Experiential learning is the application of theory and academic content to real-world experiences, either within the classroom, within the community, or within the workplace, which advances program or course-based learning outcomes that are specifically focused on employability skills.
-The general concept of learning through experience is ancient.
-Around 350 BCE, Aristotle wrote I quote”for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them”. Unquote
-But as an articulated educational approach, experiential learning is of much more recent vintage.
-Beginning in the 1970s, David A. Kolb helped to develop the modern theory of experiential learning, drawing heavily on the work of John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, and Jean Piaget.
-Experiential learning has significant teaching advantages.
-Peter Senge author of The Fifth Discipline (1990), states that teaching is of utmost importance to motivate people.
-Learning only has good effects when learners have the desire to absorb the knowledge.
-Therefore, experiential learning requires the showing of directions for learners.
-Experiential learning entails a hands-on approach to learning that moves away from just the teacher at the front of the room imparting and transferring their knowledge to students.
-It makes learning an experience that moves beyond the classroom and strives to bring a more involved way of learning.
-Experiential learning has existed in India since the ancient times in the form of the gurukul system where the student benefits from partaking in various open activities, eventually learning through daily chores and lessons mediated by their teacher.
-The current era is considered as the era of knowledge.
-Knowledge systems are either monopolized or prejudiced
-Social understanding regarding many phenomena are skewed
-Many social problems exist due to minimum knowledge about various aspects of society
-Social progression depends on the fact based policies
-Many social policies and programmes do not reach the desired goal since it is not planed and implemented and evaluated based on proper data collected from the society and focused groups
-Local bodies like panchayath and municipalities fail to make focused projects and plans since they do not have techniques to collect and evaluate data.
-Many students of Social sciences and Commerce fail to conceptualize and understand the phenomena of academic importance for the want of proper methods and techniques of Understanding the various phenomena relevant to their field of study.
-Many Compulsory projects as part of the academic requirement end up as pirated contents since students have minimum ability and skill to evolve their own thesis independently.
-One example of experiential learning is going to the zoo and learning through observation and interaction with the zoo environment, as opposed to reading about animals from a book.
-Thus, one makes discoveries and experiments with knowledge firsthand, instead of hearing or reading about others’ experiences.
-Mr Raghuram Rajan, Former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, educationist and one of the leading economists in the world, said, Education should become experiential in nature, enabling students to not just consume information, but also use it effectively in the real world.
-Such an approach, called interwoven learning, interweaves various academic disciplines and breaks the silos between the classroom and the real world thereby training students for an increasingly complex, diverse and dynamic world.
-Where is the book in which the teacher can read about what teaching is?
-The children themselves are this book. We should not learn to teach out of any book other than the one lying open before us and consisting of the children themselves.
-This concept is more relevant than ever in todays time, where the attention span of students is decreasing, experiential learning is emerging to be the future of education.
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