Experiential learning in higher education
Practical, hands-on settings create opportunities for students to engage with ideas, tools, and other people in ways that can be pivotal for developing the knowledge and skills of their chosen discipline. Experiential learning in labs, studios, fieldwork, practice placements, and projects is therefore often highly impactful for students. For teachers, it can allow us to work more closely with students in a contextualised way that enables us to accompany important aspects of their development. Teaching in these settings is valuable, busy, challenging, rich, and interesting. It can be highly rewarding, but also, sometimes, frustrating. It can be time-consuming and complicated to organise, and can lead to disappointment when the results do not fulfil the promise of what could be learned.
This book is about how to teach effectively in these settings. There are as many good ways to organise practical learning as there are teachers and disciplines, so our approach here is not to propose to you a correct way of organising practical learning that will require you to revise the structure of your course or educational programme. Instead, we focus on the ways that teachers interact with students and look at how these interactions can help to maximise students’ learning, whatever the practical setting or discipline in which you teach.
Students’ experiences of practical learning in higher education can be as varied as teachers’, with both strong positive and negative aspects. We start by introducing some key themes of this book with some students’ accounts in their own words.
Experiential learning in labs, projects, field experiences, and studios can give students a sense of what it is like to connect to their discipline for real – a sense that they will rarely be able to get from lectures and readings:
I’m very glad I had chosen to do the project assignment as it gave me a rough idea on what a real life project out on site would look like. The project based work enabled me to better see how the theoretical principles we have learned in class actually translate into the real world.
(A student in an engineering soil mechanics course project, cited in Gratchev and Jeng [2018, 795])
It was our second experiment we extracted three components from um Excedrin. We extracted aspirin, caffeine, and acetaminophen. And I just thought that was really interesting. I felt like I was kind of like more in like the medical field like last year all we did was titrations. Like we added acids and bases and like what is this? But now the stuff we are doing is actually dealing with medicine and like separating things.
(Phyllis, a student in an organic chemistry lab, cited Galloway et al. [2016, 231])
When participating in a field activity … I found myself becoming far more involved and emotionally attached than I would be in a lecture and Being let “loose” as it were, and being left to discover an area on our own [reconnaissance day] without influence from tour guides or those in the know (lecturers) … allowed us to effectively bond with … [our locations].
(Two geography students on an international field experience, cited in Simm and Marvell [2015, 606–612])
It kinda shows you the chemist perspective of chemistry. You know, like you have, when you think of like a scientist, you know, exploring stuff.
(Anna, describing participation in a chemistry lab, cited in Sandi-Urena et al. [2011, 439])
But because it is unlike learning from more familiar lectures, exercises, and reading, experiential learning poses new challenges to students as they deal with the unfamiliar complexity of real-life practice and of working in teams in their discipline:
When you get into the classroom, there’s always somewhat of a disconnect between all these idealistic theories and what’s actually going on. There’s just certain things you just don’t even get to because you also have to deal with students … and there are so many management issues.
(Céleste, a student teacher in a fourth-grade class [nine- to ten-year-old pupils], cited in Anderson and Stillman [2010, 122])
Some are shy, insecure … am I selfish to wish I didn’t have those people in my group? Because it’s really hard to work if a group member keeps repeating she doesn’t want to be here and OK, after starting off so well this morning collecting our data for the cape weavers and analysing all the data, we got to the point of writing it up which has proved absolutely impossible with lots of conflicting ideas from lots of different professors.
(Two biology students describing their field work project, cited in Cotton [2009, 171])
I was very intimidated the first, uh, project that we had, just because. I felt like we were kind of thrown in, and we had to try to swim to the surface to try to figure out what to do.
(Zoey, describing participation in a chemistry lab, cited in Sandi-Urena et al. [2011])
And because it is often new, complex, challenging, and because the stakes can be high, experiential learning can generate strong positive and negative emotions that seem unfamiliar to students and which students may struggle to process:
At the start I was fairly emotional … Your brain is just so full of stuff like and stuff you want to talk about … There were some instances in my class and I just used to write for pages … I didn’t want to be going home every evening, going on about it because some stuff you shouldn’t be talking about outside of school.
(A final year student teacher, cited in Corcoran and Tormey [2012, 164])
It is in my mind, always in my mind. It really touched my heart. I was stressed and vulnerable.
(A social work student after discovering that a client he had seen the week previously had taken his own life, cited in Barlow and Hall [2007, 403])
Um, honestly, I hate chemistry lab. Uh, I really like my lab group and I like my TA a lot, but the chemistry lab sucks.
(Anna, who was quoted above, again describing her chemistry lab, cited in Sandi-Urena et al. [2011])
Our beds are kind of gross, they should have warned us to bring a bed spread as well as a sleeping bag and We went for a look round, saw a strange rodenty creature with green eyes which was pretty cool, a locust, and an owl and some other things which I’m not quite sure what they are or they might have been a figment of my imagination. Doesn’t matter, it was still very exciting.
(Two more biology students describing their field work project, cited in Cotton [2009, 171])
I enjoyed everything, but especially the river work and walk in the Cairngorms. It was a lot more fun than I thought it would be.
(A first-year geography student describing fieldwork, cited in Boyle et al. [2007, 312])
These accounts from students report positive and negative aspects, often mixed together. Viewed like this, from the student perspective, it is easy to see why practical learning is challenging for both students and teachers. It introduces complexity, exploration, and uncertainty. It puts students in situations where they are working at the very limits of their capabilities. It generates strong emotions like joy, hate, anxiety, disgust, stress, and pride. This richness means that teachers have an important but complex role in guiding students to encounter, engage, and learn from these experiences on multiple levels. This requires teachers to manage, in addition to the core disciplinary aspects, questions of health, safety, and general well-being that typically do not arise in lectures, tutorials, exercises, or in the library.
At the same time, these students’ perspectives also make it easy to see why practical learning in labs, projects, field experiences, and studios is such an important part of learning in higher education. In lectures, students will hear about things, but in experiential learning they will hear, see, smell, touch, and taste them. Reading will often provide students with neat, ordered lists of concepts, ideas, principles, and strategies, but practical learning will help students to build connections between it all and therefore develop their ability to recall the right information at the right time to solve the problem they are facing right now. As Chapter 2 will explore, practical experiences in the field, labs, studios, and projects are central to how learners go from being a student of a discipline to starting a trajectory towards developing expertise in a discipline.
But despite its absolute centrality to students’ learning of what it means to act, think, and feel like an expert in their chosen discipline, practical-based learning is still sometimes viewed as an uncomfortable appendage to students’ learning in higher education. For some higher education managers this may be because of the high costs involved when compared to the false economies of lecture-based teaching. But the issue also probably goes deeper than just cost, and may relate to the social value that is placed on head, hands, and heart in contemporary societies and to the unfortunate tendency to see theory and practice as being separate domains. That universities tend to value thinking over acting and feeling is evident in, for example, the centrality of Bloom’s cognitive learning outcomes to so many discussions of higher education reform and development, and the comparative neglect of learning in the affective and psychomotor domains, which are often treated as an afterthought, if they are treated at all (this is an idea we will return to in Chapter 2).
A key idea underpinning this book is that practical learning should not be an afterthought assigned marginal status in our educational programmes and in our understandings of what it means to be a teacher in higher education. Rather it should be central to how we teach our students the disciplinary competence that we want them to develop, and how we put them on a pathway towards expertise.
