Picture a small child sitting before a glowing coal fire. The red, yellow and orange flames leap from black caverns, dreamy and magical. Many times, the child has been warned to keep away from the fire, to never, ever touch a glowing cinder, to always TAKE CARE! A small orange coal falls to the hearth, shimmering like some exotic jewel. A small hand reaches out and picks up this magical gemstone – and screams in unbelievable pain. That is an extreme example of experiential learning, one in which I was the active participant.
If this event is broken down into how it became a learning experience, then the “why” of it is easy to understand. By testing the warnings, by making a choice, by finding out for itself, that child had a concrete, physical result. That physical experience became embedded in the memory and carried forward the message that burning coals hurt. The message was processed and then moved from a specific to a universal truth. Fire, and by extension, all things hot, hurt. Next comes the review process where the experience is examined in the light of what happened, and more important, what will happen next time around. A child will simply know and maybe voice the learning as “That hurt, that was bad, I won’t be touching hot things again.” The learning resides indelibly in the brain and will be applied in the future.
In 1974, David Kolb explained the way in which human beings learn best through experience in his Cycle of Experiential Learning. At the top of the circle, we have concrete experience, then we move clockwise to reflective observation, then to abstract conceptualization and then to active experimentation, and back to concrete experience. It is the way human beings learn. (A diagram can be found at http://serc.carleton.edu/details/images/9499.html) We will use this in every learning situation we encounter, in fact, the school of life. Should a trusted friend betray our secrets, that concrete experience teaches us, after we have moved round the cycle, not to tell them any more secrets.
In human learning, no amount of outside influences will be as effective as personal experience. People will always need to find out for themselves, they need concrete experience in order to learn, so that the experience becomes part of their learning, a cyclical statement if ever I heard one, but true. The learning belongs then to the person and is not someone else’s wisdom or experience, it is their own, they need to claim it.
Human beings are naturally curious, intelligent, brave explorers of their environment. And there is so much to learn; we never cease to want to, no matter what anyone tells us, we have a need to find out for ourselves. Learning from experience could be described as learning by our own mistakes. If you do not try it, you will never know. Every experience teaches something, and whether consciously or subconsciously, in taken on board and enriches our lives. Because human beings seek for better things, seek to achieve fulfillment and self-realization, they will always learn best by experience – their own and not anyone else’s.
