ATI’s Elena Balcaite is collaborating with colleagues from across the Faculty of Arts, Becky Clifton, Liz Dean , Elisabetta Ferrari, Sonja Molnar, Gonzalo Villanueva, Antonia Wimbush and Rachel Woodlock, on a Learning and Teaching Initiatives (LTI) funded project to bring experiential learning into Arts classrooms.
The project aims to promote experiential learning as an effective and scalable approach to classroom instruction. While experiential learning is often associated with costly, off-campus experiences, the size and fidelity of such experiences do not necessarily determine their learning benefits. Experiential learning activities – such as simulations, project work, and drama – can foster the development of global competencies (Lee, Kobia and Sun 2023) and critical thinking (Hamilton and Klebba 2011). They also create opportunities for personalised learning (Macaulay 2016), facilitate the application of theory to practical situations (Montgomery, Brown and Deery 1997), and enhance both affective and cognitive engagement (Chavan 2011).
To that end, the project team will design and implement classroom-based experiential learning activities across seven Arts subjects. The activity designs will build on Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory (2014) and other constructivist approaches grounded in experience-reflection-learning cycle (Fenwick 2001; Meyer 2024). To maximise the benefits of experiential learning, these rigorous designs will tackle specific challenges, such as promoting active learning in large classes, enhancing student wellbeing, and overcoming barriers to formative feedback and authentic assessment.
The insights generated from the implementation of these activities and their subsequent evaluation will produce transferable learning design principles to be applied across the Arts disciplines. These principles will inform the development of the experiential learning design toolkit.
To learn more about experiential learning, please read Experiential Learning: Transforming Classrooms through Experiences, and reach out to Elena Balcaite if you are interested in this project or would look to implement an experiential learning activity in your classroom.
References
Chavan, M. (2011). Higher Education Students’ Attitudes Towards Experiential Learning in International Business. Journal of Teaching in International Business, 22 (2), 126–143.
Fenwick, T. J. (2001, January 1). Experiential Learning: A Theoretical Critique from Five Perspectives. Information Series No. 385.
Hamilton, J. G., and Klebba, J. M. (2011). Experiential Learning: A Course Design Process for Critical Thinking. American Journal of Business Education, 4 (12), 1–12.
Kolb, D. A. (2014). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Pearson Education.
Lee, J., Kobia, C., and Son, J. (2023). Improving global competence in classroom-based experiential learning activities. Journal of Global Education and Research, 7 (2), 131-145.
Macaulay F. (2016) Heart, Head, and Hands: Intercultural, Experiential, and Applied Gender Learning in a Peace Studies Department. Political Science & Politics, 49 (3), 566-570.
Meyer, J. (2024). Deciphering the Defining Features of Experiential Learning: A mix of personal experience and sustained scholarship suggests a new framing. Experiential Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 7 (1).
Montgomery, K., Brown, S. and Deery, C. (1997) Simulations: Using experiential learning to add relevancy and meaning to introductory courses. Innovative Higher Education 21, 217–229.