But what isn't Experiential Learning?
There aren't any moments of learning which aren't 'experiential', argues Mark Peace. And this is a really good starting point for deeper institutional conversations.
Experiential Learning is an over-deployed concept in higher education. Paradoxically, is also one of the most under-utilised. This is often because is an accidental presence. It sits, unacknowledged, behind other commitments: to ‘practice-led’ and ‘applied' learning. Most commonly, it surfaces in the strategic lurch towards ‘work integration’, with which it is often conflated entirely.
But these concepts are but mushrooms: the fruiting bodies of deeper mycelial richness; an interconnected philosophical-pedagogical nexus. They are fine ambitions, underpinned by good motivations, and are worthy of celebration. But if we pick only at the surface fruit, without getting into their hidden depths we will fail to put experiential learning to work at its fullest potential. We arrive at limited and pedagogically untethered understandings of what it is and how it works. And we perceive in too narrow a way the sheer range of its potential impacts (spoiler: I think employability is the least-best justification for an experiential emphasis).
There’s value, then, in poking at definitions to see what falls into scope, and what new can be made possible. In answering this call, we can draw on a long theoretical legacy. This is explicit in the work of John Dewey, but stretches back as long as philosophy has worried about education. It’s not the purpose of this article to dig into this heritage (I’ll seed the floor, here, to John Lean in a forthcoming post).
For now, I offer my working definition (mindful that it does nothing radical in the broader theoretics of experiential education):
Learning from the outside in: where concepts and capabilities are gained through appropriately scaffolded engagement in a meaningful context
But hang on a minute: does this not describe the totality of educational experience?For there is simply no other way to do education, except from the outside in. Until we arrive at some technology, or perhaps a mystical incantation, that can directly instil competencies in our learners, all teaching relies on just this vector: place students in a context and support them to acquire meanings. All learning is experiential.
So a placement is experiential, clearly - as is setting students in collaboration on a problem posed by a community partner. Maybe we can see the threads of experientiality in laboratory work, and studio time. But its also there in the most traditional death-by-powerpoint lecture and awkward-silent seminar. Because whilst some learning is richer and more dynamic than others, all learning is experiential.
This observation can, I think, be more useful than it first seems.
We tend to position experiential learning (or its proxies) as ‘other’ to current practice; something at best ‘folded in’ (at worst to be ‘bolted on’ or outsourced) to impart some delicious richness. This is particularly visible around the conflation with work-integration, so often imposed as a strategic priority and then met with a frustrating lack of pace. In some cases, this is outright intransigence, but more often its something less tangible. Good-will is coupled with an odd lack of traction; a failure of integration into the meaning systems of educational endeavour. The consequences feel like token, inauthentic interlopers to academics and students alike.
But if we start from a basis that experiential learning is already in there we have a slightly different basis to our conversation (put down, for a moment, any insistence that it be associated with work-like experiences, and I promise we’ll pick it up again later). It’s one about building out, rather than working in - an act of enhancement rather than augmentation or innovation. Whilst enhancement is always less radical, it is easier to achieve.
And if all learning is experiential, then teaching is the construction of meaningful spaces, and supporting learners to develop understanding and capacities within them. Our conversation here is about how we hold our students in a relationship with their disciplines - the richness of that relationship and the profundity of its outputs. Whilst I recognise my own tendency towards utopianism, I do hope that there is some universal appeal to this conversation (or, at least, some semblance of shame to any educator might find it irrelevant).
So we can open up common ground, around questions which are just basic learning design. In reference to my earlier definition, we might pull out two big questions:
How do we make learning contexts that are meaningful and rich?
What scaffolds which might nurture learning in inclusive and effective ways?
I’d like to reflect on each of these in turn. In dealing with the first, I’ll give us permission to reclaim work-integration (I promised I would) - through in the second, I’ll flag that employability is secondary to a deeper sense of impact.
Meaningful Contexts
Using an experiential frame to explore learning design can give us some ‘ins’ to explore pedagogy in general terms. We can, for instance, grab hold of the question of how we make learning contexts as ‘meaningful’ as possible. Here, I’m thinking in three different ways:
Where does meaning come from? There are differences in the ways in which meaning is ‘supplied’ in different learning designs. Some actively transmit meaning, for instance in the conventional lecture where content is very much front-and-centre. Others invite meaning to be contributed by the learner - for instance, where we situate a ‘problem’ as the core of our design.
Where does meaning go? There are also differing ‘demands’ of meaning. Some ask for convergence (to arrive at pre-established understandings) and others divergence (that learners generate personalised/innovative senses of understanding). These have implications in how we establish legitimate versions of success in our contexts, how we assess - and more broadly, how we understand ‘standards’ and ‘quality’.
What makes learning meaningful? Meaning also relates to ‘purpose’ in a learning context. Meaning is what glues the moment of learning to something beyond the immediate - whether through drawing in prior life experiences, or anticipating out to contexts beyond the classroom.
We can leverage these to think about the experiential natures of our learning design. Variating the supply and demand of meaning in a learning experience can forge a deeper relationships between learner and subject. We can do this in lots of ways. We might open more invitational and divergent spaces in traditional teaching, or attend to the need to more explicitly transmit knowledge in problem-based work, so that learners can gain better traction or are better able to contextualise their outcomes.
The last question, however, is one that demands critical focus, if we are committed to really enhancing experiential learning (actually, if we want to do education well at all). Our entire education system, from primary school up, does purpose spectacularly badly. Justificatory narratives for learning are so often tautologous; you have to learn this because its on the syllabus, or in canon, or on the exam. And then we worry that our students are instrumental and wedded to learning-to-the test.
If I can provoke one single thing in the sector, it would be for educators in Higher Education to disrupt this (for all our whinges, we enjoy so much more autonomy and integrity than any other sector) . Intensifying the purpose which sits around a learning experience can be transformative. It encourages engagement (‘I can see the point’). It also seeds the foundations of higher order learning; supporting conceptual traction, as learners can place ideas in context, connecting them to other knowledge and experience. It invites critical unravelling and synthesis in response to that context.
And so, at this point, I’m willing to let work-integration back in. But not as something to be brought in for reasons external to the existing actual learning or its pedagogy (our strategy has a graduate outcomes KPI). Rather, there is value to work-like experiences in answer to that deeper driver: how do I support authentic learning?
But remember, its not the only way to bring context to learning, nor should it reduce experiential learning to the service of employability…
Enabling Scaffolds
I kicked off this article with a spoiler, to which I now return: that I think employability is the least-best justification for experiential learning. Not a bad justification, of course just not the best.
To explicate, I refer you back to my working definition. I also want to fess up: I’ve been disingenuously neutral in positioning the relationship between learner and subject (in order to make for a universal appeal). Actually, I think good experiential learning does more than just attend to that relationship - it engineers a productive and agentic relationship.
Good experiential approaches empowers the learner within the meaningful contexts they create. They enable ownership and open capacity to leverage impact on the world. They tease open content from experience to make the space for individual mastery, rather than subjecting learners. For this is what ‘closed loop’ education does, in orchestrating pure transmission of knowledge, and measuring inculturation through a test of comprehension at the other end.
Unraveling the ‘meaning’ dynamics of a learning context is all about this; creating a landscape which is more open, which presents greater degrees of freedom in the journey they choose to create. But it is haphazard on its own; students have uneven access to navigational tools. And, as somebody more expert and experienced, the educator has a role in extending their ambition beyond the space they can currently imagine.
To reconcile these tensions, we need to attend to the second key component of my definition; the provision of enabling scaffolds. Here’s some of my thinking on the variety of ways these might operate (my typology, and definitely not exhaustive):
Preparatory Scaffolds relate to the learning we ensure students have access to in order to enable their engagement with our context. This might be prior theoretical learning which will be applied to a problem. Or it might be skills and knowledge beyond the discipline, which are nonetheless needed to achieve engagement. I have been vocal previously about my frustration that we often teach students to work in groups by … getting them to work in groups. This is a good illustration of a space where we could more explicitly teach tools and approaches which would enable more empowered engagement, whilst leaving genuine valuable transposable skill.
Context-Embedded Scaffolds are the ‘clues’ which are baked into a learning design in order to allow learners to leverage engagement. We do this when we open and interrupt with a bit of teacher-delivered input (here’s some concepts I’d like you to apply). Context-embedded scaffolds can be more devious - we can hide bits of meaning strategically in order to disrupt or extend thinking, or so that they are available for learners to access in self-regulated ways.
Interpersonal Scaffolds are easily overlooked, as they are the intuitive art and practice of every good educator. They occur whenever we intervene (individually or at cohort level) to prompt and provoke, mark out critical features or reduce or expand degrees of freedom in order to enable our learners to gain traction or push beyond their current states. One of the big miscues of student-centred learning is stigmatising the role of the educator - but these practices are critical to how we differentiate and individualise the learners experience.
Viewed in these ways, scaffolds are the natural foil to meanings. Where meanings establish a learning landscape, scaffolds support the relationship between it and learners, in ways that empower active and productive participation.
So why do experiential learning?
This notion of education enabling participation was fundamental for Dewey. It has echoed through progressive theory, manifesting in the active and student-centred ethos of Constructivism (see Piaget, Bruner and Gagne), and the emphasis on empowerment in Critical Pedagogy (Freire, Giroux, Hooks). But it also speaks in some powerful ways to some very contemporary concerns of Higher Education.
What we are seeking, then, are active and empowered learners - enabled by our learning design not just to grasp disciplines, but to mobilise new capabilities (disciplinary and beyond) in productive ways. We seek to empower students to affect themselves on the world: to change it ways that are both grand, and small. And we seek to enable them to form and reach their own ambitions and aspirations. This feels like a pretty good mission for Higher Education? And there’s more….
Well designed experiential learning is one answer to the sector’s current crisis of engagement (a crisis which we’re perhaps responding too without the urgency it deserves). Nationally, we’re seeing a disinvestment by students and this is, at least in part, grounded in the perceived irrelevance of passive learning. Where I can ‘catch up later’ without losing any quality, it is difficult to justify attendance against work and commuting costs.
Done right, a systematic embrace of experiential learning could reset our proposition, It would invite a more participatory approach, which meaningful, scaffolded and productive. Attendance in this context is more relevant, and more justifiable. It rewards the student with a sense of authenticity, as an active participant in their course, and a legitimate voice within their discipline. This is a powerful way of building confidence (and unravelling imposter syndromes). It leads not just to senses of belonging, but of mattering (‘my contribution means something’). It offers a more meaningful framework around that troublesome ‘learning community’ NSS question.
So why do we do experiential learning? Do it because you can’t do it any other way. But embrace its principles to reconfigure your fundamental proposition. Do it to make for a more democratic and inclusive experience. Do it to maximise the opportunity for students to gain traction on your discipline, and to build their ability to create meaning with it. Do it to develop agency and empower learners to change their worlds and the world around them.
But, yeah, all that will probably help with employability too.
