“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.”
-Galileo Galilei
Experiential learning is the process of making meaning from direct experience.
Traditional education expects participants to learn about the topic from books, lectures, tutorials and worksheets.
Experiential education places them in situations that provide similar challenges to those they might face and evokes similar emotions, and that require similar skills and behaviours to overcome.
By using an adventurous environment such as the outdoors, we can provide a ‘laboratory’ in which facilitators can create challenging and demanding situations and in which apprentices can experiment with different behaviours, without that behaviour having a negative effect in the workplace.
An Experiential Learning Cycle
This is one of many learning cycles that helps us to conceptualise and understand the complicated, messy process of learning. (For other cycles, see this great article by Roger Greenaway)
In order to learn through experience, it is not only necessary to ‘do something’. After we have performed an Action, three further things take place before that action alters how we act in the future.
First, we Reflect on the action we just took and the experience it generated. This is looking back and thinking about what happened and the feelings it generated, in ourselves and others and the effect it had on the environment we are in.
Then we conceptualise, that is, think about the reasons that it had those effects and understand those reasons. This leads to Learning.
Learning on its own is no use if we don’t then do anything with it, so we then have to Plan. This is about applying that learning next time you undertake that action and, importantly, similar actions in the future.
We all go round this cycle as we learn from experience, sometimes it takes a few seconds to complete a circuit and sometimes it might take us years. Typically, the more intense and complicated the experience, the longer it takes us to go round the cycle.
Different people favour different parts of the cycle, Peter Honey and Alan Mumford have a system for working out which area you prefer to spend your time in, which we occasionaly use on Totem courses.
There is of course, much more to experiential learning that these basic concepts, but they underlie much of what we do. Space to experiment, reflective practice and onward planning are at the core of Totem’s work.
We don’t often get involved with political issues here at Totem, preferring to solve the worlds issues by dealing with people one to one.
