Experiential Education - Other Programs

Other Programs

High school English classes in Rabun Gap, Georgia earned national attention for using their research and writing to publish the Foxfire journal. (Wigginton, 1985). Students researched the culture of the Appalachian Mountains through taped interviews with local people. They wrote and edited articles based upon their interviews. Foxfire has inspired hundreds of similar cultural journalism projects around the country.

Christchurch School, in the tidewater area of Virginia, has an experiential program called Great Journeys Begin at the River. The hands-on, skill-based, inside/outside curriculum is based on using the school's location on the Rappahannock River, in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Students recycle aluminum to raise money for the school's oyster farm, which they tend in an effort to help save the Bay.

The Nicodemus Wilderness Project provides an environmental experiential education program with a global reach called the "Apprentice Ecologist Initiative". This scholarship-based opportunity is targeted for youth volunteers who want to help protect the environment. The initiative seeks to develop young people for leadership roles by engaging them in environmental cleanup and conservation projects, empower volunteers to rebuild the environmental and social well-being of our communities, and improve local living conditions for both citizens and wildlife.

Project OASES (Occupational and Academic Skills for the Employment of Students) emphasizes experiential education in the Pittsburgh public schools. Eighth graders, identified as potential dropouts, spend three periods a day involved in renovating a homeless shelter as part of a service project carried out within their industrial arts class. Students in such programs learn enduring skills, such as planning, communicating with a variety of age groups and types of people, and group decisionmaking. In their activities and in reflection, they come to new insights and integrate diverse knowledge from fields such as English, political science, mathematics, and sociology.

Presidential Classroom, a non-profit civic education organization in Washington D.C., is open to high school students from across the country and abroad. They meet and interact with government officials, media correspondents, congressman, and key players on the world stage to learn how public policy shapes many aspects of citizens’ lives. Students travel to Washington and spend a week hearing from prominent speakers, meet with interest group spokesmen and tour the national capital. Students participate in a group project directed by experienced instructors; they have mediated debates on current issues facing the country. The focus of the week is to give students a hands-on introduction to how "real world" politics take place.

The Advantage Foundation, a not-for-profit education organization in Western Australia, helps bridge the gap between university and employment via the Australian Business Icon program. The program engages young and emerging entrepreneurs in direct experience and focused reflection to increase knowledge, develop skills and clarify values. It requires students with innovative, strategic thinking, and analytical skills, to take on four (4) pre-organized innovative and entrepreneurial business-related tasks. The goal is to develop the communication, ethics, innovation and enterprise of students.

Global College, a four-year international study program offered by Long Island University, is based on self-guided, experiential learning while a student is immersed in foreign cultures. Regional centers employ mostly advisors rather than teaching faculty; these advisors guide the individual students in preparing a "portfolio of learning" each semester to display the results of their experiences and projects.

The New England Literature Program in the English Department at the University of Michigan is a 45-day program, in which University instructors live and work together with 40 UM students in the woods of Maine in early spring. They intensively study 19th and 20th-century New England literature, in a program that includes creative writing in the form of academic journaling, as well as a deep physical engagement with the landscape of New England. NELP students and staff take hiking trips into the White Mountains and other parts of the New England natural areas each week, integrating their experience of the landscape with writing and discussion of texts.

The Chicago Center for Urban Life and Culture is the only nonprofit and independent experiential educational program for college students in the United States. The Chicago Center is distinguished by unique seminars characterized by a 'First Voice' pedagogy, its location in the multi-ethnic Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, and development of several hundred internship sites in Chicago. While many of the students who attend Chicago Center grew up in cities, the majority are from suburban, rural and farming communities. Students participate individually in its Semester, May Term and Summer Session. The Chicago Center also designs and staffs programs for groups, what it calls "LearnChicago!", which promise non-tourist experiences in the city.

Several Australian high schools have established experiental education programmes, including Caulfield Grammar School's five-week internationalism programme in Nanjing, China and Geelong Grammar School's Timbertop outdoor education programme.

Other projects and "capstone" programs have included student teams writing their own international development plans and presenting them to presidents and foreign media and publishing their studies as textbooks in development studies, to running their own businesses, NGOs, or community development banks.

At the professional school level, experiential education is often integrated into curricula in "clinical" courses following the medical school model of "See one, Do one, Teach one", in which students learn by practicing medicine. This approach is being introduced in other professions in which skills are directly worked into courses to teach every concept (starting with interviewing, listening skills, negotiation, contract writing and advocacy, for example) to larger-scale projects in which students run legal aid clinics or community loan programs, or write legislation or community development plans.

The Boys and Girls Club of America provides a framework for youth development professionals to employ experiential learning methods.

Lifeworks International offers experiential, service-learning programs for high school students. Trips combine adventure travel, cultural immersion, community service, and global education during expeditions in China, Thailand, India, Costa Rica, Peru, the British Virgin Islands, and Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.

Youth development programs have used experiential education methods to reach at-risk youth. An example is "Circus Harmony", based in St. Louis, Missouri. Their mission is to "teach the art of life through circus education". By learning circus arts skills, students come together from diverse backgrounds and experiences and learn from each other as well.