Living Learning

Experiential Learning: The Searcher

Being a "searcher" for this week's blog post is a comfortable vantage point since experiential learning is about the quest to discover knowledge through searching. This involves a two-fold journey into the world around us as well as ourselves. Logan Shook, in his excellent first reader post, appropriately draws upon the writings of Aristotle. Aristotle, the son of a physician, had a dynamic, biological model for learning that emphasized growth through exploration. This differed greatly from the fixed, idealistic paradigm of knowledge that Plato forwarded - and thus, the river of Western thought forever split (see Arthur Herman's The Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle for the Soul of Western Civilization: http://www.amazon.com/Cave-Light-Aristotle-Struggle-Civilization/dp/0553385666/ref=sr_1_28?ie=UTF8&qid=1456707017&sr=8-28&keywords=plato). John Dewey, who some consider to be the father of American education, used experiential learning as the fulcrum of his philosophy and his laboratory schools of the early twentieth century.

Source: kid.britannica.com

Mountain Vistas

Another divided river of sorts has emerged in public education as the curriculum and pedagogy of experiential learning flows in an opposite direction from the fixed, fact-based model of assessment that is in control of our schools. While many schools have adopted a Montessori-esque approach that includes "playing with knowledge" and adapting it to student lives, the ultimate perceived responsibility to prepare students for "the test" causes educators to lose the name of action. Still, there are brave teachers such as John McCrann who recently accompanied students on a winter survival trip sponsored by the Appalachian Mountain Club Youth Opportunities Program, making the case for experiential learning http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/prove-it-math-and-education-policy/2016/02/learning-by-doing-case-for-experiential-education.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news3

In a recent blog for Education Week, McCrann presents three "takeaways" that came from this trip:

1. Students will want to know more when they need to know more
2. You never know what problems will need to be solved
3. Give students the space and they will find the learning

McCrann's principles can easily be brought in from the Appalachian wilderness and utilized in the sometimes chaotic search for knowledge in our classrooms. Experiential learning," he writes, "occurs in a context and the wonderfully messy thing about life is that it doesn't make things easy for you" (McCrann, 2016).

Source: John McCrann in Education Week

 

 

Learning from our Mistakes

From whatever vistas we ultimately view our learning from, we must recognize that there are many routes to the summit. Even for teachers who are fairly young, the paths of knowledge have changed  considerably since they were in school - the implications for which Diana Laufenberg discusses in her TedTalk "How to learn? From Mistakes" https://www.ted.com/talks/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach. While the first part of the presentation is largely autobiographical, Laufenberg shows how the conduits of knowledge changed in her own life. The most useful part of her talk is when she turns the focus to how experiential learning played out in her own classroom. The mistakes of her students, and her own miscues, led to knowledge and contexts that would not have otherwise been discovered. Laufenberg currently teaches at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia where students are taught to question and experiment with knowledge. "We deal right now in the educational landscape with an infatuation with the culture of one right answer that can be properly bubbled on the average multiple choice test," she contends, "and I am here to share with you: it is not learning" (Laufenberg, 2010). While the video will not likely add any specific tools to our toolbox, what she does succeed in doing is inspiring us to continue our fight again a purely quantitative model of education in which the important questions have already been asked and answered, Laufenberg gives her students the freedom to create, to "go figure it out".

The Twilight of Learning

As we ford the landscapes of our own learning with our students, finding the passageways to new concepts and modes of action, we surely near the summit. Maybe this is the fifth dimension that Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling tried to lead us to each week through the haze of his cigarette smoke - a restless, exploratory, life-long quest for those truths that are "the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition" and lie "between the pit of man's fears, and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination."

Source: seiginonakama.blogspot.com

References

Laufenberg, L. (2010). How to learn: From mistakes: https://www.ted.com/talks/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach

McCrann, J. (2016). Learning by doing: The case for experiential education. In Education Week Update. Retrieved from: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/prove-it-math-and-education-policy/2016/02/learning-by-doing-case-for-experiential-education.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news3

Serling, R (undated). Retrieved from: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/95125.Rod_Serling