What Is Experiential Learning?

Others have cited Sophocles’ quote from 400 B.C., “One must learn by doing the thing, for though you think you know it-you have no certainty, until you try.” Or, one could quote George Santayana, “The great difficulty of education is to get experience out of ideas.” It is hard to argue that experience will not lead to learning under the right conditions. However, it will be argued that the resultant learning can be in error unless care is taken to assure that those conditions occur. The purpose of this chapter is to delineate the components of “experiential learning” so that the necessary conditions for “proper” learning can be specified. While most pedagogies allow students to learn experientially to some extent, an attempt will be made to distinguish those approaches which would be more likely to facilitate experiential learning. While the title of the chapter implies a focus on learning (the student perspective), to a large extent the chapter actually focuses on the structuring of the experience (the teacher perspective). What the student takes away from a particular experience is often idiosyncratic to his/her perceptions of the experience, and is somewhat outside the control of the instructor. The