Literature Review- Allison Wynbissinger

I read literature reviews and commented in Group 4//Embodied Learning (Lorrina Smith) and Group 5//Narrative Learning (Marti Suddarth).

Experiential Learning Theory Literature Review

Allison Wynbissinger

Ball State University

EDAC 634 Fall 2016

Introduction

Experiential Learning Theory is the concept that adults are able to gain practical knowledge and meaning from their real life experiences.  Adult learners will accumulate both a greater amount and variety of experiences the longer that they live, thus they are able to use what they have encountered or gone through for the function of learning.  These experiences may have been direct and have engaged them not only mentally but also physically and emotionally, but they also might have been fictitious role-plays, or reliving past experiences, or through meditating on their past experiences to make sense of them (Merriam, 2007).  However it comes about, experiences are never confined events that happen in a vault.  Learners must strive to connect their current reality to those situations in the past and thus impacting those that may come in the future.  Per Lindeman (1961), “The resource of highest value in adult education is the learner’s experience,” and it becomes “the adult learner’s living textbook…” As facilitators of learning, it is imperative that we acknowledge the value of our students’ experiences and the ways that they can be used to mold them.  We must use this “living textbook” to its fullest; that these life events not go to waste.  The purpose of this literature review is to delve into the general themes of experiential learning as found in specific research and the ways that these main ideas can inform practitioners in their day-to-day work.

General Themes

The human experience is a source of learning. 

As John Dewey (1938) wrote, “All genuine education comes about through experience.”  There is a lot of literature that focuses on adult experiences being a source of learning, as well as a number of theorists and scholars who explore how these can be transferred into knowledge and how we can make meaning out of real-life events.  Take for example the Living by Learning Project, where medical students’ perspectives and experiences about life lived as an older adult in a nursing home was used to provide life-altering medical education.  Throughout and following their experience of living in a nursing home, students were able to build knowledge about geriatrics and older adults by journaling about their feelings, emotions, thoughts, and observations.  This was done in an effort to “provide students an approach to discovering meaning and understanding from their experiences and observations and eventually applying these to their practice of medicine,” (Gugliucci & Weiner, 2013).  As they point out, reflection is imperative; it is the critical connection in the experiential learning process that will create a change in student attitudes, skills, and knowledge.

We must reflect on our experiences in order to learn from them.

It is not enough to just have experiences.  Everyone has experiences, but not everyone learns from them.  It is absolutely imperative that we pause to think about what we have gone through in order to gain value from it.  “Learning needs to be evaluated by the learner and take on meaning as part of the overall experience,” (Dernova, 2015).  It is only after reaction to our actions that learning can take place.

Again when we look at the Living by Learning Project, the journaling that the students did provided the participants in this 12 day study the chance to utilize the reflective processes proposed by Schön (1987).   Reflection-in-action was used to reshape what they were doing while they were actually doing the field work in the nursing home while reflection-on-action was used after their fieldwork had ended and they thought through the situation (Merriam, 2007).  These reflective practices helped these medical students to navigate surprises that arose at the time and to make judgments during this experience, and after consciously going back to reevaluate the experience and consider what they can do differently in future similar situations, it will guide them to make better judgements in situations to come.  As Baud (1992) expressed, “Learning is always based on prior experience and any effort to activate new learning should take into account the prior experience,” so we must connect current experiences with previous experiences to help our students analyze these new experiences.

Previous experiences affect how learners approach new experiences.

            Experiential learning not only allows people to gain practical knowledge but also wisdom.  This wisdom can help adults to make different, hopefully more effective decisions in the future when they face new, unknown situations and real world problems (Dernova, 2015).  Adult learners need to be able to see what is similar between their new and previous experiences and they also need to be able to identify what is different and why that is. It is through that process that they can learn to recognize varying circumstances that require them to make adjustments in order to overcome challenges.  The full learning cycle formulated by Kolb (1984) can be difficult to achieve “because within the cycle new knowledge and experience often contradict each other. That is why reflection and abstraction are crucial in the relearning process to create newer meanings based on the contradictions between students' prior and new experiences,” (Baasanjav, 2013).

Take for example, Gugliucci & Weiner’s study (2013): they found that the observations the students made during their experiential learning process in the nursing home were effective in implementing changes to the ways those same individuals would come to practice medicine differently in the future, as real life practitioners. “Learning not only changes with increasing experience, but previous experience affects how learners approach new experiences, ultimately affecting their ability to learn (quantitatively and qualitatively) different things,” (Yardley et al, 2012).

Experiential learning can be facilitated but not forced.

Adult learners need to be able to self-direct their learning and be autonomous in that; so while educators can create unique learning opportunities, we cannot force our students to participate.  Furthermore, adult learners likely have specific goals in mind so their learning outcomes should be used in practice and considered priority, while the relationship between the teacher and student should be a partnership, functioning as a cooperative activity.  “In modern society with constant changes the adult learning requires shifting the emphasis from teaching to learning that is from transferring the information to facilitating the experience accumulation…” (Dernova, 2015). 

We see this cooperative activity in the Living by Learning Project as it was created and offered to medical students, who volunteered to conduct this noncredit experiential learning research project. Dr. Gugliucci served in the research mentor role through their stay in the nursing home, but neither she nor anyone else required or forced students to participate in this project.  Moreover, she did not occupy the role of the imparter-of-knowledge, but rather a facilitator, a catalyst, or a coach (Merriam, 2007). “The theory of experiential learning has become a challenge to well-shaped ways of thinking about education as a program, a teacher as an expert, and knowledge as a theory,” (Dernova, 2015).  We can see that Dr. Gugliucci could have lectured at the medical students about the importance of getting down to eye level with their patients, touch, body position, and the tone of their voice, or even required them to do readings on these skills but the research shows that the impact through living these experiences out, were much more impactful on the learners.

Implications

“The experiential learning provides students engagement into direct experiences close to real-world problems and situations. To make the decision, students need to analyze what they know, what they do not know, and how to learn it. Secondly, the instructor facilitates, not directs students’ progress. Thirdly, experiential learning ensures strong motivation to learn. It motivates students to reflect on their existing knowledge and make it deeper through reflection; transfer their prior learning experience to new context; acquire new ideas, principles, and skills. Eventually, these skills help students to become self-directed life-long learners,” (Dernova, 2015).

            As educators, we have the opportunity to guide our students to a new realm of understanding, both in their current phase of life but also in future activities in personally meaningful ways.  Any help that we can give them to relate their personal experiences to their future goals, careers, etc. is surely appreciated and likely expected by adults.  We need to seek out ways that we can introduce and utilize experiences in our course.

Another core condition of learning is participation (Yardley et al, 2012).  We need to aide our learners in feeling connected; if they experience a sense of exclusion, it will hinder their learning and not only risk them failing to gain knowledge but could be counterproductive.  Our learning environments needs to be a safe place for students to share about experiences and talk openly and honestly about their  beliefs and views.  It falls on us, as the facilitator, to set up boundaries and expectations that cultivate this safe space, and do uphold those standards so that students feel a genuine sense of security in processing about their life experiences.

Speaking of processing, practitioners need to include a set time for reflection.  Reflection can take place in a number of ways- individually, as a group, one-on-one with the facilitator- no matter the format it takes students need to receive time to do it.  Assuming they will reflect on their own is not always an accurate assumption to make, so we need to carve this time out in our syllabus/curriculum, so that they can learn the value of it and put it into practice outside the “classroom.”

            Finally, we also must be learner centered.  For example, an online class gives our students a lot more flexibility and control over the learning process.  They are the person who decides when, where, and from what sources they will learn and this style of instruction forces the teacher to give more attention to the student’s interests, learning styles, and prior experiences.  Instructors are continually performing different roles to meet the needs of different students. “In an online environment, the role of a teacher changes from a knowledge disseminator to a mentor, and a facilitator of the learning process where students take charge over the learning process,” and we are tasked with overcoming the challenge of isolation which can manifest in the online learning community (Baasanjav, 2013). 

Reflection

One of the most significant parts of this assignment for me was gleaning new ideas on how to incorporate experiential learning into my personal practice and the powerful impact that it will have on learners.  Much of the literature I digested had direct quotes from students on the influence this had on them.  While I do try to incorporate role-playing and soliciting student reflection on past experiences, the literature I read provided the encouragement I needed to creatively consider new and even more radical (and I believe impactful) ways to put the concepts we learned about, into practice.

Regarding process, it would be strongly encouraged to begin early.  In hindsight, I would begin by thoroughly reviewing the syllabus and the expectations of this assignment, and then review it again, and then re-review it.  I would then urge students to spend time reviewing Dr. Chang’s recommended examples of literature reviews, look at previous semesters’ blogs, watch the YouTube video on how to write a literature review and take advantage of Dr. Chang’s comments on previous students’ literature review papers (screencasts).  These things will give a clear picture of what the assignment should look like and how to create a timeline to be successful.  Next, I would suggest reading chapter 7 in the assigned text, Learning in Adulthood, which is regarding the topic of “Experience and Learning,” so that the student can formulate a table with the main themes/ideas she or he identified and how those can be applied to practice.  From there, I would begin searching for literature around the topic of experiential learning, which aligns with the main themes that were identified.  Move forward with reading the articles and allow for time to re-skim the articles to analyze key aspects that connect the research together.  Conclude by writing the literature review, elaborating on the general themes and processing through the implications that experiential learning has on both educators and students and providing suggestions to impact practice.

 Table

	Main Theme/Ideas	Application
Idea 1	The human experience is a source of learning.	Educators must plan and provide experiences that will help their students grasp learning concepts.
Idea 2	We must reflect on our experiences in order to learn from them.	Students must be given opportunities to think back on their experiences, both individualistically and with co-learners, in order to interpret their meaning. To live an experience is not enough, there has to be a period of reflection to discover implications.
Idea 3	Previous experiences affect how learners approach new experiences.	Students need the space to evaluate similarities and differences between their new and previous experiences and formulate plans for approaching new situations
Idea 4	Experiential learning can be facilitated but not forced.	Educators need to arrange activities that foster learning through experience, however they cannot force students to be genuinely engaged, this is a personal responsibility of each learner.

 

Bibliography

Baasanjav, U. (2013). Incorporating the experiential learning cycle into online classes. Journal of

Online Learning and Teaching, 9(4), 575.

Dernova, M. (2015). Experiential learning theory as one of the foundations of adult learning

practice worldwide. Comparative Professional Pedagogy, 5(2), 52-57. doi:10.1515/rpp-2015-0040

Gugliucci, M. R., & Weiner, A. (2013). Learning by living: Life-altering medical education

through nursing home-based experiential learning. Gerontology & Geriatrics Education, 34(1), 60-77. doi:10.1080/02701960.2013.749254

Merriam, S. B., Caffarella, R. S. & Baumgartner, L. (2007). Learning in adulthood: A

comprehensive guide (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Yardley, S., Teunissen, P. W., & Dornan, T. (2012). Experiential learning: Transforming theory

into practice. Medical Teacher, 34(2), 161-164.