Skip to Main Content

Experiential Learning

Research on Experiential Learning to: clarify terminology, explore student experience with 'Hands-on' learning, discover new pedagogies or structures that incorporate experience learning.

Books from the Teaching & Learning Collection

Faculty Focus Articles

Minimal Guidance or Direct Instruction 

"I keep coming back to how dichotomously pitting pedagogical approaches against one another ends up trivializing the complexity of teaching and learning. Given all the different things that we teach, given all the skills we seek to develop, given all the different learners that face us, given all our different strengths as teachers, isn’t it a bit of a stretch to imagine that either telling students or letting them discover is the definitive right answer?"  By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD 

 

Making the Most of Fieldwork Learning Experiences  Dr. Glen T. Hvenegaard is a professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Alberta, Augustana campus. 

Fieldwork refers to any component of the curriculum that involves leaving the classroom and learning through firsthand experience. Most instructors incorporate fieldwork to help students understand theory, develop skills, integrate knowledge, build tacit knowledge, develop meaning in places, and work with peers and instructors in alternate settings.

 

Six Steps to Designing Effective Service Learning Courses

By: Mary Bart 

A biology class works with a local environmental organization to test water samples from the Chesapeake Bay. A graphics design class helps a non-profit organization build a new website. A childhood development class serves as mentors to at-risk students in an after-school program.

These aren’t examples of a few kind-hearted college students volunteering their time, but rather part of formalized service-learning programs designed to achieve specific learning outcomes. 

 

ECHO model of experiential education based on an adaptation of Kolb’s “Experiential Learning Cycle.”

Service Learning White Paper - Magna Commons

10 Steps to a Successful Service Learning Program - Barbara Jacoby 

Excellent list of how service learning can address Hot Issues : Persistence / Recruitment / Diversity etc

 

More Books and Articles

SSHRC Report: Leveraging Knowledge for 21st Century Teaching and Learning

Insights and opportunities for knowledge mobilization and future research June 2016

 

My Teaching, Their Learning Workshop, grew out of The Learner-Teacher Interactions (LTI) research project … 70+ of video & audio of learner-teacher interactions in University, hospital & clinical settings

Includes a Taxonomy of Experiential Learning (Queen's University - Belfast) & 6 Challenging Questions for teachers (in bold - reproduce these in the text of final report

 

Improving Student Knowledge through Experiential Learning - A Hands-On Statics Lab at Virginia Tech - detailed overview of historical theory of Experiential Learning

 

Flipping Bloom's to Start with Creating - Shelley Wright May 15, 2012 - gives examples for media, science and English classes!

 

A Review of Bloom's Taxonomy and Kolb's Theory of Experiential Learning: Practical Uses for Prior Learning Assessment by Elena J. Murphy (The Journal of Continuing Higher Education, Voi, 55, No, 3, Fall 2007. Copyright © 2007, Association for Continuing Higher Education)

 

Learning and Simulation - for Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle

 

Experiential Learning Activities list 

 

Experiential learning and its facilitation by John Fowler …Paper from Sci Direct - for the section "Barriers to Experiential Learning."

 

Hager: Recovering informal learning : wisdom, judgement and community (Book available at UVic & RRU)

 

Freire, 1972 P. Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed Harmondsworth Penguin, London (1972) From <http://libsecure.camosun.bc.ca:2095/science/article/pii/S0260691707001165?