Experience and Learning

A couple of educators I know are high on what they call �experiential learning.� They typically try to be �creative� in the use of �interactive� learning methods in their teaching: skits, simulations, role-play, art activity, dramatizations, etc. Given the dearth of imagination in the application the teaching-learning experience, I suppose this is a good thing, overall. But I also know that if I were one of their students, a steady diet of �experiential learning� would quickly burn me out.

At a conference yesterday I again tried my �obnoxious experiment� and asked a room of about 60 people to share their �philosophy of education� in their small group. When I asked for a show of hands as to how many were able to do so I counted four hands. That is not unusual. Personally, I�m an educational Constructivist. That is a phenomenological philosophy that says, to oversimplify, that learning and knowledge is constructed out of experience.

So you would think that I�d be higher on �creative experiential learning� than I tend to be. The truth is that learning happens on many levels and through many modalities. Someone once said that he doesn’t recommend books because you can’t really “learn it from a book.” Yeah, that’s true in some sense, but the fact is that people DO learn from books. Not everything, but many things appropriate to that medium. A Constructivist does not need to rely every time on kinesthetic experiences to bring about learning. The fact is that cognition (thinking, conceptualizing, imagining, muddling, assessing, philosophizing, opining, reflecting, considering, supposing, deeming, and judging, etc.) is a bona fide type of �experience.�

This is related to how the brain works and how it experiences experience. For example, the reason TALKING or dialogue is NECESSARY to educating in faith is that that is precisely the WAY some things are learned. And the things learned in that modality facilitate OTHER (kinds of) learning. It�s important to help people learn about what is appropriate to learn in the modality through which it needs to be learned. Some experiences are INTERNAL, and they are just as REAL as external experiences (and if you hold to a certain epistemological philosophy, you’d argue that those internal experiences are MORE real that the ones people “think” or �perceive� they are having in the “real”-material world).

Here’s what we know: we learn from experience. That’s a basic educational concept, but too often understood simplistically or naively. For one thing, not all experiences are the same. Some experiences enoble us, and some diminish us. Which means that HOW we do things matters.

Additionally, you can learn the WRONG thing from an experience. This is, for example, why some people get “stuck.” They have an experience, interpret it wrong, and therefore don’t “learn” from the experience because they are stuck in the experience. In this case, I say, “Experience may be the best teacher, but then you have to throw away the experience and keep the lesson learned.” This is why people go to therapy: they get stuck in an experience that they have not been able to make meaning of. This is related to emotions, learning and the brain. The amygdale is the central processing unit for emotions in the brain. It is the first, or one of the earliest, organs to develop. And, it is the only organ not directly connected to the frontal lobe, the place where we process language and conceptualize. That means that there is a natural disconnect between our emotions and our thinking. Since experience is such a feeder for emotions, the trap is that we can associate strong feelings to our experiences, but be disconnected from conceptualizing on the experience.

Experiences in and of themselves are meaningless, but we can associate feelings and emotions to them. The work of “learning” is to make MEANING of our experiences. And guess HOW that happens? Through thinking, dialogue, talking it out, and �theological reflection�! The formula is: Experience (or Concepts) + Dialogue = Meaning.

In this sense, given how many teachers misapply �experiential learning” it may matter very little that someone is participating in a kinesthetic, �creative� experience if we do not follow through on the process by helping them make theological meaning of the experience through dialogical learning. Any �experiential� learning activity disconnected from the learning outcome intended is just as ineffective and detrimental to the learning process as any �boring� lecture.