Beyond Learning by Doing

Theoretical Currents in Experiential Education

Jay W. Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136945809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What is experiential education? What are its theoretical roots? Where does this approach come from? Offering a fresh and distinctive take, this book is about going beyond "learning by doing" through an exploration of its underlying theoretical currents.

As an increasingly popular pedagogical approach, experiential education encompasses a variety of curriculum projects from outdoor and environmental education to service learning and place-based education. While each of these sub-fields has its own history and particular approach, they draw from the same progressive intellectual taproot. Each, in its own way, evokes the power of "learning by doing" and "direct experience" in the educational process. By unpacking the assumed homogeneity in these terms to reveal the underlying diversity of perspectives inherent in their usage, this book allows readers to see how the approaches connect to larger conversations and histories in education and social theory, placing experiential education in social and historical context.

1 Introduction

The River of Experience

DOI: 10.4324/9780203848081-1

I am large, I contain multitudes.

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

Stepping in to the River

From afar, rivers can take on a homogeneous appearance. I remember standing on the south rim of the Grand Canyon once, looking down on the Colorado River thousands of feet below. From that viewpoint, it looked like an impossibly blue ribbon that had been carefully placed on the rust-orange of the canyon floor. No variations were apparent, nothing to suggest movement, impediments, or dynamism. Yet, after two hard days of hiking, I saw a very different river as I stood next to the raging torrent of its shores. Here, the Colorado was no decorative ribbon, it was alive, pulsing, charging, and shifting in seemingly endless directions with color patterns of foam, soil, and sky. Understanding such as this required intimacy and exploration. It could not have come from the rim, no matter how carefully I observed or how long I spent. Standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, one can easily take much for granted. How hard it will be to hike down (and, more importantly back up). How hot it is down on the canyon floor. How dynamic the landscape becomes during a sudden rainstorm. To really see the Grand Canyon and the main shaping force of the Colorado River, the rim is not sufficient. And yet, the vast majority of tourists and visitors to the national park never leave the rim. They arrive in cars, pull over at various lookout points, take in the scenery, snap a few photos, and drive off having never ventured down into the details.

To organize a project such as this, metaphors can be of real use—they can guide both the author and the reader, providing meaningful anchors along the theoretical journey while (hopefully) maintaining a narrative coherence. Maxine Greene and Morwenna Griffiths (2003) in their essay “Feminism, Philosophy, and Education: Imagining Public Spaces” discuss the power of metaphorical thinking (p. 85):

We need to rethink, to think differently: to use our imaginations again … metaphorical language [is] a way of rethinking and questioning orthodox thinking. A metaphor is what it does. A metaphor, because of the way it brings together things that are unlike, reorients consciousness.

This book is about stepping off the rim and hiking down into the details. And, it is about realizing that the heretofore homogeneous looking “river” of experience employed in experiential education is actually much more complex and varied than perhaps previously thought. For too long, the concept of experiential education has stayed, metaphorically, “on the rim.” Theoretical and philosophical inquiries have been few and often too shallow to fully explore the diversity and range of currents in our river of experience. As a result, much of the conversation and curriculum theorizing in experiential education takes the central organizing concept—that of experience—for granted. This shallow theorizing is not just a mere oversight, it has real consequences to the ways we envision the future possibilities of the educational and schooling endeavor. A river without variations, without movement, becomes stagnant—a fetid backwater incapable of supporting a vibrant and diverse community of life. So, rather than an assumed single and relatively static theoretical current, I will contend that this “river” of experience is made up of many, sometimes contradictory, currents and perspectives. As Whitman describes, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” My hope is that using this metaphor will allow us, as Greene and Griffiths suggest, to “think differently” as it relates to experiential education. The taken-for-granted sense that we all know what we mean when we evoke the power of experience in the educational process needs to be unveiled. It is time to use our imaginations again when it comes to considering the role of experience in education.

In order to begin this work, we must first articulate a bit of background and context around this enigmatic term “experiential education” as it has been the focus of much debate, confusion, and misconception. First, we’ll need to make some distinctions in nomenclature between the terms “learning by doing” and “experiential education.” Second, we’ll place experiential education in context as a particular field of activity in curriculum theorizing. And third, we’ll consider where and when this particular strand of progressivism emerged. Articulating the contexts of experiential education will hopefully ensure that we can begin on more or less solid ground, before venturing into the shifting sands and turbulent waters of the theoretical currents themselves.

Beyond Learning by Doing

If the theoretical development of experiential education can be summed up in some form of an overarching exploration, it is the on-going quest to define itself.

Ironically, for a field steeped in Deweyian pragmatism, thinkers and practitioners have long labored over a sort of “quest for certainty” in terms of bounding and operationalizing the term “experiential education.” Indeed, there is little consensus on what, in fact, experiential education is. It has been alternatively described as “adventure education,” “outdoor education,” “challenge education,” and “environmental education” (Adkins & Simmons, 2002; Priest & Miles, 1990). The American Educational Research Association (AERA) includes such Special Interest Groups (SIGs) as “Ecological and Environmental Education,” “Outdoor and Adventure Education,” and “Service Learning and Experiential Education.” Richard Louv (2005) labels it a “movement” in Last Child in the Woods: “[t]he definitions and nomenclature of this movement are tricky. In recent decades, the approach has gone by many names: community-oriented schooling, bioregional education, experiential education, and, most recently, place-based or environment-based education” (p. 204). How could curricular approaches as varied as “adventure education” and “community-oriented schooling” be considered the same thing?

To further muddy up the water, practical applications of experiential education are numerous and varied. Certainly we might consider each of the following as examples of experiential education: taking a field trip, working cooperatively in a group on a project, volunteering in the community, completing a lab experiment, or learning to ride a bike. Each of these learning activities involves some degree of experience as part of the process. But then, doesn’t all learning involve experience? If so, have we created a sort of tautology here? That is, can we only define experiential education as “education that involves experience”? If so, we haven’t really articulated anything at all. Surely, not all education is experiential education. As evidenced by Louv and the examples listed above, people do seem to have a common-sense framework that they draw from in articulating what experiential education is. Experiential education is more of a “something” than an “everything.” What that “something” is will be the subject of this book. Yet in order to begin to flesh it out we have to clear up some misconceptions. The first is the distinction between experiential “learning” and experiential “education.”

Most often, experiential education is framed as “learning by doing.” So, in the practical examples articulated above (lab experiments, riding a bike, field trips), each of these relates to the other in the sense that they all involve some form of experiential learning. This can be equated to our metaphor of the “view from the rim.” From here, things look fairly simple and straightforward. But even the most cursory glance at all the possible variations of education and learning that would count as “experiential” under this definition would reveal its inadequacies. As Itin (1999, p. 91) claims:

Meaningful discussions have been … hampered in that the terms [experiential education and experiential learning] have been used to describe many different teaching approaches, work experiences, outdoor education, adventure education, vocational education, lab work … [and that] experiential education and experiential learning have often been used synonymously with these other terms.

So here we have a key distinction that must be understood before we proceed. Experiential education is not experiential learning. While there may be a variety of educational contexts that employ experiential learning (what I call learning by doing), this does not necessarily mean experiential education is a part of the process. What is the difference? We might think of learning as knowledge or skill acquired by instruction or study. This can happen either in formal schooling contexts or in informal settings outside of school (such as learning to ride a bike). Education, from the Latin root educare, to lead out, on the other hand, implies a broader process of what Richard Rorty called “individuation and socialization” (1999). Education, properly conceived, involves important questions about the structure and function of knowledge, the ethical imperatives of such knowledge, and the purposes to which learning ought to adhere. Thus education, as a process of both individuation and socialization, is rooted in longstanding philosophical queries as to the nature of self and society. Experiential learning, on the other hand, can be seen as a method or technique that any teacher might employ to meet certain instructional objectives. For example, an English teacher might help students learn rhyme and meter by asking them to “dance out” a poem in iambic pentameter. This is certainly “learning by doing” or the use of experiential learning in the moment. But it does not necessarily follow that using this method is the same as the process of experiential education as articulated by John Dewey (1938) and others. The two ask fundamentally different questions and work in different domains.

It should be noted that learning by doing as a method or technique is not without merit. Research supports the educational effectiveness of novelty, emotion, and challenge often associated with experiential environments (Bransford, 2000; Caine & Caine, 1991). Teaching techniques that support cooperative interaction and active student engagement have been championed in the popular literature on educational reform (Sizer, 1997; Meier, 1995; Fried, 2001). Certainly, many effective teachers understand the importance of mixing it up in the classroom and providing opportunities for students to learn in a wide variety of styles and methods—one of which may be experiential. Educators have long relied on the experiential approaches mentioned above (and many others) to create enriched learning environments for students.

Yet, while there is nothing categorically wrong with this particular construction of experience in education, it does come with limitations. In this frame of reference, experiential methods or activities are used as a technique available to the teacher (among a wide variety of other techniques such as direct instruction, Socratic seminar, small group work, etc.). For example, “hands-on” activities are used to break up the monotony of direct instruction or to bring to life specific content areas. Field trips are used to “get kids out of the classroom.” Or, experiential activity can be seen as accessing a type of kinesthetic intelligence (Gardner, 1993) or learning modality that teachers ought to use to reach a variety of different learning styles. What all these methods have in common is the manner in which experience is technically defined and applied. That is to say, the experience is tightly bounded (in both time and space) and efficiently controlled. Experience becomes not organic, interactive, and continuous but rather a scripted, timed, and located “activity.” Normal classroom or school processes stop and “experiential” activity then begins for a bounded and specific timeframe. Equating experiential education with “learning by doing” in this way frames the way we think and as a result it has particular consequences for the way we enact educational projects. As Paul Hawken (2007) argues, “what we already know frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand” (p. 15). In many ways, experiential education, when framed as “learning by doing,” becomes equated with a method or a technique. It becomes a useful tool in the hands of the teacher—something to be employed in small chunks, but not functionally altering the broader purposes and aims of education and school. It does not get at the philosophical queries about the purposes of schooling and structure and function of knowledge described earlier. It is also vulnerable to caricature and over-simplification. Just like the tourists on the rim who look out, snap a quick picture, and perhaps even declare “I thought it would be bigger” as they drive away, limiting our viewpoint of experiential education to “learning by doing” lends itself to shallow thinking. E. D. Hirsch, for example, in his seminal and influential text The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, defines learning by doing as “a phrase once used to characterize the progressivist movement but little used today, possibly because the formulation has been the object of much criticism and even ridicule” (1996, p. 256). Surely, there must be more to experiential education than mere activity and method? There is. And it is this broader and potentially deeper articulation of experiential education that we turn to next.

The Field of Experiential Education

So, we have taken care of one misconception—that of equating experiential education with experiential learning. But this leaves us with another. If experiential education is not simply a method to be used by a teacher in an instructional moment, what is it? Itin (1999) argues that, properly understood, experiential education is a philosophy. He states (p. 97):

if experiential education is correctly identified as a philosophy, it allows for the various expressions of this philosophy (service learning, cooperative learning, adventure-based, problem-based, action learning, etc.) to be linked together under this single philosophy. This provides a method for bringing those together who promote these various expressions and to argue for educational reform that would support experiential education in all settings.

Framing experiential education as a philosophy, to Itin, avoids the vulnerabilities of equating it with a method or technique while at the same time allowing for a number of curricular projects to find a coherent home underneath its conceptual framework. This seems like a good, useful move. However, there are problems here as well. A “philosophy” of education has to sit on its own in terms of its epistemological, ethical, and ontological assumptions. Experiential education, as we will see here, draws from a variety of other philosophies and, as such, ought to be seen as derivative of them and not a philosophy in and of itself. So if we can’t exactly call it a philosophy, what is it?

As I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the defining characteristic of the theoretical explorations of experiential education has been on-going quest for definition. But, in many ways, experiential education is a sort of tabula rasa, a blank slate from which we project our hopes, fears, and assumptions about education and schooling. How we choose to frame it, define it, and conceptualize it says as much about us as it does about some objective reality out there. As Capra (1997) noted in a different context, “We never speak about [it] without at the same time speaking about ourselves” (p. 77). I don’t make any claims that this theoretical exploration will somehow capture or retrieve some truer or more accurate sense of what experiential education “is.” As Martin Jay (2005) states regarding uncovering a “correct” notion of experience in his excellent work, Songs of Experience (p. 3):

Rather than force a totalized account, which assumes a unified point of departure, an etymological arche to be recaptured, or a normative telos to be achieved, it will be far more productive to follow disparate threads where they may lead us. Without the burden of seeking to rescue or legislate a single acceptation of the word, we will be free to uncover and explore its multiple and often contradictory meanings and begin to make sense of how and why they function as they often have to produce such a powerful effect.

So, if we avoid attempting to “legislate a single acceptation” of experiential education, where does that leave us in terms of exploring this theoretical landscape?

If experiential education is not a method and it is not a philosophy and yet at the same time we need to avoid legislating a single definition of the term, how can we speak of it? This is the difficulty of employing such a philosophically enigmatic term such as “experience” and combining it with another enigmatic term: “education.” For the purposes of this book, it will be most useful to refer to experiential education as a field.

As Rumi writes: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there” (Barks, 1995). Defining the boundaries of what might be considered experiential education is a tricky task for all the reasons stated above. If we take Rumi’s advice about avoiding “wrongdoing and rightdoing” we are left, in his words, with a field. And this, I contend, is just the way to view experiential education. Not as a method, or a philo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction:The River of Experience
• 2 Headwaters: From Experience to Experiential Education
• 3 Experience and the Individual:The Romantic Current
• 4 Experience and the Social:The Pragmatist Current
• 5 Experience and the Political:The Critical Current
• 6 Experience and the Market:The Normative Current
• 7 Experience and Democracy:The Hopeful Current
• References
• Index