Experiential learning
Experiential learning (alternatively known as activity-based learning or ABL, learning by doing or learning through play; hereinafter, the Method) is any educational method that is based on both direct experience and cognitive reflection on that experience. Those methods may include a wide range of techniques from observations, experiments, and heuristics to public service, fieldwork, community-based research, and apprenticeship, but the following consideration of what was experienced and what can be learned is the key. The Method may also be defined as learning through reflection on doing.
Practices
According to Harvard University,
ABL pedagogy aims to enrich students' academic experience and learning outcomes by connecting theory with practice, and concepts with methods, using data and insight they obtain through engagement with the larger world.
Play as experience
Learning through play. The process of acquiring knowledge, skills, or conceptual understandings through play. According to Johan Huizinga is the critical anthropological text Homo Ludens, play is “an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and outside the sphere of necessity or material utility. The play-mood is one of rapture and enthusiasm, and is sacred or festive in accordance with the occasion. A feeling of exaltation and tension accompanies the action.
Making as experience
Constructionism. According to Seymour Papert, constructionism is, put roughly, learning by making. That Papert is known to struggle with the idea of defining Constructionism by a “pipeline” of knowledge-giving hints at its nature–open-ended, learner-centered, playful, non-institutional, non-academis, and so difficult to describe in an academic context. Papert explained that, while close in meaning and spelling as Constructivism, it is suitably unique: “Constructionism–the N word as opposed to the V word–shares constructivism’s connotation of learning as “building knowledge structures” irrespective of the circumstances of the learning. It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe.” Papert went on to describe Constructionism as a kind of learning which “allows full range of intellectual styles and preferences to each find a point of equilibrium. (Papert, Harel 1991)
