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I DREAMED I SAW JOE HILL LAST NIGHT--EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
ESSENTIALS
WISE WORDS
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
--Aleister Crowley
READINGS
EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
Without getting into the academic details, experiential education (or more precisely, experiential learning) is a form of teaching/learning (and that's a good way to describe it, since in the experiential education process the "teacher" becomes "student," and vice versa) that places more reliance on students learning about and utilizing knowledge. The emphasis is not on abstract exercises such as test-taking and writing, but on performing activities in situations that may be part of the real world or simulated, or both. Experiential learning has been described as "learning by doing" and as "making meaning from direct experience."
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The method places much less reliance on that bundle of practices that has come to be known as the "transmission model" of education. The transmission model is the one that most people, through being acculturated into formal schooling systems, are accustomed to. In the transmission model, information is delivered in various forms (principally reading and lectures by a teacher) to students ("transmitted," in other words). The success of this model is supposedly determined through assessment procedures such as examinations and papers. The transmission model of learning is judged successful when the student performs well on the assessments measures ("gets a good grade").
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Some words from the ghola Hayt (Dune Messiah)
"Four things cannot be hidden: love, smoke, a pillar of fire, and a man striding across the open bled."
CURRENT WORK
PAST
SIMULATIONS
While this model appears to have done a good job serving the interests and goals of formal schooling systems, there are a number of problems with it. First (and this should make a particular impact if you specialize in communication studies), the idea of teachers teaching information; students "receiving" that information; teachers assessing what they think they have taught; teachers composing examinations or instructions for papers based on these perceptions, then subsequently evaluating student responses for fidelity to what they think is necessary to demonstrate competence--well, you don't need training in communication studies to see how many different opportunities for misunderstanding exist in this complex chain.
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The transmission model often seems like nothing so much as the "telephone game" in which a chain of people whisper a message to each other down the line until it arrives at the end so garbled that it no longer even remotely resembles the original message. This analogy is made even more poignant when one considers that in the telephone game, the message goes in one direction; in the transmission model, it goes both ways, over and over again.
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Second, the transmission model (and I realize I am painting with a broad brush here, since there are many variations in and additions to the model) in general relies on approaches that engage far too limited a range of human intellectual performance, concentrating primarily on data and information, but neglecting the emotions, will, imagination, and other features of the human mind that not only are not well adapted to the transmission and retention of data, but are widely (though, in my opinion, mistakenly) believed to interfere with it. To appropriate another metaphor, the transmission model is like running a multi-cylinder engine with only a few of the cylinders firing.
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This seems to me a tremendous waste of potential resources students could bring to the performance of extraordinarily complex tasks. (In passing, although I cannot prove this, I have always thought that much of our irrational attachment to the transmission model arises from the fact that it is the chief method of instruction [at least in its early stages] used in training people in medicine and the law, both of which are also considered the "gold standard" for quality instruction. I would agree that the memorization of large amounts of information is absolutely necessary for doctors and lawyers, though I would also point out that in the later stages of learning about medicine and the law, heavy reliance is placed on experiential learning through, for example, internships at health delivery facilities [for medicine] and moot court [for law].)
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Third, one of the chief advantages of experiential learning--its vivid experiences in unusual circumstances, which in turn makes it easier to retain information--is largely lost in models that rely entirely or primarily on the transmission process. With traditional education, so much information is presented in classroom circumstances that seldom seem to vary much, regardless of which field one is in, that it fails to "stick" in the memory. In experiential education, particularly in those versions of it relying on vivid or memorable simulated problems (such as occurs in COMS 608), it is difficult to forget what one learns, not simply because it is novel (although that is a very important part of the reason for its success), but also because many different forms of intelligence and understanding are used by the student, awakening whole regions of their internal mental landscape that have lain fallow in conventional instruction, sometimes for decades. When the brain combines with the emotions, the will, the imagination, values and virtue, as well as a host of other abilities long underused, it makes the "dry information" of the classroom enter and become a part of the student's experience.
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Finally, one of the great tragedies attending the unreflective use of the techniques of the transmission model is that it is so dismissive of what students already know, the wealth of information brought by all students to the classroom environment, no matter how well or badly they perform. Some of those who espouse the experiential model (and I personally am adamantly of this viewpoint) assume that students are accomplished, often to an extraordinary degree, in various areas of life, before they engage in the classroom instruction experience. Much of this willingness on the part of the teacher to recognize the role students can play, as teachers themselves, comes from the view of the experiential learning process as collaborative, as against the "one way" path of knowledge from teacher to student (and back again) that characterizes the transmission model. In the experiential learning process, every person involved constantly functions as both teacher and student. As I say in my syllabus, my goal is not to be a sage on the stage, but a guide on the side. Instead of trying to transmit to students what I know, I dedicate myself to intertwining my knowledge with the impressive skills and knowledge they already have.
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In this brief introduction, I have not gone much into the details in the ongoing debate concerning what constitutes experiential learning (for example, the distinction between "experiential learning" and "experiential education," or the various other names experiential education has gone by [such as, to name only a few, action learning, free choice learning, cooperative learning, and service learning]). As for an academically acceptable statement of what experiential learning involves, most usually point to the model proposed by the man thought by many to be the founding father of experiential learning, David A. Kolb, who asserts that the following occur when a student makes meaning of personal experience: (1) the learner must be willing to be actively involved in the experience; (2) the learner must be able to reflect on the experience; (3) the learner must possess and use analytical skills to conceptualize the experience; and (4) the learner must possess decision-making and problem-solving skills in order to use the new ideas gained from the experience.
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In this class, we will have the opportunity to learn using all these skills and abilities. However, despite the fact that I have learned much from published work on experiential learning, what I have created, fine-tuned, adjusted, and refined has come about as a result of my having serendipitously come upon an extraordinarily effective way to teach students about the realm of external organizational communication (a domain in which there is a daunting absence of widely accepted knowledge). Then, through various iterations of my experiential simulation technique, I have consistently applied my analytical skills, developed through training principally in the sociohistorical approach to the study of human activity. As the course progresses, I continue to learn, since, despite (or perhaps because) of being a teacher, I am also a student.
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