Experiential Learning
Confucius around 450 BC:
"Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve
me, and I will understand."
Experiential Learning
Experiential training aims for a very different degree of learning
from that which is based on ‘didactic’ teaching methods.
The different quality and nature of experiential learning lies in
its involving as many different aspects of the participant’s
capacities as he or she is prepared to invest in the learning process.
Learning occurs at intellectual, emotional and behavioral levels
in an integrated manner, resulting in real attitude and behavioral
change, as influential early learning is effectively re-evaluated.
Experiential learning is both exciting and challenging. It includes
a range of different processes such as individual or team problem
solving initiatives, physical challenges, games, simulation exercises,
structured processes, sharing sessions, guided visualizations, and
structured interactions. In all these events, students are actively
engaged in the learning process and are able to generate meaningful,
relevant insights from their experience.
Experiential learning has
been defined as having four main characteristics:
- The learner is aware of the processes which are taking place,
and which are enabling learning to occur;
- The learner is involved in a reflective experience which enables
the person to relate current learning to past, present and future;
- The experience and content is personally significant: what
is being learned and how it is being learned hold a special importance
for that person;
- There is an involvement of the whole self – body, thoughts,
feelings and actions, not just of the mind. In other words, the
learner is fully engaged as a whole person.
These principles result in the following propositions:
- Experiential learning is concerned with the experience of individuals,
not just with their participation. Participants are asked to consider
and utilize their own experience as the basis for self-understanding
and assessment of their own needs, resources and objectives.
- The individual participant is regarded as an active, rather
than a passive, participant in the process of defining and putting
into practice educational agendas and methodologies.
- Through this learning process, power (focus of control) is shifted
away from the teacher and in the direction of the learner. Another
way to put this would be to say that in traditional learning the
nature of the teacher-student relationship is usually asymmetrical;
the former has more power than the latter. In experiential learning,
this asymmetry is reduced. Learners are planning, carrying out
and evaluating their own learning. The ‘expert’ and
the learner engage in a process which is concerned, not with the
former transferring facts into the latter, but rather with facilitating
an active process of learning in the student.
- The participant becomes responsible for his or her own learning.
The expert is a resource and a provider of structure, but learning
is seen as taking place when the learner is trying actively to
assimilate external knowledge into his or her own internal frame
of reference.
All our OD and Training interventions can be customized to an experiential
learning. We combine the depth in out bound expeditions with management
training experts to give a holistic transformation to in the individual
thus bringing the desired change.
Top
|
