as what he or she says. We can easily forget that we are role models for learners. We display our values, character, integrity and authenticity for all to see.
We become educators by learning from our experience. The great psychologist David Hunt proposed an “inside-out” approach rooted in our own experience as the starting point for becoming an experiential educator. Here the “outside-in” knowledge of the expert is not rejected but tested against the realities of the educator’s experience-in-context. The experiential educator is a unique person in relationship with equally unique students, influenced by a wide variety of contexts. The findings of scientific research must be implemented by educators integrating scientific knowledge and practical experience.
Teachers, coaches, consultants, managers, parents or others who have jobs and responsibilities to help other learn can benefit by adopting the larger identity of educator in the process of becoming through learning from experience. The experiential educator is one who embraces this process of becoming through learning, no matter how accomplished and successful they might be. To become an experiential educator involves raising our sights from the preoccupations, demands and institutional constraints of our daily work to embrace a larger vision of what it is to be an educator. A great number of educators we have worked with had already discovered through their own practice some of the concepts of experiential learning, such as the value of connecting with and beginning from the learner’s experience and individual differences in how learners learn best. They were looking for a guiding framework, a theory or personal philosophy to give a vision and direction to their careers as educators.
Some of our most unsettling conversations have been with educators who are overwhelmed and over-stressed by their positions and institutions, often feeling “burned out” in their jobs. They felt frustrated and trapped by the systems and contexts they work in, struggling to find ways to focus on learning in spite of system constraints which often are preoccupied with everything but learning—performance, certification, discipline, research productivity, the list goes on and on. It is hard not to be cynical about their institutions and their apparent lack of a genuine focus on learners and learning. We could certainly empathize with their cynicism, but we were also aware that even in the most anguished cases there was still a glimmer of hope, a vision of the possibility for fostering learning and development and a desire to overcome the obstacles they faced. They had, after all, come to ask about experiential learning and its promise for educators.
Learning through shared experience
As humans we share a capacity for learning with almost all living beings; but we are far more unique in our capacity for educating. The great psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called us the “teaching species” who pass on through generations the accumulated wisdom of our collective experience.
The primal parental educator role, with its emphasis on learning through shared direct experience, has particular relevance for the experiential educator. For educators, the magic of experiential learning lies in the unique relationship that is created between teacher, learner and the subject matter under study. Traditional approaches to education have relied on an information transmission model of learning where knowledge about the subject is communicated, often by lecture, through the teacher’s discourse about the subject. Learners, having no direct contact with the subject, are unable to investigate, explore and judge for themselves. They are left one-down in a power relationship with only the choice of “taking the teacher’s word for it”. Teachers for their part are left in a one-way “conversation” that is ultimately deadening and boring. Often responses from learners have to be required and rewarded by points for participation.
The experiential approach places the subject to be learned in the center to be experienced by both the educator and learner. This has a leveling effect on their relationship, to the extent that both can directly experience the subject. Everyone has a perspective on the subject. Those with different learning styles, for example, will view the subject experience through their own lens for processing experience. Questioning differences that arise from these multiple perspectives is the fuel for learning and new insights. Challenging the expert’s viewpoint even becomes possible. This can be quite unsettling to novice experiential educators; but also it becomes a source of unpredictable new insight and learning for them. In becoming an experiential educator with this approach the teacher also becomes an experiential learner. Instead of “acting on the learner” we learn how to “act with the learner”.
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