Practice
The methodologies reflected in experiential education have evolved since the time of Hahn and Dewey. For experiential education to become efficient pedagogy, physical experience must be combined with reflection. Adding reflective practice, allows for personal introspection of challenges and key learnings. That is, physical challenges provide a gateway in which we can observe qualities about ourselves, and those whom we are working with. Further, for the efficacy of experiential education, experiences must be separated, giving the learner sufficient time to process the information.
Experiential education informs many educational practices underway in schools (formal education) and out-of-school (informal education) programs. Many teaching methods rely on experiential education to provide context and frameworks for learning through action and reflection.
- Outdoor education uses organized learning activities that occur in the outdoors, and uses environmental experiences as a learning tool.
- Service learning is a combination of community service with stated learning goals, relying on experience as the foundation for meaning.
- Cooperative learning alters homogeneous groupings in order to support diverse learning styles and needs within a group.
- Active learning, a term popular in US education circles in the 1980s, encourages learners to take responsibility for their learning, requiring their experience in education to inform their process of learning.
- Environmental education is based in educating learners about relationships within the natural environment and how those relationships are interdependent. Students participate in outdoor activities as part of their learning experience.
Experiential education serves as an umbrella for linking many diverse practices into a coherent whole. Its philosophy is closely linked to numerous other educational theories, but it should not be conflated with progressive education, critical pedagogy, youth empowerment, feminist-based education, and constructivism. The development of experiential education as a philosophy has been intertwined with the development of these other educational theories; their contrasts have clarified differences.
Fellowships and other training programs are available for experiential educators; but, formal training in experiential methods is lacking for K-12 undergraduate teaching programs (see Wendel, A. and Mantil, A., (2008) and the National Society for Experiential Education).
Read more about this topic: Experiential Education
Famous quotes containing the word practice:
“Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.... It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Kindness is a virtue neither modern nor urban. One almost unlearns it in a city. Towns have their own beatitude; they are not unfriendly; they offer a vast and solacing anonymity or an equally vast and solacing gregariousness. But one needs a neighbor on whom to practice compassion.”
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)
“In my practice I’ve seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happens slowly instead of all at once. I didn’t seem to mind.... All of us, a little bit. We harden our hearts. Grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear.”
—Daniel Mainwaring (1902–1977)