Experiential Learning

Experiential Learning encompasses hands-on educational experiences that help students contextualize what they are learning in the classroom with what happens in the real world. “Ideas are not fixed and immutable elements of thought but are formed and re-formed through experience” (Kolb, 1984, p. 26).

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Overview

Experiential learning often takes the form of internships, student teaching, and lab courses. However, the experience doesn’t necessarily have to take the whole semester. Shorter activities can also provide similar benefits. These might include applied research projects where students create a prototype or report with recommendations. It may entail using specific design standards from an actual company on a class project, industry, or community research project. It could also involve hands-on activities with real-world scenarios and challenges, role plays, interactive workshops, guest speakers from industry, flipped classroom activities, or fieldtrips to an industry partners’ business (Kang et al., 2022).

Students report experiential learning as more enjoyable and providing a deeper learning experience (Mamatha, 2021; DeGiacomo, 2002). As it turns out, rafting on the river is more enjoyable than reading about someone else doing it! And after you have done it, it’s much more interesting to read about since it brings to recollection the memories of your own experience (Newell, 2018).

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Benefits

In an autoethnography, Newell (2018) explains that his students “come alive in real-world settings” (p. 52) as they learn the curriculum in a hands-on way. Newell was teaching sixth grade, but he was able to incorporate outside elements to many of his lessons: reading and writing on river rafting trips during summer school, creating a sundial on the playground, tracking Newell’s father-in-law as he rowed across the Atlantic Ocean and calculating daily distance, total distance, and how long it would take him to get to his destination. These lessons took a little longer for him to plan but made his teaching experience much more rewarding because it gave him opportunities to have meaningful connections with the students and to see the impact that learning was having on them from day to day. What could you do in your outside classroom?

 

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Considerations

Instructors may need to develop working relationships with industry professionals to incorporate this strategy into their classrooms (Kang et al., 2022). This takes time and effort on their part, but may benefit industry professionals by providing future employees who are better prepared to take on the challenges presented to members of the workforce. This might involve getting authorization from the industry partner and coordinating which activities will meet the learning needs of the students (Villarroel et al., 2020).

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Teaching Format Modifications

Experiential learning is most commonly practiced with in-person delivery methods, but there are ways to apply this engagement method with other delivery methods as well. Below gives examples and descriptions how you could implement these principles into other delivery methods.

Online

Boschetto (2023) applied experiential learning theory in her online course during the pandemic. Students had the option to opt-in to become active participants in a research study to gauge the effectiveness of their study habits and learning outcomes based on the type of clothing they were wearing. They kept a record of their motivation, productivity, comprehension, and mental state along with photos of what they were wearing over a two-week period. Students wore relaxed attire during the first week and business casual the second week. They were also asked to write a reflective essay. Through this experience students were able to test concepts they were learning in class with their real-world experience.

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Connection to Service Learning and Community-Engaged Learning 

“Service Learning is an evolving pedagogy that incorporates student volunteering into the dynamics of experiential learning and the rigors and structure of an academic curriculum. In its simplest form, service learning entails student volunteering in the community for academic credit.” (Mooney & Edwards, 2001, p. 181) Service learning is also important to the university for retention purposes and because it has been identified by the AAC&U as a high impact practice to improve student success (Louviere, 2020).

Community-Engaged Learning is the same thing as Service Learning. Gavazzi & Gee (2018) talk about the shift from the term “Service Learning” to the term “Community-Engaged Learning”. When the Kellogg Commission planning group was coming up with a name for a new Carnegie classification to show the value of public institutions to the broader community the term “Extension” was identified as a possible option. However, the public perception of “Extension”— its connotation of farming and ties with rural America combined with it being functionally for dissemination of knowledge rather than a two-way exchange—didn’t fit the need for the new initiative. Engagement was selected as the term that would be used because it was inclusive of land-grant institutions and public universities and allowed for “urban-involved efforts” (Gavazzi & Gee, 2018, p. 49).

Community-Engaged Learning is core to the mission of Land-Grant Universities, such as Utah State University (Gavazzi & Gee, 2018). Involvement with Community-Engaged Learning allows institutions to apply for an elective classification through the Carnegie Foundation. This classification is evidence that the university is involved in deep, pervasive, and integrated community engagement (“The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education,” n.d.). This classification is important proof that the university is meeting its mission to provide service to the public as a publicly funded institution.

See the CCE website or contact Nelda Ault-Dyslin at nelda.ault@usu.edu for additional information about Community-Engaged Learning at USU.

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References