Impact
of Experiential & Energizing Learning
Experiential learning is an active process,
one “through which individuals construct knowledge, acquire skills and enhance
values from direct experience”.
The primary objective of experiential learning
is to instill within the individual learner a sense of ownership and
responsibility.
Thereby, one way for learners to become
more actively involved is for educators to design the module that requires student
participation.
This begins by invoking enthusiasm amongst
the teachers which would promote students' intrinsic motivation to learn.
In an experiential learning environment, students
work in teams to perform a real task and understand the output of their
efforts. The exercise raises a number of provocative issues regarding many
concepts and specifically occurs in a spirited, enlivened class session.
The 4-Stage
Experiential Learning Cycle imparts-
* Experiencing: A structured experience in which individuals
participate in a specific activity so as to have involvement of personal and cognitive aspects of a
person. The same fact has been emphasized in the media time and again.
* Reflecting: A need exists to integrate the new experience
with past experiences through the process of reflection which is instilled with self-initiation: a sense of
discovery which comes from within.
* Generalizing: this stage calls for individuals to
search for patterns based on the specific experience to explore whether
emotions, thoughts, behaviors or observations occur with some regularity. This
understanding is then applied to other situations.
* Applying: In this stage, individuals are
encouraged to plan ways to put into action the generalizations (patterns) that
they identified in the previous stage. This directly activates the “learners’
self-concept,” calling upon the learner to become more self-directed in the
learning process.
Throughout the experiential
learning process, learners are
actively engaged in posing questions, investigating, experimenting,
being curious, solving problems, assuming responsibility, being creative and
constructing meaning.
Learners are engaged intellectually, emotionally,
socially, and/or physically. This involvement helps produce a
perception that the learning task
is authentic.
Thus, when experiential learning takes place,
its meaning to the learner becomes incorporated into the total experience
which “makes a difference in the behavior, the attitudes, perhaps even the
personality of the learner.”
Experiential learning holds the ability to heighten the sense
of democracy by welcoming participation as a construct for evoking the reality
of a community of practice.
