Deeper pedagogies are key to cracking open the black box of experiential learning
In its scramble to improve employability, the sector risks appropriating experiential learning in ways that leave behind the truly transformative pedagogies, argues Mark Peace
Experiential learning is having something of a moment.
As graduate outcomes migrate from peripheral strategic decoration to become core drivers of educational missions, many universities are seeking to build out from the long-standing gold-standard of sandwich degrees.
Responding to the challenge of scaling and aborted early attempts at “a placement for every student,” universities are rightly diversifying how they integrate work-like “experiences” into the curriculum, heavily mobilising concepts like “practice” and “application” (of knowledge).
This may be something of a global trend, with a slew of new posts investing in experiential capacity through Australia and Asia in recent months – joining a more established appetite for “service” and applied learning in the States.
Though rarely anchored as experiential learning, this language is familiar to those of us committed to the area – committed not just for its manifest potential to support employability, but for broader and more humanistic reasons. Our practice is broadly unified by learning “from the outside in,” through immersion, experimentation, and play. And it recognises that scaffolded exploration in context generates rich understanding and academic authenticity that counterbalances knowledge-in-knowledge-out habits of higher education.
Framed through this lens, there is much to celebrate in this moment for experiential learning. It could be a robust response to pressures that might otherwise be experienced as pushing an instrumental view of higher education. It could propagate a slew of teaching innovation, with employability as a constructive pedagogic and curricula provocation and not just as a “mix-in” offloaded to professional services.
At its very best, it might interconnect with commitments to active and engaged learning, deepening authenticity and belonging and giving students genuine agency to enhance their experience and outcomes.
There are also real risks that we miss this potential of this moment, particularly if our grab at experiential learning remains accidental, or becomes a cheap sticking-plaster quick-fix to complex challenges.