NOVEMBER 3, THURSDAY

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

This week was the yearly Retired Staff Luncheon at the Fellowship Hall of the Warren Wilson Church honoring everyone who has worked at Warren Wilson College who could come. There were are about thirty people there. For the retired people it is a chance to say hi to friends we haven’t seen for awhile and for the Advancement Staff at Warren Wilson it is a chance to tell us about all the good things that are happening at the college with the hope that we might continue to contribute yearly and put Warren Wilson in our will.

The good things that were happening at the college were mostly connected with new programs for experiential learning, new ways of learning experientially through the college’s programs of required work which does most of the maintenance of the college, through many hours required community service required of every student and, of course, through academic learning. Warren Wilson is one of very few colleges that include all three, so it makes sense. The recently arrived Vice President for Academic Affairs, Jay Roberts, has experiential learning as his primary interest and led the program.

So we were introduced to a number of new programs for encouraging and evaluating experiential learning, all with acronyms of precise intellectual terms. We were then introduced to a student from Colombia who had benefitted from many of these programs who identified them all by name. It all sounded very exciting.

When I taught at Warren Wilson for 40 years I was very interested in experiential learning both through taking students for 2 to 4 months to Sri Lanka and India every two years and through learning in class through the personal experience of students and my own personal experience through journal writing and class discussion.

During the afternoon after the luncheon I thought about learning through experience without really knowing what Warren Wilson is doing since I had only a hazy understanding of these new acronymed programs. And as I reflected I wondered if what I am doing every day in these WordPress posts as well as daily journal writing, learning from and sharing my experience, trying to be as aware as I can be of my own experience was maybe experiential learning. Without knowing what Warren Wilson is doing in all of these acroymed areas I know that they must be having the same problems that I had when I was identifying and evaluating what students learned through experience in India and in Swannanoa.

In my personal case I had trouble with acronyms, or rather I had trouble with the ideas that the acronyms stood for which are usually very long, complicated and abstract words summing up very complicated processes in an abstract way.

The person who made the most sense to me in defining areas of cross-cultural learning was John Duley of the University of Michigan. He identified seven skills that students learned when immersed in another culture. I followed his model and when students wrote a summary of what they had learned in India and had recorded and analyzed in their journals, I had them identify the ways they learned each of these seven cross-cultural skills with a detailed example of each skill to show they knew what they were talking about.

And then the presumption was that I was evaluating their experience in India by how well they identified and developed these skills. As an example, one of the most obvious skills they developed was what Duley calls Information Source Development. That means that they were able, partly through it being pointed out to them, partly through their own questioning and, more likely, through direct observation how things were done in Indian culture and how to get along in India. It was obvious to me, even without them identifying it, that they must have absorbed a great deal about Indian culture over four months.

The problem for me was not identifying or being sure that they learned how the culture worked through experience. It was a double problem. The first was that the way we learn through experience is not the way we learn in the classroom from books and lectures which are fairly easy to evaluate, if not precisely, at least plausibly. The way we learn through experience is by feeling our way along out of consciousness, absorbing all kinds of things and being able to function in ways that get us along in the culture, but we do this out of consciousness. It is much more like falling in love, slowly being attracted to a person and drawing closer and closer to them until we are bound together. You know consciously that it is happening and feel it intensely, but you are simply feeling your way into a relationship, not analyzing your way in. You don’t read up on the seven stages of forming a relationship which you can identify, though there might be generally seven steps. In fact, you resist thinking about the seven steps and analyzing your relationship because analysis seems to turn your relationship into an abstraction and can take the life out of it.

That is the problem, for me, with emphasizing information source development or any one of the seven skills that John Duley, with the help of many others, identifies.

In a way academics are a form of Information Source Development. And while this abstract analytical way of learning and describing learning works well in the classroom, I had trouble with it outside the classroom in India.

Actually I had trouble with it inside the classroom in Swannanoa when students were learning about themselves and their own experience through writing in their journal and then discussing what they learned about themselves with other students in daily class discussions which were all any of my classes were.

I knew students were learning a great deal through their own experience and the shared experience of other students but it was by feeling along and absorbing what they learned in an unconscious way that they were impacted. I could evaluate them by how much they wrote, or by how deeply they seemed to dig in their journals, but the only way I could really know how much they learned was to ask them how much they had learned which they could answer in an intuitive way, somehow weighing in their mind how much they had learned and loosely saying whether it was a lot or a little.

I don’t know if people in these acronymed programs have this problem of the distinction between academic learning and experiential learning but it is a problem I had during the 40 years I was at Warren Wilson.

I am going to keep wrestling with this for the next few days so if this is too abstract or too boring, take a break or at least skip the words and just look at the pictures for a few days.