Experiential Learning Need For Institutions And Students

GLOBALLY, studies have shown that experiential and service learning is taking on a central place in education.

However, its application in the Namibian context is still questionable. For any learning to be relevant and to contribute to the betterment of society, educators need to ask the following questions: * What is our vision for our students? * What kind of students do we want to produce at the end? * How can institutes of higher learning contribute to Vision 2030? * Why do we have several graduates who have never seen and even visited an organisation that relates to their career? A critical question is: why do we see it fit that nurses gain hands-on experience within the first year of their profession and the same does not apply to other careers such as teaching? How many of us would like to be operated on by a surgeon who has never practised before? Equally, why should parents entrust their children to a teacher who has only been in a classroom for two weeks during his or her four years of training? As I was gathering my thoughts to write this article, I happened to come across a television programme that illustrated the importance of experiential education.It was Donald Trump’s ‘The Apprentice’, where he invites graduates and persons that he thinks can run his company.More than 250 000 people applied for the position and it came down to two candidates.These candidates both had excellent credentials from the best universities in the USA, they were ambitious and they were eager to get the position.During the assessment period, the committee members all had the same comment about one of the candidates: “He is book-educated”.He knew the theory, but did not have the experience to run a company.On the other hand, the other candidate had the education and the experience and was able to draw from his theoretical background as well as experience and apply it to the situation he found himself in.Because of a lack of experience, the other candidate was not able to apply his theoretical know-how to the practical situation.This is unfortunately the reality of our graduates too.When book-educated graduates become workers, they continue where they left off at university.They spend time writing memos and shuffling papers because the university taught them to shuffle assignments and exam papers and failed to give them the opportunity to get first-hand experience.Much of our education system focuses on the abstract and theoretical and places less emphasis on experience, and this contributes to making Namibian graduates unemployable.The reality in today’s competitive climate is that very few companies can afford to employ people with no experience.Other institutions have addressed this situation by sponsoring students and employing them during their vacations as a way of ensuring that they gain experience before entering the workplace.There is a danger in promoting theory over practice, or vice versa.The education system should enable those who are being educated to look at their own situation critically and strive to make the necessary changes for the betterment of society.This is possible when students are provided with an education system that combines theory and practice, through experience and reflection.This way they will be given the necessary tools and knowledge and be motivated to effectively participate in the world and improve upon it.Experiential education is learning by doing; it is an education that encourages and challenges students to become personally engaged in learning through fieldwork, whether research, placement in community organisations or internships.It is a process of actively engaging students in an experience that will have real consequences.Students make discoveries and experiment with knowledge themselves instead of hearing or reading about the experiences of others.Students also reflect on their experiences, thus developing new skills, new attitudes, and new theories or ways of thinking.(Kraft & Sakofs, 1998) Others define experiential learning as one that engages students in critical thinking, problem solving and decision making in contexts that are personally relevant and connected to academic learning objectives by incorporating active learning.This approach requires the making of opportunities for debriefing and consolidation of ideas and skills through reflection, feedback and the application of and skills to new situations.(Centre for Experiential Learning 2005) Experience alone is insufficient to be called experiential education, and it is the reflection process that turns experience into experiential education.The following are some of the key underlying assumptions in the implementation of an experiential learning programme: Institution – The institution should support the idea of having learning that goes beyond the campus; thus it needs to make provision for financial support both for professional development and logistical aid such as transport to and from placement sites.Faculty – The faculty should value experiential learning as a pedagogical approach.There should be institutional staff support.A teaching assistant should be attached to the programme – this is critical as it lessens the time the faculty spends on placement logistics.The disadvantage of this is that the training of the teaching assistant can be time consuming.Placements for internships – For the placement to provide a meaningful experience, it needs to be linked to the course objectives.In addition exposure to a career would encourage some students to embark on such a career or to make alternative choices.Community partnership – For a placement to be effective, it is crucial that there is mutual and reciprocal community partnership.Spending time in a community enables participants to establish relationships and to learn about the group’s culture, attitudes and behaviour.Moreover, it is important that the community actively participates in the experience; they may be able to give input such as evaluating the participants.Curriculum – Experiential education programmes should be integrated across the curricula; there should be a link between practice and theory.Core elements in experiential curriculum are skills practice, theory and knowledge.The course should apply abstract theories to real-world situations.There should be guided discussion not only around course content and theory, but also interpersonal and situational issues.The experience is only experience, unless reflection is incorporated in the course design.And for reflection to be effective it should be regularly and systematically included in the syllabus.Why is experiential learning key to Namibia’s development, and in what way can experiential learning be one of the strategies to achieving Vision 2030? I would like to draw from questions raised by Chabal in 1996, about the failure of Africa to take off economically.”Why is it that the preferred option of most African entrepreneurs is exchange and trade rather than the kind of productive economic activity which can provide the foundation for a country’s economic development?” (Chabal, 1996) Our education system has deprived its students of their creativeness and by focusing on theory it has not enabled our learners to think and ask critical questions.Each institution, whether regionally, nationally and globally, should strive to produce responsible citizens who will play a key role in the development of the country and eventually in the world we are living.According to Vision 2030, Government hopes to have by the year 2030 students who are prepared for a rapidly changing global environment, which includes developments in science and technology.As we saw from the discussion above, experiential learning should and must be an integral part of an institution of higher learning.In a globalised world one cannot afford to rely on people with only experience, neither can you afford to rely on people who are only book educated.We need to have a balance, as reinforced in the following below: “Practice and theory seem to be the two inseparable sides of the same coin – these including the exper
iential learning.As someone once said: theory without practice is sterile, practice without theory is blind,” (Antonio, LTT, from Learning and Teaching for Transformation) We need to have an education system that produces a well-rounded individual, a system that has a positive impact on the psychological, social and intellectual development of the participants.We can no longer afford to have book-educated graduates who do not know anything about the communities they are working for.Vision 2030 will be challenged by our education system, which is still based on a philosophy of sitting in the classroom, listening and writing assignments.Our current students never leave the campus to do any study outside.It is important that any education enables students to transform their experiences into knowledge and to use acquired knowledge as a process to unveil new knowledge, and most importantly to make a difference where they are living.An education system should be able to bring its participants in touch with existing social problems through both experience and theory, and in this way contribute to Vision 2030.If we are thinking about an education system that will contribute to Vision 2030, we need to think about the context and community.We need to have an education system that provides both theory and practice, which creates opportunity, exploration, experimentation, practice, application and strategising.Experiential learning is an excellent vehicle for the academic, professional and social development of the student, and this is only possible when the education system provides knowledge and information that may be evaluated, analysed and validated by the student through his or her experience.In today’s globalised world we cannot afford to rely on only one type of education, be it theory or experiential – a combination of both is the answer to Namibia in achieving Vision 2030. REFERENCES: Hubelbank, J et al (2004) What faculty say about implanting service learning in Higher education.NSEE Quarterly Fall 2003/Winter 2004.volume 28 Nr. 4 Freire P (2000) ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’.30th anniversary edition.Continuum New York Moore R 1996: Administering Experiential Learning Programs Shaul R (200) in ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ Centre for Experiential Learning (2005) http://www.stolaf.edu/services/cel/defintion.htmlFor any learning to be relevant and to contribute to the betterment of society, educators need to ask the following questions: * What is our vision for our students? * What kind of students do we want to produce at the end? * How can institutes of higher learning contribute to Vision 2030? * Why do we have several graduates who have never seen and even visited an organisation that relates to their career? A critical question is: why do we see it fit that nurses gain hands-on experience within the first year of their profession and the same does not apply to other careers such as teaching? How many of us would like to be operated on by a surgeon who has never practised before? Equally, why should parents entrust their children to a teacher who has only been in a classroom for two weeks during his or her four years of training? As I was gathering my thoughts to write this article, I happened to come across a television programme that illustrated the importance of experiential education.It was Donald Trump’s ‘The Apprentice’, where he invites graduates and persons that he thinks can run his company.More than 250 000 people applied for the position and it came down to two candidates.These candidates both had excellent credentials from the best universities in the USA, they were ambitious and they were eager to get the position.During the assessment period, the committee members all had the same comment about one of the candidates: “He is book-educated”.He knew the theory, but did not have the experience to run a company.On the other hand, the other candidate had the education and the experience and was able to draw from his theoretical background as well as experience and apply it to the situation he found himself in.Because of a lack of experience, the other candidate was not able to apply his theoretical know-how to the practical situation.This is unfortunately the reality of our graduates too.When book-educated graduates become workers, they continue where they left off at university.They spend time writing memos and shuffling papers because the university taught them to shuffle assignments and exam papers and failed to give them the opportunity to get first-hand experience.Much of our education system focuses on the abstract and theoretical and places less emphasis on experience, and this contributes to making Namibian graduates unemployable.The reality in today’s competitive climate is that very few companies can afford to employ people with no experience.Other institutions have addressed this situation by sponsoring students and employing them during their vacations as a way of ensuring that they gain experience before entering the workplace.There is a danger in promoting theory over practice, or vice versa.The education system should enable those who are being educated to look at their own situation critically and strive to make the necessary changes for the betterment of society. This is possible when students are provided with an education system that combines theory and practice, through experience and reflection.This way they will be given the necessary tools and knowledge and be motivated to effectively participate in the world and improve upon it.Experiential education is learning by doing; it is an education that encourages and challenges students to become personally engaged in learning through fieldwork, whether research, placement in community organisations or internships.It is a process of actively engaging students in an experience that will have real consequences.Students make discoveries and experiment with knowledge themselves instead of hearing or reading about the experiences of others.Students also reflect on their experiences, thus developing new skills, new attitudes, and new theories or ways of thinking.(Kraft & Sakofs, 1998) Others define experiential learning as one that engages students in critical thinking, problem solving and decision making in contexts that are personally relevant and connected to academic learning objectives by incorporating active learning.This approach requires the making of opportunities for debriefing and consolidation of ideas and skills through reflection, feedback and the application of and skills to new situations.(Centre for Experiential Learning 2005) Experience alone is insufficient to be called experiential education, and it is the reflection process that turns experience into experiential education. The following are some of the key underlying assumptions in the implementation of an experiential learning programme: Institution – The institution should support the idea of having learning that goes beyond the campus; thus it needs to make provision for financial support both for professional development and logistical aid such as transport to and from placement sites.Faculty – The faculty should value experiential learning as a pedagogical approach.There should be institutional staff support.A teaching assistant should be attached to the programme – this is critical as it lessens the time the faculty spends on placement logistics.The disadvantage of this is that the training of the teaching assistant can be time consuming. Placements for internships – For the placement to provide a meaningful experience, it needs to be linked to the course objectives.In addition exposure to a career would encourage some students to embark on such a career or to make alternative choices.Community partnership – For a placement to be effective, it is crucial that there is mutual and reciprocal community partnership.Spending time in a community enables participants to establish relationships and to learn about the group’s culture, attitudes and behaviour.Moreover, it is important that the community actively participates in the experience; they may be able to give input such as evaluating the parti
cipants.Curriculum – Experiential education programmes should be integrated across the curricula; there should be a link between practice and theory.Core elements in experiential curriculum are skills practice, theory and knowledge.The course should apply abstract theories to real-world situations.There should be guided discussion not only around course content and theory, but also interpersonal and situational issues.The experience is only experience, unless reflection is incorporated in the course design.And for reflection to be effective it should be regularly and systematically included in the syllabus.Why is experiential learning key to Namibia’s development, and in what way can experiential learning be one of the strategies to achieving Vision 2030? I would like to draw from questions raised by Chabal in 1996, about the failure of Africa to take off economically.”Why is it that the preferred option of most African entrepreneurs is exchange and trade rather than the kind of productive economic activity which can provide the foundation for a country’s economic development?” (Chabal, 1996) Our education system has deprived its students of their creativeness and by focusing on theory it has not enabled our learners to think and ask critical questions.Each institution, whether regionally, nationally and globally, should strive to produce responsible citizens who will play a key role in the development of the country and eventually in the world we are living.According to Vision 2030, Government hopes to have by the year 2030 students who are prepared for a rapidly changing global environment, which includes developments in science and technology.As we saw from the discussion above, experiential learning should and must be an integral part of an institution of higher learning.In a globalised world one cannot afford to rely on people with only experience, neither can you afford to rely on people who are only book educated.We need to have a balance, as reinforced in the following below: “Practice and theory seem to be the two inseparable sides of the same coin – these including the experiential learning.As someone once said: theory without practice is sterile, practice without theory is blind,” (Antonio, LTT, from Learning and Teaching for Transformation) We need to have an education system that produces a well-rounded individual, a system that has a positive impact on the psychological, social and intellectual development of the participants.We can no longer afford to have book-educated graduates who do not know anything about the communities they are working for.Vision 2030 will be challenged by our education system, which is still based on a philosophy of sitting in the classroom, listening and writing assignments.Our current students never leave the campus to do any study outside.It is important that any education enables students to transform their experiences into knowledge and to use acquired knowledge as a process to unveil new knowledge, and most importantly to make a difference where they are living.An education system should be able to bring its participants in touch with existing social problems through both experience and theory, and in this way contribute to Vision 2030.If we are thinking about an education system that will contribute to Vision 2030, we need to think about the context and community.We need to have an education system that provides both theory and practice, which creates opportunity, exploration, experimentation, practice, application and strategising.Experiential learning is an excellent vehicle for the academic, professional and social development of the student, and this is only possible when the education system provides knowledge and information that may be evaluated, analysed and validated by the student through his or her experience.In today’s globalised world we cannot afford to rely on only one type of education, be it theory or experiential – a combination of both is the answer to Namibia in achieving Vision 2030. REFERENCES: Hubelbank, J et al (2004) What faculty say about implanting service learning in Higher education.NSEE Quarterly Fall 2003/Winter 2004.volume 28 Nr. 4 Freire P (2000) ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’.30th anniversary edition.Continuum New York Moore R 1996: Administering Experiential Learning Programs Shaul R (200) in ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ Centre for Experiential Learning (2005) http://www.stolaf.edu/services/cel/defintion.html