Understanding experiential education

Experiential education is a form of teaching and learning that emphasizes experience and reflection on that experience. There are many different types of experiential education, and there are many different ways to do experiential education in and out of the classroom.

Some key features of experiential education include intentional design of the learning experience, which requires you to plan and design the learning experience, emphasizing key learning goals, connecting them to experiences in and out of the classroom, and then reflecting and assessing those experiences. Another key element is crafting the experience that happens outside of the classroom or learning program.

There are many different types of experiences. It could be work integrated learning or internship experiences. It could be service learning or community-based learning experiences. There are also examples of undergraduate research or study abroad and domestic travel programs that could be forms of experiential learning. Crafting those learning experiences are really important as well as crafting the reflection on those learning experiences.

Reflection is another key component that requires you to make sure that you’re guiding the learning for the students, crafting guided learning questions that allow students to reflect and describe, analyze and critically reflect on those experiences.

In addition, creating feedback or assessment opportunities for the learners, which will allow them to change courses, adapt to the situation as well as build capacity in learning about their experiences and the reflection on those experiences.

And finally, action. What is the action plan going forward that the learners want to take with them? All of these key components are really effective ways to craft active learning experiences in and out of the classroom, known as experiential learning.

Building experiential learning takes a lot of planning and intentional design. The way to first get started is responding to the question, what are the learning goals or learning outcomes for this activity, course or program? Next, how do you plan to assess or evaluate those learning activities? And finally, what activities or experiences do you want students to have to get to those learning goals?

So utilizing this backward design process will allow you to craft the type of experiential learning activities within your program, or course. However, I hear from educators time and time again, that the reflection portion is sometimes a struggle. How do you build in those reflection activities with the experiences? Research tells us that the reflection needs to be continuous, connected, challenging, and contextualized.

For example, when we say reflection activities need to be continuous, they need to be offered in multiple ways at multiple times, and they need to be ongoing pre, during and post the experience. When we say connected, reflection activities need to be connected to the topic of study. They need to be clearly articulated and on how and why students are doing these activities based on the experience and the theme or topic that they are studying and exploring at the time. They need to be contextualized with real-world issues or issues that are happening in the local neighborhood, community, the larger world or important real-world topics. And lastly, they need to be challenging. They need to move the learner from their current state of thinking to new perspectives, new insights, and new levels of thinking on the topic of study. So reflection activities are the opportunity for the learner to transform their experience into new learning.