What is Experiential Learning?

Doing, interacting to be focus of new centre

Experiential learning-also known as hands-on or inquiry-based learning-has long been a staple of science education. But today, it's making a move into other disciplines as well.

Long a staple of laboratory teaching settings, experiential learning is now taking centre stage in even broader programs designed to equip students with important, real-world skills. It's an approach that goes beyond traditional book-learning and memorization, instead acknowledging the social as well as the strictly academic aspects of learning.

The concept puts students at the centre of their own learning, immersing them in a process of inquiry that begins with the student's own knowledge and shows them how to find answers to their own questions. In this model, teachers become mentors and students learn to think for themselves, work collaboratively with others, and create new knowledge by following their own curiosity.

Advocates of the approach contend that it produces graduates who can respond to the demands of a fast-moving society, where textbooks quickly become outdated and information-gathering, flexibility and critical thinking skills are increasingly important to a students' post-graduate success.

"Students learn best when we teach them to think, to problem solve, and to ask the right questions," says Mike Boorman, former dean of the Faculty of Science who has become program manager for the energy environement experiential learning project (EEEL) . "They learn best when we help them to discover things for themselves. That spirit of inquiry will serve them well whether they become engineers, biologists, psychologists, or government and community leaders."

Learning spaces will pair the latest and most technologically-advanced scientific instruments with wireless workspaces, classrooms and meeting places. Staff will be centrally located, allowing easier access to greater numbers of students conducting independent or group hands-on projects.

"We're catering now to a different student population," says Boorman. "We're increasing opportunities for personalized learning and enhancing the interaction between students and the experts in their fields."

Erasing boundaries

Gone will be many traditional divisions between lecture and laboratory activities. Organizers envision flexible learning areas with movable seating, computers and equipment configurations. Students will be able to observe short lectures, but may then be invited to regroup and apply their new knowledge using individual computer research, group discussion and inquiry, or hands-on experimentation.

This so-called "blended learning" environment, which mixes theory and practice, has been practised in certain departments at various universities, including U of C, for a number of years. But formalizing the approach -- indeed creating entire buildings and learning spaces that cater to it -- is an idea only now beginning to surface in higher education institutions in Canada and elsewhere, especially those originally built around vast lecture halls for undergraduate students. Formalized lectures won't disappear entirely, but lectures will be increasingly conducted in smaller, more intimate groups.

"We're thinking about our learning spaces in a new way," says Jon Greggs, program director for the EEEL project. The flexible learning spaces will also increase efficiency by allowing the university to offer, say, a physics lecture/laboratory course one semester and a mechanical engineering course in the same space the next. Such flexibility represents a departure from traditional space-allocation models, which typically fall along departmental lines.

In the new model, organizers envision collaborative work spaces, meeting rooms and integrated, vibrant social spaces that encourage sharing of ideas and expertise among students, researchers and faculty from various disciplines. They also envision creating public atrium space and placing working researchers' laboratories near student spaces, possibly with see-through partitions, promoting the connection between academic inquiry and its public beyond.

The result: a place where interaction, sharing, questioning and discussion are the norm, and differing approaches lend perspective to thoughtful, reasoned debate. Such a multidisciplinary approach is viewed to be particularly important as society becomes more diverse and our problems more complex.